Cinemonkey

Grace Under Pressure

Hemingway might have enjoyed The Grey. The story concerns a man, Ottway (Liam Neeson), returning home from a job around an oil rigger in Alaska shooting wolves. The plane crashes, stranding Ottway and a handful of others in the wild. Shortly, though, the surviving men learn that they are being tracked and hunted by a large pack of fire-eyed wolves. Ottway more or less takes charge and tries to save the men and himself.

The experience tests Ottway in more than one manner. The man was on the verge of suicide just a few days earlier, thrusting his rifle into his mouth a la Hemingway, but backing off at the last second. It's not made explicit at first, but Ottway seems to be despondent over the recent death of his wife. The crash and the taunting wolves test Ottway's will to live, and the movie ends at a moment of profound decision making, though it is left ambiguous (until you stay through the end of the credits). The Grey harks back in many ways to earlier films such as Never Cry Wolf, David Mamet's Ayn Randian The Edge, even aspects of the Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger, but what's interesting about the film is its gestures toward the philosophical underpinnings of the crisis of man against nature and its concentration on character.

The Grey has a cast of dependable character actors (Dallas Roberts, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney) but you can't recognize them beneath the beards and frost so it is almost like have a cast of unknowns. The screenplay is credited to Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, from a short story called "Ghost Walker," and Joe Carnahan, who also directed. Mr. Carnahan has a checkered cinematic career, going from the truly independently made Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, a "calling card" movie that I haven't seen, to the intelligent and gritty Narc, which was one of the best movies of 2002. His Smokin' Aces was widely ridiculued but this reviewer liked it a lot, and it was a film that showed early the range of Ryan Reynolds, before that a TV sit-com player. His The A-Team was widely misunderstood and mocked for its betrayal of the physical laws of nature, but in fact there was clarity to the action in defiance of recent trends in cinema (Michael Bay) and an undercurrent of seriousness beneath the defeated mockery of the source TV show. The Grey is a 180 from the comical violence of some of his earlier films. It's a deadly serious existential drama and a fully satisfying adult tale.

Kill Ken

 

Haywire begins with a woman sitting in a dinner. The music score, by David Holmes, gently evokes a form of '60s surf music. Shortly thereafter a fight breaks out. The woman's name is Mallory Kane, which evokes memories of Mickey and Mallory from Natural Born Killers, a murderous couple who also spent a lot of time in dinners. The film ends in part with an fight scene on a beach, which apes a scene in the script for Kill Bill that didn't make it to the screen, in which The Bride has an elaborate final duel with Bill. The first three-fourths of Haywire is told via an intricate structure in which the heroine is recounting the recent past to an innocent bystander whose car she has borrowed. In one scene Mallory subdues an opponent with her powerful thighs, which cites a moment in the Joseph Losey movie adaptation of Modesty Blaise, one of Tarantino's favorite book series.


In brief, Haywire is director Steven Soderbergh's master class in action filmmaker to that attention-grabbing upstate and fellow independent film forging pioneer Quentin Tarantino.

I don't believe that there is any animosity between the two helmers. In fact, I can't even recall either of them mentioning the other in interviews. But I have the impression that there is a surge of resentment within Hollywood to Tarantino's success, just as there was to Spielberg's or any other director who has a head for success and who also lets success go to his head. Soderbergh has fraternal links to Tarantino, in that George Clooney acted with Tarantino in From Dusk Till Dawn before partnering with Soderbergh in a short-lived production company. But more than that, Tarantino's movie geek approach to film, embracing the messier visual style of '70s cinema coupled with black humor and a cold morality, must make lovers of "classical" cinema irked.


This is all speculative, of course. An alternative theory is that Tarantino is so influential and his unique approach to subject matter so marbled through current film culture that some of his tropes are going to invade action films intentionally or not.

Haywire begins with the word "shit," uttered by Mallory at the beginnsing as she takes note of who is arriving outside to meet her at the dinner, and ends with the same word, voiced by Antonio Banderas's Rodrigo as he realizes that he is the next victim on Mallory's (s)hit list. In between, the story, from a script credited to frequent Soderbergh collaborator Lem Dobbs (The Limey), tells of Mallory's betrayal by the Blackwater-style private government contractor she works for, run by a certain Kenneth (Ewan McGregor¹), and her movie-long attempt to solve the puzzle of the betrayal and exact capital revenge on its conceivers. The plot is complex but easy to follow, though probably hard to summarize out-loud after a screening; the action scenes are terrific; the cast is great, including Michael Douglas, Bill Paxton, Mathieu Kassovitz², Channing Tatum³, and Michael Fassbender, late of Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds⁴.


Mallory is of course played by Gina Carano, a retired mixed martial arts competitor whose life story is well known. She is an authentic fighter and did many if not all of her own stunts, which also included climbing up the sides of buildings à la Bourne. She is also an unusual screen presence. She is pretty but not conventionally so, she is tallish for an American woman (five foot eight), she has stubby hands, and she is unusually voluptuous for – at least– a martial arts star. In some shots she seems to have a bit of a belly. These features make her endearingly real in the way that movie stars can, as opposed to super models.


Like many action directors, Soderbergh takes the opportunity offrered by the heightened "reality" of such films to play with the surface texture. At one point he performs an editing echo of a famous scene in Psycho in which the wife of the town sheriff is kept in the center of the frame despite the cutting back and forth between images. Here, the trick takes place at a soirée attended by Mallory, Fassbender's character, and master villain Mathieu Kassovitz.⁵ And as he frequently does, Soderbergh also visually quotes some of his favorite films from the '70s, especially those of Alan J. Pakula. As he did in Contagion, where he adapted a shot from Klute set in a fashion model's audition, here he quotes parking garage moments from Pakula's All the President's Men.

Soderbergh's "great theme" is the return after a time by a disgraced or absent figure to the lives of those left behind. His first feature, sex lies and videotape, enunciated this plot template first, but it has arise in most of his films, most dramatically in The Underneath, but even in his "entertainments," such as the Ocean's Eleven series, in which Danny Ocean keeps popping up back in the lives of his ex-wife, or his various nemeses. Here he takes the idea to an extreme. Mallory is supposed to be captured or dead. Instead, as with any vengeful action star, she is implacably plowing through her betrayers. Oregonian reviewer Michael Russell has a term for this kind of vengeance film, based on such examples as Taken, calling them "man as shark" movies, in which the driven hero feasts unstoppably on his opponents.

The result is an action film with unexpected depth, breadth, acting variety, and free of plot contrivance, while at the same time aspiring for a level of believability and authority that most acton films forsake in favor of compensating humor.


1 … who maintains his "wide eyed moron" school of acting. Mr. McGregor is one of the poorest actors on today's screens.


2 Both of these two actors are also directors, as well.


3 Or is it Tatum Channing Tatum? He seems to be in every movie, yet I can never remember him from one film to another; another reviewer came me the visual equivalent of a mnemonic device. Unlike, say, Sam Worthington, Tatum is the one with the ears that stick out like Mr. Potato Head.

4  Between Mr. McGregor and Mr. Fassbender alone the penile strength of the film is off the charts.

5 Soderbergh both photographed the movie under the pseudonym Peter Andrews and also edited it under the screen credit Mary Ann Bernard.

Motley Fool Links

I've started contributing to the investment website The Motley Fool, and below are links to the first four entries.

I started off with the five best business oriented movies of 2011.

This was followed by an entry on the prospects of Lionsgate's curiously low share price (around $12) in light of the release of The Hunger Games this summer.

 

 

Next I did an account of the Oscar prospects of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

 This was followed by a critique of Portlandia, both in business and entertainment terms.

The Best and Worst Films of 2011

Receiving the year end issue of Sight and Sound is intimidating. There, a round up of the world's best film writers, or perhaps mostly BFI staffers, list their top 10 films of the now-ending year. The January 2012 issue is especially exasperating, because the films its international writers praise sound so much better than most of the films on conventional, regional reviewer lists. This cuts to the heart of the absurdity of 10 best lists, that not every reviewer can or even should see everything. But that's why all the reviewers do it, perhaps, and the Sight and Sound survey offers the perspective of some 75+ writers. On the other hand, a working writer can see almost everything if they dedicate the time and know how to do it.¹

Had I been such a person, here's what my 10 best list might have looked like: 

Faust (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia)

A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, Iran)

Once upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey-Bosnia and Herzegovina)

The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr, Hungary, Switzerland-Germany-France-USA)

The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium-France-Italy)

Kill List (Ben Wheatley, UK-Sweden-Australia)

Shame (Steve McQueen, UK)

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, UK)

Hors Satan (Bruno Dumont, France)

I Wish (Kiseki; Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan)

Unfortunately, none of these films have appeared yet, or at least in a way that this particular reviewer could see them in a timely fashion.² With luck, some of these titles will appear in the forthcoming Portland film festival (or the one the following year!), on DVD, or through other avenues. But even more so,  reviewers need to stop viewing themselves as regional or provincial. Since most newspapers are (or should be) on line, and so potentially are speaking to an international readership, they should write aggressively and accordingly. With a world wide readership also comes the capabilities of viewing international films, either via Netflix downloads or other avenues.

Which brings me to another matter, the sloppiness of most 10 Best Lists, in that some reviewers prefer to draw upon films that were released in their area rather than follow strict calendar year limits. Thus a terrific movies such as 13 Assassins, Le quattro volte, and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaucescu appear on the Sight and Sound lists because a lot of writers saw them last year even though they were released in 2010. I prefer to follow the strict limits of the calendar, on the feeble hope that future generations won't be confused by smudging of works from one vast track to another. 

In any case, in comparison with the high toned films that could have been on it, my list for 2011 will look modest and commercial. As usual, it is a list of films that I would very much like to see again, and then again, that is, films that are now to become a part of my life. Also, as usual, the list if something of a cheat, since it is nearly impossible, unfair, or Procrustian to limit the best to a mere dime. 

Melancholia, is my favorite film of the year, and it is a typically challenging yet beautifully photography and well-written and acted psychological portray by Lars von Trier. 

Is it possible that the best performance of the year was a blend of animation and motion capture? Yes, in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Margin Call, Moneyball,  The Ides of March, Contagion: Four serious adult dramas from the Clooney-Soderbergh-"indie-to-mainstream" infusion. Probably too slow paced for the majority of viewers. 

2011 was a surprisingly good year for comedies: The Change-Up, Horrible Bosses, The Sitter, Crazy Stupid Love, and A Very Harold & Kumar Xmas.

Drive Everyone's favorite American action film – directed by a Dane and written by an Iranian.

A Dangerous Method is a rare examination of ideas, but also the personal foibles whence they came, as it charts the falling out between Freud and Jung. 

The Green Hornet and the X-Men prequel serve as my place holders for good comic book or pulp hero adaptations, of which the others see below. Hornet was the only funny, interesting, and original, while X-Men caught the spirit of the early '60s marvel comics. 

Hugo is yet another love letter from Martin Scorsese to cinema.³

Two '70s Peckinpah remakes, The Killer Elite and Straw Dogs, proved to be better in most ways to their originals. Killer Elite was simply a much better and more coherent action film, while Straw Dogs brought some of the nuances of the central relationship and showed more sympathy for the wife. 

Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol showed yet again, at least to those of us who don't need reminding, that Tom Cruise is a great screen star, with both action film skills and serious thespian capabilities. Paul W.S. Anderson's Three Musketeers was also notable cinematically. 

Troll Hunter was fun and goofy and well worth seeing again.

The "American" version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is really much the same as the Swedish one, but with certain core, key differences. I enjoyed it as a movie much more, thanks to the casting, the pace, and the compression of the plot. 

Yin to the above list's yang must come the worst films of 2011. And here it does no good to list the obvious examples, your Transformers and your Zookeepers, films which are either obviously bad or simply routine. Rather better is to focus on the ambitious movies that could or should have been better or which signify dire cinematic trends or audience tastes.

It is intentionally provocative to put The Tree of Life on one's worst films list, especially given that I did indeed kind of like it. But it is not for everyone, and there is always the intuition that Malick is not issuing his best versions of his films. Even worse is the rote inclusion of the film on too many other best lists. 

Midnight in Paris is the most overrated film of the year: middlingly competent Woody Allen with middlebrow citations of notable artists and writers and a sappy and predictable ending. 

Of Gods and Men was highly praised and yet clearly misunderstood by many viewers, at least when the film could be understood at all. 

It was also a bad year for comedies: Larry Crown, Bad Teacher, Your Highness, Arthur.

The decline of the religio-medieval-fairy-tale action film: Priest, The Rite, Season of the Witch, Red Riding Hood

Green Lantern, Thor, Captain America were just among many comic book adaptations that betrayed the source, bored the audience with inauthentic origin stories, and happened also to be all terribly and boringly miscast. 

Art of Getting By  and  Beginnings were just the latest two examples of too many films by debuting writer-directors who draw on their own recent private lives to essentially brag about themselves. 

Water for Elephants was just one of many bad love stories. 

The American Compare this dull Europeanized thriller to Drive and note how incoherent, willfully obscure, and repetitions it is, especially in its many driving sequences. 

Rarely has a title and trailer prepared viewers for as much fun and excitement as Cowboys and Aliens only to be let down terribly by the actual film. 

J. Edgar: Another tedious, lazy, dark, and inconsequential film from Clint Eastwood. 

The first episode of the second season of Sherlock Holmes, with its great pace, acting, and clever script from Stephen Moffat, shows the diminishing returns of the big screen series, reaching its nadir already in Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. 

In Conclusion

On other matters, I wish that I had seen Young Adult. Update Tuesday, 2 January: I've just seen Young Adult and it is great and deserves to go on the 10 best list. It's a remarkably subtle script, and Theron is perfect in it, along with Oswalt. I especially enjoy the way Theron's writer is continually stealing from the real world, as well as from Oswalt's character. 

Also, I did not include any documentaries or animated films in this survey. Really, these two types of movies should have their own lists. 

1 The full list is available on line at the BFI website. 

2 Shame is currently playing locally at the Cinema 21. 

3 Coming out the same year that the festival-hogging, Oscar-bound The Artist also celebrates silent film, though from a derivitive angle.