My review of The Counselor

First of all a little disclaimer, this isn't the worst film of the year or the worst film ever which according to Salon film critic Andrew O'Hehir it is.  I usually respect this critic and in fairness he makes a lot of valid points in his critique but the tone of the review is so acidic and vitriolic that I'm wondering if he was having a really really bad day when he set foot inside the theater. It could have been a great film but it certainly falls short of necessary expectations.
The Counselor has high pedigree written all over it.  It was written by famed author Cormac McCarthy who also wrote The Road and No Country for Old Men, both were turned into successful movie adaptations, the key word here being adaptations.  This is McCarthy's first foray writing a screenplay solo and it's quite a different endeavor than writing a book.  Before we get to the meat of the story and why it's not all that tasty,the film features an A-list cast headlined by Michael Fassbender in the titular role, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz,Penelope Cruz and Brad Pitt, pretty heavy hitters all.  Fassbender who I usually love in everything and on whose shoulders this film mostly rests appears bemused and perplexed throughout most of the film except for a bit of a heartfelt crying jag at the end.  I understood and shared his confusion, he was probably thinking what the heck am I doing in this picture and thank God I have Twelve Years as a Slave to redeem myself, ditto for Brad Pitt, greasy haired pony tailed and cryptic, he's also in Twelve Years and can at least look forward to some favorable publicity on that one.
The film opens with a view of tangled white sheets and a voice over from the Counselor.  The bodies are hidden under the sheets but are soon revealed to be those of Fassbender and Cruz.  The talk is supposedly dirty but McCarthy being in his early eighties might no longer have a very clear idea of what dirty talk should sound like.  When Cruz is asked what she would like the Counselor to do to her, her tentative reply is: "I want you to touch me down there."  Ok down there where, my toes my knees etc... plenty of options plus it just sounds ludicrous and silly.  There's another attempt at sex talk over the phone and it falls equally flat. Even though Fassbender can usually make reading the phone book sound sexy, it doesn't work this time because he's such a cipher, a character in search of development, a character so unworthy of being noticed that, in fact, he doesn't even deserve a first or a last name.  The whole affectation of being called Counselor
 throughout the whole movie gives the character less not more weight.  We basically have no idea who this guy is, we only see him in lawyer mode once while the rest of the time he's listening to people telling him what a bad idea this drug deal is (they're right) in pseudo-philosophical verbiage which is meant to be meaningful but merely ends up sounding pretentious and uninteresting.  I love intellectual discourse in a film as much as the next gal (the French are very good at this) but this is just verbal diarrhea.  For instance do I need a dissertation on the merits of such and such a diamond when all the Counselor wants to do is buy a friggin stone but had to jet set all the way to Amsterdam to get it....really and he still needs the drug deal.  The drug deal itself is a mess of such gigantic proportions I won't even try to make sense of it because it doesn't.  The players are all bad stereotypes of stereotypes.
Javier Bardem in a very very bad hairstyle with very very bad glasses and very very bad taste in women, namely one man eater named Malkina (I kid you not) played by Cameron Diaz, is one of those players. Besides his fondness for Malkina and two cheetahs which he lets run loose in the desert like some bad ad for a perfume or maybe a car he too has a fondness for expounding at will.  He does utter the best line in the movie though while Malkina is busy fucking his car with her Brazilian waxed vagina pressed against the windchill he declares it "too gynelogical" to be enjoyable.  Thankfully we can only see her gyrating from the back a scene bound to be imitated countless times on You Tube.
The deal goes bad, the hammer falls as we knew it would, the unintended victim being the Penelope Cruz character the only moderately true character in the film but one we hardly get to see. Malkina is somewhat interesting, she is played ferociously by Cameron Diaz but in the end we know too little about her to feel anything but revulsion for her viciousness and lack of compassion. Apparently she's the pin on which everything turns and it really doesn't matter since the whole story is so incomprehensible.
The Counselor ends extremely abruptly and leaves the viewer with a sense of is this it, apparently it is. The central problem probably lies with the screenplay. McCarthy is known as a difficult writer but the ample room to expound in a book form is not available in screenplay format with the end result being a screenplay which feels slight,pedantic and unfocused.  Good acting and a competent director are not enough to rescue a deeply flawed script in precious need of a rewrite.

Review of film Gravity

I was expecting a great deal from the film Gravity by director Alfonso Cuaron whose other films namely Y Tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men I have loved.  Furthermore I have a special place in my heart for Mexican directors, they're risk takers and more often than not the risks pay off.  Gravity is an ambitious film and a departure for this director.  It's successful on many levels especially from a technical point of view and the jaw dropping cinematography which must have taken countless hours of refining to achieve.  The problem is space itself, it's not a very interesting place in which to spend a couple of hours or maybe it's just me.  I have never been particularly attracted by the idea of space travel, it leaves me cold and shivering and this movie does nothing to alleviate my fear.  Space is not a fun place to be and if that was the intent of the movie then it's certainly successful on that count.  We follow the journey of medical engineer Ryan Stone played by Sandra Bullock and astronaut Matt Kowalski played by George Clooney as they attempt to survive after having more or less been cast adrift in space tethered to each other by the flimsiest of thread.

Basically that's the story in a nutshell.  The experience with the help of the 3D technology is meant to immerse you in that environment.  As a viewer you're often behind the mask of Ryan Stone as she struggles to breathe with oxygen depletion in her suit quickly threatening to overcome her.  We hyperventilate with her as she tries to negotiate free falling in space with little to anchor her to anything solid.  It is a frightening experience and one which I would not particularly like to duplicate.

I have a couple of problems with the film.  I've decided that 3D is just not for me.  Yes objects float in space and appear to come towards you, yes there is more definition, yes there is the possibility of immersing oneself in an alien environment but it doesn't grab me the way it should.  Maybe I'm just weird but to me it overemphasizes the totally artificial nature of the medium thus instead of bringing me closer it moves me further away.    Furthermore once you've gotten over the awe of space, the environment itself is pretty boring, except for fleeting glances of earth curved and beautiful with all of its colors reflected in the masks of the astronauts, there's really not that much to look at.  It's dark and foreboding.  At the same time the movie brought forth in my mind all the now useless junk which is orbiting somewhere above us and which we keep sending up there, it's a giant repository of now defunct technology forever doomed to circle and circle or do whatever objects that can never land do in space.  Space is not clean, it's dirty and it's full of man made debris, in fact it's those very same debris which cause the fatal accident in the film.

Sandra Bullock does a good job of appearing scared but we know so very little about her that it's hard to fully empathize with her character.  It's not an Oscar worthy performance, there just isn't enough subtlety in it.  I also had a problem with the casting of George Clooney as Matt Kowalski, not sure what it is about the name but it just didn't fit the persona.  Clooney at this point in his career has become bigger than life, he's just too Clooneyesque to ever be really taken seriously in this role.  He comes off as Ocean's Eleven Clooney with the self-referential I'm so handsome kind of guy.  

Somebody else pointed out that the scene where Bullock takes off her suit and is down to her skivvies, meant to emphasize vulnerability or maybe a shout out to Ripley's Alien, is not realistic.  In a suit you're tied to all sorts of wiring in order to facilitate bodily functions which totally makes sense, where do you pee or defecate if you're stuck orbiting in space.  It's a moot point I know and it's more effective to show her in her undies and have women in their forties despair at how great Bullock looks and how much work at the gym there's still left for them to do to ever achieve that look.  I myself am over 40 and have given up.

In conclusion I liked it, it lagged a little in parts, I didn't love it.  I give it a cautious recommendation.  

Review of La Vie D'Adèle. or Blue is the Warmest Color

Blue won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year not only for its director Adbellahtif Kechiche but also for its young actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux the Emma with blue hair of the English title.  The French title which draws less attention to the color blue and more to the life of Adèle itself is perhaps the more appropriate title.  Adèle is a story of self-discovery,love found,ecstasy,love lost, pain and grief.  Throughout the unfolding of the story the camera is an intrusive almost abusive presence in the life of Adèle as it follows her though her various transformations.  I understand the need for the director to do that, he wants us to get under Adèle's skin and to know her as intimately as an artificial medium such as cinema will allow.  I didn't necessarily get under her skin but got as close to it as was possible, felt her joy,her growing power in her nascent sexuality and most importantly her loss.  Much as been written about the overtly sexual scenes in this film and some might go see it out of a prurient sense of discovering the forbidden, they might end up being disappointed.  Although clearly explicit the scenes, there are two almost identical scenes, are not overly sexy although they are not devoid of sensuality.  These are two beautiful young women who are obviously taking extreme delight in each other's bodies.  My problem, and it's a small one, was that the scenes went on for too long, so long as to become more voyeuristic than they should have been.  Furthermore Adèle is young and inexperienced in lovemaking, clearly being seduced by an older more adept and experienced partner yet we don't see anything tentative in the lovemaking where there should have been some hesitation or even "pudeur" we see none.  Of course that could also be explained by the voracious nature of Adèle herself.  The filmmaker does spend a lot of time particularly on Adèle's mouth to convey that message.  The closeups of her extremely mobile face are very intense.  It's especially shocking to see her eating almost gluttonously and with obvious pleasure not just in one sequence but in a few sequences interspersed throughout the film.  There is sauce on her lips, she sticks out her tongue to lick it, she talks with her mouth full, these are things rarely seen on film.
In fact the whole focus on a character eating is something rarely seen on film.  Characters are seen ordering, sipping wine, having a bite here and there but it's all very gentile and sober.  Eating is messy and not especially sexy to film with bits stuck in one's teeth, the chewing and the mouth opening and closing, it doesn't lend itself to being filmed that easily.  There is something so naked about Adèle eating which could be in an of itself more shocking than the sex scenes themselves.
This is a very moist film.  Characters cry, especially Adèle, with the kind of reckless abandon rarely captured on film.  There is mucus aplenty and no attempt to wipe it off.  Grief too just like eating isn't especially pretty, it's visceral and organic.  This film might have the best, most moving breakup scene I have ever witnessed, it's executed so flawlessly and with so much passion like a punch in the gut, the pain is real for her and it becomes real for us.  Kudos to the two young actresses for putting so much of themselves out there, these are brave performances especially by the young Adèle although Leah Seydoux also shines in her role of temptress and seductress.  Highly recommended.

Review of Don Jon

I hadn't intended to write a review of Don Jon and truthfully it's been a couple of weeks or more since I've seen it my recollections therefore might not be all that fresh.  Ideally I should do the reviews closer to the actual viewing but was lazy on this one and not all that highly motivated, still I do have a few thoughts bubbling in my head which I will attempt to write down.
Don Jon was written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt he's also the titular character thus wearing many hats.  For a first effort the direction is all right, it's not a film which would require a great deal of expertise, there are no big action sequences, not too many actors to direct, the sets are few and the camera is often stationary just panning on people's faces.  The problem lies with the script.  Don Jon is a guy of few words and few interests.  If anyone has seen the previews for this film his interests are easy to list:  His family,his boys,his body,his church and especially HIS PORN.  Emphasis is mine but it's also his as he narrates his interests.  I suppose the film is meant to be somewhat satirical of a certain type of guy who lives in Jersey,is of Italian descent,a practicing Catholic (Sundays only) and loves hanging out with his boys at familiar clubs where he always gets to go home with the choicest piece of ass in the joint while his buddies can only stare and salivate.  The buddies never seem to have any luck in that department and what's even more puzzling is the fact that they don't even resent the DON, they admire him,not even the slightest tinge of envy, his buddies are GOLD.  Back to the satirical idea, satire requires a light touch and razor sharp humor in order to be effective.  Here the satire is too broad to be considered anything but a failure.
Don Jon is not an interesting guy and only uninteresting girls would want to go out with him, I use going out in the most general way since he mostly just beds them although we never actually see them doing it. While the gal is asleep and apparently sated Don Jon stares painfully at the ceiling wishing for a little porn excitement which this latest bout of sexual bliss failed to conjure.  This is the central theme of the movie.  It's the story of a guy who can only connect sexually with his computer, a porn addict who can't really feel unless he's face to face with the manufactured sex provided via the internet.  This is a worthwhile topic, much better explored in another movie called Shame, here it simply feels inert and unreal.  First of all Don Jon tells us that he loses himself in the porn, something which he is unable to do when he's with a live partner even with one as bodacious and sexy as Scarlett Johansson.  We are asked to take him at his word on this but whenever he's at the computer watching porn the camera lingers on his face with no noticeable action taking place below.  There is no movement, no excitement, no tremors, no sweat, his face is just placidly bored, is that what losing yourself should look like, where's the ecstasy of the moment, obviously nowhere to be found.  Furthermore here's a guy sitting on a hard back chair in front of a tiny computer screen spanking his monkey day in day out, countless numbers of times and he's losing himself.....there's just no way. Can one even masturbate that often without incurring severe carpal tunnel injury a question for the ages I suppose.
Don Jon's family is equally boring. A highly plastified Tony Danza serves as the dad, the mom always speaks as though she's on the verge of an hysterical breakdown, the sister is constantly messaging on her phone and during the Sunday dinners they watch football plays on t.v. with the two men wearing "wife beater" white shirts and eating spaghetti, can it get any more stereotypical than that, I think not.
When Don Jon finally learns to connect during sex thanks to a helpful older woman played by Julianne Moore the conversion is sudden and improbable.  He goes from A to Z in a nano second and by then, in any case,  we've lost interest.  Scarlett Johansson is absolutely adorable as the ditsy New Jersey girl chewing gum, wearing tight clothes and expecting certain things from her man none of which include porn watching but do include an instant makeover.  Never having met a New Jersey Italian girl I can only assume that everything about her performance is spot on, it was the highlight of the film for me.
I do like J. Gordon-Levitt generally loved him in 500 Days of Summer, I feel he should stick to romantic losers or winners role, he's also been great in action flicks, simply didn't like him or the subject matter in this one.  One additional thought for a film about a guy addicted to porn the film is incredibly chaste.  The actual sex scenes are not sexy, the only tits and asses to be seen periodically on screen are those from the porn videos, the clips do get extremely tiresome and the objectification of women body parts is complete.