Tag: Philip Seymour Hoffman

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

There was no need for “Mockingjay” to be broke into two sequels, but why does this hardly resemble a Hunger Games movie at all?

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1” started the unfortunate trend of major film franchises splitting tentpole books into two separate films. Though it may be a cash grab, that seventh Harry Potter film is actually one of the most distinct in the series. Six movies of being tied down to Hogwarts and Quidditch, the seventh film took the main characters out of a familiar world, threw them in the forest against insurmountable odds and allowed them to act. They grew up into adults and the whole franchise matured overnight. It’s the most unusual Potter film, yet also David Yates’s best.

The previous “Hunger Games” movie “Catching Fire” was the blockbuster everyone needed after Potter. It was dark, inventive and upped the stakes on the previous film, not an easy task when you consider the first film was about teenagers murdering each other for sport and survival. But it also ended in such a way that “Mockingjay – Part 1” could hardly repeat the successes of the second. Katniss had been thrown into the rebellion, separated from her love and Hunger Games partner Peeta and asked to serve as a symbol she never wanted to be.

“Mockingjay” was poised to rewrite the franchise, but Francis Lawrence’s opportunity to make “Part 1” into something more than a cash grab has been squandered. It’s the most unusual “Hunger Games” yet, but hardly for the better. The fantasy, the color, the intrigue and the creativity has all been sapped from this sequel to make a frustrating half of a movie, one that’s talky, filled with exposition and set pieces that hardly resemble what made either of the first two films memorable. Continue reading “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1”

A Most Wanted Man

Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of the John le Carre novel lacks the slow burn of “The American” or visual intricacy of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

The best spy movies are built on their gray area, the thorny nuance of corruption, deceit and betrayal that keep the wheels turning and our minds guessing. “A Most Wanted Man” is all gray area, with a criminal without a plan or motive, a spy without authority or intentions and a government without regard or patience. Anton Corbijn’s film based on John le Carre’s novel is so densely plotted and hazy that it’s tough to see out the other side.

In Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last complete starring role, he plays Gunther Bachmann, a spy for the German government in Hamburg leading a team of terrorist insurgents so secret that even his unit isn’t officially recognized. For all intensive purposes, they do not even exist. Bachmann’s target is Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), a wealthy Muslim philanthropist he suspects is directly funneling money to Al Qaeda under the guise of his many charities.

When a half Russian and half Middle Eastern refugee named Issa Karpov (Girgoriy Dobrygin) shows up in Germany, his focus changes. Corbijn carefully leads us down a rabbit hole into believing he’s an imminent terrorist threat, but a wrinkle shows up in the form of the German lawyer Annabelle (Rachel McAdams). She shows us there may be reason to trust him, as he’s looking for asylum from the Russian government and is seeking a banker (Willem Dafoe) who may be of help.

“A Most Wanted Man” is easier to follow than the remarkably deep and jargon filled “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” another le Carre novel, but Corbijn’s film too is one of constant exposition. The talking is endless, the surveillance goes on behind closed doors and the action never truly starts. Continue reading “A Most Wanted Man”

Side by Side: Happiness and Election

Todd Solondz and Alexander Payne’s breakout films have a lot in common in depicting suburban life.

Of all the depressing, pitiable people in “Happiness,” Todd Solondz’s absolutely disturbed black comedy of suburbia, sex, sickness and sadness, the one I feel the worst for is Trish Maplewood.

Wait, which one is Trish (Cynthia Stevenson)? Is she the sister caught in arrested development, the smug, narcissistic poet who secretly suspects she’s talentless or the woman who described a case of rape and murder over an ice cream sundae?

No, Trish is perhaps the only one in “Happiness” without a crippling sex addiction, perversion, loneliness or self-destructive tendency. Her fatal flaw seems to be that she’s too normal, and worse yet that she managed to fall in love with a monstrous creep.

Trish is like the control group in Solondz’s examination of twisted individuals, the least interesting and noticeable figure of the bunch. We arguably identify with her the least because there’s the least to latch onto. Part of what makes “Happiness” so affecting though is that there’s a little bit of something we can relate to in each of the other dark characters because each has a little bit of normalcy.

She’s not unlike Jim McAllister’s wife Diane (Molly Hagan) in Alexander Payne’s “Election,” a simple house wife who exists in the background. We learn some about her, her desires, her sex drive and what she loves about her fairly awful husband. But for all intensive purposes, she’s nobody.

Released a year apart in 1998 and 1999, “Happiness” and “Election” are both complex satires of those nobodies, simple people in ordinary middle American neighborhoods, people who in their own strange ways feel universally relatable. For those who have levied claims that Payne is mocking and trivializing the simpleton schmucks in his films, that’s absolutely accurate, and it feels no less honest.

Continue reading “Side by Side: Happiness and Election”

Click Bait: Woody Allen, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bill Nye

This week Philip Seymour Hoffman, Woody Allen and Bill Nye were all in the news along with Green Day, The Beatles and George Zimmerman.

I read a lot of stuff, and not all of it makes it to my social media feed. “Click Bait” is my weekly roundup of links pertaining to movies, politics, culture and anything else I found generally interesting this week.

RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman

The outpouring of love and sadness that followed Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death last Sunday is not rare for an actor, but it is rare for an actor such as he, an actor better known for villainous, repugnant character actor parts, for the mourning period to be so fervent for so long and for him to have gone in such a horrible way, not unlike another great actor’s career cut criminally too short in much the same way, Heath Ledger.

I likely first noticed Hoffman in “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” in which he could not look less like his supposed brother Ethan Hawke, but was in control and was simply scary good. It wasn’t long before I started seeing his face in half of the great American movies of the last two decades, most memorably for me in “The Master” and in his fiery scene stealing moment in “Punch Drunk Love.”

There have been a lot of eulogies written, perhaps why I didn’t write one myself. Here are clips from some of the better tributes I read:

A.O. Scott:

“Pathetic, repellent, undeserving of sympathy. Mr. Hoffman rescued them from contempt precisely by refusing any easy route to redemption. He did not care if we liked any of these sad specimens. The point was to make us believe them and to recognize in them — in him.”

Scott Tobias and the rest of The Dissolve:

“He set off small detonations whenever he appeared, and instantly amplified the stakes. He was the most electric actor of his generation.”

Derek Thompson in The Atlantic:

“He could puff himself up and play larger than life, but his specialty was to find the quiet dignity in life-sized characters—losers, outcasts, and human marginalia.”

Aaron Sorkin writing in TIME:

“So it’s in that spirit that I’d like to say this: Phil Hoffman, this kind, decent, magnificent, thunderous actor, who was never outwardly “right” for any role but who completely dominated the real estate upon which every one of his characters walked, did not die from an overdose of heroin — he died from heroin. We should stop implying that if he’d just taken the proper amount then everything would have been fine.”

And this troubling report about Hoffman and his appearance in the remaining “Hunger Games” movies Continue reading “Click Bait: Woody Allen, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bill Nye”

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

“The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” finds new director Francis Lawrence raising the stakes on this already dark franchise.

“The Hunger Games” franchise has now done what it took the Harry Potter movies perhaps four or five films to get right. “Catching Fire” is a sequel that sees its stakes increase tenfold, its action becoming more crisp and polished, its themes growing deeper and its deep cast of talented individuals gelling completely.

It does beg the question, how does a story in which teenagers murder other teens for sport and sacrifice manage to get darker, more serious and more consequential? Gary Ross’s “Hunger Games” was a film about the internal struggle of an individual to find her strength and voice. It treated survival instincts like a virtue. Now in “Catching Fire,” that lone wolf mentality to just survive plays like another death sentence.

New director Francis Lawrence ties “Catching Fire’s” dystopian future concept and steamy love triangle to broader ideas about rebellion, fame, loyalty and psychology. Best of all, he’s packaged it in a slick, suspenseful package that hasn’t lost any of its twisted edge.

“Catching Fire” resumes shortly after Katniss and Peeta’s (Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson) victory from the previous games. Now President Snow (Donald Sutherland) is using their celebrity as a symbol of false hope as he tours them around each district of Panem. Snow threatens to kill Katniss and her family unless she tows the evil Capitol’s line and makes her act in front of the cameras genuine.

Katniss however has become a reluctant symbol of a slowly growing rebel uprising. The film has done a wonderful job playing up the franchise’s iconography, with early shots framing Katniss as a figure of solemn power or people raising three fingers in defiance to the Capitol and making it feel significant. When they do celebrate her legend, people are beaten and killed by the Capitol’s “peacemakers,” faceless stormtroopers modeled off another similar franchise, “Star Wars.”

Because she’s creating problems, the new Master of the Games, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), arranges a special event for the 75th Annual Hunger Games in which past survivors of the games are forced to compete again. Given how few there are still living, Katniss and Peeta are on the chopping block yet again. Continue reading “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”

The Master

Don’t blink. If you do, we have to start from the beginning.

This phrase marks the first time both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix truly communicate with one another in “The Master” and possibly the last time they really get inside each other’s heads.

They’re in each other’s control, both devoting their full attention. We, as an audience, can look away no sooner.

With “The Master,” Paul Thomas Anderson has made yet another film that demands intense focus and patience. But it rewards those opening their eyes with a vividly allegorical film about the lengths of human control, one with tour de force performances, hauntingly pallid colors and towering images of stunning depth and clarity.

We meet Freddie Quell (Phoenix) languishing over his peers at the end of World War II. Sprawled out on his ship’s upper deck, he looks like the giant in “Gulliver’s Travels” surrounded by swarms of shipmates way below hurling stones to wake him. He’s arrived at this point after a night of heavy drinking, enabled by a lethal cocktail of his own fermenting. This swill will get him into trouble later when it poisons an elderly farmer.

The incident sends Freddie running and hiding as a stowaway to the cruise ship of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), a man who comes to be known to Freddie only as Master. He’s a writer, philosopher, doctor, but above all a man, as he says to Freddie, but more accurately he’s the leader of a growing cult movement called The Cause.

Maybe it’s because he enjoys Freddie’s swill, but Master sees potential, bravery and room for personal growth in Freddie. He takes him into his home, enlists him as a guinea pig for The Cause, performs “processing” on him and believes that through Master’s own guidance, Freddie can be helped.

Master and The Cause are both fictional versions of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, and the accounts of the film show the religion’s initial development in the early ‘50s. And yet neither this comparison nor the actual plot of the film give a great sense of what “The Master” is really about.

More so than a nihilistic condemnation of Scientology, Anderson uses this as a setting and metaphor for themes of sexual repression and the possibility of man. Continue reading “The Master”

Rapid Response: Boogie Nights

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” is a hilarious movie about sexuality while also being an interesting take on a genre picture.

When Hollywood struggles because YouTube thrives, so does the porn industry suffer as anyone can film themselves having sex. Not every porn star can be Sasha Grey and find work with Steven Soderbergh.

Strangely enough then, Paul Thomas Anderson’s breakout film “Boogie Nights” has renewed significance. It’s the story of the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) as the veteran porn stars struggle to stay hard and horny as video tapes take movies out of the XXX theaters.

“Boogie Nights” isn’t really about porn, it’s just more open about its sexuality. (“Jack says you have a great big cock. Can I see it?”) The one-off joke is that this coming-of-age story of stardom and struggle is just the same even with a grindhouse quality filter. Anderson’s whole goal is not to make a genre picture but to make an art house movie that looks and feels like a genre picture. He did much the same thing with romantic comedies in “Punch-Drunk Love.” And it’s the reason why in “Boogie Nights’s” second half, the whole story seems to go off the rails when it becomes so drenched in painful and melodramatic self parody. The end belongs to another movie, and PTA finally acknowledges that shift with a 13-inch nod to “Raging Bull.”

Anderson wonderfully mixes style and kitsch here. The film has a vitality in its disco score that permeates the campy, referential ’70s vibe and carries through to the more depressing moments all bathed in jaded melodrama and cynicism.

His camera moves in ways that don’t intrinsically make sense, but they draw your eyes and your mind. Watch the camera crop out Burt Reynolds’s character to show Julianne Moore staring admiringly at the young, nervous Dirk. He doesn’t return the glance even though the camera does the same for him, and this is not necessarily a clue to her motherly infatuation with Dirk. But we’re captivated by the moment. The camera itself is alluring and sexy.

The early moments of the film are also plain funny as hell. Wahlberg was overshadowed by Burt Reynolds’s Oscar nominated performance (he turns into a sort of George Lucas of porn, and he’s capable of conveying a vision of porn that is simultaneously idealistic and perverse), but it’s refreshing to see Wahlberg when he was still the young Marky Mark posing for Calvin Klein. He’s been typecast in so many tough guy roles lately that it’s impossible to imagine him playing anyone like Dirk anymore.

John C. Reiley and Philip Seymour Hoffman are also riots. Hoffman especially is playing off type as an overweight, closeted gay man with an attraction to Dirk. As for Reiley, the camera stays put and lets him work. His best moment is when he asks Dirk how much he can squat, only to up Dirk’s ante by an absurd 150 pounds.

In the way you could argue we don’t have movie stars like Cary Grant and John Wayne anymore, we don’t really have porn stars like Dirk Diggler anymore. And for that matter, we don’t have other directors in America making movies the way Paul Thomas Anderson does anymore.

Punch-Drunk Love

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love” is so much more than an “Art House Adam Sandler Movie.”

Most movies are pretty surreal when you think about them. When you’re watching a formulaic romantic comedy for instance, you suspend some disbelief and know that everything that happens is a little strange.

So for Paul Thomas Anderson to make a genre picture with Adam Sandler but call attention to just how odd a movie can be, he’s really making a more realistic, elegant and beautiful movie than anything Adam Sandler would usually star in.

“Punch-Drunk Love” has been generously referred to as “The Art House Adam Sandler” movie, and since its release in 2002, it’s used that label to justify its cult appeal. It’s become a favorite PTA film for most of his fans, displaying all the life and gravity of “There Will Be Blood” with the charms of “Boogie Nights.” Continue reading “Punch-Drunk Love”

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”

Moneyball

“Moneyball” is a clever baseball movie that makes you think differently about the game and the film genre it belongs to

Baseball is called America’s pastime because we love to imagine it the same we always have. But who still “root roots for the home team” and actually likes Cracker Jack?

“Moneyball” is a clever baseball movie that makes you think differently about the game and the film genre it belongs to. It’s a witty, cynical take on a rousing, inspirational sport, and it’s massively entertaining.

Here is a film that ignores the personality and skill of baseball players, that says the classic ways of finding a winning baseball team is wrong, and stars an anti-hero who’s been kicked down to the point that he doesn’t even see the point of the game anymore. Yet every sports fan is still rapt with attention. Continue reading “Moneyball”