Pot boiler
3
Inherent Vice If you’re like me, and you abstain from weed because some people really shouldn’t do drugs, you might need two or three viewings to totally get the vibe and plot of Inherent Vice. If, however, you smoke daily and watch the movie mildly high, you might follow everything in one shot. I’ve watched director Paul Thomas by Andersons’s latest twice now, and it was Bob Grimm almost like watching a different movie the second time through. I enjoyed it very much bgrimm@ newsreview.c om both times, but the language and proceedings made more sense to me the second go-round. No, I didn’t do bong hits the second time I watched, but I guess I must have some sort of latent stoner sensibility stored in my brain from years’ past bong hits. Mind you, it takes some prodding—like a second movie viewing—to make my latent stoner cells awaken and decode drugspeak, but when it does, everything’s cool.
4
“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
1 Poor
2 Fair
3 Good
4 Very Good
5 excellent
18 | RN&R |
Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc, a sloppy private investigator in 1970 Los Angeles who operates, inexplicably, out of a doctor’s office. When an ex-girlfriend (Katherine Waterston) goes missing, he conducts a haphazard investigation into her disappearance that involves dead people who aren’t dead, drug dealers and kidnapped real estate moguls. All of these things are being investigated by a guy who is seriously high most of the time, and just sort of piecing things together at his own mellow, sometimes clumsy pace. Along the way, Doc comes across a parade of colorful characters portrayed memorably by a first-rate cast. Josh Brolin is perfection as an unstable macho cop with a penchant for kicking down Doc’s door. Phoenix and Brolin have a lot of fun making the characters bitter enemies, yet almost chummy at times. Brolin’s final scene is, shall we say, surreal and bizarre on joyous levels. JANUARY 8, 2015
Owen Wilson does some of his best film work in years as a musician, believed dead, who has gone into hiding. He has some scenes with Phoenix that are borderline brilliance, as does Martin Short as a lascivious dentist with a taste for young girls and pharmaceutical grade cocaine. In fact, even though it is only a couple of scenes, Anderson may have given Short his best role since his SCTV days. Benicio del Toro shows up as Doc’s attorney, which reminds me of his similar role in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Reese Witherspoon caps off a great year playing Doc’s uptight current girlfriend, and Jena Malone has a terrific scene as a wife who pleasantly and happily discusses her drug addiction and missing husband. The mystery, if you want to call it that, ties up cleaner than you think it does. The film, despite what some folks are saying, has a beginning, middle and end that makes sense. You just have to work at it a bit. The locations, clothing and hairstyles are very ’70s. The film plays like a stoner mood piece, swinging from relaxed to paranoid, unintelligible to highly coherent, as if going through the phases of some high grade kush. So, you might be thinking “Hey, this sounds a little bit like The Big Lebowski" based on my descriptions and the weed talk. Lebowski was a lot cuter and far funnier. Both stories do, however, feature a stoner dude investigating a missing person. It should be noted that the Coens wrote and produced Lebowski 11 years before Thomas Pynchon published the novel Inherent Vice is based on. If you’ve never smoked weed, but have a friend that does, go see the movie with him or her. I think there’s a chance you will emerge not quite getting it, while your friend’s mind will be blown. He or she will explain some things to you, and you’ll be all set for a healthy, more informed second viewing. Also, don’t smoke weed for the first time before seeing Inherent Vice. The stuff out there now is pretty damned powerful, and the sight of Phoenix’s Wolverine chops will surely freak a first timer out. Ω
Big Eyes
Tim Burton’s odd and fun little movie tells the story of Margaret Keane (Amy Adams), the painter behind the “big eyes” portraits of the ‘60s, and her loser husband Walter (Christoph Waltz) who took credit for her work. The story begins with Margaret leaving her first husband and winding up in San Francisco, where she eventually runs into alleged artist Walter. They have a quick courtship, get married and, before long, Walter is claiming her work as his own. The two eventually wind up in a legal battle, with Walter defending himself. The movie oscillates back and forth between serious drama and outrageous comedy. The comedy angle definitely plays out in the courtroom scenes, where Waltz goes full-blown clown. The look of the film has the characteristic Burton exaggerated colors, and is reminiscent at times of his Edward Scissorhands. Adams is mostly fine here, but seems a bit lost at times, as if she’s not quite sure how Burton wants to tell the story. Waltz delivers a somewhat crazed performance that makes the film’s tone a bit uneven at times, but it remains enjoyable.
3
The Imitation Game
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, who helped win the war against the Nazis when he and others invented a machine capable of breaking the Enigma code. Morten Tyldum’s film, while a tad cumbersome at times, does do a good job of illustrating the impossible odds Turing and his team were up against in trying to decipher the code. Keira Knightley (who had a nice 2014 with this and Begin Again), Matthew Goode and Charles Dance contribute to a strong supporting cast. Cumberbatch portrays Turing as a disagreeable, unlikeable social outcast who just happened to play a huge part in saving the free world thanks to his talent for solving puzzles. The film also delves into some of the more controversial times in Turing’s life, and sometimes the order of things gets a little confusing. Cumberbatch keeps the whole thing afloat with a typically strong performance.
4
The Interview
Co-directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s film, like Team America: World Police 10 years ago, plays like one of those impossibly strange and undeniably funny Warner Brothers propaganda cartoons that were in circulation during World War II, the ones where the likes of Bugs Bunny would square off against Hitler. This is touchy stuff, but Rogen and his costar James Franco are up to the task of pissing all over North Korea, American media and the CIA. They don’t go after these institutions with contemplative, important, intellectual arguments. They attack with dick and shit jokes. Franco plays Dave Skylark, the flamboyant host of an American tabloid interview show, notorious for such stories as Eminem admitting he’s gay and Rob Lowe revealing his baldness. When Skylark discovers that Kim Jong-un’s favorite TV shows are Big Bang Theory and his program, he conspires with his producer (Rogen) to procure an interview with the world leader that will establish their legitimacy as real news guys. Their plans to just interview the guy get mildly complicated when the CIA gets wind and insists upon the two killing the notoriously reclusive basketball fan. A big “sorry” to all of you looking for The Interview to be some sort of patriotic manifesto intelligently taking a stand against North Korea. For that sort of movie, you must look elsewhere. This film is about the political ramifications of a world leader sharting on live TV.
1
Into the Woods
Here’s an adaptation that renders something that was totally fun into something totally dreary. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1987 Broadway hit was a slightly sick, plucky wink at the audience, an almost mocking look at the dark side of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. As captured in the 1991 American Playhouse broadcast starring Bernadette Peters, it was a 150-minute romp with an adult sense of humor. It was hardly the stuff of Disney. Director Rob Marshall has cut his film version to just over two hours, yet it feels twice as long. On stage, the music of Into the Woods was perky, tightly choreographed, consistently funny and almost frantic. In the
movie, most of the songs just fart along. The singers search for the emotive, warm, soulful qualities in Sondheim and Lapine’s musical. The problem with that is the original musical didn’t really emphasize those qualities. It was more of an intelligent, operatic goof, not a feel-good musical. Meryl Streep has some good moments as The Witch, but that’s about it when it comes to anything good to say about this endeavor. Johnny Depp shows up for a few minutes as The Wolf in a stupid outfit that makes him look more feline than canine. His “Hello, Little Girl,” a song that is supposed to be rife with innuendo, sounds more like an animal who just wants to eat some food. Marshall and Depp give the number a slow, crooning presentation, taking away its former jaunty, obnoxious edge. It’s just wrong.
5
Selma
David Oyelowo portrays Martin Luther King Jr. in director Ava DuVernay’s stunning depiction of the civil rights march on Selma, Alabama, in 1965. It’s one of 2014’s most accomplished directorial efforts. In an attempt to gain equal voting rights, Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the march despite violent opposition from citizens and law enforcement officers. The film covers everything from MLK’s dealings with President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to the bewildering, despicable actions of then Alabama Governor George Wallace (an evil Tim Roth). Oyelowo delivers a star-making performance as King, while Carmen Ejogo excels in the role of Coretta Scott King for a second time. (She played the role in a 2001 TV movie, Boycott.) The very British Wilkinson and Roth do well with their accents and create memorable characterizations. This is one of those films everybody should see.
3
Unbroken
Angelina Jolie directs the harrowing story of Louis Zamperini (Jack O’Connell), real life Olympic runner and American soldier shot down over the Pacific during World War II. Zamperini wound up doing a grueling stretch at sea on a lifeboat until he and his co-survivor Phil (Dohmnall Gleeson) were picked up by Japanese soldiers and put into prison camp, where the real hell began. Jolie’s film shows Zamperini going through a nasty amount of torture at the hands of the camp commander, Watanabe (Takamasa Ishihara). In fact, some of the stuff Zamperini endured, like an entire prison camp population having to punch him in the face one at a time, seems like it would have to be embellishment. (Nobody could survive all those haymakers in a row.) Still, the story is an uplifting one, and Jolie made a good-looking movie. The script was co-written by the Coen brothers along with Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson, based on a book by Laura Hillenbrand. The real life Zamperini died in July, 2014. The film acts as a nice tribute to his courage.
4
Wild
Reese Witherspoon, in her best role since Walk the Line, plays author Cheryl Strayed, who took it upon herself to do a solo trek on the Pacific Crest Trail after some tragedies in her life. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee (The Dallas Buyer’s Club), the film winds up not only being a fine showcase for Witherspoon, but a damn fine commercial for the PCT and those REI outdoor gear stores. The film opens on the not-so-pleasant sight of Strayed losing a toenail in bloody fashion to a wrong-sized boot, already days into her trek. It then flashes back a bit to the beginning of her hike, and takes a non-chronological approach to its plot. We see moments in Strayed’s life when she makes a lot of mistakes involving infidelity and drugs, interspersed with her experience walking the trail. While being an uplifting film about redemption and Strayed’s personal triumphs, the movie also works as an authentic and informative film about the art of hiking. From Strayed’s struggles with her super huge backpack, to her reliance on trail tanks for water, to her stopovers at community outposts along the trail, you get a sense of what you might experience on such an expedition. Hopefully, this and her small role in this year’s Inherent Vice are indicative of more adventurous choices in Witherspoon’s future.
