Tag: Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The Walk

Robert Zemeckis uses 3-D to tell the story of Philippe Petit and how he tight-rope walked across the World Trade Center Towers

thewalkposterThere have been reports that people have vomited after witnessing the tight rope sequence across the World Trade Center towers in Robert Zemeckis’s film “The Walk”. The fact is it’s a bad trigger for Vertigo sufferers, but the scene itself is not made to be a thrilling stunt. It actually slows the film, away from the madcap whimsy of Zemeckis’s biopic and to something a little more peaceful, tranquil and spiritual.

And yet for all the CGI wizardry and IMAX, 3D spectacle for which “The Walk” is earning its buzz, Zemeckis never manages a moment as beautifully weightless as James Marsh does with just still images and Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1” in the Oscar winning documentary “Man on Wire”. “The Walk” is weighed down not only by its storytelling building up to the walk but in its spectacle.

Philippe Petit managed a daring stunt upon the completion of the World Trade Center towers in New York by dangling a wire across the 140 feet of the two buildings and walking across, 110 stories off the ground. The performance was a coup, a beautiful demonstration against the law, and the movie charts not only Petit’s madness but the pain and struggle it took to sneak past the guards to make his art.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Petit, and although he’s not French and doesn’t quite look the part, he’s a spunky song and dance man capable of embodying Petit’s goofy, circus charms and showmanship. He’s also perfectly insufferable, narrating his life story from atop the Statue of Liberty no less, the towers idling in the background as though 9/11 never happened.

It’s the laziest sort of storytelling, in which not only does Zemeckis opt to tell us Petit’s story rather than show us, Gordon-Levitt seems all too eager to do so and lays the whimsy of becoming a wire walker on thick. Gordon-Levitt butts up against the equally galling accent of Ben Kingsley as Petit’s Czech mentor, and the early chapters of the film range from cheesy to grating.

“You’re doing too much,” Kingsley’s character says to Petit about how to be sincere in performance. “Do nothing!” Zemeckis would’ve been good to heed this advice, for as we wait for the 3-D to make itself useful during the walk sequence, Zemeckis throws juggling pins and balls at the camera and has Petit showboat or spin a globe to keep things alive.

Things liven up a bit when Zemeckis switches to caper mode, diving into how Petit spies on the Twin Tower construction crews, builds his team of accomplices, and tries to rig his equipment while avoiding detection. “Man on Wire” did this wonderfully, donning a style that borrowed from Errol Morris but had energy all its own. “The Walk” suffers from a few stock characters like a flaky stoner and some negative nellies constantly telling Petit it’s impossible.

“The Walk” also doesn’t get inside Petit’s art as strongly as “Man on Wire” does. Marsh knew that the artistry of Petit’s act was in the coup, defying the law but in a peaceful, beautiful way. “The Walk” is all about the thrill and spiritual sensation of its major set piece. The camera throughout the movie teases the sensation of staring downward until finally it cranes overhead and sees to infinity. Its movements around Petit are slow and feel treacherous, but only to the extent that we sense each of Petit’s steps and feel comfortable in his shoes.

As James Marsh accepted his Oscar, Petit joined him on stage and said, “Thank you to the Academy for continuing to believe in magic,” performing a slight of hand trick and then balancing Marsh’s Oscar upside down on his chin. It was an unexpected moment of levity that immediately deflated the stuffy airiness from the Oscar ceremony. “The Walk” is a movie that aims to be full of those moments, whimsical and endearing to the point of being insufferable. At least up on that wire he shuts up for a moment.

2 ½ stars

Don Jon

The ideas in “Don Jon” are occasionally as thin as its meat-head protagonist, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt brings charm to the part.

After seeing something as gratingly powerful as Steve McQueen’s “Shame,” it perhaps occurred to Joseph Gordon-Levitt that for most, Internet porn is not as severe as a crippling sex addiction, and yet it’s prevalence suggests something much deeper about our culture.

This is nothing new. The think pieces about how it’s changing our kids’ perceptions about sex, relationships and what defines someone as attractive are everywhere. Vanity Fair wrote one just this week. The media has immense influence, and it most strongly affects those who already display a level of naiveté and arrogance.

That’s perhaps why the eponymous protagonist of Gordon-Levitt’s “Don Jon” is not just a narcissistic Jersey boy but also a lowest common denominator schmuck without much to his name beside his seedy browser history. In his attempt to make a film about addiction, media overdose and modern, self-centered personalities while still keeping “Don Jon” a swift, funny, 90-minute sex romp, Gordon-Levitt is somewhat grasping at straws, making the ideas in it as thin as the movie’s buff hero.

Yet JGL’s ability to make Jon disarmingly charming even as he’s playing the fool is what makes this indie comedy rise above the rest of the rom-com, media trash the movie condemns. Continue reading “Don Jon”

Lincoln

The photography in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” often paints our country’s 16th President in stylized obscurity, the beautiful backlighting casting Honest Abe in shadows of his own history. It’s a movie that fully embraces our American virtues, and yet for all we thought we knew about Lincoln suggests there is more to the man than the icon.

The Lincoln we see here is not the towering man with the deep, resounding voice that can carry across a battlefield. This is a Lincoln suffering from nightmares, giving piggyback rides to his youngest son, wrapping himself in an old blanket, telling cute stories with his soothing, high-pitched whisper of a voice and furrowing his brow as he deals with the impasse of war and the effort to abolish slavery. This is perhaps not the man we imagined in preschool but the man that was and the man who still portrayed an immense presence.

When screenwriter Tony Kushner (“Munich,” “Angels in America”) approached Spielberg with an adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography, it was a sprawling 500-page script on Lincoln’s life. Spielberg focuses in on the short period between April of 1864 and January 1865 when the Civil War is coming to a close, the Senate has already approved the 13th Constitutional Amendment and the Democrats in the House threaten to vote it down.

Lincoln’s battle is a powerful paradox. End the war and readmit the Confederacy and they will certainly block the law to end slavery. Fail to pursue peace and the swing votes in Congress may turn against him. And yet if slavery is abolished and done so before fighting resumes in the spring, the war is over, as the South has nothing more to fight for.  Their fight to get it passed is a war of words, not of worlds, and “Lincoln” is approached as a stately performance piece, not a war epic.

It is more theatrical than cinematic, but Spielberg does the job of emblazoning these big ideas onto the silver screen. For all its talking, “Lincoln” is a movie of action. Their Congress gets more done in two and half hours than ours did in two and a half years, and the scenes of debate and voting are invigorating moments of politics, racism, boastfulness and insight.

And because all these historical figures are in their own way larger than life, Spielberg has assembled a cast that is just as impressive. Daniel Day-Lewis is remarkable as Lincoln. At times, Lincoln is calm and without words for all the harried politicians in his cabinet. Day-Lewis seems almost detached from the scene, but he slowly builds and shows why Lincoln was so arresting. Sometimes the end to his story is a punch line, like about how a man loathed the image of George Washington, and at others he unleashes philosophical truths of equality and common sense with the greatest of ease. Unlike some Day-Lewis performances, he melds into this role and never proclaims he is acting. Sometimes he finds the best notes when he’s just being a father, child on his knee in a rocking chair and revealing his deep humanity.

Then there’s Sally Field as Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd, a frazzled, fiery woman of great hidden power. Field above all is the one who sets the film’s stakes, heaping the burden of passing the amendment with the threat of the death of their oldest son (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and her admitting herself to a mental institution. Watch Field as she greets guests at their White House party, holding up a long line to speak more candidly with some of the key Congressmen. She appears at once absent minded and in full control, figuratively shaking hands with a powerful grip but really not exerting any pressure at all.

But best of all is perhaps Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, the Republican representative from Pennsylvania. In one pivotal Congressional scene, he goes against his belief that all men are literally created equal and proclaims that all men should be equal under the law, regardless of race or, as he says to his vocal Democratic opponent, character. The beauty of Jones’s performance is that although his dialogue is eloquent and verbose language of the times, Jones can still deliver such lines with the same blunt force he does in all of his roles.

Spielberg and Kushner have put a great deal of effort into recreating every period detail as historically accurate. We get a movie of remarkable production design in stunningly authentic and old-fashioned clarity. But “Lincoln” does still feel like a movie for the modern day. He jokingly asks, “Since when has the Republican Party unanimously supported anything,” and draws startling parallels between Obama and Lincoln by observing that many Democrats viewed Lincoln as something of a tyrant.

By ending on its bittersweet note, it leaves us with the idea that some ideas and possibilities must be withheld now to achieve prosperity in the future. There may be some wet eyes as the visage of Lincoln burns powerfully in a gas lamp during a closing shot.

“Lincoln” may not always be the rousingly patriotic portrait of Lincoln we imagined, but it’s the American vision we deserve.

4 stars

Looper

“Looper” is a polished action sci-fi about time travel with enough stylish coolness, emotional depth and narrative elegance to be an instant classic.

Most time travel films fall flat because the rules of the sci-fi are so dense that they collapse under the weight of their own paradoxes. Rian Johnson’s (“Brick”) film makes the characters, their story and their psychology the most important parts, allowing the film’s rules to become an integral part of a well-oiled machine.

In the future, when the mob needs to dispose of a body, they use time travel to cover their tracks, sending a victim back in time to be murdered where the body can’t be traced. The hit men responsible for these killings are Loopers, people on a contract with the mob until a set time when that person is sent back in time to be killed by their past selves, thus closing the loop of responsibility.

The youngest Looper in 2046 Kansas is Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and he discovers that a new mob boss in the future is terminating all the Looper contracts. When his future self (Bruce Willis) comes back in time to be killed, he hesitates, and Future Joe escapes, launching him on a mission to kill the mob boss responsible for killing his wife by stopping him before he comes to power.

There are many ways this plot could veer and become something other than the accessible, exciting genre picture it is. Continue reading “Looper”

Premium Rush

When YouTube was still in its infancy, some of the earliest viral videos I remember watching were bicyclists doing trick moves to hop up steep inclines and thread the needle in tough to reach places.

It was parkour… but with bikes!

And you know what I always thought those videos were missing? Bumbling cops chasing these daredevils for absurd comic relief.

Thankfully, “Premium Rush” delivers.

And “delivers” is the right word, because “Premium Rush” is about that most loved of all groups of people, bike couriers. Yes, now those annoying people who you just want to run over in traffic (unless they’re bringing you your Jimmy Johns) have their own movie dedicated to making you wish you were as constantly amped as they are. Continue reading “Premium Rush”

The Dark Knight Rises

The bat signal is lit. Since 2008’s “The Dark Knight,” the world needed another proper superhero movie, one that tested our minds and rattled our core.

Christopher Nolan’s follow-up, “The Dark Knight Rises,” is more of an enduring challenge than some will expect. For others, it will even feel little like a superhero movie. But its heavy themes of untapped emotion and social anarchy dwarf the flimsy blandness of “The Avengers” and “The Amazing Spiderman.” It does the Batman franchise proud. Continue reading “The Dark Knight Rises”

50/50

They say laughter is the best medicine, but it’s not an appropriate treatment for cancer, even though it has no cure. “50/50,” a dark dramedy about a 27-year-old who contracts a rare spinal cord cancer, isn’t being “jokey” at our expense. It finds laughs through blunt, direct practicality and acceptance of a bad situation.

Through the unfortunate plight of Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), “50/50” finds characters who address his cancer head-on and reveal themselves as the healthiest people of all. Continue reading “50/50”