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+

ONLY GOD FORGIVES Is a Beautiful Mess of a Movie

ONLY GOD FORGIVES Review:

- Drive was my favorite film of last year. To me, it was a stunning, ultra-cinematic tour de force. In an age in which CGI and digital noise often take the place of true cinematic style, I was blown away by filmmaker Nicholas Winding Refn's instantly-iconic movie - which was bursting with stylistic flair and dripping with neo-noir atmosphere. With Drive still fresh in my memory, I was eager to see Refn and star Ryan Gosling's follow-up, ONLY GOD FORGIVES. The trailers promised an eye and ear-melting foray into moody action on par with Drive. However, Only God Forgives is another beast entirely. With this film, Refn has stepped away from conventional narrative, and instead created a piece of hardcore, extreme cinema that mixes exploitation sleaze with David Lynch-esque narrative abstraction. This is a film that deals heavily in symbolism and metaphor, much more concerned with evocative imagery and jaw-dropping, thought-provoking "moments" than with any sort of conventional characters or narrative. This is a movie that is and will remain ultra-divisive. If you have no patience for non-conventional narratives, this film will frustrate. Even those who are open to a film that deals so much in the abstract will likely come away with many questions, and likely some degree of confusion.

In all honesty, I watched ONLY GOD FORGIVES transfixed by the imagery and enthralled by certain scenes - but I walked out of the theater largely baffled by what I had just seen. Only after combing through other reviews and articles did I begin to piece together the intended themes of the film. Ultimately, the film looks incredible, it's got moments that are memorable and shocking and visually stunning. But personally, I just don't know that it all comes together in a way that drives home the themes that Refn was hoping to convey. For some, this will be an all-time cult classic. For me, I see it as a fascinating but flawed misfire in the catalog of one of today's most talented and interesting filmmakers.

What is Only God Forgives about? Let me start with the actual narrative, and I'll get into the larger themes a bit later. On the surface, this is a movie about Ryan Gosling as Julian, a drug-smuggler living in Bangkok with his brother, Billy. Both brothers are rough customers, but Billy is a whole other level of crazy. After getting into an argument with a local pimp, Billy tracks down and kills the pimp's young daughter. Billy then becomes the target of the local police, led by the sword-wielding Chang. Chang - an enigmatic middle-aged man, is a trained fighter and killer. He's a ruthless and sadistic guy, whose bloodlust is counterbalanced by a preternaturally calm demeanor, and a love for singing cheesy karaoke songs. Chang is a mysterious figure throughout the movie - we're told he's a cop, but he also doesn't seem to be just any old cop. He leads squads of policemen, but is never shown wearing a uniform or badge, and seems to operate on his own authority and no one else's. In any case, Chang is big on biblical-style vengeance and wrath, and helps lead the pimp back to Billy, so that the pimp can kill him to avenge his daughter. Billy's death, however, makes Chang and his men a target for Julian. We soon learn though that Julian is less of a leader, and more of an unwitting puppet. The one pulling the strings is Julian's hateful, conniving, devious mother, Crystal - played by a positively demonic Kristin Scott Thomas. Enraged by her favorite son's death (and uncaring that Billy was an evil psychopath), Crystal journeys to Bangkok to help destroy anyone who had a hand in his fall. This puts her and her criminal empire at war with Chang and his men - with Julian, steadily growing tired of being marginalized, spat on, and emasculated, caught in the middle of these two almost godlike forces.

It's funny, because writing that down now, it all seems to make a strange sort of sense. But while actually watching the film, a lot of things - even the most basic info about these characters' identities - seemed unclear to me. Refn gives us a lot of very broad strokes, but not many details. This is a movie that - perhaps intentionally, perhaps not - feels consistently vague and elusive.

A lot of criticism of the movie is likely to be directed at Gosling - or at the least, with Gosling's character and the way he's portrayed. In Drive, Gosling's Driver was stoic and a man of few words, sure. But beneath the surface, there seemed to be a lot going on. And part of the point of the movie was to have Gosling be this larger-than-life, iconic character. Here though,  it's frustrating because the events of the film seem to indicate that Julian is a tortured, pained, deeply disturbed and psychologically-scarred character. But time and time again, Gosling's expression is so blank that we can't read *anything* into it or into his character. I don't blame Gosling, per se, because I think this is what Refn wanted from him. But I also think Refn makes a miscalculation in having Julian be *this* blank of a slate. Because it means that Gosling will do or say things that just come off as completely lacking any context. An example: late in the film, Julian approaches Chang - finally coming face-to-face with his adversary after playing cat-and-mouse for much of the film. You would expect a moment of heated emotion, of brimming tension. But instead, Julian blankly looks at Chang and nonchalantly asks: "wanna fight?" Cut to a long but almost entirely-devoid-of-emotion boxing-match between the two, in which Julian is soundly beaten to a pulp.

I get that Refn is going for a Lynchian vibe here, and I get that he's showing us the movie's events in a dreamlike fashion, and at an emotional and narrative remove. But I also thought about the great Lynch movies like Mulholland Drive, that still managed to elicit genuine emotion and feeling from me, even in spite of their abstract imagery and dream/nightmare-like aesthetics.

To his credit, Refn crafts numerous scenes that are just visually spectacular. His use of color is amazing. His Bangkok feels like hell-on-earth. From the blinking-neon streets to the blood-red interiors of the hotel at which Julian stays - there's no question that Refn is quite simply a visual stylist who's in a league of his own. He also uses music almost as effectively as in Drive, syncing scenes with haunting electro tunes that give the whole movie a feeling of slow-burn dread mixed with pulsing electric danger.

Now, the scene-stealer of the film is hands-down Kristin Scott Thomas as Crystal. Whatever criticisms I may have of the film, there's no doubt that every scene she's in simply crackles with energy. Her character is just jaw-droppingly cruel, blunt, and manipulative. One minute she's creating all-kinds-of-wrong sexual tension with her son, the next she's eviscerating him in front of his female companion with acid-tongued insults that no mother should ever speak. I'll go so far as to say that Crystal is one of the most memorable cinematic villains in recent memory - a hellish witch of pure hatred and horribleness, a perverse femme fatale like none we've ever seen before.

Crystal's scenes are almost all barn-burners, but like many of the film's most interesting scenes, they seem to exist in a sort of narrative and thematic vacuum. I've now read numerous interpretations of the film and its characters. Many writers have pointed out the film's clear references to Oedipus Rex, and it's hero-who-screws-his-mom-and-kills-his-dad iconography. Many have also called out Chang as an avenging angel of death, and noticed Crystal's devilish / Satanic similarities. Some have wondered if Gosling's Julian exists in some kind of purgatory-on-earth, where his moral choices and allegiances will end up either damning him to hell, or else sparing him - at least in part - from the angel of death's full wrath. Certainly, the movie has a lot of psycho-sexual imagery, with Julian portrayed as a somewhat impotent figure - his mother has rendered him essentially unable to find comfort or to have normal relations with any other woman. I've even heard that the film is in some ways a metaphor for film itself - that the constant recurring image of characters bound and strapped to a seat represents the way we as film-watchers restrain ourselves in our chair in order to be served up a filmmaker's vision.

All of this is interesting food for thought - but here's the thing: to me, a lot of these ideas just aren't present in the movie in any truly satisfying manner. The attempts at symbolism are clearly there (i.e. all the Oedipal stuff). But what does it mean? What is the *point* of this story? It's not enough just to craft a film where a equals b and x equals y. The filmmaker has got to be relaying a vision that takes that metaphor and symbolism and molds it into some kind of profound statement. I left ONLY GOD FORGIVES feeling about as blankly unmoved as Gosling appears to be throughout the film. I mean, sure, a couple of individual scenes wowed me, but ... what was the ultimate takeaway supposed to be? I think again to Mulholland Drive, which is one of those movies where every scene ultimately - brilliantly - adds up to a stunning, unforgettable statement about dreams and artifice vs. reality, and the world of Hollywood dreams and fakery vs. the world that we actually live in. The fact is: Refn doesn't nail the thematic aspect of this film. He nails the visuals - the colors, the cinematography, the aesthetics ... but I think that attention to aesthetic brilliance may have come at the expense of everything else. With Drive, Refn found the perfect narrative vehicle for his amazing aesthetic and stylistic sensibilities, crafting a simple piece of pulp-fiction that just worked on every level. Here, he really stumbles by getting away from more straightforward characters, narrative, and theme.

The end result is a movie both fascinating and frustrating. Again, I found ONLY GOD FORGIVES to be positively hypnotic in stretches, and Kristin Scott Thomas and her character took the film to another level whenever she was on-screen. Maybe repeat viewings would sway me differently, but to me there was just that nagging, persistent feeling that what Refn was *trying* to do here wasn't being reflected in what was actually on-screen. That's tough, because man, the guy is really aiming to give us bold, original, uncompromising, and challenging films here, and that's something we need more of. Nicholas Winding Refn remains one of the most unique voices in film, and can't wait to see what he does next. But this is one of those films that is sort of a glorious mess - moments of awesome, moments that misfire, and moments that are quite simply WTF-worthy. It's well worth seeing and talking about, even if it doesn't realize the potential of its seemingly lofty ambitions.

My Grade: B

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES Is An Ambitious Genre-Mashup

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES Review:

- The Place Beyond the Pines is one of those films that I'd easily recommend that any real film fan check out asap, but also one that I had some reservations with. It's frustrating, because the movie is admirably ambitious, features some incredible performances, and has certain sequences that are truly memorable. But it's also a movie that feels like it's overreaching a bit, halting its own momentum with a clunky structure and a number of plot points and twists that feel contrived. There is greatness in this film, but it's weighted down by a number of elements that just don't quite work. Still, it's easily worth watching as an interesting and discussion-provoking film - an example of a movie that has a lot on its mind, but can't quite articulate it all in a cohesive and fluid fashion.

This is a film, primarily, about fathers and sons. From Derek Cianfrance, the guy behind Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines has a similar moody darkness that permeates throughout. It's also a hard movie to talk about without giving away major spoilers, so bear with me as I try to talk around any major plot points. I will say this though: in my opinion, the first third of this film is incredible. If the film had simply stuck to its initial narrative, expanded it, filled in some of the gaps, and called it a day, I think we'd be looking at a possible Oscar contender. But Cianfrance isn't necessarily interested in telling that sort of story. Instead, he divides the film into three distinct but interconnected segments, with each segment completely shifting its focus to a different set of characters. And unfortunately, the film seems to lose momentum each time a new segment begins.

To back up though, the first segment is an amazing piece of filmmaking. It features Ryan Gosling as Luke, a down-on-his-luck drifter circa 1990 or so. Luke, perpetually sporting a tattered Metallica t-shirt, feels like a slightly de-mystified version of Gosling's character from Drive. He's a loner, a vagabond who makes end's meat by working as a motorcycle stuntman in a travelling carnival. One day, however, while at a show in upstate NY, Luke runs into a woman, Romina (Eva Mendes) who he'd had a brief fling with a year prior. Luke discovers that Romina has a son - it's his - and Luke becomes determined to force his way into Romina and their child's life (despite Romina shacking up with another man and wanting little to do with him). But Luke is persistent. He quits the carnival and gets a job working for a burnout mechanic named Robin (an amazing Ben Mendelsohn). Eventually, Robin convinces Luke to partner with him to rob banks. Luke goes along with it, and becomes quite good at it to boot. And so a classic sort of story begins to unfold - the kind that will be familiar to fans of Breaking Bad. Even as Luke finds something he's good at, his life of crime creates two problems for every problem it solves, and even as he enjoys success, it's only a matter of time until the other shoe drops.

Man ... this initial segment with Gosling is so well done - it had me captivated. From a visual perspective, the entire first third is incredibly shot. The heist sequences are gritty, visceral, ultra-intense. Other scenes have a moody, foreboding, neon-lit film noir atmosphere. And Gosling, Mendes, and Mendelsohn are absolutely at the top of their games. Gosling brings the same sort of quiet intensity that he brought to Drive, and delivers a powerful, magnetic performance. Mendes is at her best, world-weary yet ever so slightly curious about the mystery man who's come back into her life. And Mendelsohn is wonderful - funny, charismatic, and memorable as a ne'er do well small-time hood who sees Luke as his ticket back to the bigtime. The absorbing characters, the top-flight performances, and the visually-stunning direction make this first segment positively electric. As the segment culminated in a shocking chase scene (as we are introduced, on the fly, to Bradley Cooper as the driven cop Avery Cross), I was on the edge of my seat, and my jaw was on the floor as the screen faded to black.

But that is only the first of three segments. In the second segment, the focus switches to Cooper's character, who we learn is also the father of a young son. The tone of the film switches - no longer a neo-noir, the look and feel of the movie takes on the stylings of a procedural cop drama. The film adopts a more drab, more dull look. And the story, while compelling, lacks the all-or-nothing drama of Luke's tale. As it turns out, Cooper seems to be one of the few good cops in his precinct - hailed as a hero cop following an on-patrol injury, Cross seems to be a sort of white knight figure - especially in contrast to the corrupt, racist lawman played by Ray Liotta. But as the story progresses, we begin to see that Cross is partly motivated by altruism, but also partly by an aggressively political streak. Cross may not be as inherently corrupt as his colleagues, but he's got a survivalist instinct that makes him dangerous. Similar to Luke, we see how Cross makes a series of decisions that come, initially, from a pure place, but that end up becoming corrosive and corrupting.

The movie's middle section is carried by a great performance from Bradley Cooper - right up there with his work in Silver Linings Playbook. It's nice to see Cooper continue his streak of fantastic performances - and even more impressive, he's very much playing against type here - Cross is quiet, measured, carefully masking his motives with a mild-mannered demeanor. Liotta is also characteristically excellent - scary and imposing. But while the story works well in and of itself, it unravels a bit as it becomes apparent how Cianfrance wants it to connect thematically with the first segment. The ways that Cross' story mirrors Luke's - they don't quite hold up to scrutiny. And there starts to be a contrivance to the way that Cross keeps running into characters from Luke's story. Cianfrance is going for a "we're all connected" vibe, but as that increasingly becomes what the movie is about, it comes off less as profound and more as stretching.

And it feels like stretching to the breaking point when the film gets into its third and final segment. I won't spoil what this segment is about, but it continues Luke and Cross' story in an interesting, but ultimately forced-feeling manner. The highlight is, easily, Dane DeHaan (who was great in last year's CHRONICLE), playing Jason - a high school outcast. DeHaan does some fantastic work here, but it's offset a bit by the extremely over-the-top performance of Emory Cohen as AJ, a friend/rival of Jason's. This may be one of those love-it-or-hate-it things, but Cohen's performance in the film - where he seems to be trying to channel the ghost of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire - really took me out of the film. It was just too much - too cartoonish, too weird. And the backstory of his character - which has some major gaps and makes little sense - is also an issue. And so this third segment - which is essentially a mini high school coming-of-age drama - is easily the film's weakest. As Cianfrance attempts to tie up his ambitious saga in a bow, it collapses a bit under its own weight. There's two much we as an audience must blindly accept for it all to work, and the jumpiness of the narrative ends up hurting rather than helping the film.

And yet ... the last ten minutes or so of the film are quite strong, and function as a moving, memorable, and iconic epilogue to the first segment. It really made me wish that the movie had focused on Gosling's Luke, kept Cooper's Cross as a side character/rival, and perhaps featured a short epilogue with DeHaan's Jason. The ambitious structure, ultimately, makes the movie feel less fluid and much more clunky than it might have been otherwise. Like I said, it's frustrating, because I feel like the movie has all the ingredients to be a masterpiece. And for the first forty minutes or so, I was convinced I was watching a classic unfold. It's a great cautionary tale about how to tell (or perhaps not to tell) this sort of generation-spanning saga (and who knows, perhaps the story would have been better served as a TV miniseries). As is, THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES is a movie overflowing with incredible scenes and moments and performances. This is in many ways a must-see, because the film's best moments will likely be, at the end of the day, some of the best of any movie this year. It just, sadly, doesn't quite come together as it should. But ... what is there is well worth taking in, flaws and all.

My Grade: B+