Review: Pulp Fiction (1994)

okay so okay, you ever hear the old expression "a good decoy can lead the enemy away from the king, a master decoy can do it again"? how do you prove you weren't some flash-in-the-pan ripoff artist who got lucky once? and if you just do the same, it has to be moreso, right? critters moved from the house to the neighborhood, so Tarantino moves from the warehouse to the outside world, into the yellowed pages of Amazing Tales.... into John Carpenter's modern wild west, with danger and death behind every door, where law enforcement is a sad, distant dream. you can find a lot of the mundane, circular repetition of Reservoir Dogs but in a larger space, in a fascinating universe of neo-nostalgia resell and sudden shootouts and a literal macguffin, characters having musical conversations and possessing a strange sense of killer's honor. it as well is not an action film -- its visceral thrills are a surprising rarity amid the words themselves, and can barely compete. film's got it going on all over, never slows down, and never gets old. it's magic.

oh I guess Roger Avary helped with that, fine, fine.

Review: Reservoir Dogs (1992)

listen, listen: let me tell you a little somethin' about the early nineties, all right? it was a magical time full of possibility and wonder, okay? all of the sixties kids had grown up and were selling us nostalgia we didn't understand, a lot of rudy ray moore and pam grier who-the-fuck-knows who else. vague memories of blaxsploitation and Baby Boomer sitcoms and porn and 'Nam ultraviolence and whatever song was on the radio the day they were learning to touch themselves. best part of it all was the only nearby database was a video store... a group of fellas could go into a warehouse and make a movie that ripped off about twenty-seven French and Hong Kong productions and only other filmmakers would know about it... and maybe it didn't even fucking matter, okay? because style can go a long fucking way, my friend, and it can even fuel your career for a few decades. a Greek Tragedy centered around a jewel heist and a group of thieves pointing guns at each other ain't half of it when you make the structure your bitch, too, when you humanize these monsters with lyrical, mundane conversations about popular culture that increase the stakes around the site of the climax, instead of leading up to it. when ya got velocity, nobody else can turn the wheel -- right place, right time, right personality never meant so much. the only sad part is that it can never be done again... unless, of course, you're the guy who did it this time.

Review: Song to Song (2017)

When cooking a steak, be sure to awkwardly stare at it until it heats itself.

Malick's ongoing scriptless Shoot the Rodeo projects continue their study of the Human Osprey, squandering the goodwill of performers and viewers alike and generally sucking valuable oxygen away from the working class. A movie about musicians and producers who fuck each other has never contained so little music or fucking. It's amazing that his steadicams and fish-eye lenses haven't been confiscated by a government or an angry mob.

The film, in comparison to his recent works, is at least telling a story this time. The four featured characters have discernible arcs -- relationships start and end, mistakes lead to revelations, somebody dies tragically... all could be universally relatable experiences if they weren't set between the 200 vacations they go on over the course of, seemingly, one year. When the film doesn't twitch with faint signs of life or when Malick splices in footage from Voyage of Time to wake you up, you can derive some suspense from reimagining it all as a PSA on sexually transmitted diseases, because nobody-but-nobody wants Cate Blanchett to get herpes.

You know the pattern by now and you can imagine the entire film, start to finish, without seeing a single frame of it. In addition to the minor positives above, I'll say that Malick also included the line from one of his Osprey surrogates, "I could go on for hours with one chord..." as perhaps the ultimate proof of self-awareness. Remember when this guy only made films every 20 years? Those were the fucking goddamn days.

Review: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017)

Baumbach's Embarassing Dad Years.

Consequences of an incestuous family come home to roost in Shadow Earth's The Royal Tenenbaums 2, where all of the kids have grown up and have kept themselves busy by churning out anxious little copies of themselves. Will our characters something-something in time?

Hoffman, substituting the Jeff Daniels role while wearing Brian De Palma's wardrobe, remains an insufferable burden on his ex-wives and children (Sandler, Stiller, Marvel), where his lack of social awareness forces them to micromanage his behavior and ride the bull for as long as they can before the patience of the universe wears thin. Moments of joy are fleeting, moments of frustration linger, and a car gets beaten up. Standard fare, really.

Taken in the short view, it's hard to know if these experiences are transforming the characters into stronger individuals or further galvanizing them into one mess of a family, doomed to forever live under the high-maintenance shadow of their father. Transformations are internal and never-ending; in Baumbach's films, the transformations may never begin. The hopeful message of the ending casts the Meyerowitz siblings as a buffer generation between their children and their grandparents, that as long as they can contain their neuroses, the next generation is saved. Okay... the joke's on them when their kids unknowingly create another Hoffman.

Baumbach is building a Cinematic Universe of Discomfort with only slight maneuvering of continuity. Books become sculptures, adoptions become births, ping-pong (paddle-that-cock) becomes pool, Pais becomes Eisenberg becomes Stiller becomes Sandler, and Laura Palmer is rescued between every film. The performances are so good and the situations so infuriating that a complete and utter lack of movement doesn't matter. This is far from the filmmaker's best and an admirable distance from his worst, but I do appreciate this new age of Baumbach where actors remember they can act and film remembers how to be film.

Review: Dunkirk (2017)

Dunkirk is a war film of an unusual sort, one that frustrates as it entertains, though not in equal measure. Nolan's usual trademarks (quick pacing, gimmicky time manipulation, non-sensationalist cinematography) blast us through an intense, rarely-portrayed moment in history -- a retreat! -- while deftly avoiding the trappings of the genre (heavy-handed character development, an all-powerful antagonist with a scar on his face). Its ballsy approach breathes life into what has become routine, a genre that wears out its welcome the older Braveheart gets. Loving everything about Dunkirk would be a whole lot easier... if we didn't have, er, History to ruin it.

It is perhaps a mistake to lean too far into glorifying the Event instead of merely portraying it. Without a flashback scene or one where someone stares longingly at a blood-stained photograph of a wife and child, the main character is the Dunkirk Evacuation itself and with it the baggage of any bottom-up artistic licenses. Cillian Murphy is the lone survivor (???) of a torpedoed ship because the story requires him to be. French and British soldiers holding the line are needlessly simplified as the result of a German tactic of not "wasting precious tanks." In the film's most egregious scene, three different war film clichés collide in one tugboat. It's a shame, as with Interstellar, that Nolan simply can't go whole-hog on an objective POV. Somebody just gots to have a crowbar.

Poor decisions like these accumulate to lessen the overall impact of the film. The "miracle" of the real-life evacuation is the result of solidarity, the protective instinct of soldiers and civilians, which is difficult to convey when the story conspires to tell us otherwise. Not that this could please everyone, but those most displeased should be British soldiers, who only have deserters and shell-shocked madmen portraying them -- unless, of course, you're in the RAF, then you're safe.

So, at this stage in his life, Christopher Nolan has a number of achievements under his belt that anyone could count as proof of "doing enough." The next step in his plan, mimicking the career of Steven Spielberg, is a lofty goal but hey, if anyone can do it...

*waits patiently for Nolan's kids movie*

Review: De Palma (2015)

Baumbach's... um... wait, you're telling me Brian De Palma didn't take one drink throughout this whole thing? Dammit.

Seems as if we're suddenly in an age of bridge-burning, earth-scorching documentaries that confirm our suspicions of Hollywood as an unforgiving bitchtown that fights creativity and meritocracy at every opportunity. That successes are jet engines constructed by tornados and failures are coliseums falling upon one person. You got yer Jodorowsky's Dune and yer Lost Soul, both flashy and exhaustive deconstructions of a specific tragedy. But what about a documentary of one long, difficult career? What about one that's driven by its own subject?

"Documentary" could even be stretching it. De Palma comes across more like the home movies of Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, supplemented five years afterward with still frames and film footage. This is their attempt to at least make some damn money off of this thing, and it's Brian De Palma sitting in a chair and talking. What else? It's a goddamned compelling hour and forty-five minutes.

It turns out that De Palma is the perfect candidate to talk about himself. He can do so with such clarity, such seemingly perfect recall, that there's no feeling that this had to be cobbled together from several afternoons. Baumbach and Paltrow's involvement was only to start the propeller and let the ship drive itself. It would be foolish to think that this could be done for every filmmaker in the twilight of their careers -- who would be as effusive, as honest about their failures? Still. Let's try.

Review: Mr. Jealousy (1997)

Baumbach's Post-College Years.

There are two concepts at work in this film. One is Every Beta-Male's Biggest Fears Realized, and the other is Man Goes to Therapy as His Friend. The former is certainly enough to make a movie on, but I can't help but lament the backseat given to the latter, a more fertile soil for zany hijinks than simply following your girlfriend's ex around. Payoffs for the subplot shine far too late, at the climax to the main story, upstaging a wholly underappreciated performance by Eric Stoltz.

The movie is more Allen-esque setups than Baumbach-isms, though Baumbach is well-suited to the requirements of non-sequitor jokes, fantasy sequences, irises, and a constant running narration from a god character (Ernie Fusco, maybe?). I will say that his usual fallbacks are missed; they appear in scenes shared with Kicking and Screaming alumni Carlos Jacott and John Lehr, here and gone very fast, and I counted only one Uncomfortable Meeting in the entire film. I wonder, was Baumbach going through an identity crisis? Like the main character? Is he going to start rehashing his childhood after this? Are his films -- dare I say it --- autobiographical?

Stories can't help but lean Biblical, no matter how hard they try not to. Logically, Lester has every reason in the world to be jealous. His life is full liars and cheats, people that confirm his worst suspicions and prove him right at every turn and don't see the irony in their actions. However, Lester is unfortunately in a fiction, where the antagonist resides in his own brain. Gotham creates its own supervillains, so Lester's suspicions create cheaters in other people, where he is more to blame for the infidelity of his girlfriends than they are. Baumbach is aware of this, I'm certain, but it's hard to tell if he thinks this is an endurable lesson or an unending hell. His main characters usually end up in purgatory, in the middle of some internal transformation, headed somewhere. Which direction is always unclear.

Review: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

Ah, the resilience of a franchise. Some can survive anything: from the poor decision-making skills of a shitty 20th Century Fox Executive to a drift in Tokyo to a series of seemingly endless JJ Abrams nonsense. No one thought that Mission: Impossible would be among those still standing after the great collapse in the 00s, least of all me. Yet here we are.

Rogue Nation one-ups the previous entry, Ghost Protocol, in a department that was sorely underserviced: the plot. A newly disavowed IMF tussling with its own Hydra/Spectre organization and uncovering its evil plan through globetrotting and barely seeing something to completion is more interesting than a group of agents learning to trust each other while a nuclear threat looms in the distance (and doing those other two things as well). McQuarrie's hand also means that dialogue is snappier, loftier, and less reliant on what was more than likely conjured up on the set.

It loses against Ghost Protocol's big set pieces, sadly. A quiet fistfight in the rafters above Turandot, while fun, isn't as creative as the Kremlin infiltration. The opening plane robbery, while impressive, loses a lot of points when cheapened by an obvious digital effect. And a deep dive into a cold computer server followed by a car chase, while McQuarrie's bread and butter, is 100% not the Burj Khalifa centerpiece.

Along with setting up the franchise's new formula of Heist Sequences broken apart by Dialogue Scenes (and essentially siphoning the Marvel CU's spirit), Ghost Protocol created a back door waiting for Tom Cruise any time he wants to take it. There's a chance that, seeing the end of this era of his life biting at the heels of his very tiny feet, he decided to stay in the franchise as long as he is able to do some of his own stunts. This lack of meta-baggage is unique to this series, imbuing it with a strange immortal glow and frees us all up to have a bit of fun. Well, fun as long as certain people keep their dick-beaters off of it.

At times, it's difficult to tell if Mission: Impossible is a smarter James Bond or a dumber one. Bond is an infectious agent burrowing through a sinister host, bringing down a corrupt entity that underestimates him, with brute force. Hunt is a man groping blindly in the dark, succeeding partially through cunning, luck, and having more than two friends. Mission: Impossible does things that James Bond would never consider doing, but the way things are going now for that series, it ends up being mostly a good thing.

It remains a tough act to follow. Considering the future, what the hell could possibly be next? There are only so many times you can pull the "We're like a family!" trick, and how many Middle Eastern countries could there possibly be? Seven? I don't envy anyone in this position. However, this is why you make more money than I do.

Review: Jack Reacher (2012)

Yay, he's back!

New York Times Bestseller trash turns to gold under the right helmsman, and we live in an age where that is becoming increasingly common as long as your name isn't Ron Howard or Edward Zwick. Auteurs who used to scream "God is dead!" at us in the 90s now work for Apple and Taylor Swift. It's both good and awful.

Jack Reacher's story sets out to do nothing more than tell an easy-to-reckon mystery with a few zingers and thrills along the way. My relationship with the series of books doesn't extend beyond doing an awesome job shelving them at Borders, and knowing from my grandmother that Tom Cruise is all wrong for the title role because he is "too fucking short." The good news is that McQuarrie, in the 12 years he's been writing various cinematic failures, keep all of his tools sharp and ain't afraid to use any of them.

His objective touch works wonders on the film's few big action set pieces and they steal the movie away from fairly unremarkable genre trappings. Enough for most people should be the car chase in the center with absolutely NO music attached to it, just shifting of the gears and the roar of the engine, but the film shines in quieter moments as well (there is a scene at a shooting range with an added sense of impending dread, seemingly for very little reason). The film is bolstered by smaller decisions that, on paper, sound much better than they come across. Werner Herzog does a fine job as the Man at the Top, but can only do so much when confined by the material. In general, that's a pretty good rule for determining the quality of this film. Nice, not perfect.

Ultimately, Jack Reacher functions as a surprise in that it exceeds well beyond its own grasp, and as a sign of man breaking free of his One-and-Done status, I'd be a fool not to take it.

Review: The Way of the Gun (2000)

Christopher McQuarrie didn't cut the cord entirely to Bryan Singer (good thing -- how else can you meet Tom Cruise?), only enough to unlearn some fairly awful filmmaking habits. Public Access, a film with two ideas stretched to feature length and The Usual Suspects, a film lacking about as much atmosphere as What Lies Beneath and one you'd only watch after finishing Tarantino's First 4 in a weekend, were apparently enough to give him the hootzpa to direct his own film. Good thing he smart, dawg. Well, to a degree... I'd like to hear him explain Jack the Giant Slayer.

The Way of the Gun could be set in the same universe as Pulp Fiction, in a world filled with liars and bastards who live at the expense of total squares and take breaks shooting at each other to talk in smoky bars and dark parking lots. Where the tradition of the treasure hunt runs strong and the Game ends in a draw. Where Order is only an implication.

McQuarrie wisely tells the story without a lot of flash, opting for a coldly procedural presentation. But the story he tells, a simple kidnapping scenario, is complicated by half-stated motivations and a surprising amount of verbal metaphors. A zany pre-credits scene establishes the absence of morality but stands apart in terms of tone, and the soberly staged modern western action scenes that come quickly afterwards end up being an empty promise. With such a killer opening Twenty, it takes a bit of a readjustment to fully absorb the slow-paced chess game that follows, where two inscrutable characters have obtuse conversations the likes of which could only be written by a former private investigator. We are left to figure out a lot of the world's economy by ourselves. What happened in Baltimore? What is this family business? How did everybody meet? Why aren't Diggs and Lehman keeping their romance more secretive? Just where the hell are the cops? And so on.

For being a drama set in a harsh world with very little joy, there is a great amount of joy you feel watching all accounts getting settled through extreme violence and misery. McQuarrie is surely destined to stay at the forefront of our lives for- hey, where'd he go?

Review: Love & Friendship (2016)

Dreams do come true, about 25 years later.

I'm not too familiar with Jane Austen -- I only know what the movie adaptations have taught me, that among other things they are Hoiti^Toiti and they require 95% perfect of my attention. Love & Friendship stands apart from my impressions of her story content, and from Stillman for that matter, in the sense that the plot isn't driven by characters failing to communicate with one another but from one character coldly manipulating the others for not-quite-so-nefarious reasons.

Stillman is suited to the time period in the same way Whedon was suited for a modern Shakespeare adaptation. He is no stranger to elegance, subtlety or grace. Whit wisely allows his team of acting powerhouses to do the heavy lifting, and so there's not much to the film other than watching Kate Beckinsale's horrifying plan unfold before us, told in pieces to her best friend Chloe Sevigny (the Disco team is back!), and played in such a way that we can't help but admire the cunning. The film is a showcase of acting talents at its core, lifted further upwards with your constant curiosity at who's ahead of whom, dry jokes that take two seconds to reach their chuckle-points, and one jarring but well-timed gag using subtitles.

As with most of Stillman's work to this point, we have such a good time with the characters and the performances that when we are suddenly dropped into the closing credits, we are left with an intense desire to stay in that world longer. Then we remember that we are surrounded by 2 1/2 hour noise-fests and get whiplash reversing our position. Keep doing this, Whit.

Review: The Nice Guys (2016)

Hope you like Christmas. Shane Black keeps his streak alive of recalling his usual trademarks (even a direct one from Last Action Hero) and gives us the gift of watching two lovable characters fumbling through a classic Schlubs v. Coverup scenario. No one writes reluctant partners, kills off background extras, or puts noir in a new setting quite like Black. Refreshingly, he's also unafraid of putting kids in incredibly adult situations ("Don't say 'and stuff.' Just say 'They're doing anal.'") and completely ignoring our discomfort at that prospect. An action film is an adult venture, but there's nothing that says it can't be fun for everybody.

It's a shame, therefore, that the plotting isn't as tight as Black's earlier efforts, that some jokes don't land and character arcs don't quite thread through the runtime; regarding that in particular, Crowe learning mercy even though describing the time he beat someone with a shotgun as the greatest day of his life and Gosling embarrassing his daughter with his drinking but solving a surprising amount of problems through it (and ending the film that way). These seem to be symptoms of a stretched pilot script, moments that would play correctly along a shorter time span and, at the very least, make a fairly major twist less obvious.

It's charming enough to make it all work. In a shockingly dismal year for Hollywood, The Nice Guys is not a beacon of hope but a torch in a mineshaft. It offers the opportunity for a sigh of relief, and it definitely deserves a sequel even if we all know it won't get one.

Review: Iron Man 3 (2013)

To succumb to my own bit of mythologizing, Marvel had to realize, along with at least half of their audience, just what a safe, by-the-numbers, boring-ass sequel that Iron Man 2 was, and that Favreau's gradual fade out of the franchise was either a cause or a symptom. It's a problem if even the true believers lament what could have been. Why else say yes to a bunch of seemingly crazy ideas from a madman if you didn't have something to prove?

Given all of the press surrounding Whedon and the tough Age of Ultron production, it's difficult to determine exactly how much leeway Marvel gives its helmsmen. Tony Zou, Every Frame a Painting video essayist and twenty-year old doomsayer, hypothesized on his twitter feed that working for Disney doesn't offer you more opportunities, it imprisons you. Maybe an accurate assessment for Kenneth Branagh, who directed Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit between two Disney properties (one a live-action remake of a classic cartoon). It certainly scans for Jon Favreau (who directed Cowboys & Aliens and Chef before returning to direct a live-action remake of a classic cartoon). Can anybody get a Great Mouse Detective script delivered to Shane Black's office?

Black's personality does shine through in what is still recognizably a modern superhero film. Amid all his usual trademarks (including gratuitous naked breasts, appearing the only way they could: on a giant stuffed rabbit) and noticeably borrowed material from his previous work, this is an immensely satisfying action film. Instead of a dumb, reverse engineering of Stark's heart condition and resulting overconfidence(?), the demons he needs to conquer are much more serious (PTSD standing in for alcoholism and weaving into the soldier-for-hire plot). His journey's progression is earned with his own wit, through losing fights and then barely winning fights and then kicking some motherfucking ass in breathtakingly staged action sequences, ones that rank best in the entire series. Much better than being handed half the cure by S.H.I.E.L.D. and a deus ex solution hidden in a model.

But there are some fairly major flaws as well. The fusion with an 80's action film was bound to result in rejected tissue. The behavior of the villains are cruel enough to be off-putting, entering that Die Hard 2 level of sociopathic violence where killing goes beyond merely the cost of doing business, not Marvel's style at all. The middle section of the movie, Stark solving a mystery in a small town without a suit or an AI with a precocious youngster at his side, barely justifies itself before it concludes. Two decades ago, this would have been the whole movie. These days, we have toys to sell, don't we?

The (required) appearance of the Mandarin bumps into at least one unnecessary villain, one that should have been played by Sam Rockwell, and crowd an already packed movie. So much time is spent on "fun" that basic requirements are moved past too quickly. Clearer rules regarding the Extremis soldiers would have helped -- they seem to be incredibly scary and powerful, but they also can be killed if you hit them in one specific spot? Eh. Iron Man flying away on autopilot after his house is destroyed is a straight-up cheat, as well as the inexplicable disappearance of an Extremis soldier later in the small town. And it seems like Wing Attack Plan R (or whatever) should have been implemented much sooner... yknow, when people were falling out of the sky... or not at all. Oh shit, I forgot already, we have toys to sell.

Perhaps the most divisive entry into the MCU has turned me into somewhat of an apologist, a staunch defender of a movie I only like, not love. I'm telling ya, these giant moving parts may shudder and grind, but the suit flies. It's unfortunate that taking story risks has backfired on them, but I have a feeling that Marvel will be just fine. I hope Shane Black will be too.

Review: Knight of Cups (2015)

Christian Bale, indistinguishable from Ben Affleck and Sean Penn, wanders around the decadent wasteland of the Los Angeles overworld, hopping from girlfriend to topless girlfriend, mumbling something or other about a lifetime of regrets while the latest in filmmaking technology is used to say absolutely nothing. We'd sure feel bad about it if these people weren't so goddamned rich.

It is unsurprising at this point that Malick uses his legacy to strip his own work to its core, down to what is essentially a visual symphony of his own subconscious. Images are strung together randomly, title cards reference material we haven't read, narration is present because something has to be said, and the nudity is there to wake up the audience. Do the investors ever wonder if they were tricked into financing a vacation?

To be fair, there is a spark here that, had he hired the editor of the trailer, could have ignited into a fireball. If the staged earthquake near the start of the film led into the beginning of a plot, if scenes actually connected to those around it, if he had drawn parallels from the balsa wood sets on the WB Lot to the stone artifice of the city itself, if extemporaneous dialogue blurred with actors playing actors reciting lines, if he hadn't missed so many opportunities to build something, there could have been an actual movie here. Malick confining himself to a metropolic prison and drawing connections from metaphysics to the incomprehensible nature of the movie industry practically films itself, but even he couldn't resist falling back on his old standbys: shots of mountains and fields and oceans curving into the horizon and wasting our time with bullshit. More like Yawn of Time, right guys?

This long after 1973, I think I'm finally beginning to understand Malick. The man who always seemed so uninterested in screenplays and storytelling structure is exactly as he seems, no artifice no filter. Myth is biography to him, and that has become his own hell. The manifestations through the narration, actors speaking inaudibly, fish-eye lenses and slow dollys on nature, all of it comes from a man trying to break free of himself, a man hopelessly addicted to the search for meaning but unsuited to the task. Doomed.

Review: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005)

Shane Black has proved, over the course of a few decades, that once a formula works, it can be used repeatedly and that people don't care much as long as you're only ripping yourself off. Turns out languishing in Hollywood gives you plenty of material about Hollywood, and what didn't get used in Last Action Hero can now be used here. Two mismatched characters forced into what essentially amounts to a marriage, solving a mystery with a powerful Aryan is at the top. Add some murders, dimwitted heavies, parties with topless women, a car ramming into a lake or a house, some saxophone, and set it around Christmastime. Repeat every four years.

There is a difference this time around: Black includes himself in the equation. The additional layer of acknowledging storytelling limitations and constant self-deprecation, along with Robert Downey Jr at the boost phase of a meteoric comeback, breathes new life into what otherwise would have been serviceable action-noir. The plot is so greased and moves so fast that it becomes unpredictable, even skipping over plot holes a la Wages of Fear (how did the body arrive in Harry's bathroom so quickly?) and dialogue charming enough so that it doesn't really matter. Gags-Per-Minute reaches new power levels and a spaced-out main character gradually learns over the course of the film that murder solves most problems. It is immensely satisfying.

Review: Damsels in Distress (2011)

Christians in college, this time. Kay.

Greta Gerwig and her team of blank-faced sprites attempt to improve the morale at their college by implementing a strict regimen of tap-dancing, donuts, and hygiene awareness. Every once in awhile there's a hookup followed by a breakup followed by some dry comments and some more breakups. Surely you get the drill by now.

13 years later and Stillman has lost a measure of his edge. The settings he concocts are usually specific enough to be almost entirely unrelatable, but this one is a real doozy. This can't be anyone's college experience. It seems to be closer to a late-Shakespearian farce, rather than a comedy of manners, but for that to work there has to be actual farce. The plot is instead driven almost entirely by the dialogue, per usual, and fixates on less-than-funny character quirks ("How can you not know all the colors?"), bizarre repetitions ("He's an operator,"x16), and anal sex played for laughs (???). Worst of all, soft close-ups of two characters kissing grossly, get that shit out of your goddamned movie, every last one of you.

It's certainly watchable but fairly uneventful and very disposable, with no closure of story threads and what is most assuredly a waste of talented actors sitting at the ready. It should have been an Amazon pilot for a future TV show, which is probably how that Cosmopolitans project actually came about. Oh but don't bother looking for that or anything, Amazon hates their own work more than they hate the idea that you might want to watch it. Oh, this. Right. Uh... eh.

Review: The Last Days of Disco (1998)

It's bad enough trying to get a book published under your name while living in an apartment with people you dislike, but you also gotta worry about cocaine addiction, tax indictment, and violent punk rockers? Christ, it's so tough being into disco, I had no idea.

It's the 80s! Music is terrible, AIDS is right around the corner and the economy is about to tank. I'm confused, though...  are we uptight or are we loose- aw fuck it, this is a paaaaarty. Why worry? The only looming specter that haunts our characters is the possibility that they won't make it into the club that night. This outright deflection of what is actually the cause of their misery means that The Last Days of Disco possesses much more cynicism than the previous films, that the solution is to overcome themselves and each other. The theme compacts into another microcosm: Chloe Sevigny trades her true feelings for popularity and makes some poor decisions resulting in real high-stakes punishment, divvied by Robert Sean Leonard and his reprehensible outbursts of sudden celibate guilt. Goddamn.

There is a bit of a misstep, come the second half. The way this film decouples its boxcars really reiterates Stillman's disinterest in storytelling structure. After a small time jump, it seems like we're following a completely new set of characters, with new relationships and romantic goals. Those two are together? That guy always loved that woman? ... Huh. It makes it difficult not to think the worst, that there was no way to continue the film on its current course so Stillman had to invent a new one to force it into the satisfying closure he had in mind. Otherwise, you simply have to take his word for it.

At least there still exists the usual dry one-liners and strange conversations about nothing, including a classic argument about The Lady and the Tramp. It's fun at a consistent clip and charming enough to overshadow the large holes. This time.

Review: Barcelona (1994)

Leaving our out-of-touch group of UHB socialites, Stillman's focus shifts inches to out-of-touch American citizens living in Spain. Communication breakdowns are expanded to include political and cultural differences, one that really exposes Metropolitan's climax as a symptom of the American puritan, while critical plot movement happens slowly or, sometimes, entirely offscreen. Taylor Nichols as a stressed-out neurotic doormat and Chris Eigeman as an adorable, genuine patriot embodying a microcosm of unwanted occupation hoist the story on their shoulders, and keep us invested with their petty bickering. The themes nest under a column of air.

And yet...

It's tough to pinpoint what has been lost here, however small it may be. The writing is just as sharp but the thrust is softer. Barcelona is a lot closer to a personal journal; narration comes in jarringly, at unexpected moments, regardless of our need for them, and indicates early on that this moment in time is transitory and a little meaningless. Perhaps the bigger shame is the complete jettison of the original climax, one that would have cleverly tied together the dark subplot running in the background. Fixing the low stakes of Metropolitan was inches away, and for whatever reason, is gone now. In more keeping with the diary entry aspect, the film exits quietly, where once again, the final page turns.

Review: Metropolitan (1990)

The bones of Pride and Prejudice find a new body in New York, 1990, where yet again, two acquaintances fall in love with each other, at different times.

Stillman chucks us into the middle of group of friends and gives us enough credit to leave the introductions between the characters offscreen. While we're catching up with the diagram of how these card-carrying members of the UHB know each other, we observe complex social interactions where the concept of 'fun' lies distant from its practice and heated debates appear initially to end in a fractures, but do not. A strange sort of stuffiness remains in dances, games of bridge, and even in a game of strip poker, during 'orgy week.' Emotional outbursts are directed internally, buried beneath prep-school trivia and golden one-liners that are impossible to repeat to your friends.

Eventually, it's time for the plot to move and we languish in an Eigeman-less limbo, a third act that could have probably progressed in fewer steps with stronger stakes. The group dynamic changes so fast that there is only time to lament its loss, and the characters we are left with realize that they were good buddies all along, perhaps at the same time we do. The film's ending leaves various threads dangling, indicating the final page of a journal rather than the closed loop of a story. Its strongest connected thread is that being poor is no limit to snobbery and wealth is no limit to pain, and it's enough.

Thank you, Austen and Allen. You're welcome, Baumbach and Smith.

Review: Secret in Their Eyes (2015)

Billy Ray's second framework of bureaucratic impotence is built upon the tried-and-true bedrock of a teenage girl's murder (additionally, under a façade of the height of the War on Terror), so you'd think that he would at least have a clear idea of how serious the film has to be. You'd certainly think that, all right, but the problems go all the way past its odd tone down to a clear misunderstand of the material itself, The Vanishing style, and with no begrudgingly respectable supervillain at the center and no epilogue where somebody becomes a lawyer, his house collapses.

A fairly large problem is the storytelling structure. You can appreciate the mystery of not knowing which time period a scene takes place in, using only visual cues to orient yourself, but isn't worth it when the tradeoff is no suspense in the 2002 era when we know the case has to last for thirteen more years. A linear structure is a no-brainer way this could have been avoided but what about the rest of it? The film shifts into strange tonal contradictions on a dime. Julia Roberts plays up the yucks seconds before finding her daughter's corpse, making it seem like this ordeal is punishment. Chiwetel Ejiofer is bitten by a tiny dog in the middle of an illegal search-and-seizure and they talk about that instead of the "clue" they just found. And should this other character really be called 'Bumpy'? You say his name so often.

The questionable decisions stack higher, like adding an annoying sound to signify Nicole Kidman's anxiety or putting Julia Roberts in a terrible wig. Ejiofor, who is talented enough to portray young and dangerous and old and weary with a mere graying of his hair, is wasted on what has to be the most ineffective agent in movie history. There are sudden descents into odd genre schlock; "I don't talk to him. I don't like the way he looks at the horses," is a line that happens. And there's a bit of business involving a huge dick that I won't spoil because woweee.

A very late twist ends up rendering over half of the movie a waste of time, including a preposterous diversion involving comical caricatures of white gangsters. The inclusion of big stars and a PG-13 rating imprison the film in the weird sort of box, where they can't stick the thematic landing or even deliver on visceral thrills. Bizarre bullshit pulls the walls down. Oh, and for an additional bit of discomfort, it turns out David Mamet was right... it's the Jews' turn at the barrel.