THE BIG SHORT Is An Effective But Messy Rage Against The Machine

THE BIG SHORT Review:

- There remains a lingering anger over the fallout - or lack thereof - from the financial crisis of 2008. How could it be that the banks and Wall Street ultimately emerged relatively unscathed, with almost no one facing repercussions or prosecution for their oftentimes illegal conduct? For many - myself included - the exact circumstances that led to the crisis, and the particular ways that bankers gamed the system and screwed countless Americans, remained murky. But THE BIG SHORT makes it its mission to explain to viewers just how big of a scam Wall Street pulled on the public in the years leading up to the crash. From Adam McKay - the director best known for over-the-top comedies like Anchorman - THE BIG SHORT channels the manic energy of McKay's previous films into a more serious and purposeful form of satire. The film wears the chip on its shoulder proudly, and its rage is infectious. To that end, it wholly succeeds at its goal of getting you angry, pissed-off, and demanding that someone be held accountable.

McKay directs the movie with a wild abandon, channeling a sort of Scorsese-on-acid vibe that injects the film with a sense of meta playfulness. I'm not 100% sure if it works though. One of the most distinct aspects of the movie is McKay's use of fourth-wall-breaking narration. Sometimes, it comes from characters in the film - like Ryan Gosling's slick, alpha-male investor. Sometimes though, it comes from tongue-in-cheek cutaways in which Margot Robbie, as herself, explains financial terms while taking a bubble bath. I give McKay points for trying something different, but the cutaways feel extraneous, and like a distraction from the main narrative. Additionally, they sort of cut away at the distance between filmmaker and subject matter in a way that's a little uncomfortable. I mean, people criticized Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street for glamorizing its hedonistic, predatory subjects - even though Scorsese's film was in fact a pretty biting critique. But imagine if Scorsese had broken the fourth wall in a way that undermined his own satire? That's sort of what it feels like McKay is doing here. Even as he skewers the sleazy machismo and excess of Wall Street, he also seems to sort of revel in it. How else to explain naked Margot Robbie used as a narrator? It's audacious and unique, and I sort of see what McKay is going for - but again, it almost makes it feel like McKay is approaching the movie as a guy who on one hand is happy to skew Wall Street, but who also wouldn't mind getting invited to their stripper-filled, coke-binging holiday parties.

All that aside, the real meat of the film is in its parade of colorful characters who each recognized the oncoming crash before most (or, at least, most who were willing to openly admit it was on the way). The three standouts to me are Gosling, Christian Bale, and Steve Carell - all three of whom are in absolute top form. Starting backwards, Carell is a scene-stealer - and pretty much steals the movie - as a tightly-wound banker who - based on Gosling's sales pitch - makes a big bet that a housing crash is imminent. There is no real moral center in this film, but Carell perhaps comes closest. If nothing else, he is the guy in the movie who, after having experienced personal trauma, now reaches the point of giving zero %$&#'s. He calls people on their bull$^&$ left and right, with nary a regard for being the crazy guy in the room. Gosling's hustler is looking to profit. So is Bale's eccentric genius - but mostly, he's wrapped up in his own head - lost in a maze of esoteric equations and data streams. But Carell is the guy who, though he wants to be right, what really drives him is a festering disgust with the lies that his peers tell and the lengths they are willing to go to manipulate and re-shape reality to their liking. It's a great, great performance from Carell. Gosling is really good as well - and incredibly funny. Bale, too, is fantastic. He is a shorts-and-tee-shirt guy in a world of custom-made suits - a head-banging outsider who seems to be the only guy in Wall Street circa 2008 not in it to be in it, if you know what I mean. Bale is often at his best playing a guy with a screw loose, and he nails it here.

For all of its flash, THE BIG SHORT actually ends up being a pretty legitimately educational movie. I came a way with a much better understanding of subprime mortgages and the housing market and all of the factors that led to the '08 crash. The movie's ADD style is actually its way of overcompensating for really getting into the weeds of the financial industry, and for serving as a fairly comprehensive overview of the banking world. I'm just not fully sure that the movie ever finds the human center of its story. Carell's story-arc is the only one that has a real *reaction* to the lies and corruption we're seeing play out before us. Bale's arc is that he's a quirky outsider proven right. Gosling's is that he's an opportunist whose risky bet paid off. And then there are the "garage" investors - played by Finn Wittrock and John Magaro (guided by a gliding-through-the-movie Bradd Pitt, as an investor turned zen hippie) - who defy expectation but who never really grow as characters or as people. And so, the movie works best when focused on Carell, but has a bit of an empty feeling when it centers on the other characters.

I think THE BIG SHORT is an important movie for the way it gets you invested in the details of what caused the '08 financial crash, and opens your eyes to the way the financial industry screwed people, profited from said screwing, and then ultimately and unfairly got off mostly scott free. But as a narrative, it falters in finding the right way to tell us this story in a way that works as a story. The point of the movie is clear and powerful, but the road to arrive at that point is sort of messy. THE BIG SHORT is the cinematic equivalent of a long and angry and slightly drunken rant.

Still, the film is a very interesting departure for McKay, and it's filled with some terrific performances, moments of real humor, sharp satire, and effective raging against the machine. It's maybe the best campaign ad for Bernie Sanders of 2015. And it's a movie well worth checking out.

My Grade: B+

ANCHORMAN 2 Is I'm Ron Bergundy?

ANCHORMAN 2 Review:

- I remember being skeptical going into the first Anchorman. Up until then, I was only mildly a fan of Will Ferrell, and hadn't loved the sorts of cheap-laugh fratboy antics he'd become known for in movies like Old School. But Anchorman - which teamed Ferrell with SNL writer Adam McKay - brought Ferrell back to the style of comedy that had resulted in his funniest moments on Saturday Night Live: big, weird, crazy, out-there. Anchorman was so funny because it dared to ditch frat humor for absurdist humor - lampooning 70's-era alpha-male bravado while also not being afraid to throw in randomness like talking dogs and ultra-violent gang fights between rival teams of newsmen. Anchorman won me over, and it opened up the door for further hilarious Ferrell-McKay collaborations like Talladega Nights and Step Brothers. Suddenly, Anchorman - a movie that felt like Ferrell and McKay were getting away with something - became the template for more, increasingly absurdist comedies. I suspect that the success of Anchorman also opened up the door for guys like Seth Rogen and Adam Goldberg, David Wain, and others to do more over-the-top comedies at big studios, like This Is The End and Role Models. Sort of awesome, in my opinion. But funny in that Anchorman 2, a movie that its studio didn't even want to fund for many years, ended up becoming one of the most hyped and hotly-anticipated comedy sequels of all time. Weird, random humor becoming the norm? I'm okay with that.

So how is ANCHORMAN 2? It's funny - really funny. And it goes even bigger and broader than Part 1, with numerous bits that are very random and oddball and out there. The crack team of comic actors from Part 1 - Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, David Koechner, and Christina Applegate - are all back, and in fine form. And when you've got such a talented line-up of comedians, it's hard to go wrong. Carell, as loony weatherman Brick, gets a lot of big moments in this one, including a hilariously insane romance with an equally loony Kristin Wiig. Other notables joining the cast include Meagan Goode as Ron Bergundy's tough-customer new boss, and James Marsden as a slick rival reporter.

Interestingly, just as the first Anchorman tried to tell a story that was sort of socially relevant to its period setting (where Applegate's Veronica Corningstone caused upheaval at the local news station by being its first female anchor), so too does the sequel try to place Ron Bergundy and co. in the context of history. This time, it's 1980, and 24 hour cable news emerges as a competitor to the networks. After getting fired by his boss at the network - passed over for a promotion in favor of Veronica - a distraught Ron gets a second chance, when he's offered a shot at being a cable news anchor. Ron gets his old team back together, and they beat the odds and rack up ratings by inventing the sorts of schlock-tactic "news" coverage (car chases, for one) that is commonplace today.

Where ANCHORMAN 2 hurts itself is by trying to do too much at once. I feel like Ferrell and McKay are trying to have their cake and eat it too, by indulging in both a lot of media satire and social commentary-comedy, yet still taking extended side-trips into the wacky and absurd. We go from scenes that take not-so-subtle jabs at today's 24-hour news cycle, to scenes where Ron Burgundy nurses a wounded baby shark back to health and sings a song about it. There's interoffice rivalry with James Marsden's character, and romantic rivalry, with Veronica taking up with a new man (an on-point Greg Kinnear) following a falling-out with Ron, and Ron taking up with his new boss, Linda. The result is a long and at times rambling comedy that tries to do a LOT, without necessarily having a single through-line to tie it all together. By the time the movie ends, you start to wonder what the movie was actually *about* to begin with.

And that's not to say that it had to be about anything. But McKay and Ferrell, as mentioned, squeeze in a ton of plot. Not content to *just* be a riff on the modern era of news, this film packs everything and the kitchen sink into its two hour runtime. This means that when scenes don't elicit big laughs, they tend to really bomb, because they're often disconnected from the rest of the story. One example: when the movie plays the race card and has Ron attend an awkward dinner with Linda's African-American family, the jokes are more cringe-worthy than laugh-worthy. And the fact that the scene mostly bombs, combined with how tangential it is to the main plot, makes you wonder why it didn't get chopped in the editing room.

That said, when the jokes work, they often work big. From Carell and Wiig's oddball pairing, to a gang-fight scene that rivals the first movie's for sheer audacity and shock-value (and in terms of applause-worthy cameos), the movie gets more than enough belly laughs to make it a worthwhile watch. I'm a fan of the random stuff, so I didn't mind the film indulging in it. Honestly, I think Ferrell and McKay are funnier when they're going broad than when they try to do satire. And to that end, I have mixed feelings about, but ultimately support, the extended sequence in which Ron Bergundy goes blind, and becomes a lighthouse-dwelling hermit. On one hand, it comes so late in the movie that part of you thinks "really? they're doing this *now*?". And yet, the funniest moments of the whole film, I think, come as Ron struggles to adjust to being blind in the most hilariously misguided fashion imaginable. The whole thing comes off as an extended SNL sketch randomly thown into the middle of an Anchorman movie. And yet, it's hilarious, so it's hard to find fault. I guess you sort of wish Ferrell and McKay could just ditch narrative altogether and do a longform sketch film or something. As is, Anchorman 2 zips back and forth between its various plotlines and numerous divergent bits of randomness. So yes, there's a lot of funny packed in, but there's also a feeling that the movie is a bit overstuffed.

If you dug the first Anchorman, as I did, you can't go wrong in checking out its sequel. It's a funny flick, and I was laughing pretty consistently throughout. If there's to be a third though, I think that it'd wise to go back and re-tool the formula before things go too off the rails. I love seeing movies where it feels like people are getting away with something, but sometimes, more does not always equal better. One equation that does still very much hold up, however, is that Ferrell + McKay = funny. I'm glad that they are out there making weird $#%& like Anchorman.

My Grade: B+

THE WAY WAY BACK Is Way Way Good

THE WAY WAY BACK Review:

- It's been a good summer for quirky coming-of-age flicks. Several weeks back. The Kings of Summer really impressed me with its offbeat charm. Earlier in the summer, Frances Ha wowed me as one of the better movies about young adulthood in quite some time. Now, THE WAY WAY BACK comes along and impresses me even more. This is a movie that, first off, comes to you via some very smart and funny people: Jim Rash and Nat Faxon. These guys really can do it all. They co-wrote the script for the Oscar-winning The Descendants. And they've both done very funny stuff as actors - Rash is hilarious as the Dean on Community, and Faxon impressed as goofball older brother Ben on FOX's tragically short-lived sitcom Ben and Kate. This is a duo that deserves major attention. I would love to see them continue to churn out oddball comedies that they both write and appear in. The Way Way Back is proof that these guys have great, funny, affecting stories to tell.

The lead character here is Duncan (Liam James), a sullen teen who is dragged on a summer retreat with his family. His divorced mom, Pam (Toni Colette) has a new boyfriend, Trent (Steve Carell). Trent is taking Pam, Duncan, and his daughter Steph to his summer beach house. In a sunny, breazy, beachy town brimming with colorful characters, Duncan feels more miserable than ever. He hates Trent, the slightly older Steph is embarrassed to be seen with him, and the adults who hang around the beach house are less mature and more annoying than Steph's snooty friends. But Duncan finds an oasis from the misery in the form of the Water Wizz water park. After a chance encounter with the park's man-child owner Owen (an awesome Sam Rockwell), Duncan gets a job working at Water Wizz. There, with Owen as his zen-master mentor, Duncan learns to loosen up, be confident, laugh at himself, and just generally begins to realize that, yes, "it gets better."

The Way Way Back blends drama and comedy in such a way so as to perfectly capture a sense of teenage wasteland. The angst is reminiscent of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but there's also a lot of overt, quirky comedy that balances out the movie's darker elements. The relationship between Duncan and Trent is particularly raw. In fact, the movie opens on a car-ride conversation between them that is funny, but also flat-out heartbreaking. Reportedly based on a real-life conversation between a young Jim Rash and his step-dad, Carell's Trent says that Duncan is only a three out of ten - essentially calling him a loser to his face. This sets the stage for the rest of the film. We see Duncan grow up and realize his own self-worth, even as Trent - falsely confident, a yuppie d-bag - is cut down to size. Carell brilliantly makes Trent into a truly hateable character - taking some of the worst aspects of Michael Scott, but toning them down just enough so that Trent's self-centered meanness is all too believable and grounded. The performance though that really drives this home is Toni Collette's. To me, she is in many ways the heart and soul of the film - and she has some absolutely heartbreaking moments. It's a tour-de-force bit of acting, because Colette perfectly conveys just how desperate this middle-aged divorcee is to make this seemingly solid relationship work. At the same time, we see her eyes start to open as to Trent's true nature, and the cracks in the relationship start to show more and more clearly.

On the flipside, Sam Rockwell is similarly brilliant as Owen. He's the classic slacker sort of guy - the ultimate big brother: full of wisdom about life, girls, and how to achieve maximum waterslide velocity. He's got some hilarious moments, but there's also a slowly-developing poignancy in his relationship with Duncan. But the real fun comes when Rockwell's Owen is paired with Jim Rash and/or Nat Faxon, as an odd-couple pair of longtime Water Wizz employees. Both are absolutely hilarious - Rash playing the oh-so-over-it curmudgeon, and Faxon playing the horndog prankster who's made an artform of checking out bikini-clad girls as they wait for their turn on the waterslides. The gang at Water Wizz is hilarious, but there's also a specificity and authenticity to their interactions that rings true. Anyone who's worked at a summer camp or held any other such summer job will likely relate to the sense of wild-west possibility that comes with working at the Water Wizz.

There are several other strong supporting turns in the film. AnnaSophia Robb is quite good as an outsidery teen who forms a connection with Duncan. Also excellent is Alison Janney as her loopy, quasi-alcoholic mother. Rob Corddry and Amanda Peet are very interesting as a couple friendly with Trent. Corddry is usually the likable oddball, but here there is a menace behind his easygoing facade. He's like the school bully who never quite grew out of it. And Peet is also playing against type, as a troublemaking flirt. Again, there's something almost disturbing about her character, because it's illustrative of those moments you have growing up where you realize that adults - far from having it all figured out - can have just as many issues and failings as kids and teens, if not more so.

What didn't work as well for me? Surprisingly, even though I love Maya Rudolph in general, she seemed maybe a little miscast here as Rockwell's co-worker/love interest Caitlin. The movie really wants you to root for things to work out between the two, but there's not much chemistry. And it's hard to see what the laid-back, witty Owen sees, exactly, in the wet-blanket Caitlin. In any case, this part of the film seems a little forced. My biggest issue with the movie though might be some of the choices made by lead actor Liam James. Overall, he's good. But he lays on the malaise just a little too thick. He's *so* sullen and awkward for most of the movie that he seems less like an angsty teen and more like someone who has serious mental health issues. And who knows, maybe that's how he was told to play things. But if the character is really supposed to suffer from clinical depression, it's never really explored in the film. Not that this is a movie that needed to go the full Silver Linings Playbook route, but it does seem to take Duncan to some pretty dark, extreme places. The result is that some of the big emotional moments feel a little overdone and, at times, slightly cheesy - because James as Duncan seems to go a little too far.

One other weird thing about the movie - not a huge knock, but just sort of odd: I think it may have originally been set in the 80's? Clearly there's an autobiographical element to the film, but there's a sort-of-strange disconnect where many of the trappings (old Pac Man arcade games, 80's-era music, the Water Wizz park itself) seem of a certain period. And yet, there are cell phones, so I guess the movie's actually set in modern times? Regardless, there's definitely a very 80's vibe to the film, and many tonal similarities to the coming-of-age movies of that era.

While I felt some key scenes in the middle of the film felt a little tonally off, things really gelled in the movie's final act, and the film really won me over with its genuinely winning and triumphant final scenes. What I liked and appreciated was that the movie didn't cheat, and wrap things up, plot-wise, in a tidy bow. Things are left unresolved, and yet, the emotional arcs of the movie come to a head in a natural and satisfying manner. We don't know exactly what will become of Duncan, for example, but we do know that he has evolved from the character we met at the start of the movie. As has his mother. The movie has a great, macro thematic arc that colors it - the journey of these characters as they discover their own self-worth. When faced with the Trents of the world - those who rate them as mere three-out-of-tens, these characters can feel like they're stuck in the proverbial way-way-back (or the literal way-way-back - Duncan is forced to sit in the rear-facing backseat of Trent's old station wagon). But the movie shows how a guy like Duncan can learn to overcome - to become a man, maybe even a great man. Maybe - if he can be the first person to ever pass someone else on Water Wizz's tallest and windiest waterslide - he can even become a legend. The Way Way Back is highly recommended. It's one of the must-see indie flicks of the summer.

My Grade: A-