Film

Slow emotion

Killing Them Softly

As I watched Brad Pitt’s latest movie, Killing Them Softly from director Andrew Dominik, I sat in a virtually empty theater with a few friends and other patrons. The movie is a slow, meditative and strangely beautiful examination of bad people, and I could sense it testing the audience’s patience. I kept hearing the relentless “tap, tap, tap” of restless leg syndrome coming from somebody behind us. I heard a lot—a lot—of deep sighing from the few who were there, along with the rustling of their clothes as they fidgeted in their seats. I guess I’m trying to say Killing Them Softly is a film that requires great patience. This movie takes its time, features more than a few wordy monologues, and lots of poetic slowmotion shots. Pitt plays Jackie, a smooth, shady type called upon to clean up a situation gone bad with an organized crime card game. Set about four years ago, the country is in recession, and that recession has spread to crime. So when the card game, a big money generator, goes down, something has got to be done. The big card game is off due to a series of robberies at the games, some of them inside jobs, some of them not. So, some folks are going to die, and it’s Jackie’s job to make sure that goes off without a hitch. This all results in an interesting look inside what makes a crime syndicate tick, whether it’s accurate or not. I enjoyed seeing Pitt’s Jackie discussing the mechanizations of his killing plans with a buttoned-up type, played by Richard Jenkins, while parked in a swank car.

I also liked seeing a hired hitman (James Gandolfini) drinking heavily and bitching about his wife before he’s supposed to pull off an important job. Jackie, essentially his boss, acts like an antsy shift supervisor who knows his cash drawer is going to come up short when the bell tolls because his employee is hitting the bottle. Dominik has made a movie like this one before, and it even starred Pitt as another crimi-by Bob Grimm nal type. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford had a similar meditabgrimm@ tive vibe about it. Audiences were split overnewsreview.com how beautiful that film was, and its slow pacing. Killing Them Softly is producing a reaction that echoes the previous film. 4 In a way, Jackie represents the sort of criminal Jesse James was in his day, but hampered by modern problems regarding money and technology. Dominik uses speeches by Obama and other political types as a background noise, constantly reminding the likes of Jackie that the landscape is changing. When the average Joe has trouble making a buck, it results in less money for stealing and paying hitmen. Some folks have a pretty bad time in this movie. Ray Liotta endures what has to be one of cinema’s all time worst beatings, full of blood, vomit and broken bones. I’ve read some comments about how Dominik romanticizes or glorifies violence with some of his more poetic killing sequences. Hey, the scene involving Liotta getting his clock cleaned more than balances things out. It’s brutal. Pitt is just a freaking movie star of the highest order. Every moment he spends on screen in this movie just amplifies that point. Jackie is a despicable character, and while Pitt doesn’t necessarily make him all that likeable, he does make him sinisterly funny and always engaging. I really liked the use of Gandolfini in this movie. I pictured his Tony Soprano all washed up, relegated to taking killing assignments and drinking himself to oblivion. No, he’s not Tony in this movie, but I’m sure the connection wasn’t lost on him or Dominik. Critics like Killing Them Softly, while audiences are giving it an “F,” according to Entertainment Weekly’s standard moviegoer polling. I guess that qualifies Dominik as a “critical darling” who’s going to have a hard time procuring big budgets for movie ideas in the future. Ω

“Wait’ll I get the guy who wrote this script.”

1

POOR

2

FAIR

3

GOOD

4

VERY GOOD

5

4Anna Karenina While this is not a story that has ever really drawn much interest from me, in the hands of the innovative Joe Wright it is something more than decent to look at. Keira Knightley, who just gets better and better, is good as the title character, a member of Russian late 19th century society who has an affair with a young Count (the ever reliable Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Jude Law is effective as Anna’s long-suffering husband, as is Olivia Williams as the Count’s annoyed mother. Wright takes an interesting approach, staging much of the movie on an actual theater stage, with characters rarely venturing out of its confines. Whenever I found myself a little bored with the plotting, I was always fascinated by the look of the film. It must be the one-millionth telling of this story, but it’s certainly one of the more original ones.

4Argo Ben Affleck makes another meaty movie with this spellbinding recreation of the late ’70s/early ’80s Iran hostage crisis, and the strange CIA mission that helped to extricate six American citizens from Iran at a most inopportune time. Affleck directs and stars as Tony Mendez, who hatches an elaborate plan to pose as a Canadian film director scouting Iran for shooting locations, with the six Americans posing as his Canadian film crew. The whole scenario seems ridiculous, yet it actually happened. Having lived through this period of American history, I can tell you that Affleck does a terrific job of capturing the look and mood of the time. The late ’70s were sort of humiliating both in terms of our status overseas and the way folks were wearing their hair. Bryan Cranston, John Goodman and Alan Arkin are all superb in supporting roles. This one will be in the running for some Oscars.

1The Collection This piss poor Sawrip-off had me missing Sawmovies—and I hate the Saw movies. After an interesting opening where a young girl (Emma Fitzpatrick) survives a dance club massacre, things go relentlessly downhill. This features yet another serial killer that has the time and resources to create huge Rube Goldberg killing machines and traps. This guy, who wears an oily black mask, actually turns an entire building into a deathtrap full of trip wires, swinging blades and squishing elevators. It’s all extremely tedious, and for lovers of a good gore movie, the bloodletting in this film is highly unimaginative. It’s strange that a studio would release total garbage like this in the middle of the holiday season. It’s a total bummer. I totally don’t want any eggnog now. Nobody is getting anything for Christmas this year.

3Flight Denzel Washington stars and Robert Zemeckis directs this uneven film about an airline pilot with mad flying skills and a mad problem with alcohol and drugs. Washington is Whip Whitaker, a man who ties one on the night before a flight that first requires him to pilot through a horrible storm and then results in a spectacular crash. Whip performs miraculous feats as the plane goes down despite an alcohol level off the charts. Washington is typically great in the role, keeping the movie worth watching even when it gets a bit trite. The first half hour of this movie is a powerhouse. The remaining nearly two hours are OK, but nothing like the punch of that flight sequence. Sure to score Washington on Oscar nomination. A decent return to live action for Zemeckis, who had gotten all caught up in those creepy motion capture animation films like The Polar Express. 2Hotel Transylvania This animated take on Dracula (Adam Sandler) and other big monsters like Frankenstein’s monster (Kevin James) and the Werewolf (Steve Buscemi) has a fun setup and some great gags. But its overall feeling is that of total mania in that it barely slows down long enough for you to take it in. It’s often unnecessarily spastic in telling the tale of a nervous Dracula dealing with his daughter on her 118th birthday—young in vampire years). A human (Andy Samberg) shows up at the title place, a building Dracula created to keep dangerous humans away, and his daughter (Selena Gomez) falls for him. The overall story is hard to digest, but there are some great moments, such as every time the vampires turn into bats (cute) and a werewolf baby knowing what plane flight somebody is taking by smelling his shirt (unbelievably cute). Even with the cute moments, there were too many times when I just wanted to look away because the animation was far too frantic.

5Life of Pi This is an amazing achievement in filmmaking. It’s one of the year’s best movies, and easily one of the best uses of the 3-D medium. Director Ang Lee is a creative force that cannot be deterred or stopped. Life of Piis his most splendorous and enchanting film to date, and this is the guy who gave us Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Suraj Sharma plays Pi, a young man who winds up on a lifeboat with a tiger after a storm sinks a ship carrying his family and its zoo animals. Pi must learn to appease the tiger, the tiger must accept or eat him, and that’s the plot of the movie. The story is told in flashback with an older Pi (Irrfan Khan) being interviewed by a writer (Rafe Spall). This is a great screen adventure full of countless magical moments and a sure contender for Best Picture.

2Lincoln I love Steven Spielberg, I love Daniel Day-Lewis, but I do not love this movie. In fact, I don’t even like it. While Day-Lewis is astoundingly good in the title role, the movie around him is a drab, lifeless retelling of the final days of Abraham Lincoln’s life. Spielberg makes this a darkened room political potboiler, chronicling how Lincoln and his staff managed to get slavery abolished in the waning days of the Civil War. Sally Field is cast as Lincoln’s troubled wife. While Mary Todd’s plight deserves a movie of its own, it’s not given much consideration here, nor is the life of Lincoln’s eldest son (an utterly wasted Joseph Gordon-Levitt). The movie’s final act treats the death of Lincoln like a strange afterthought. They would’ve been better off ending the film before his assassination. I expect Day-Lewis to be in the Oscar hunt. He could actually win for this movie, a film that doesn’t live up to his magnificence.

1Red Dawn This one languished on the studio shelf for three years; I wish it had stayed there. I would say it’s the equal of the 1984 original, for they are both pieces of shit. Chris Hemsworth and Josh Peck replace Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen as two brothers who become experts in guerrilla warfare after the Pacific Northwest is invaded. This time the culprit is North Korea, although that happened in post-production, because they shot the movie with China as the invading enemy. The movie shows some promise in the buildup, but goes off the rails in the second half, becoming too much like its ridiculous and melodramatic predecessor. If I had to choose, I would say this one is better than the John Milius original. I really hated this new movie, so that’ll give you an idea just how much I hated the first crack at it.

Reno

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