Or, A Criminal Waste of Susan Sarandon.
Nudity in art, if it has a reason to be there, can be very explicit and not be accused of prurience. But if it has no reason to be there, no justification, no artistic purpose, then it's just pornography.
Arbitrage is the bastard child of Wall Street and Bonfire of the Vanities, with the exploding car from Michael Clayton, but without the virtues of any of these. It's a film that spends a lot of time in fancy restaurants, richly furnished offices and townhouses with spiral staircases that would be at home in the last scene of Sunset Boulevard. But it's empty and pointless. It's just another form of pornography. And Arbitrage is too preoccupied with its real-estate porn to bother with a sex scene, anyway. It's M&A without the T&A.
Richard Gere plays Robert Miller, a Wall Street hotshot who made one incredibly bad investment which he is now trying to cover up. This involves a lot of boring conversations about bridge loans and Russian copper mines, so the writers have manufactured a subplot about the death of his unbelievably annoying mistress in order to manufacture some urgency.
In a better movie, this script might be used to prompt us to ask ourselves about the values of loyalty and family, and what money can buy and what it can't, and whether the police are any better than the criminals they're pursuing.
Director Nicholas Jarecki simply isn't up to the task. He adds nothing to the script, which has some serious weaknesses. The police commit an act of jaw-dropping misconduct, they're caught by a judge, and he doesn't really seem to consider the possibility that this might be a case for Internal Affairs. Robert's wife catches him philandering and perpetrating fraud, and he appears to claim that this behavior is justified because she shops too much.
Robert's daughter Brooke actually is helpful enough to point out another flaw in the script when she mentions that as the film's Chief Investment Officer, nobody is going to believe she didn't know anything about the missing $400 million, so it's kind of a cheap shot for her dad to claim he committed the fraud for the family, since she's probably going to jail too. Since Brit Marling, who plays Brooke, turned down a job at Goldman Sachs to go into acting, it makes you wonder if she helpfully suggested that her character shoot a huge hole in the movie.
Richard Gere is capable of subtlety as an actor, but he's at his best when he's cast against type. As the cuckolded schlep of a husband in Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful, he's the best thing about the movie. He's surprisingly compelling in the improbable role of a Japanese-American in Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August. But here, there isn't any subtlety for him to bring out. He winds up yelling a lot. It's almost as if Jarecki can't decide if his character is supposed to be sympathetic or not, and frankly, Gere seems just too nice to play a total jerk. Do we want the police to catch him or don't we?
The supporting cast is uneven. If this is the best movie role Susan Sarandon is getting offered these days, she should decamp for the small screen. She was hilarious as Frank's jailbait-loving teacher on 30 Rock. Here, she's window dressing. She's almost too good: the audience is bound to wonder why Robert would sleep around with Laetitia Casta's whiny, self-doubting, needy French artist tramp when he has Sarandon's elegant, fit, devoted Ellen waiting for him.
Tim Roth disappears into the role of the bloodhound detective determined to sink his teeth into Robert's leg, but his motivation is puzzling and neither the script nor the director comes to his aid. Nate Parker has the thankless role of the righteous poor African-American who demonstrates the hypocrisy of the rich white man.
Even the makeup fails this movie. Robert sustains some kind of stomach injury as the result of a car accident. This injury is key to the plot, but the editor doesn't stay on the shot more than a few frames, evidently because the makeup job is so unconvincing that lingering on it for so much as a full second would reveal its incompetence. In another scene, the police detective comments on a head injury that Robert is supposed to have but for the life of me I couldn't see.
For some reason this movie was a film festival darling, screening at Sundance and earning raves. Personally, I'm mystified. Maybe lefty critics are just happy to see a movie that portrays Wall Street moguls as selfish bastards. If so, they should browse the documentary category and pick up Inside Job. The truth in this case is so much more compelling than the fiction.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
ParaNorman
Or, 28 Decades Later.
ParaNorman is Coraline's little brother: born at Laika Studios in Hillsboro, Oregon, he inhabits a stop-motion world that will stop your heart.
Most of the 3-D animation we see today is characterized by straight lines and elegant curves, jewel-box colors and a feeling that the world is made out of plastic. ParaNorman is different. It feels like you fell asleep and all the inanimate objects in your house came to life. In most computer-generated movies, the test of their artistic success is whether each strand of hair flows luxuriously with every toss of the character's head. Norman's hair sticks straight up and never moves, but the toilet-paper ghost that appears to him in the boys' room at school is a work of genius in a class by itself.
I didn't see this film in 3D, and I regret that now, because Coraline is the only film I've seen in 3D that didn't make me feel like I'd wasted the five-dollar surcharge. ParaNorman feels more like Jan Svankmajer than John Lasseter, and as much as I love Pixar that's a good thing. It also means that, just like Coraline, there are parts that are genuinely scary and not Disney-scary. My six-year-old loved it in the end but spent a good part of the movie in my lap.
Not that I'm complaining.
Norman is a sensitive kid who lives in a twenty-first century Salem, a kitchy witchy tourist trap with a distinctly New England lower-middle-class vibe, only without the pahk your cah accents. He has an overbearing father, a dimwit mother, and an obnoxious teenage sister who don't understand him. Since he sees ghosts all the time, that's not so surprising. It's also not surprising that he's bullied at school.
As he wipes the word FREAK off his locker, we see another kid wiping off the word FATTY in the same handwriting, and we know they're destined to be friends. What's surprising about Norman's new friend Neil is that his disposition is so sunny that no amount of bullying can cloud it over. He doesn't rail against it or the kids who perpetrate it.
ParaNorman has a more nuanced view of bullying than your average kids' movie. In the world of the television series Glee, it's only a matter of time before the geeks, gays and goths are embraced by the jocks and the jerks, because once they realize they're hurting your feelings, how could they possibly continue torturing you?
The first half of ParaNorman seems to embrace a different, almost Gandhian philosophy: you can't keep them from hating you, but you can insulate yourself from their hate with the love of your friends and family. As Norman's dead grandmother says: "it's okay to be scared, as long as you don't let it change who you are."
This world is so new and interesting, and so lovingly constructed, that it's a pleasure to be immersed in Norman's loneliness and oddity. From the trailers you'd think this movie was funny, but actually humor's not its strong suit--all the good gags are in the trailer. It's more successful when it's being sentimental. A scene where Norman plays medium to help Neil connect with his dead dog is touching, and you can see Neil's positive energy affecting Norman–literally: for a moment the brilliance of a blue sky invades the neutral gloom of the film.
Once the actual plot begins to intrude the film gets somewhat less interesting. We're told everyone in the film, including his parents, are scared of Norman because he's different. That doesn't ring true, because Norman's not scary in the slightest. But it's necessary in order to create a very artificial parallel between him and the seventeenth-century girl who was sentenced to death by a group of Puritans who were scared because she was different.
So Norman's crazy uncle appears to him and demands that he deal with an ancient curse, and Norman tries, eventually involving his curvy teenage sister and Neil's hunky triangular teenage brother, and if you think you know how that plays out I guarantee you're wrong. There's a sassy African-American female cop who teeters just on the edge of stereotype, and maybe falls over the edge, I'm not sure; a drama teacher who's a boring caricature; a dumb bully who adds nothing to the film; and an amusing group of Puritan zombies.
It's too much, and Norman and Neil get crowded out. It all reaches a goofy climax in a scene in the woods between Norman and the witch girl that just has no energy in it despite the desperately pulsing yellow streaks. The bigger the movie tries to be, the smaller it becomes; the more action it tries to inject, the more flaccid it gets.
The irony of ParaNorman is that unlike its hero, it's trying to be something it's not. Still, half a brilliant movie is worth the full price of admission.
ParaNorman is Coraline's little brother: born at Laika Studios in Hillsboro, Oregon, he inhabits a stop-motion world that will stop your heart.
Most of the 3-D animation we see today is characterized by straight lines and elegant curves, jewel-box colors and a feeling that the world is made out of plastic. ParaNorman is different. It feels like you fell asleep and all the inanimate objects in your house came to life. In most computer-generated movies, the test of their artistic success is whether each strand of hair flows luxuriously with every toss of the character's head. Norman's hair sticks straight up and never moves, but the toilet-paper ghost that appears to him in the boys' room at school is a work of genius in a class by itself.
I didn't see this film in 3D, and I regret that now, because Coraline is the only film I've seen in 3D that didn't make me feel like I'd wasted the five-dollar surcharge. ParaNorman feels more like Jan Svankmajer than John Lasseter, and as much as I love Pixar that's a good thing. It also means that, just like Coraline, there are parts that are genuinely scary and not Disney-scary. My six-year-old loved it in the end but spent a good part of the movie in my lap.
Not that I'm complaining.
Norman is a sensitive kid who lives in a twenty-first century Salem, a kitchy witchy tourist trap with a distinctly New England lower-middle-class vibe, only without the pahk your cah accents. He has an overbearing father, a dimwit mother, and an obnoxious teenage sister who don't understand him. Since he sees ghosts all the time, that's not so surprising. It's also not surprising that he's bullied at school.
As he wipes the word FREAK off his locker, we see another kid wiping off the word FATTY in the same handwriting, and we know they're destined to be friends. What's surprising about Norman's new friend Neil is that his disposition is so sunny that no amount of bullying can cloud it over. He doesn't rail against it or the kids who perpetrate it.
ParaNorman has a more nuanced view of bullying than your average kids' movie. In the world of the television series Glee, it's only a matter of time before the geeks, gays and goths are embraced by the jocks and the jerks, because once they realize they're hurting your feelings, how could they possibly continue torturing you?
The first half of ParaNorman seems to embrace a different, almost Gandhian philosophy: you can't keep them from hating you, but you can insulate yourself from their hate with the love of your friends and family. As Norman's dead grandmother says: "it's okay to be scared, as long as you don't let it change who you are."
This world is so new and interesting, and so lovingly constructed, that it's a pleasure to be immersed in Norman's loneliness and oddity. From the trailers you'd think this movie was funny, but actually humor's not its strong suit--all the good gags are in the trailer. It's more successful when it's being sentimental. A scene where Norman plays medium to help Neil connect with his dead dog is touching, and you can see Neil's positive energy affecting Norman–literally: for a moment the brilliance of a blue sky invades the neutral gloom of the film.
Once the actual plot begins to intrude the film gets somewhat less interesting. We're told everyone in the film, including his parents, are scared of Norman because he's different. That doesn't ring true, because Norman's not scary in the slightest. But it's necessary in order to create a very artificial parallel between him and the seventeenth-century girl who was sentenced to death by a group of Puritans who were scared because she was different.
So Norman's crazy uncle appears to him and demands that he deal with an ancient curse, and Norman tries, eventually involving his curvy teenage sister and Neil's hunky triangular teenage brother, and if you think you know how that plays out I guarantee you're wrong. There's a sassy African-American female cop who teeters just on the edge of stereotype, and maybe falls over the edge, I'm not sure; a drama teacher who's a boring caricature; a dumb bully who adds nothing to the film; and an amusing group of Puritan zombies.
It's too much, and Norman and Neil get crowded out. It all reaches a goofy climax in a scene in the woods between Norman and the witch girl that just has no energy in it despite the desperately pulsing yellow streaks. The bigger the movie tries to be, the smaller it becomes; the more action it tries to inject, the more flaccid it gets.
The irony of ParaNorman is that unlike its hero, it's trying to be something it's not. Still, half a brilliant movie is worth the full price of admission.
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