Film

Folk you!

Inside Llewyn Davis

The 1961 Greenwich Village folk music scene is the rich setting for the latest Coen brothers triumph, the brilliant Inside Llewyn Davis. Featuring a knockout performance from Oscar Isaac as the title character, and the usual top notch writing and directing from brothers Joel and Ethan, it’s easily one of the year’s best films. The movie, loosely based on the life of late folk singer Dave Van Ronk, opens on a profile shot of Llewyn singing his heart out on the traditional track, “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me.” Isaac does all of his own singing and guitar playing, and he does it well. Shortly after completing his performance, his ass gets royally kicked behind the Gaslight Cafe, and the saga has begun. Slightly sour, brooding and acerbic, the talented Llewyn is going through some hard times. He’s lost his singing partner, his new solo album isn’t catching on, and he doesn’t have a place to live. He surfs couches, one of them belonging to the married Jean (Carey Mulligan), who might be carrying his baby. Llewyn tries to relax at times, perhaps even attempts to smile and enjoy life. That’s not going to work for him, at least not in the timespan this movie covers. If he stops to happily address a cat, it escapes out a window. If he tries to lovingly play a tune for his aging father, the dude craps his pants. The universe seems to require Llewyn to remain steadfast with the snarky retorts. Through all his misery, Llewyn tries to make it as a musician. He performs studio duties on a novelty track called “Please Mr. Kennedy” with Jim (Justin Timberlake) and Al Cody (Adam Driver), eschewing royalties for a quick session paycheck. The performance of this song, with Driver employing some strange Big Bopper-like vocal styling, is a total hoot.

On a whim, Llewyn travels to Chicago and forces an audition with infamous agent Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham). The Bud Grossman audition scene is the total antithesis of the joyous and funny “Please Mr. Kennedy” sequence. Let’s just say it’s a terribly honest nod to the music industry. The cross-country trek allows for some by Bob Grimm quality time with Garret Hedlund’s stoic, cigarette hoarding driver, and John Goodman’s bgrimm@ pretentiously cruel jazz musician. Goodman, newsreview.com who has a nice Coen pedigree, is a hilarious mess as Roland Turner, a blathering back seat 5 passenger with an opinion about everything and nefarious bathroom secrets. His presence is priceless. Seeing Isaac and Mulligan together reminds me of their previous work together in Drive (Isaac played Mulligan’s troubled husband). They are total magic on screen, with Mulligan showing an impressive aptitude for justifiable rage. She’s very funny, and just a little scary. Joining Llewyn on most of his journeys are numerous orange tabby cats that do felines proud. Their presence equates to one of those great, eccentric Coen touches. A sequence where a Llewyn friend screams about a cat’s gender is quite memorable, and beautifully strange. Llewyn’s moment closing a car door on that same cat will break your heart. I’m allergic to cats, but I want an orange one after seeing this movie. The music is produced by T. Bone Burnett, who also worked with the Coens on O Brother, Where Art Thou? In casting musically talented performers like Isaac, Timberlake and Stark Sands as a folk-singing soldier, the Coens have given their film an authenticity that couldn’t be achieved with lip-synching. (Although it must be said that George Clooney did some badass lip-synching in O Brother.) Inside Llewyn Davis is an authentic look at the pre-Dylan folk music scene, and it gets high marks for its dedication to the music. It sounds great across the board. It’s also an uncompromisingly honest character study of a disagreeable sort with a wounded soul. The Coen brothers can do no wrong. Ω

“Did somebody hit a skunk?”

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excellent 4 American Hustle David O. Russell continues his impressive directorial roll with this semi-comedic look at the notorious ’70s Abscam scandal. This is basically Russell shooting for Scorsese glory here, and while the style of the movie seems copied at times, there’s no denying the power of the ensemble cast. Bradley Cooper scores laughs as a pathetic FBI agent looking to make a name for himself, and Christian Bale looks great in a comb-over as the conman forced into an alliance with the law. Amy Adams gets one of the strangest roles of the year as a con artist pretending to be British, and she pulls it off quite nicely, while Jennifer Lawrence steals her every scene as a seemingly dim Long Island housewife. You also get stand up comic Louis C.K. as Cooper’s field boss. (C.K. canceled a show I had tickets for to make this movie. I was pissed but, after seeing how good he is here, I’m OK with it now.) The film falls a little short of greatness due to its sometimes carbon copy feel, but the cast pulls it out of the fire. It also has the best use of Robert De Niro as a bad guy in many years.

4Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues After nearly a decade of being absent from our movie screens, Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell), the world’s greatest newscaster, has returned. This time, it’s the ’80s, and a new media craze called 24 Hour News has Ron and the boys (Paul Rudd’s Brian Fantana, Steve Carell’s Brick Tamland and David Koechner’s Champ Kind) working the late night shift in New York. The plot is basically just a place setter for weird, random humor involving bats, sharks, shadows, scorpions in RVs, and hair. Ferrell and the crew manage to sell the dumbest of things, and they make so much of it funny. Even the stuff that’s just strange has its own humorous appeal. Carell goes super dopey with Brick as he finds a love interest (Kristen Wiig), Champ still loves Ron in a dangerous way, and Brian has a new condom cabinet. I laughed my face off, with this being a sequel that continues the comedic legacy of the brilliant original, and even ups the ante when it comes to anchor-on-anchor battles in the park (the battle scene in this one is one for the ages, and involves fighter jets). The last time they made one of these, they had enough on the cutting room floor to release an entire other movie. I hope that happened here as well, because I don’t want to wait 10 years for more.

4Dallas Buyers Club Matthew McConaughey continues his career resurgence in this film based on the life of Ron Woodroof, a man who tested HIV positive in the ’80s, and had to battle the FDA while smuggling non-approved drugs into the country for himself and fellow sufferers. McConaughey lost many pounds to look the part, and it’s a frightening transformation. He also delivers an incredible performance. This, combined with his work earlier this year in Mud, easily establishes 2013 as the best year of his career. Jared Leto does incredible work as Rayon, a cross-dresser who helps Woodroof distribute the drugs to those needing some sort of treatment. Director Jean-Marc Vallee does a good job of capturing a time where HIV was a death sentence, and the terror that surrounded those who were fighting for their lives. This is a very good movie with great performances.

3Frozen I have to admit I was more into the strange Mickey Mouse short that precedes this musical adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen” than the actual feature. It features retro Mickey busting out of a black and white film and becoming 3-D as he battles a bad guy kidnapping Minnie. It’s worth the price of admission. As for the actual feature movie, Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel have wonderful voices, and the visuals are fun to behold in this middle-of-the-road Disney fare. It has a lot of music—some of it quite good, some of it, well, not—and a beautiful look to it. For recent Disney animation, my vote goes to Tangled for best, but that’s not to say this one is a letdown. It’s OK. Just OK. It’s about on par with Pixar’s latest, Monster’s University. It’s fun to watch, but not altogether memorable.

1The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Peter Jackson’s decision to shoot his latest Tolkien trilogy in High Frame Rate 3-D is a tragic, disastrous choice. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, like its predecessor, An Unexpected Journey, is a task to watch. The look of the movie simply doesn’t jibe with the technology, resulting in a visual nightmare. As a middle chapter in The Hobbit saga, Smaug is guilty of the same flaws that marred the first film. It’s overstuffed, the dwarves are severely uninteresting, and the action scenes lack any kind of urgency. It’s just a big, boring stunt film with people looking silly in their getups. As Bilbo, Martin Freeman labors to make things interesting during action scenes that feel redundant. (Hey, it’s another giant icky spider attack!) He definitely stands out among a cast of bland actors playing bland dwarves. Oh Gimli, how you are missed! Jackson finds a way to bring back Orlando Bloom as Legolas. Bloom’s scenes are a bunch of sorry minutes that could be cut from the film’s running time. Too many scenes in this movie feel padded and bloated. With each passing minute, Jackson is doing further damage to his directing legacy. His original Lord of the Rings trilogy was a major triumph. These Hobbit films feel and look like parody. Smaug the dragon (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) finally shows up, and he is easily the best thing in the Hobbit films thus far. He should’ve arrived in the second half of the first film, and the whole damned thing should’ve been over in three hours.

5The Secret Life of Walter Mitty The dream world and reality progressively and beautifully blend in the latest from director Ben Stiller. The film is based, just a little bit, on the short story by James Thurber about a man prone to elaborate daydreams. Stiller uses that story as a springboard to something altogether new and surprisingly intimate. Stiller, in one of his best performances, plays the title character, an introverted man holding down a job handling photo negatives for Life magazine. When an important negative for the final publication of the magazine goes missing, Walter, with help from work crush Cheryl (a delightful Kristen Wiig) springs into action on a quest that leads him through Greenland, Iceland and Afghanistan. Along the way, he reignites former passions (like skateboarding and hiking), and those daydreams become more and more unnecessary. The message that Stiller is delivering with his film is an obvious one: Many of those daydreams we are having are just a hop, skip and skateboard away from being realities. A great supporting cast includes Adam Scott, Sean Penn and Shirley MacLaine.

4Saving Mr. Banks Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson are charming as Walt Disney and Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers in this obviously whitewashed look at Disney’s attempts at getting Travers’ approval to make a movie out of her book. Of course, most of us know he succeeded, but many don’t know that Travers was quite the holdout. The movie splits time between the Disney/Travers business and Travers’ childhood, where we find out much of Mary Poppins was based on her troubled father (Colin Farrell) and actual nanny. B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman are wonderful as the Sherman brothers, who made Poppins into a musical, much to the chagrin of Travers. The movie takes a lot of artistic license with the situation. Even though Travers is depicted as difficult here, she was far more adversarial in real life and never approved of the movie (those animated penguins!). Still, the film is fun to watch, with Hanks and Thompson making it all very worthwhile and heartwarming.

5The Wolf of Wall Street Martin Scorsese’s latest explodes in your face like a mortar full of deranged bliss. Leonardo DiCaprio, in the performance of the year, plays slimeball stockbroker and convicted felon Jordan Belfort, a real life scumbag who made millions selling penny stocks at a Long Island, New York brokerage. The movie, based on Belfort’s own autobiography, takes people doing bad, bad things to such an extreme that the film doesn’t just stand as one of the best of 2013, but one of its best and most deranged comedies. Like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, DiCaprio talks to the camera on occasion, often during the sort of highly elaborate tracking shots that have become a Scorsese mainstay. It’s in these moments, and during Belfort’s drug-fueled “rouse-the-troops, fire-breathing speeches to his crew, where DiCaprio does his most exhilarating, bona fide nuts acting to date. He is a formidable competitor for a Best Actor Oscar. He’s certainly my pick.