Tag: Paul Giamatti

Straight Outta Compton

StraightOuttaComptonPosterName me another music biopic that opens with a battering ram. “Straight Outta Compton’s” incredible sense of location is so strongly of the streets and of the Compton neighborhood. It knows how crazy things can get, to the point where it needs to begin with the cops bringing an army to nail some black kids doing drugs. Director F. Gary Gray places the film not in the canon of other music biopics but in the league of a racially charged masterpiece like “Boyz n the Hood” or “Friday,” which Gray also directed starring N.W.A’s Ice Cube.

The music of N.W.A. and specifically the album “Straight Outta Compton” is so charged with personality and local identity that it would be a mistake if the movie didn’t also aim for that level of knowledge about the community in which it was brought up. These kids starting out making music show some real effort in a tough upbringing, and their attitude is to rap about that reality. “Speak a little truth and people lose their minds,” the film says, and we can see how immediately crazy things can get. The words matter more than the beats, and the movie doesn’t over intellectualize their music to the point of fawning over its brilliance. It just scares the shit out of people, leaving room for some truly insane rock star moments, like a massive hotel orgy culminating in N.W.A. pulling out their massive glocks at some intruders like it was nothing.

But on a biopic level, “Straight Outta Compton” is rare in how it manages an effective, yet comprehensive story. The film starts with N.W.A. cutting their first single and goes until Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and Easy-E (Jason Mitchell) had all gone their separate solo routes. With the Director’s Cut at nearly 3 hours, it takes its time fleshing out the story of all three characters individually, rather than trying to stuff subplots into the story of one. I imagine it’s how a Beatles biopic would have to be approached were anyone to ever take it on.

“Straight Outta Compton” even plays the biopic game of showy musical performances and celebrity cameos, but embedded within each of these more superfluous set pieces and attractions is a real sense of danger. The cops could be harassing the band or Suge Knight could be threatening to shoot a crewmember in the next room. Paul Giamatti is also officially the go-to guy as a sleazy, manipulative tour manager, having now played the part here, in “Rock of Ages” and “Love & Mercy.”

Music biopics are often concerned with history and personal legacy, but Gray makes “Straight Outta Compton” modern and urgent in its delivery of powerful melodrama, vital lyrics and hyper-relevant themes. This is a Movie With Attitude.

3 ½ stars

Love & Mercy

John Cusack and Paul Dano both play Brian Wilson in this biopic on the life of the Beach Boys singer.

LoveandMercyPosterAs a biopic, “Love & Mercy,” the story on the life of Beach Boys singer Brian Wilson, is a bit unusual. It passes over their surf pop rise to stardom in the early ‘60s in just the credits sequence. It jumps forward and backward in time to when Brian was both a young and middle-aged man on a whim. At times Bill Pohlad’s film is as deeply spiritual and scatterbrained as its subject.

But upon recording “Pet Sounds,” Brian Wilson’s unusual, yet signature, masterpiece album with The Beach Boys, he explained to one of the musicians who thought the music didn’t work, “It works in my head.”

“Love & Mercy” follows Brian as a young man played by Paul Dano during the sessions for “Pet Sounds” and the unreleased “Smile” in 1966, then again in the ‘80s, now played by John Cusack. As an older man, Wilson met Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) while under the supervision of Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). Awkward, soft-spoken and timid, Cusack walks a fine line between making Wilson creepy, damaged, flat out weird or all three. Regardless, he asks Melinda out on a date after revealing his identity and in a scary scene at a barbecue makes clear to her just how terrified he is of his caretaker.

Dr. Landy explains to Melinda that Brian is a paranoid schizophrenic, and asks that if they are to become romantically involved they need to establish ground rules such that he can retain control over how Brian is cared for and behaves. What’s daring for a biopic, but not uncommon, is that in these moments we see everything from Melinda’s perspective. Her detached position challenges our notion that Brian is really the genius we know him to be, separating us from the musical history and conflict portrayed in the earlier point in his life.

And yet Dano perhaps shines the most, performing incredibly lifelike recreations of Brian’s meticulous creative process. The faded, docu-realistic camera work inside the studio shows us the gradual methodology of his genius at work. They’re fun, lighthearted scenes as dogs bark on the sound stage and Brian picks at the inside of a piano with bobby pins, but we never get the full picture or adoration for Brian’s music. Pohlad always calls attention to the failures and the mental turmoil that masked just how significant his work was. Pohlad gets a big gasp out of news that Brian’s father sold the band’s song rights for profit, or when Brian loses his mind to the noise of silverware clinking on plates. Dano sells Brian’s madness from just the neck up in a terrific scene where he’s flailing from the deep end of a pool while the band tries to hold a serious meeting.

The melodrama however comes to an unfortunate head when “Love & Mercy’s” climax aims to take us on a busy mind trip to justify Brian’s sickness. And though the ending title card confesses Brian was never as damaged as he seemed, the movie at times makes Brian out to be a mad genius who also created one of the best albums of all time in the process.

One of Wilson’s band mates however has a good description for some of the singles on “Pet Sounds”. “Even the happy songs are sad.” “Love & Mercy” is a hopeful film, dearly respectful of his subject and ultimately a crowd-pleaser, but it has a lot of hurt and honesty behind its words and melodies.

3 ½ stars

12 Years a Slave

“12 Years a Slave” is the heaviest, hardest film to watch of the year, but it’s much more than a grim history lesson.

A black woman in tatters is sitting in a cart crying uncontrollably as she pulls up to a luxurious Southern plantation home. A wealthy white woman comes to greet her new “property” and asks her husband why this one is in tears. She’s been separated from her children in the slave trade; it couldn’t be helped, he explains. “Poor woman,” the new master opines, “Your children will soon be forgotten.”

Such coldness despite an occasionally glossy and soothing tone is business as usual in the masterpiece “12 Years a Slave.” Like the stylish but burdensome “Shame” before it, Steve McQueen’s film is by far the heaviest, most difficult film to endure of the year. It should not be taken lightly that this is a film about slavery and all its harsh colors. Such devastating films are usually just about braving it only to learn a history lesson. “12 Years a Slave” is about maintaining your fortitude and still knowing who you are when you come out the other side.

The film is quite simply the story of a free black man living in upstate New York in 1840 who was kidnapped and sold into slavery for 12 years. That the man lived to tell his tale and write the memoir that inspired this film is magnificent enough. But McQueen uses Solomon Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) story to show us what freedom is. It’s not the ability to live in wealth and privilege, to live free of pain or to be allowed to walk where you please. Northup earned his freedom by remembering who he was when the time came. Being strong enough to retain that memory: that’s freedom. Continue reading “12 Years a Slave”

Sideways

I watched “Sideways” at least three times before I decided I liked it. The characters are smug, entitled, loutish, pretentious and depressing, and yet like a good bottle of wine it required a delicate aging until I savored it for its maturity, beauty and perfection.

Miles (Paul Giamatti) is the Pinot Noir of pricks, a rare survivor of someone who’s likeable, clever and dopey all at once. Divorced for two years and scraping to find a publisher for the lengthy novel he keeps in not one but two shoe boxes, he goes on a trip to wine country for his best friend Jack’s (Thomas Haden Church) bachelor party.

Miles listens patiently as Jack announces his plans to get laid one last time before a life of marriage. Because he’s only tacitly unsupportive, we get the feeling we shouldn’t feel pity for either of them. Miles is in such a rut and yet still notoriously sarcastic, pitiful and righteous in everything he does we hope he might act up if he just gets laid too.

Alexander Payne’s film is darkly funny in this way, overwrought and pretentious at times but sincere and touching in a way we wouldn’t expect.

“Sideways” is a wonderfully well-crafted love story and coming of age drama for a group of middle aged men little seen in the movies. Miles and Jack’s courtships with the locals Maya (Virginia Madsen) and Stephanie (Sandra Oh) are lovingly relatable.

In one instant Miles can give a crash course on snobbish wine tasting, systematically examining its smell and its color before hilariously berating Jack for chewing gum. But contrast that with his and Maya’s theories on when a bottle of wine is at its best: even drunk they are mature adults capable of generating thoughtful metaphors on how drinking reflects mortality and the possibility of missing out on life’s luster and flavor if you don’t enjoy it at its peak.

“Sideways” matches its characters’ level of pretension with a trendy window panel montage and a jazzy soundtrack. It stays distant from these people and their tendency to embarrass themselves, and in the process finds pitch perfect comedy in some wonderful set pieces on the side of a hill, on a golf course and in the house of a local couple having sex.

This is a terrifically heart wrenching, intelligent and sincere film with a great ending that doesn’t last a second too long. Its tricky characters may be an acquired taste, but my pallet has developed the maturity to appreciate their charms.

4 stars

Win Win

 

How do you take a losing situation and turn it into a winning one? Better yet, how do you take a generic screenplay and turn it into one that is clever, funny and, yes, winning?

“Win Win” is the simple story of a down on his luck father who gets stuck with a runaway teenager but learns to love him, which is not the most ambitious of ideas, but whereas another film would be cynical and mean spirited, “Win Win” cheerfully takes the punches life dolls out in failure after failure and wins us over naturally. Continue reading “Win Win”

The Ides of March

George Clooney’s political drama lacks the complexity and emotional punch of its predecessors.

Why can’t the Democrats just flat out say how crazy they think all the Republicans are? What is the point of being both rational and polite when it doesn’t make for good drama and certainly doesn’t make for good politics?

“The Ides of March” is a very deliberate, direct film with domineering characters that say what they mean and don’t pull their punches. They don’t have any real wit, charm or depth, but by God they get the job done.

George Clooney’s political thriller follows the events of the Democratic primary and the actions of intelligent, confident and ego driven campaign advisers who will do anything to win. Continue reading “The Ides of March”

Rapid Response: The Truman Show

“The Truman Show” doesn’t seem to really be about the philosophical ideas of fate vs. choice or the conflicting concepts of reality vs. artificiality. It’s also a weak jab at Hollywood and reality TV obsessions and becomes almost exclusively about itself, an elaborate exploration of its “what if” scenario.

I watched the critically acclaimed cult film for the first time last night, despite how often it’s on TBS, and found it to be somewhat overrated. It was cute in its tongue-in-cheek, sitcom-y sort of way that included product placement and continuity sight gags, but all the questions that it left me with were more problematic than they were intriguing. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Truman Show”