The banality of conformity

Good deeds punished double feature

Experimenter: The Stanley Milgrim Story

Crit

Peter Sarsgaard at his usual low-key best plays the title character, who, working at a New Haven university in the early '60s, made a surprising and self-evidently important discovery about people's tendency to bow to the instructions of perceived authority figures, only to be attacked for the alleged ethical violations of the experiment's (vital) deception and encouragement of subjects to inflict (illusory) torture on others.

A fascinating portrait, elevated from standard biopic fare via carefully crafted selective surrealism.

Bridge of Spies

Crit

Tom Hanks as a Cold War Schindler, gliding easily from business to gotta-do-more altruism, an insurance lawyer drafted to defend a Soviet spy who then goes all Mr. Smith Goes to Washington about the sacredness of the Constitution instead of giving the pro forma courtroom performance expected of him.

Cheese of the very finest Spielbergian sapor. Oh, and a wonderful performance by Mark Rylance as the Rooskie (via the north of England).

Trailer

• Victor Frankenstein--Meh.

Brilliant mistake

Steve Jobs

Crit

Golly! What I didn't understand going in was that this is a stunning experiment by director Danny Boyle in pacing, or rather the abandonment of pacing: no action film has ever moved more helter-skelter than this. Miraculously, it works, partly because Boyle is brilliant, partly because he's got the brilliant Aaron Sorkin writing his screenplay, partly because he has the brilliant Michael Fassbender bringing . . . well, not humanity, but something empathy producing, to the brilliant asshole title character, and partly because Fassbender/Jobs has the brilliant Kate Winslet/Joanna Hoffman constantly as his side, desperately trying to school him in how empathetic human beings actually behave.

With this and The Social Network to his credit, Sorkin needs only to write the screenplay for a Bill Gates biopic to be directed by, say, Quentin Tarantino to have nailed the 3 tech genii of our time.

Trailers

• Hail, Caesar--Oh, hell yeah!
• The Big Short--Uh, hell maybe?
• The Danish Girl--Oh, hell yeah!

Building and loan

99 Homes

Crit

Huh! Who could have foreseen that the satanic home-foreclosing Realtor® played by Michael Shannon would be named Chase Utley? Nah, just kidding.

Andrew Garfield plays the innocent in the postlapsarian, postbubble garden, and that he will be seduced by the serpent is a given; the only question is whether he will lose his soul irrevocably. I won't spoil that for you, but it is Andrew Garfield, don't forget.

Surprisingly flat, disappointingly simplistic.

Actor on wire

The Walk 3D

Crit

I was so wowed by Man on Wire--the 2008 documentary that covers the same essential ground (or air) as this, about loony Frenchman Philippe Petit and his quest to walk a wire stretched between the twin towers of the World Trade Center--that I was prepared to hate this. But I don't; I don't really feel strongly enough about it to hate it.

In Robert Zemeckis's attempt to dramatize what could not have been more dramatic to begin with, he shoots for gripping and compelling and thrilling, but he gets only as far as interesting: if you haven't seen the other, better film, you'll certainly find your two hours and change adequately repaid, but I think you can guess what my recommendation is.

For one thing, what an asshole the guy was (maybe still is)--brilliant, unique, artistic, yes, but a manipulative, selfish bastard--is more told than shown here, and it's an essential point that all the people who helped him (including his lover of some duration) were really only his props. For another, the relation of narrative and audience to those buildings is handled much more adeptly in the earlier film. Maybe the fact that nearly a decade and a half has passed now makes it easier to look at Zemeckis's reconstruction of those unlovely, undistinguished boxes--enormous file cabinets, one character calls them--but in Man, 9/11 is never mentioned but always present. Here, the fatal day is just something we know that the characters don't until two hamhanded bits in the coda--in one, it's proposed that Petit's feat, more than a quarter of a century before the event that really accomplished this, gave the buildings "a soul" and changed the way New Yorkers felt about them; in the other, Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with a bad accent) pointedly boasts that a pass he received from the Port Authority after the walk entitles him to access to the observation deck "forever," whereupon we pan from his perch atop France's most favorite gift to America to the downtown skyline; apparently it didn't occur to Zemeckis to drive home the point by showing the skyline as it exists now. Thank god.

Trailers

• The Last Witch Hunter--You were wondering, weren't you, when Vin Diesel and Michael Caine would appear in a film together.
• Star Wars: Episode VII, The Force Awakens--The old gang is back (and old). Hard to imagine missing this; hard to imagine not being disappointed.

Unbreakable

He Named Me Malala

Crit

One good thing about the Mets' postseason opener not starting until the ungodly hour of 9:45 (seriously, what's the deal with Pacific Daylight Time?) is that I had time to go to a movie after work, and now I have time to blog about it.

As you'll see if you click on the title link, this documentary has gotten middling reviews. I guess that's because it's oversimplistic. I mean, the opposing view is never aired in counterpoint to such assumptions as:

• schools shouldn't be blown up
• girls should be able to go to school
• girls shouldn't be shot in the head for going to school
• the Taliban don't speak for Islam

So, yeah, if you're looking for a balanced discussion of those propositions, you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for inspiration from one of the bravest people of our time, I think you'll be OK.

Trailers

• Youth--Looks star-heavy.

Rocket man

Doubleheader double feature

This day was so busy that I'm only now--on my Monday lunch break--writing my post. Mets, still playing meaningful games, were rained out on Friday, meaning that they played a day/night doubleheader Saturday. Since I was going to the regular-season finale on Sunday--and since I was still hoping to be attending 2 postseason games next weekend (a hope since dashed)--I had no choice but to: (1) go to movie 1, (2) rush home, (3) speedwatch (i.e., watch on the DVR at about triple speed) game 1, (4) rush back to theater for movie 2, and (5) rush back home to watch game 2, this one at regular speed, not quite ever catching up to live.


I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's hard being me.

The Martian

Crit

Well, you can try to resist Matt Damon's potato-eating grin, but if he doesn't make you believe everything about the science you don't understand (or simply not care about it), you're a better Earthling than I. This is grade A Ridley Scott manipulative entertainment, and I say that as a very good thing. The special effects are useful--even the 3D, which puts visual screens in our face while characters sit comfortably at the normal depth of field--and everyone in the cast nails it, but this is a big movie about one little man. I saw that some reviewer called Damon "our James Stewart," and I nearly swallowed my tongue, but having seen this, I find that absurd proposition almost apt.

Sicario

Crit

That was weird: a sizable percentage of a fairly large 5:20 audience got a real kick out of violent and extremely creepy deaths--I won't say I was in the minority in not being under the impression that this is a comedy, but the minority that did laugh a lot at what we conventional sorts would call inappropriate moments was larger than I'm comfortable contemplating.


The film I saw was hard to watch and excellent--Emily Blunt kicks some serious butt as the FBI agent with an inconvenient conscience, co-opted by CIA/military antidrug cowboys (Josh Brolin as cowboy in chief), and Benicio Del Toro is as good as he's even been, as an agent many of the baddies know as Medellín and whose character ultimately resolves itself into something very close to another mysterious figure from the film in which the actor first came to the attention of many of us.

Trailers

• Joy--As the person who didn't love Silver Linings Playbook, I'm also not the person not particular thrilled to see David O. Russell reassemble his repertory company of Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro.
• The Revenant--Jeremiah Johnson bent on revenge. González Iñárritu directs Leo.
• Concussion--The movie the NFL really, really, really, really, really doesn't want you to see. Really. With Will Smith.
• In the Heart of the Sea--Based on the Essex disaster, source of an American novel about whaling you may have read. Directed by Ron Howard.
• The Forest--Set in Japan and based, I assume, on a Japanese original--has all the ear-and-other-body-part-marks of a Japanese horror flick. Stars Margaery Tyrell, aka Natalie Dormer.
• Spectre--Just a teaser, but what more do you need? Best news is that Christopher Waltz is back, as is Naomie Harris as Moneypenny.

River road

Mississippi Grind

Crit

This isn't the best Oz movie ever (which is not to say it's not pretty darned good), but it's one of the Ozziest, following rainbows from Dubuque to the Emerald Crescent City and a bet on a horse named Toto's Revenge. Two gamblers, one too good to be true, one too hopeful to be anything but hopeless, set out like Huck and Jim, except in a car, gaming their way down the Big Muddy ostensibly toward a private poker table, but knowing what the film knows: the journey is the destination.

This one could have reached/seemed to reach its destination a reel or so earlier (kids: ask your parents about reels), but, being all in, I could do nothing but wait for the river.