I am a big fan of the collected works of Paul Thomas Anderson. Bart is decidedly less so.
This makes for a fairly entertaining podcast.
His latest film, Inherent Vice, is certainly not his best work and it's easy to see why the majority of audiences would find it pretty off-putting. After all, it's a detective noir about the death of the 1960's west coast counter-culture wrapped in a mystery so dense as to be practically impenetrable. But that's part of why I found it so enjoyable. Instead of spending the (very lengthy) running time trying to figure out what happened to Shasta Fay Hepworth and why I should beware the Golden Fang, I was able to sit back and let the colors and the textures all wash over while basking in the glory of Joaquin Phoenix's doper PI, Josh Brolin's unhinged LA cop and Jenna Malone's ridiculous chompers.
I will say that I think the film suffers some pacing issues and feels like it goes on about 20 minutes longer than necessary. There's also a part of me that wishes the film's tone retained some of the lunacy and charm of that first trailer. Ultimately, the strong performances by Phoenix and Brolin were joyful enough to get me through, but I must admit that Inherent Vice didn't pack quite the emotional wallop of some of Anderson's previous efforts.
Next Week: We finally catch up with Nightcrawler and I introduce Bart to The Bourne Identity.
Last night, while I was watching the Patriots give a Monday Night Football performance worthy of a high school JV squad, the internet was freaking the fuck out over the first trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice.
That excitement is justified.
Anderson's last few movies (There Will Be Blood and The Master) are each genius level films in their own right, but they're also pretty dark and nihilistic so I understand why the majority of audiences didn't exactly find them accessible. But this looks like a return to Anderson's more populist work, exhibiting not just a lighter touch but some sheer hilarity. And the continuing collaboration between P.T. and Joaquin Phoenix makes me happier than words can express. Phoenix's work in The Master is easily one of the most underrated performances in the last five years and if we're all very very lucky, Inherent Vice will pave the way for his entry into the Marvel Universe as Dr. Strange.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to spend the rest of the day watching and endless loop of Josh Brolin shouting for pancakes and Joaquin Phoenix falling down.
If you'd like to become completely disenchanted with Eva Green's breasts and the female form in general, boy have I got a movie for you.
Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is an ugly film from top to bottom. Soulless and lacking any of the thrills of its predecessor, it strands too many talented actors on screen with hackneyed dialogue and plots that go absolutely nowhere. There's no joy to be found anywhere in the movie. At least in the original film, you could tell that folks like Clive Owen and Brittany Murphy were really digging in and having a ball. Here, Josh Brolin and Jessica Alba feel completely lost in the wilderness. Not even a heroin-addicted Christopher Lloyd or Stacey Keach as a potato mutant (!) can save this grim, disgusting retread.
Bart and I were so depressed walking out of the theater that we decided to pair it with another movie for podcasting purposes. We landed on the opposite end of the Robert Rodriguez spectrum with Machete Kills, which is easily the director's best movie since the first Sin City. It starts out fairly straightforward, with Danny Trejo's ex-Federale character Machete getting drafted by President Charlie Sheen to track down a madman with a nuclear missile, but it eventually winds its way into a completely insane sci-fi revenge flick chock full of the kind of Itchy And Scratchy-level cartoon violence that I can't help but fall in love with. I found the first Machete film more than a little disappointing, but Machete Kills actually left me hungry-bordering-on-desperate for the promised third entry. This is a movie that demands to be seen with lots of friends and lots of beers.
Episode 28 of the podcast finds Bart comparing Eva Green's Sin City performance to the water level in Sonic The Hedgehog and hatching a scheme to bring Danny Trejo into the Expendables universe while I somehow end up lamenting the lack of full frontal penis shots. We also talk about Ant-Man finally starting production, The Rock as a possible Shazam and some potentially spoilery rumors regarding Star Wars: Episode VII. The news remains at the top of the episode for those of you who are still waiting to see the movie(s) in question, but at least when it comes to A Dame To Kill For I feel like our 30 minute discussion is probably more entertaining than the actual film.
Next Week: Ghostbusters 30th Anniversary Re-Release and another movie TBD.
"Shit, you might want to think about what you're doing here."
Disclaimer: I'm going to tread really lightly here in terms of spoilers, mostly because this is one of those stories that you can never watch the same way twice. I'll say up front that I absolutely prefer the original Korean film, but I'd be curious to see how someone reacts to this American version as their first introduction to the story.
Park Chan-wook's Oldboy is a bugfuck crazy awesome revenge flick that you don't watch so much as experience in extremely lurid detail. The ending of that film so intensely gut wrenching on every level that it sears itself into your memory. As soon as word spread that there was an American remake looming on the horizon, everyone's initial reaction was, "Well they're definitely gonna punt the ending." Steven Speilberg attached himself to the project for a few years, and it was such an ill fit of director and material that I never really believed he'd end up making that film. Will Smith's name got tossed around for the lead role and I would have considered that an intriguing possibility if I thought for a single second that Smith would be willing to really go for it an risk sullying his carefully cultivated public persona, a move made increasingly unlikely after he passed on Django Unchained. But eventually it ended up on Spike Lee's docket and he actually seemed like an exciting choice, someone who'd really bring a unique perspective to the already challenging material and make it his own.
But alas, it was not to be. In fact, if I didn't know that it was a Spike film before walking in the door, I'd find little evidence to support the claim onscreen. I'll admit that Joe Doucet's extended captivity is actually pretty engaging; I enjoyed the quick bit when the bellhop poster comes to life and the baby rat thing is a real heartbreaker. But once Joe is released from his hotel prison, everything goes downhill. It's grim and lifeless, lacking the manic energy that made Park's film so damn exciting to watch. Only Sam Jackson seems to understand how to give the material a pulse. Josh Brolin, who I'm generally a big fan of, is practically on autopilot for much of his time on screen, which stands in stark contrast to the breathtaking transformation that Min-sik Choi undergoes in the original film. As much as I like Elizabeth Olsen, you can often see the wheels turning as she tries really hard to "act" opposite Brolin, exacerbated by the fact that they have next to no chemistry together. And then there's Sharlto Copley as the film's villain, a performance that's so extremely mannered and peculiar that it feels like he was spliced in not just from a different movie, but from a entirely different plane of existence.
The only person who comes out of this thing relatively unscathed is screenwriter Mark Protosevich, whose script maintains the teeth of the original film while also making some alterations that sharpen those teeth in places. I'm glad that he kept the original dumplings instead switching it to something more western friendly like chicken wings. Characters are constantly showing Brolin how to look stuff up on his smartphone, and while I appreciate the real-world practicality of it, by the time they're Shazaming his ringtone to identify the prep school anthem the film almost starts to feel like an extended commercial for mobile apps. I think there's a little too much energy spent at the top of the film proving that Joe Doucet is an irredeemable shitheel, as opposed to Oh Dae-su who was simply an irresponsible fool. It makes a big impact on the respective films' finales - Doucet deserves everything he has coming to him, whereas you kind of pity Dae-su. I certainly missed the original's memorable moments of deranged brilliance like the squid and the tongue, but I kind of love the change to the villain's backstory, a simple tweak that not only makes Copley's character infinitely creepier, but also makes the final reveal and turnabout on Brolin all the more devastating. Granted that reveal is pretty awful on the face of it, so we're really only talking about a matter of degrees, but I'm impressed that Protosevich found a way to make his riff on a very memorable ending even more affecting on some level.
Remakes are always a tricky business, especially when you're tackling something as singular as Oldboy. I think that all too often the inclination is to try and "improve" the original source material in some way, despite the fact that such attempts often end up erasing the thing that everyone likes about the property in the first place. And as the number of remakes and reboots continues to increase at a seemingly exponential rate, I find myself caring less about whether or not the new version is better or worse than its predecessor, and caring more about whether the remake can bring some new element to the table in order to justify its existence. There has to be some specific, concrete reason to watch the new version instead of the original. Simply employing better special effects usually isn't enough, as proven by the recent Carrie remake. Oldboy proves that simply swapping in English-speaking white folks doesn't get the job done either. If nothing else, it sticks to the structure of Park's film so closely that I can't bring myself to call it a bad movie - the story is still so weird and fucked up that still connects on a base level. (However, it should be noted that there's a big red herring in this version that really helps to sell the shock value unless you already know how the film ends, in which case it feels like a boring distraction that perhaps hits the nail a little too much on the head.)
Spike Lee's Oldboy is fine I guess, but it simply doesn't play at nearly the same level as Park Chan-wook's original masterpiece.
Then again, very few films do.
--------------------------------------- Title: Oldboy Director: Spike Lee Starring: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, Sharlto Copley, Michael Imperioli, Samuel L. Jackson, Lance Reddick, Rami Malek Year Of Release: 2013 Viewing Method: Theatrical - Showcase Revere
Pro Tip: If traveling to Mexico in July, you may want a stronger sunscreen than SPF 30.
I've got some pretty strong Sicilian roots, so I've always tanned pretty easily. I usually go with an SPF 15 if I use sunscreen at all and reserve the 30 for the times I've taken a cruise to the Bahamas or the Caribbean. But I got a bit too much sun on our last vacation in February, so this trip I'd been slathering on the 30 from day one. Despite my careful precautions, my long shirtless walk on day one plus the next morning spent snorkeling on the beach in Akumal, a.k.a. the land of sea turtles, resulted in my shoulders becoming pretty much roasted by the afternoon. After a quick snack of empanadas and mojitos, we staked out a new beach spot in the shade of a palm tree and did our best to stay out of the sun for a few hours before grabbing a late lunch of fish tacos and cervezas and then driving back to Tulum. By then we both had a hankering for air conditioning so we stayed inside and watched Reuben Fleischer's Gangster Squad.
Jamie probably summed it up best: "I wouldn't have been so disappointed if the trailers for that movie hadn't been so awesome."
On paper the movie sounds brilliant: a 40's yarn based on a true story about a small band of honest cops led by Josh Brolin who take on Jewish gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) as he tries to cement his hold on organized crime in Los Angeles. Throw in a romance between Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone plus a supporting cast that includes Michael Pena, Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi, Nick Nolte as the chief of police and T-1000 himself Robert Patrick as an aging gunhand and tie it together with a creative up and coming director (Fleischer) who's demonstrated a talent for fun, well staged action in flicks like Zombieland and 30 Minutes Or Less and you should have a recipe for success. Unfortunately the script by Will Beall simply never delivers on all that promise. The trailers had me expecting L.A. Confidential 2.0, but instead I got a poor man's Untouchables.
Penn is a worthy successor to DeNiro's Capone, in that he absolutely tears up every frame he's in; Penn doesn't so much chew the scenery as he devours it whole. But other than one good fist fight with Brolin at the end, he doesn't really have a whole lot to do. Brolin's John O'Mara is surly and bullheaded but not exactly the kind of guy who can out-think Cohen, to the point that after a while it feels like his success is due mostly to dumb luck. Ribisi is the squad's Jiminey Cricket and we spend a lot of time with him and his family that would have been better served fleshing out the barebones romance between Gosling and Stone. Both are phenomenally talented and they demonstrated an abundance of chemistry together in Crazy Stupid Love, but the two are given precious little screen time together. Most of their relationship is basically left to the viewer's imagination, as the film cuts from the first time they meet and sleep together to their first fight weeks later. The whole thing feels sloppy and I wouldn't care except that their relationship becomes crucial to the plot very late in the game, so it's not exactly the kind of thing you can brush off.
But that kind of criticism is true of the whole script. Everything feels a bit out of whack, like Beal was so scared of shortchanging one character that we're left with only broad sketches of everyone and really care about no one. For example, we're constantly reminded that Robert Patrick is an amazing sharpshooter but the only time we see him display his marksmanship is when he shoots a tin can six times in the air. The movie is constantly telling us stuff like this without giving us the chance to see any of it play out naturally. That being said, it's not really a bad flick. Everyone's clearly giving it their all and Fleischer does a solid job staging most of the gunplay (he relies a lot on speed ramping but that's never really bothered me) and his recreation of 1940's Los Angeles is just gorgeous to look at. It's a time and place that feels nothing short of magical. It's actually kind of goofy and fun in a way, and I'm convinced a slightly tighter script would have really put this thing over the top. So long as you're not expecting a prestige period film and you just surrender to it's frothy, wannabe pulp, then Gangster Squad is not half bad.
After the movie we walked down to El Asadero, where we had the specialty of the house:
That's arrachera (a grilled, marinated flank steak) with chorizo, a roasted jalapeno, grilled cactus and a roasted potato with cheese and grilled chicken. The cheese on the potato was sort of gloppy and strange, but everything else was fantastic, served with homemade corn tortillas.
Because everything is better wrapped in home made corn tortillas.
--------------------------------------- Title: Gangster Squad Director: Reuben Fleischer Starring: Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Emma Stone, Nick Nolte, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pena, Robert Patrick, Anthony Mackie Year Of Release: 2013 Viewing Method: Redbox DVD
