The Sanity Clause - Page 24 of 99 - Movie Reviews of New Releases and Classic Films by Brian Welk

The Essentials: The Maysles Brothers

The documentarians the Maysles Brothers found nuance and intimacy in all of their films, including “Salesman”, “Gimme Shelter” and “Grey Gardens”.

One of the most heart-rending tracks on Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bookends” album is “Voices from Old People”. Not even a song, it’s a collection of elderly, frail, shrill voices not directly clear but echoing throughout the room. It’s ambient, natural sound reverberating off the walls, with overlapping discussions about death and life and everything in between. One woman speaks about how she still sleeps on her half of the bed long after her husband has passed. It’s lonely, devastating, and endlessly fascinating.

In the sprawling halls and rooms of the once great mansion Grey Gardens, Edith and Little Edie Beale’s voices travel throughout their home in much the same way. In just the way Albert and David Maysles allow us to listen to them chattering about their former glories, we get a poignant sense that the people we’re observing and the home in which they live are relics. The Beales are a pitifully saddening portrait long past its prime, in desperate need of restoration. Perhaps most painful of all is that in “Grey Gardens”, they still present themselves as though they’re an elegant museum piece.

In “Grey Gardens,” “Salesman,” and “Gimme Shelter” the Maysles Brothers captured life and people in a way that they felt somewhat pained. All of their movies could at times be funny, exciting, insightful, and intimate, but there’s a sense of pain that runs through all of them, that these are somewhat lonely or wounded people.

Albert Maysles passed away at the start of March. His documentary style that he adapted with his brother has grown somewhat out of fashion. Werner Herzog and Errol Morris would be more aggressive and cynical. Many others would be more topical or political. And others still doing portraits and slice of life movies would move away from the “Fly on the Wall” type of documentary filmmaking.

But the Maysles still hold incredible influence and have their fingerprints on many facets of contemporary documentary filmmaking. In the case of “Grey Gardens”, both Albert and David are actually quite present. Little Edie speaks and even performs for the camera. It heightens the idea that she’s a socialite and debutante, simply lighting up once the camera shines in her face.

The story of the Beales isn’t told during “Grey Gardens” but is simply introduced. Both Big and Little Edie are relatives of Jackie O, President Kennedy’s wife. They had been thrust into the public spotlight when their home at Grey Gardens estate was threatened to be condemned. Landlords had discovered the wretched state in which the two lived, under filthy conditions and crumbling disrepair. Jackie O personally helped them remain in the home, but two years later, the Maysles pick up with them to see how they’re faring.

Suffice it to say things have not improved. In the Blu-Ray reissue by the Criterion Collection just released, we have a pristine look at the filth, grime and mess littered around their home. Bugs are crawling on the walls in numerous frames. Little Edie leaves an entire loaf of white Wonder bread for raccoons and cats to pick from. When they have guests, they drink champagne from Dixie cups. They’re a hideous wreck.

But the Maysles aren’t here to necessarily judge or ascribe a reason as to why they feel unwilling to improve their horrid conditions or leave. We’re allowed to make that assertion on our own, and both Big and Little Edie need barely any prodding to speak their mind and make a case for their pitiful delusion. Together they bicker about tiny details and do so in a high-pitched shrill befitting a decade well before the ‘70s. And despite the mess of their condition, Little Edie still seems concerned with décor, wall patterns and fashion choices. We never see Little Edie without her shawl, and she deliberately makes choices to wear frumpy skirts inside out with mismatched blouses.

The Maysles get a look at old photos of the two, and it’s impossible to imagine that the brimming debutantes photographed are the same people. In providing that backwards look, it would be easy to say the Beales are simply mentally ill, unable to cope with the present. But the Maysles are smart enough to get intimate with the details of Big and Little Edie’s conversations. Little Edie expresses a desire to leave, to do more and to relive so many opportunities she has missed out on, but the Maysles make it clear that the two together thrive on their bickering and their reminiscing of the past. They bring out the best and worst in each other, and though they’re keeping a dangerous illusion alive, they also maintain their charm and poise.

Modern reality shows like “Hoarders” or shows highlighting the garish and the ugly are only interested in those extremes. The Maysles saw the Beales and could’ve condescended. Instead they made a portrait with nuances and shades.

They were possibly the only documentarians to do the same for a bunch of rock stars, The Rolling Stones. Looking at the Maysles visual technique, they’re an unusual bunch to be filming a rock documentary complete with concert footage. During the Stones various performances, the camerawork is without many of the usual flourishes that are typical in the genre. In fact, they appear transfixed with Mick Jagger’s face in tight close ups, arguably not a bad subject.

But what they do call attention to in their live performances is just how ragged and raw the Stones were back in their heyday. Today the Stones live show is so polished, complete with pyrotechnics, orchestras and choirs, but the Maysles demonstrate that they were once just five guys on stage with a lot of energy.

They also bring to the film the inspired idea to sit the Stones down and show them the footage. “Gimme Shelter” documents the band’s struggle to stage a free concert out in California. So many kids were expected, the location had to be altered numerous times, and the logistics just seemed impossible. 300,000 arrived in 80,000 cars lined for miles along the road. But it became really controversial once security arrived. The Stones hired the Hell’s Angels biker gang, who were largely uninterested in protecting the band or others. The Maysles simply observe the mayhem, and the way they shoot it, without comment or fanfare, truly makes it seem like a cultural event (they did the same when documenting The Beatles arrival in New York). One gang member pulls an entire motorcycle from underneath a group of bodies in the crowd. And when things really go wrong, the Maysles are there to confront and humble the Stones with the consequences of their performance.

The Maysles even brought this humble, observational quality to a short they did titled “Meet Marlon Brando”. Filmed at a press event in 1966, it’s easy to see why Brando was not just a great actor, but a true movie star. The Maysles edit out the substance of the press questions and focus on Brando’s charm and irreverence. We see him here as handsome, flirtatious, and best of all, unexpected in everything he says. On the whole, “Meet Marlon Brando” is not an essential moment for the Maysles but a neat novelty to see Brando in an unusual position.

But just two years after, the Maysles did film their first essential documentary, “Salesman”. The simplicity of this story with these characters would be almost unheard of today, better reserved for a magazine article or indie film. But in four wandering salesman, the Maysles capture one of the toughest lifestyles of the ‘60s as well as some of the American hardship and culture of the time.

The Badger, the Gipper, the Rabbit and the Bull. All four salesman have their own styles, experience and level of success as we see each try and hock some expensive Bibles for nearly $50 each, which would be a lot even in 2015. The Bibles are massive, filled with ornate lettering and images and perhaps completely unnecessary, but sell them they must. The Maysles never comment on whether this is a worthy endeavor (even in the ‘60s, this way of life already seems to be fading), but view the men themselves as upstanding.

We relate to them in a curious way. “Salesman” vaguely reminds of the profane dialogue found in “Glengarry Glen Ross”, and surely Jack Lemmon could play one of these men in a movie, but they’re largely pitiable. They’re charming and slick, vaguely racist, and perhaps unflinching, even when certain clients seem to be hiding home and financial troubles, but we feel for them when time and again they hit a wall when failing to close. They’re stuck driving around suburbs in Florida, away from any wives or children we never see and whom they may not even have.

The Maysles are given surprising access into people’s homes and truly do feel like flies on the wall, but that’s not to say “Salesman” is any less intimate or understanding. They bring that rare quality of touch and nuance to all four of these films, and no one did it better.

It Follows

David Robert Mitchell’s indie horror film is directly about sex and the fear of being watched.

Sex has long gone hand in hand with horror films. The promiscuous girl among a handful of teens in a cabin in the woods is always the first to go, and the virgin always lives to tell her tale. As that cliché grows more prevalent, more and more horror films have attempted to subvert it.

The genius of “It Follows”, by far the best horror movie in recent memory, indie or otherwise, is that sex is no allegory. Director David Robert Mitchell uses horror to directly implicate the person committing the dirty deed, and the consequences “It Follows” suggests feel that much more real and disturbing.

Jay (Maika Monroe) is a young teen living a peaceful life in the suburbs with several friends and admirers. While swimming in her backyard pool, some young neighbors spy on her from the bushes, and it’s easy to see why. Her friends label her stupidly pretty, her room is lighted with misty, dreamy shades, and her friends feel her childhood friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist) is obsessed and won’t be able to keep it in his pants.

Jay ends up sleeping with a boy named Hugh (Jake Weary), and as soon as they finish, he drugs her and ties her to a wheelchair in an abandoned parking garage. “You won’t believe me, but you have to listen,” Hugh explains, claiming its for Jay’s own good. Something will follow you wherever you go, and it will try and kill you. It may look like someone you know or someone you’ve never seen before, and it will be invisible to everyone else. But he explains if she sleeps with someone else, she’ll pass it along, just as he did to her.

This is a real fear. It could be an STD. It could be the stigma of being labeled a slut. Then there’s the moral concern of knowingly passing that shame along. Whatever the circumstance, for some, sex changes you, and the lingering feeling doesn’t go away.

Mitchell doesn’t make a point of it though; the reality is that these people following Jay are as plain as day, and we’re given all the time in the world to process this cold, disturbing figure that does little more than lurk. Jay’s followers are typically nude or partially clothed. They can be young or old, but more often beaten and bruised as though they died that way, and their scantily clad appearance only strengthens the case for abstinence.

More so than just sex, “It Follows” is about the fear of being watched. The opening shot places the camera square in the center of the road and finds a partially clothed girl fleeing from her home. The camera rotates to some other neighbors, never breaking, and the perspective is that of an onlooker; the only danger we see is the one that feels obvious to her. In other moments the camera is fixed on Jay (if not tethered in the gripping wheelchair sequence) but receptive to her peripheral surroundings. The fear that any figure on the horizon might be “It” is a palpable one. And because Mitchell plays with our sense of perspective, it’s unsure when it’s safe to not look over our shoulder.

For a movie concerned with sex, there is no sexuality to be found in “It Follows”. Jay sleeps with her hunky friend Greg (Daniel Zovatto) in the hopes he might be able to see “It” and protect her. Later Jay sleeps with strangers on a boat in an attempt to pass “It” off. And she hopes to save her meeker, nicer friend Paul from the same fate.

Though “It Follows” might scare some teens from sex, Mitchell’s film isn’t puritanical. Paul’s male perspective is one handled a lot on screen, horror movies aside. Why does the cute girl always overlook the nice guy and go for the hunky jerk? But “It Follows” is Jay’s story, not Paul’s. The reality is that there’s more to a woman’s choices than meets the eye. It’s a powerful feminist statement packaged in a creepy thriller, and the real horror is that in the film’s ambiguous ending, the act of sex may be rendered completely sexless. That’s scary.

3 ½ stars

The Essentials: Robert Altman in the ’70s

“Nashville,” “MASH,” “3 Women” and “Thieves Like Us” each speak to why Altman defined the ’70s in film.

In his breakout film “MASH”, Robert Altman set his war comedy in the midst of the ‘50s and the Korean War, but every line of dialogue and moment of anarchy was pure ’70s. The characters are obsessed with sex and the swinging, free love attitude that carried over from the ‘60s. They’re anti-establishment in a way that’s more “Cool Hand Luke”-cheeky than “Rebel Without a Cause”-angst-y. And the visuals on display are often somber and bloody in the New Hollywood fashion rather than melodramatic.

Robert Altman was the ‘70s. Across multiple genres and points in history, Altman always made movies for his time. Directors make biopics so generic they have little to say about the present or the past. Some films are iconic relics of their time because of the effects they used, the stars they championed and the look they adopted. Altman’s style was his own and it became the look of the ‘70s. His best films from this period seem to embrace their own influence and legacy and eventually even come to challenge it.

“MASH” so quickly became a hit and a staple for how storytelling and dialogue could be done that it looks less revolutionary compared to films he would release even a few years later. But Altman’s knack for transforming stories into his present day didn’t end at the war.

To adapt Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye,” Altman took the rugged Philip Marlowe of Old Hollywood and made him a chain-smoking, pitiful PI muttering one-liners under his breath. “Thieves Like Us” is dripping with period styling emblematic of the early 20^th Century, but the film plays like an anti-“Bonnie and Clyde,” modern, scandalous and violent, but with a new self-aware mentality and style. In his Western classic “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”, the overlapping dialogue adds to the film’s rugged, observational quality and strengthens the sprawling cast of Western supporting players. And in Altman’s masterpiece “Nashville”, the drama is focused on just a few days in this American country town in the 1970s, but it feels like a portrait of the entire country writ large.

The universal nature of “Nashville” makes it a good place to start; nearly all of the players Altman amasses here will turn up across his other ‘70s pictures, and the storytelling and character arcs are all free-flowing, non-traditional and emblematic of Altman’s style across all his films. Roger Ebert wrote in his Great Movies piece that “Nashville” may not be about any one thing. It’s a tone poem and musical that moves from character to character, full of some of the same dry humor and busy sense of activity first seen in “MASH”.

It could be about nothing in particular, as Ebert says, specifically the idea that life is messy, always overlaps and never occurs in a straight line. But if it’s about anything, it’s Nashville itself. What makes it such a ‘70s movie is that everything Altman observes has a sense of irony and even an air of criticism to it. When the Coen Brothers spoke about making “Inside Llewyn Davis” and recording the song “Please, Mr. Kennedy,” they explained that it’s a joke song, but not a bad one.

In “Nashville”, the songs are a bit ironic, but they’re far from parodies. Haven Hamilton’s (Henry Gibson) opening number adorning the credits is a hollow political anthem befitting Hamilton’s garishly country attire, but you instantly know the song to be one of a famed veteran with a respect for the art. When Hamilton performs again later at the Grand Ole Opry, it’s a purely stylish, endearing and magnetic performance of a country classic. But Altman includes a sly wink when Hamilton is caught adjusting the microphone stand towering above him.

Even the sillier characters aren’t merely one-dimensional. Altman looks at them through two separate eyes and plays up their flaws and their finer points. Sueleen (Gwen Wells) is a cocktail waitress who can’t sing a lick, but aspires to be a singer. Her voice is its own punch line, but we’ve seen her ambition in her dressing room mirror, and pity her humiliation in a devastating striptease scene. Keith Carradine plays a womanizing jerk who calls up another girl in his black book as soon as he’s finished with Lily Tomlin. But he’s a guy with talent and charm all the same, and his performance of the Oscar winning song “I’m Easy” is another of the film’s high points.

A friend once commented about the show “Modern Family”, saying he loved the show because it has no “B-story”. All the plot threads matter equally and comprise the whole. “Nashville” works in that sense. Characters aren’t lead and supporting. They all have nuances, expressiveness and layers. And when they’re all together at the film’s closing political rally, it’s hard to imagine any film’s cast as rich and as sprawling as this.

Two years after “Nashville”, Altman made another contemporary drama, and while he retained the non-linear story, the observational character building and subtle nuance, he reduced the sprawling scope into something intimate and eerie. “3 Women” takes those big emotions and seems to magnify them in two peculiar characters, and never has Altman made a film as surreal.

It stars Shelley Duvall as Millie Lammoreaux and Sissy Spacek as Millie’s obsessive admirer and friend Pinkie. The two work at an old folks therapy home, and Millie is showing Pinkie the ropes. Spacek was no longer a teenager by the time she played Pinkie, but she still had that immature, girlish quality to her that makes her perfect casting as a lost deer in the headlights type. When Pinkie moves in with Millie and the two slowly become friends, it becomes increasingly clear what a blank slate Pinkie is. She doesn’t have other clothes, friends, a background or possessions. She’s creepy, clingy and desperate for Millie’s attention.

But Altman plays a little trick. The dialogue is still in his signature style, casual, overlapping and ordinary. He develops Millie as a perfectly normal individual chatting it up with friends and colleagues, going out to bars and shooting flirtatious smiles at her cute neighbor Tom. But slowly we pick up on the fact that Millie seems to be making small talk to no one in particular. She makes up conversation topics as she goes, seemingly talking through her colleagues and neighbors as though her presence doesn’t even register. “Don’t look now, but its Thoroughly Modern Millie,” one of her neighbors scoffs. Both Mille and Pinkie are equally bizarre empty shells, and what we know about these characters slowly erodes.

What’s so unique (it does however bare a lot of similarities to “Persona”) about “3 Women” is that Altman is now taking the tricks he has established throughout the ‘70s and using them to the point that nothing feels quite right. The dialogue is not just muted but it creates an awkward silence so thick you can cut it with a knife. He uses quick zooms and cold, distant characters that still have as many tiny intricacies as those in “Nashville” or “MASH”, but they’re packaged in a way that makes the movie beguiling and hypnotic instead of observational and inviting.

To be fair, that peculiar mood setting is not too far off from “MASH” in the first place. The TV show of the same name, which has become far more iconic over the years, is purely conventional and silly. While Altman stages sequences of zany anarchy that would rival and pay homage to the Marx Brothers, particularly the long football finale, so much of the film feels almost solemn and too quietly subtle in its humor, enough to make an unprepared fan of the show bristle.

That’s because while war was the setting in the TV show “MASH”, Altman makes it an actual background. We don’t see any images of war, but we see the aftermath Hawkeye and Trapper are stitching up. They mask their wartime stress behind deft double entendres and prank filled, stick-it-to-the-man attitudes that would become the decade’s hallmark. The audacity of some of these set pieces, like drugging an officer and photographing him with prostitutes as blackmail, removing a shower wall to publicly gawk at their naked female commander, or a football player touchily named “Spearchucker Jones”, all work because of how cavalier and coolly unaffected Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould play Hawkeye and Trapper under Altman’s direction.

“MASH” also ends with a knowing wink to the time in which it belongs. The announcer on the PA reciting silly Old Hollywood films has now rattled off the cast and plot description to “MASH” as the film’s sly sign-off. Altman knows even at the breakout of his career where he stands and how his film belongs to both New Hollywood and Old.

Because of that fear of being lumped in too easily, his 1974 film “Thieves Like Us” has the gangster vibe of “Bonnie and Clyde,” the definitive New Hollywood movie, and makes a slower, more anti-climatic heist movie by design. The opening shot is a long, unbroken nature shot without the punchy editing reminiscent of the era. It fools our eye and delays introducing us to our real protagonists and point of focus. Once the thievery does begin, Altman keeps us outside the bank and away from the action. “I should’ve robbed people with my brain instead of my gun,” Keith Carradine’s Bowie says. The thieves then begin to lay low, and the romance between Bowie and Keechie comes not from a sense of excitement but almost from a lack of it.

Shelley Duvall shows up here as well, and across three of Altman’s films she is never cast the same. She was the obnoxious flirt in “Nashville” and the oblivious socialite in “3 Women”, and here she plays Keechie plain to fit the period simplicity Altman is aiming for.

Sadly, “Thieves Like Us” is not up to Altman’s same par as the other films included in this overview. His writing is ordinary and observational, but less layered and intricate. And despite a resistance to be “Bonnie and Clyde” during the rest of the film, that’s exactly how it ends.

But Altman’s films were made to be messy. That style defined his day, and he laid the groundwork for Paul Thomas Anderson and many more. At the end of “Nashville”, Altman has brought all his characters together, only for hell to finally break loose. It’s a powerful scene, in which everyone emerges in the heat of the moment and shows their true colors. Haven Hamilton takes the mic and proclaims, “You can’t do this to us in Nashville!” He rallies the crowd, and they blindly but nobly carry on the torch. Altman’s films in this time are like “Nashville’s” crowd, each so flawed, colorful and distinctive, that when brought together make up a universal whole.

For more, also check out previous writing on McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye, each masterpieces and certainly worthy of being called “essential” ‘70s Altman.

Rapid Response: Strange Days

“Strange Days,” Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film, from a story by Jay Cocks and her then husband James Cameron, imagines through a sci-fi lens what 1999 Los Angeles might resemble had race riots never stopped and perpetuated into a dystopian police state.

One might assume that a film set at the dawn of the new millennium and about the fear of Y2K might feel a hair dated. But while that aspect does, “Strange Days” touches on a subject that’s been more than prevalent in 2015.

Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film, from a story by Jay Cocks and her then husband James Cameron, imagines through a sci-fi lens what near-future Los Angeles and Hollywood might resemble had race riots never stopped and perpetuated into a mildly dystopian police state. It was released just four years after the Rodney King beating, and it uses the death of an iconic rapper named Jeriko One to act as a martyr and catalyst for all the unrest. Back when the film was released, Tupac Shakur and his eventual death in 1996 came to mind. Today, any of the black men wrongly killed and captured on video will do.

The reason though “Strange Days’s” concept of race feels so poignant has all to do with its sci-fi parameters. In the near future, the police have introduced a tool called a “Squid” that can capture a person’s live experience, from their point of view, as they’re living and experiencing it. People can then enter into “playbacks” that allow you to relive and feel what that person felt.

Now the technology is used on the black market, and Ralph Fiennes plays Lenny Nero, the “Santa Claus of the Subconscious” who sells sexual and thrill seeking experiences like it’s a drug. At the start of the film, we witness a crew robbing a restaurant and then falling to his death as he escapes from the cops. Bigelow shoots in a shaky-cam, first person POV that pre-dates found footage films and makes for some gripping action. Lenny himself is an addict for “jacking in”, or “wire tripping”, as Lenny says, as he obsesses over old memories of him with his former girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis). But when someone starts leaving threatening videos for him to watch, Lenny and his tough friend Mace (Angela Bassett) are on the run from both a madman and a pair of renegade cops.

The plot twist for what’s causing Lenny to be on the run is captured in a video involving the death of Jeriko, and it inherently brings to mind the cell phone videos that have sparked protests today. But after the events of the past year, one has to wonder if the outrage, animosity and eventual justice seen here is just another part of “Strange Days’s” fantasy.

Part of the problem with “Strange Days” is that the race riots are hardly even the main focus of the film. Made for $42 million back in the ’90s, the film was a giant flop that raked in only $7 million. One of the film’s trailers touches on just how all over the place “Strange Days” is, with a heavy focus on the sci-fi, a conspiracy mystery and the fear of what’s to come on New Year’s Eve 1999.

That’s not to say Cameron and Cocks’s story is bad or unfocused, but it drags to over two and half hours and feels like it has two endings, one to confront the sadistic madman threatening Lenny and Faith, and the other to confront the cops who want the tape Lenny is hiding. And the thread connecting these two plot strands is tenuous at best.

But you wish Bigelow did take a bigger interest in the unique sci-fi angle of the story. “Strange Days” becomes strictly procedural in its last hour or so, whereas other sci-fis that take us inside people’s minds, like “Minority Report,” “A.I.,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Being John Malkovich”, to name just a few, go deep into psychological implications; “Strange Days” only considers these brain-teasing pleasures and consequences superficially.

Bigelow does however put the POV perspective to powerful, action heavy use, implicating the viewer in some of the film’s more depraved moments. If you thought Bigelow was advocating for torture in “Zero Dark Thirty” and that those scenes were rough, try on the rape scene in “Strange Days”. A masked intruder sneaks into a woman’s hotel room and begins to rape and strangle her, but before he finishes, he places a viewing device on her head, forcing her to watch herself die from the eyes of her killer. Lovely.

That scene could be debated for days. More simply however, while Angela Bassett kicks ass and dominates the screen in Bigelow’s stylish fights, and Juliette Lewis commands a a handful of grungy rock performances, Ralph Fiennes seems strangely miscast. Only his fifth film role at the time, it’s hard to imagine him as the steamy count in “The English Patient” or the sinister Amon Goethe in “Schindler’s List”, let alone any of his more recent iconic roles. He has the sleazy, slick, fast-talking demeanor of James Woods and the ’90s haircut of Nicolas Cage. He’s not the action star, but audiences should appreciate the depth he and the cast bring to “Strange Days’s” more melodramatic moments.

If anything, the interesting foibles of “Strange Days” demonstrate that Bigelow was well on her way to becoming a master. It’s just hard to “jack in” to that frame of mind.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

“The Thief of Bagdad” is pure spectacle, lacking the psychological heft of “Metropolis”, the emotional beauty of “Sunrise”, the economic and timeless genius of Buster Keaton stunts, but it rivals all of them and more as a film full of real movie moments. The production design is grand and daunting, the creativity and scope is unmatched. It is not a “film” but a “movie” with inspiration and sights worthy of a prince.

Critics who today bristle at true movie spectacles like “Avatar” or “Gravity” for want of a more substantive story are less likely to do the same when faced with a silent film. The technical precision and thoughtful filmmaking required to communicate ideas and tell any story seems to be enough.

And yet “The Thief of Bagdad” is pure spectacle, lacking the psychological heft of “Metropolis”, the emotional beauty of “Sunrise”, the economic and timeless genius of Buster Keaton stunts, but it rivals all of them and more as a film full of real movie moments. The production design is grand and daunting, the creativity and scope is unmatched. It is not a “film” but a “movie” with inspiration and sights worthy of a prince.

Such was the nature of the swashbuckler film, a genre of capes and swords and heroes and sandals in a far off Eastern World and period in history. None were better than “The Thief of Bagdad”, and no one was a bigger star than Douglas Fairbanks Sr. His visage here is rugged, shirtless, masculine, cocky and virile. Fairbanks opens the film sleeping in the sun in the busy Baghdad bazaar, awaiting unsuspecting citizens to stop to take a drink so he can swipe their purses. Despite his crimes, Fairbanks immediately carries the movie star swagger that would define onscreen masculinity for decades. He’s the film’s hero because we know him to be. And his charms as a thief and criminal, one tempted to drug the princess, one who is sacrilegious and rejects God, are shocking and remarkable for a pre-code film.

But there’s no sense what he’s doing is wrong. It’s fun and exciting action of a man on the run. One of the film’s great early stunts sees him throw a man’s turban onto a high-up ledge, place it beneath the man’s heavy frame, tie the end to a donkey, and get the motion of the donkey to lift him up.

Fairbanks did all his own stunts, and despite having his hands in every aspect of the film, he stayed out of the way to allow Raoul Walsh to direct and capture the moment in one perfect wide shot. And Fairbanks makes it look easy, performing with a wink and a smirk much unlike the stone-faced Keaton when doing the same.

Truly though “The Thief of Bagdad’s” charms are in the effects and spectacle and not the stunts alone. The film was the first to cost over $1 million. Though that’s just $13 million in today’s dollars, hardly enough for even a mid-size indie, Fairbanks orchestrated upwards of six acres on which to build his Baghdad, staging magnificent palaces and armies of extras to populate this miniature city. And the money is certainly on the screen. We see tigers and chimps climbing out of trap doors, massive and ornate palace gates opening in sections, hazy, glimmering filters to create underwater sequences, hidden caves and valleys of fire, many with vast depth in the shots to highlight the film’s grandiose proportions.

Admittedly these effects have not aged well, or perhaps are not as timeless as some of the more tangible effects in other silent classics. Fairbanks does battle with a monster that’s in actuality a superimposed reptile with additional spikes. He rides a “Winged Horse” that doesn’t fly but gallops “in the sky”. And yet to see Fairbanks and the princess take off on a flying carpet at the end of the film is as whimsical as advertised.

The story is drawn from the tales of Arabian Nights legend, and was remade most notably in 1940, another fantasy classic. Modern audiences however might know it best as Disney’s “Aladdin”. A thief living on the streets makes to steal treasure from the palace, but encounters the princess and falls in love. She is to be wed to one of several princely suitors (“He’s fat and gross as if fed on lard!”), so the thief disguises himself as a prince to win her affection. When he is outed as a fraud, he goes on a quest to find a magic chest that will make him a prince, all while the evil Mongol prince plots to capture Baghdad.

It’s a charming tale of romance, adventure and all that makes a great swashbuckler, even if it does greatly sag during the more modest scenes of romance. But “The Thief of Bagdad” is ultimately a spiritual journey. The film is bookended with the priest’s prophecy, “Happiness Must Be Earned.” The effort on splendor on display here is more than enough to earn any modern audience’s happiness.

Still Alice

Julianne Moore is a revelation in the modest film about Alzheimer’s disease.

Though most fictional movies are not trying to be documentaries, there’s a desire we crave for authenticity in characters, storytelling and habits. To make a truly “authentic” movie about a woman suffering from a disease or disability might not be much of a movie at all. People grow old and sick, and those affected try to adapt and move on.

“Still Alice” tells the story of a woman struggling with Early Onset Alzheimer’s, and it’s a modest movie without the added frills or melodramatic hooks of adversity, romance or history that attempt to turn a story about disability into a more traditional narrative. In that way, “Still Alice”, along with Julianne Moore’s impeccable performance, feels like the most authentic movie about Alzheimer’s yet.

So many disability movies involve characters that are defined by their disabilities. Watching “The Theory of Everything,” you’d be fooled into believing that all Stephen Hawking did in his life was have Lou Gehrig’s disease. And for the bulk of “Still Alice”, that’s all Alice Howland (Moore) is: a 50-year-old woman with Early Onset Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t delve deep into her past or explore her life outside of her family, but what Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s film does is tell the story of a woman who fears losing herself, both physically and symbolically. Alzheimer’s is just a means to that end.

Alice is a renowned professor of communication at Columbia College, and her life’s work of research is also her life. She’s a woman who thrives on her intellect and her family, and that seems to be enough. She goes running on campus and uses practically made-up words like “Hadj” to win at her Words With Friends obsession.

Alice’s very first mental slip-ups are so miniscule that you could miss them; her family certainly does. After one run on campus, the world around her turns into a blur, the camera spinning dizzily around Alice’s head. Moore’s breathing gets heavy, and the fear that Alice has no idea where she is sinks in.

In one very economical scene, Alice visits a neurologist and goes under a quick evaluation. In a static shot captivated with Moore’s plain, confident work, the camera never breaks, and we never see the doctor’s face. Such a long look seems to put our minds at ease, but it doesn’t stop Alice from testing herself in creative ways, writing words on a chalkboard to see if she can remember them minutes later, or posing questions to herself in notes on her phone.

When the news is confirmed, Alice’s bigger fear is passing the disease on to her children. Her oldest Anna (Kate Bosworth) is successful, married and about to have kids. Her middle son Tom (Hunter Parrish) is just through medical school. And her youngest Lydia (Kristen Stewart) has skipped college and is working to be an actress in L.A.

The whole family is intimate, conversational, understanding, and the movie focuses in on the pain Alice is feeling by making it clear how her disease impacts the life choices of those closest to her.

“I wish I had cancer,” Alice says in plainly cynical terms. With cancer, people understand. But with something like Alzheimer’s, it changes you, and it changes how people perceive you, she believes. “Still Alice” isn’t about the fight to beat the disease, but about how Alice maintains her resourcefulness, intuition and in turn her identity even as her condition worsens, be it in wetting herself because she can’t remember where the bathroom is, or in blindly reading Lydia’s private diary without realizing what it contains.

Why “Still Alice” must be valued above all is that it’s a movie with a middle-aged woman at its core who is experiencing challenges, hardship and emotional peril like a relatable human being. It passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors, and Moore proves to be a revelation, an every woman symbol when there are so few others in the movies. She can be witty, droll and confident but can also fall to pieces in an instant. And her work matches the tonal modesty of the film. Free of clear delineations of time, she goes through a slow, but radical physical transformation and feels convincing at every stage. And in a long career, it’s not a stretch to say this is possibly Moore’s best work.

There’s a sense that “Still Alice” could go further. The directors hint at tension between Anna and Lydia that if explored further could’ve complicated the family’s decision about what to do with their mother. And both daughters are served with devastating news as a result of their mother’s diagnosis, but the degree to which their lives change goes unexplored.

Further, compared to a film like Sarah Polley’s “Away From Her”, “Still Alice” lacks a romantic angle that could help elevate it in terms of cinematic storytelling. But what remains is hardly the shell of a movie, a character or a person; it’s still Alice.

3 ½ stars

Out of the Furnace

Christian Bale and Casey Affleck star in Scott Cooper’s grim Americana noir.

There’s a moment in “Out of the Furnace” when a backwoods, villainous hick named Harlan DeGroat has a deer skinned to its bones hanging from the ceiling. The imagery calls to mind something absolutely raw, as though this bleak look at Americana symbolized all that’s emotional and open about the people who live this way. But Director Scott Cooper’s prized trophy doesn’t have that much meat on its bones to begin with. “Out of the Furnace” feels frustratingly unspecific, empty and generic, no matter how gritty the characters are.

It starts as a story of two brothers grappling with the complications of poverty, crumbling industry, crime, family, violence and more before taking a left turn as a revenge story driven by not much at all. Cooper has loaded his film with imagery and personalities full of gravitas as though that were enough.

Russell and Rodney Baze (Christian Bale and Casey Affleck) are two good ‘ole boys with little to their name beyond their factory jobs and their truck. Russell has a girlfriend he loves dearly (Zoe Saldana) and a father on his death bed, but he’s yanked violently from those loves when he gets involved in a drunk driving wreck that kills a woman and child. While his brother lies in prison, Rodney has lost thousands gambling and looks to repay his debts through illegal bare-knuckle brawls. As a former soldier, fighting seems to be all he knows.

Rodney eventually finds his way to the most rural of rural areas, where the meth dealer and backwoods boss Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson) has organized a fight that gets Rodney in trouble. Russell, now free from prison, looks to rescue his brother and bring him back home.

These are men full of rage, anger and addiction, but none of it seems specific or tied to a real backstory or social issue. That Rodney is driven to fight as a result of his veteran status is treated as a given. The police claim they have no jurisdiction in Harlan’s gangster society up in the hills, and yet their dynamic as criminals seem to have no real impact on Anytown, USA where “Out of the Furnace” is set. Rodney is forced to take a dive during his fight, but it’s never explained why there should be an unspoken tension and danger between Harlan and Rodney’s manager (Willem Dafoe). “Am I supposed to be scared because he sucks on a lollipop,” Rodney asks of Harlan. Cooper struggles to explain why we should be afraid of Harlan, but with a line like this he calls attention to how cartoonishly cliché and short tempered Harrelson’s character is in the first place.

In fact all of the industrial, Americana imagery in the film contains an understated melodrama but doesn’t seem to signify much of anything in particular. Saldana is the film’s only named female character, and she’s given absolutely zero to do. And Bale’s Russell is the protagonist, but possibly only to serve as an ironic counterpoint to his more troubled brother. “Out of the Furnace” ends on a heavy note, and the cinematography makes it to be a movie of purpose, but it’s without much purpose at all.

2 ½ stars

Rapid Response: Slacker

Richard Linklater’s first film “Slacker” is a cinematic experiment bucking narrative or constant characters.

Richard Linklater was featured in a documentary with another famous director James Benning. The two were watching “Sweet Smell of Success” together, and 10 minutes before the end, as a random man speaks with Burt Lancaster, Benning made a casual joke saying, “And then we just follow that guy, right at the climax of the movie.” Linklater, who was just finishing editing “Slacker” thought to himself, “Uh oh, I just made an entire movie like that.”

And I thought nothing happened in “Boyhood“. Richard Linklater’s “Slacker”, his first film, is strictly an experiment. It bucks narrative or protagonists altogether and simply wanders around Austin, Texas observing people, life and behavior. Since 1991, Linklater has coalesced this ploy into the most honest, thoughtful, introspective and emotional cinema he’s making today, from the walking and talking romances of “Before Midnight” to the documentary hybrid “Bernie“.

“Slacker” lacks these traditional narrative devices because Linklater wanted to make a point that audiences could relate to people not on story but on personalities, moments, events and the things we experience everyday. To say nothing happens is missing the point. A lot happens in every day; it’s just a matter of choosing which details to focus on, and what those details can tell us about ourselves.

Linklater lays out his thesis right up front, making a cameo in the backseat of a cab traveling from the train station. “Have you ever had a dream,” he asks, “where everything feels so life like, but nothing happens?” That’s “Slacker” in a nutshell, but for as lazy and uneventful as the actions of his characters, Linklater doesn’t rest on his laurels, and makes pains to think of these things profoundly. “Every thought you have is a choice you make, and they all become separate realities.”

It sounds merely like college psychology quad talk at first, but Linklater then deliberately avoids telling a story to make this point. A woman is hit by a car and is lying dead in the street. Someone says to call the police and help her, but instead of hanging around and learning to find out more about the woman or what happens next, Linklater goes out of his way to follow a passerby into his home. Later, a teenager is walking to his friend’s house, and an older man starts keeping pace with him and talking his head off about conspiracy theories. He’s allowed to ramble, and rather than confront him to stop and cause conflict, the teen arrives at his destination, the two carry on with their day, and we carry on with the next couple.

“Slacker” has an undeniable rhythm to these little observations, each one so nuanced and detailed in their momentary slices of life. Some of the people are funny and awkward (one woman offers two friends Madonna’s supposed pap smear, thinking it to be valuable), others are thoughtful and philosophical (“Perhaps human beings aren’t meant to be happy. We’re always enslaving ourselves”), and others still are ironically morbid (“The next person who passes us will be dead within a fortnight”).

Linklater spends individual moments with a mentally challenged person, a hapless loser, an annoying hipster activist, a conspiracy theory weirdo, a lazy homebody, and kids who have discovered a way to get Coke out of the vending machine for free. Like “Boyhood”, these characters feel developed enough that we could spend an entire film with any one. But this is cinema, and life is endlessly more fascinating when we take the time to look around.

Rapid Response: Fail-Safe

Sidney Lumet’s “Fail-Safe” is a forgotten masterpiece released the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”.

My generation never grew up with the fear of imminent destruction. The media raves about the threat of ISIS to America, and we were born into an age where our country had experienced the worst attack on American soil, but the Millennials like me never knew the feeling of the Cold War and the threat of a real super power on the brink of total nuclear war and annihilation.

For that reason, Sidney Lumet’s “Fail-Safe” struck a particularly unusual chord. From 1964, it’s the stepchild to Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” with virtually the same plot but none of the irony or grim satire, and due to a lawsuit, it was kept on a shelf until after “Dr. Strangelove” left theaters and became the defining Cold War movie. The film bombed at the box office and was received as camp as a result, and now “Fail-Safe” is widely unseen, but ranks among Lumet’s masterpieces.

“Fail-Safe” is worlds more than a Kubrick clone or a Cold War movie without a sense of humor. It’s a grim and at times calmly nihilistic depiction of politics, bureaucracy and technology. Superbly acted, tensely directed and haunting to look at, it’s less a political commentary than a horror story of a system gone wrong and the world gone to hell as a result.

The plot that leads to doom is simple, but always feels more complicated as it’s happening. Before the times of long range missiles, fighter jets still needed to carry bombs to their targets. American pilots survey an area for suspicious enemy movement, and if they reach a critical Fail-Safe point, they can receive an order via a closed circuit box instructing them to attack. The system is designed to be fool-proof and account for all possibilities, but a mechanical malfunction leads one team of pilots to set on an attack course to Moscow. Believing these orders came directly from the President, the pilots are not to turn around or verify the attack via radio, fearing the possibility that America is already under attack and unable to communicate or that the President’s voice could be impersonated. “Fail-Safe” plays out as a real time race of negotiation with the Russians, strategizing and attempts to shoot down the rogue planes.

While the last plot twist seems like an implausible, fatal flaw, Lumet uses it as a strategic plot device. In such a system where safeguards are put in place, it’s the systems, the policies and the people obligated to obey them that results in tragedy. And the fears that put these systems in place are not aimless. There’s a constant fear of surveillance and technology as to what the Russians are truly capable of, and it’s these presuppositions that lead to the worst.

“Fail-Safe” heightens the pulse of the Cold War tenfold, and it conveys the many nuanced debates and worst case scenarios with eloquence and suspense. The generals in the Pentagon debate the possibility of a limited war, and how with calculated casualties victory can be achieved. While there are vocal naysayers pleading for the prevention of war at all costs, a Pentagon advisor played wickedly by Walter Matthau eggs on the logic behind an attack. He’s a calculated mastermind not unlike Dr. Strangelove who imagines that the only survivors of nuclear war will be convicts in solitary confinement and file clerks. The way Matthau plays the role, seemingly disconnected from the rest of the grounded cast, his political theory ranges from outlandish to scarily accurate.

That nuance is just one virtue Lumet brings to “Fail-Safe.” His characters across the board are not one-dimensional, over eager or seeking bloodlust. They’re flawed bureaucrats trying to find the best case scenario and discovering it to also be the worst. And Lumet carries that nuance into the war room and to the emotional stakes. In one pivotal scene, American General Bogan (Frank Overton) is revealing the location of the rogue fighter jets to a Russian general so they can be shot down and that disaster can be averted. As they talk and fear failure, Bogan is given a file with the general’s picture and one of his family. It’s a poignant, minuscule touch that makes “Fail-Safe” plain brilliant.

But the film is also striking as a film on the cusp of a revolution in Hollywood filmmaking. Lumet incorporates the same claustrophobic feel he brought to “12 Angry Men,” but the sparse settings, imposing low angles and even some repeating jump cuts make it feel daringly unlike anything in Old Hollywood. Two of the film’s best performances and most impressive cinematography come from the scenes with Henry Fonda as the President and Larry Hagman as Buck, his translator. Confined to a sparse bunker for the entirety of the film, Lumet stages incredible monochromatic close-ups that put these two at odds and have them staring down the camera with immense gravity. It’s amazing how much tension Lumet draws from such economy.

And yet “Fail-Safe’s” ending is so powerfully sickening that it makes me question its necessity. The President’s twist is something I will not reveal, but it feels outrageous and impossible even for the stakes Lumet has raised. Sure enough, the consequences are immense and the conclusion is nightmarish. I’m trying to think of another film that has ended in such a way, one with as much of a bleak, devastating outlook as this.

To symbolize such an outcome as a natural possibility and the only rational choice in this circumstance might be too great a scene to depict without any irony in the way “Dr. Strangelove” did. “Fail-Safe” ends with a disclaimer from the Army that none of the technological glitches that occurred are truly possible, and the real cold irony is that Lumet is inadvertently saying they’re wrong. Does such an end justify the horrific means it took to arrive here? “Fail-Safe” is such immensely powerful storytelling and filmmaking that in a time separated from “Dr. Strangelove,” it certainly would.

Revisited: Up in the Air

Jason Reitman’s third film reflects how he has evolved into the filmmaker he is today, for better or worse.

Few directors other than perhaps M. Night Shyamalan (and even he still has some admirers) have experienced such a dramatic shift from critical acclaim to cinematic whipping boy than Jason Reitman.

Once considered an indie darling with thought provoking films like “Thank You For Smoking” and charming affectations of the high school experience like “Juno”, Reitman took a rapid nosedive in respect with his last two films, both unseen by me, that any mention of his name seems to illicit furrowed brows. Like Bono and U2 in 2014, Reitman’s past marvels have been marginalized and erased by their current transgressions to be made into the most hated in America.

The first misstep was “Labor Day”, an uncharacteristic melodrama and romance known for a pie-making scene that’s just about the worst metaphor for sex and romance ever captured on film. His most recent, 2014’s “Men, Women and Children”, was seen as Reitman sinking even further out of touch with humanity than ever before. It’s an unsettling portrait of suburbia that uses grave self-importance to treat the Internet, smartphones and all modern technology as the roots of all evil. Lambasting the film was like critics taking revenge on the fact that “American Beauty” ever won Best Picture.

“Up in the Air” however, Reitman’s third film, was once considered his crowning achievement, and released at the tail end of the first decade of the 21st Century, felt like a brilliant, touching, satirical portrait of the Way We Live Now. How did this guy fall out of touch so quickly? What caused critics to turn against him so fast?

The truth is that “Up in the Air” is not as out of line with the themes of “Men, Women and Children” as you might expect. In fact you might even say that “Up in the Air” reflects a natural progression of a young independent director evolving as an artist and storyteller.

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man whose job it is to fire people for a living, brought in by other companies as a way of easing the transition by means of placement services and George Clooney’s charming, calming reassurance. Reitman earns points by turning the story into a documentary on a crumbling economy, with companies being downsized and people losing their jobs left and right. Reitman interviews non-actors and has them react to their termination in a way that reflects a semi-documentary style that Richard Linklater would recreate later in “Bernie“.

But Reitman is more interested in making Bingham into a charming louse, preaching the idea of ditching all the belongings we shove into our metaphorical “backpack” in order to live a more efficient and productive life. He relishes the little touches of customer loyalty that keep his life in orbit, he’s casually racist and stereotypical when selecting security lines to wait in, and he scoffs at the idea of marriage or anything else as an institution. He and his alter-ego “with a vagina” Alex (Vera Farmiga) both get off on comparing the weights in their rewards cards and on how many collective miles they’ve racked up over time.

Clooney and Farmiga have steamy chemistry, and Reitman’s dialogue allows them to zip along like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday” or some other classical screwball comedy. Separated from that context however, Reitman makes Clooney and Farmiga come across as frustratingly smug, condescending to people with bulky suitcases, collapsable strollers and those who rent from that awful new car rental place with terrible kiosk placement.

The idea that most people don’t talk the way Clooney and Farmiga do is something that first rubbed people the wrong way with Juno McGuff, as though her early 2000s slang and wit made her appear pretentious. Reitman there however had the crutch of Diablo Cody’s wickedly ridiculous and infectious script. Here they’re likable but difficult; they’re the kind of people you want to hate, and Reitman doesn’t seem to mind.

Ryan however is gradually revealed to be a shockingly unhealthy person. Without emotional connections of a meaningful sort, he’s without real ambition or direction in his life, and in the film’s final shot, he can be seen standing in front of an immense departures board completely lost as to where to go or what to do with the tiny backpack of belongings he has to his name. As a storytelling device, it works gangbusters, turning this business professional into an actual human with grace and humor over time.

But as a philosophical statement, it’s a plea for the more traditional American Dream. The one thing Ryan does take seriously is when his younger self Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick in her breakout role) seeks to digitally disrupt his industry, firing people via video technology and saving her company a whole lot of time, money and awkward, face to face encounters with disgruntled employees. Knowing how people react in this situation, he’s appropriately wary of the rise of new technology and change. But of course this isn’t just about break-ups through text message or firing through Skype; it’s about America, and how technology gets us further away from the human interactions and precision that allow Ryan to do his fastidious job so well.

It all comes to a head when Ryan travels to Milwaukee to attend his sister’s wedding. Ryan’s family is as quick as Natalie at calling his BS about throwing away attachments, and the images of love and marriage provide a gooey change of heart for Ryan that maybe love and a normal life on the ground would be for him.

Natalie even has an interesting scene with Alex and Ryan shortly after her boyfriend has broken up with her that subtly reflects Reitman’s conservative values. “I don’t want to say anything that’s anti-feminist,” she says, “but sometimes it feels like, no matter how much success I have, it’s not gonna matter until I find the right guy.” There’s nuance to this exchange for sure, but how might this line go over in 2015?

Reitman has spent the whole of two hours subtly picking away at the technological institutions that can transform business and people’s lives, opting instead for the nuclear family in the Middle America that is Milwaukee. Is this so different than starting “Men, Women and Children” in “outer freaking space” as a scary metaphor for the rise of the Internet? Most would agree that “Up in the Air” is a much better film, and that even if Reitman shares some different values, this is an emotional, compelling, competently told story by a filmmaker with his feet on the ground and his head out of the clouds. At the very least though, revisiting “Up in the Air” has been a revealing experience as to just how this promising director at the top of the world started to lose his footing.

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