Don't You Worry 'bout a SING

Sing is the least you can do to make an inoffensive all-ages animated amusement. It’s not particularly inspired or entertaining, with none of the visual beauty of a Laika or Ghibli, the innovation of a Pixar, or the all-around crowd-pleasing nature of a Disney. Despite a host of celebrity voices and colorful shenanigans, it doesn’t even have a leg up over Trolls, the other recent jukebox karaoke musical comedy aimed at youngsters and the adults who don’t mind taking them to such things. No, Sing doesn’t have higher highs or lower lows, because it’s not trying to do as much. It’s set in a world of animals behaving like people in an expansive metropolis, but hasn’t a tenth of Zootopia’s imagination. It is filled with characters yearning to make something of themselves, but with nary the picture book psychology of an Inside Out. It finds a plucky koala (Matthew McConaughey) throwing a singing competition to save his crumbling theater – Muppets much? – and gathers a menagerie of contestants with individual little dramas and conflicts, but isn’t interested in setting up American Idol suspense. It just wants to live up to its title and sing. That’s it. And so it does.

Totally undemanding, the movie starts out like it’ll be a family friendly Altman picture, swooping around its city to find the characters who’ll be the finalists. There’s a harried hog mother (Reese Witherspoon), soulful gorilla (Taron Egerton), moody porcupine (Scarlett Johansson), sleazy rat (Seth MacFarlane), shy elephant (Tori Kelly), sparkling pig (Nick Kroll), and others who fall by the wayside as the big show approaches. That they all have little problems to overcome – stage fright, gambling debts, bad dads, and so on – is par for the course. That none of these issues derail the movie’s genial good spirit and even keel plotting contributes to its blasé sense of anodyne amiability. Some wild cards – a lazy rich sheep (John C. Reilly) whose grandmother (Jennifer Saunders) was once upon a time a theater (or, as she’d pronounce it, “thea-tah”) star – enter the proceedings just to keep churning incident between bobble-headed snippets of pop songs sung loudly and enthusiastically from the mouths of cartoon critters.

The songbook is at least somewhat admirably diverse. Animals sing hits by Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Van Halen, Frank Sinatra, Nicki Minaj, Elton John, and many, many more. Remember those infomercials for multi-CD sets of “Greatest Hits,” which would reliably end with brief excerpts from songs included while a complete tracklist would scroll by in garish yellow font? That’s how many a child parked in front of the TV would get introduced to earworms of times gone by. (That and the oldies stations were formative instruments of pop knowledge.) So maybe that’s the function Sing will serve in this on-demand age, letting kids hear a broad swath of easy pop listening while their parents smile in recognition at a couple measures of, say, Crazy Town’s “Butterfly.” That we get a plot punctuating abbreviated musical numbers is too bad, as the whole thing grinds to a halt when we need to care that a mammal is cut from the competition due to his excessive flatulence or that another critter in need of money throws a car wash and uses his fur to buff and dry.

There’s really nothing else to it other than bland believe-in-yourself moralizing that’s been done better, and with more conviction, in a dozen other animated family films of the last quarter century. It has a whole colorful animal world that’s been imagined at the level of a particularly underdeveloped picture book, with not even a scrap of the visual ingenuity and clever visual gags of a Zootopia. There’s even a missed opportunity for an exploration of what these real-world singers look like in the parallel animal world. Think of all the puns left for the taking. Diana Sloth. The Beetles. Llama Summers. Weird Al Yak-ovic. Director Garth Jennings (of the decent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from a decade ago) and the team at Illumination (of the Despicable Mes) are content to simply groove on the borrowed charms of fun songs to power their blandly amiable time-waster.

Three is a Magic Number: KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS

The best parts of Kubo and the Two Strings are its textures. A soft-spoken fantasy film, this latest feature from stop-motion animation studio Laika has gorgeously tactile creations. That’s a feature of the form, where the characters look like stunningly molded action figures and dolls posed against striking dollhouse spaces. But the craftspeople and artisans at Laika (now as much a consistent high-quality brand as Pixar, Aardman, or Ghibli) are thorough imaginers, able to create a sense of magic in movement and sturdiness in worldbuilding. They also can mold their house style to a variety of tones and moods. Look at their works: dark Gaiman fable Coraline; family-friendly Carpenter-influenced horror ParaNorman; whimsical Dahl-meets-Dickens-meets-Monty-Python allegory The Boxtrolls. With Kubo, the company has a project that takes on the flavoring of ancient Japanese legend, from samurai tales to paper lanterns and a sense of fluid boundaries between the mortal and the spiritual, the fated and the created. It’s a very different sort of family fantasy: hushed, gentle, simple, spare.

Its widescreen story begins with Kubo, a one-eyed young boy (Art Parkinson) alone with his mother in a cave at the edge of a small village. He earns money for food by performing stories for the villagers, with heroes, villains, and monsters he animates by making origami puppets come to life with his magic stringed instrument. He strums and narrates while the art acts out his tales. Soon, though, he’ll be in a real hero’s journey of his own. His mother always says never be out at night. They have a tragic backstory. Kubo’s grandfather and aunts on his mother’s side are cruel moon spirits who stole his eye when he was a baby, killing his noble samurai father in the process. His mother has since hidden them to protect the other eye, which they still crave. If moonlight spots the boy, they will return to collect. Alas, this is what happens one night. Kubo is attacked, and his mother uses her last bit of magic to spirit him away and conjure a protector. What follows is a journey for the items that will save his life, told in a mood as delicate and involving as the origami tales he tells.

This is fascinating and intriguing fantasy setup, patiently and slowly unfolding its world. It’s less about its simple story, but more about how rich its visual opportunities are and how consuming its tone is. The boy awakes to find his monkey figurine is now a real monkey (with the voice of Charlize Theron), maternal, stern, and skilled in martial arts. She’s his mother’s final gift. Together they must go on a fairly standard quest set up in threes. There are three travelers: the boy, the monkey, and a man-sized beetle (Matthew McConaughey) they meet along the way. Their goal is finding three mythical objects to help them defeat the enemy: an unbreakable sword, impenetrable armor, and a golden helmet. Getting those involves three deadly obstacles: a giant skeleton, underwater eyeballs around a reef-sized toothy maw, and a dragon. And there are three villains to be confronted: Kubo’s twin porcelain witch aunts (hauntingly voiced by Rooney Mara), and his grandfather, the evil Moon King (Ralph Fiennes). Screenwriters Marc Haimes and Chris Butler, with story credit to Shannon Tindle, use these threes to structure a movie of repetitive rhythms, like an easy-to-recall bedtime story with exciting incident and imaginative sights told in a comforting pattern.

In typical Laika fashion, director Travis Knight allows the movie to move at its own pace, and take on its own distinctive character. It’s a story of melancholy and loss, with real life-and-death stakes and a reverence for the fragile line between the living and the dead. An early sequence finds villagers earnestly communing with the spirits of relatives who’ve passed on. This makes Kubo jealous, but as his journey brings him closer to memories of his parents, he draws on their example as well as the inner strength (and magic) they’ve left in him to do right. This is quite a somber topic for a family film, and it’s allowed its due seriousness. It informs the movie’s whimsy without trivializing the ambiguities and mysteries it works through. This is still, after all, a movie in which a talking monkey has a dazzling swordfight with a ghostly moon spirit who comes gliding in on spooky CG fog, a sailing ship is made out of twigs and leaves, and a beetle-man scurries to the top of a giant skull to pull out a sword imbedded in it. There are magnificent and creative sights used for quiet, minor key effects. It’s fun, but slower and sadder than you might expect. It's like a spell. No wonder the movie begins the same way Kubo starts his origami tales, as the paper folds itself into delicate astonishments: "If you must blink, do it now."

To Boldly Go: INTERSTELLAR

Interstellar is a film out of time about a man out of time. It’s set in a future world in which climate change isn’t solved, leading to food shortages, dust storms, and economic collapse. In other words, it’s our world if we don’t get our acts together. It’s gotten so bad, a highly skilled engineer and pilot like Cooper (an earnest Matthew McConaughey) has found those jobs gone, forcing him to take up farming. There amidst the cornfields he, widowed, lives a frustrated life with his kids (Mackenzie Foy and Timothée Chalamet) and his father-in-law (John Lithgow), working the land and watching the skies, lamenting the lack of opportunity not just for himself, but for his children as well. They’re doomed to work the land for a starving planet losing habitable soil by the day. His father-in-law tells him, “You were born forty years too late, or too early.” How strange to hear that said about a future person, wishing himself back in our day.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan is a man out of time as well. His brand of pop seriousness, with the likes of The Dark Knight and Inception, may be in vogue, but his insistence on un-franchised tentpoles and shooting on film (full IMAX and 70mm, no less) make him an outlier. Sure enough, he, along with brother Jonathan who co-wrote, makes Interstellar an old-fashioned science fiction tale. It’s built out of bits and pieces of major sci-fi landmarks past, with the slow build of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the workaday travelers of Alien, the matter-of-fact procedure of Contact, the trippy leaps of 2001. There’s also some Gravity, Apollo 13, and The Right Stuff mixed in. And the opening sequence even has talking heads literally reappropriated from Ken Burns’ Dust Bowl, an odd choice.

The film steadily takes its time, gets its thrills out of the power and excitement of the unknown, and finally leaps beyond its reach into an ending as intuitively satisfying as it is both literal and baffling. Cooper is recruited by one of his old bosses (Michael Caine) to join a secret last-ditch effort to save humanity by looking to the stars. The plan is to travel through a wormhole near Saturn to a distant galaxy perched on the edge of a black hole and scout habitable worlds. Feeling the weight of the doomed Earth dying fast and taking his kids’ futures with it, he agrees to embark on this difficult and potentially indefinite mission. The film, which up until this point is appealing without being gripping, achieves liftoff at the same time the spaceship does.

The scientists (Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley, and David Gyasi) joining the journey are embarking on exploration meant to resist the prevailing earthbound public sentiment to merely manage decline. No, they’re out to discover a way to save mankind, a standard sci-fi trope here done slowly, seriously, and well. Nolan takes the opportunity to find the absorbing detail of scientific exploration, the majesty of awe as all manner of cosmic phenomena drift by.

Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema makes gorgeous images out of the interplay between the gunmetal grey ship and the gleaming, glittering panoply of stars, nebula, wormholes, and singularities lighting up the night sky. A host of talented artists conjure gorgeously rendered effects as beautiful as anything Douglas Trumbull cooked up for 2001 and The Tree of Life. Hans Zimmer’s score makes use of a pipe organ, making the connection between swirling space and spiritual reverence, the resonances of hope and progress as a light in hopeless darkness, the cosmos a cathedral of wonder and fear. It’s a film that’s reaching, and often thrilling in that reach.

That’s all in line with Nolan’s typical interest in concept over all else. His filmmaking is interested in process and rules, in films that constantly explain their preoccupations with puzzling over magic tricks, rattled memories, and layers of dream spaces. This is narratively his most straightforward film, thrilling to the step-by-step procedures that launch our team of astronauts (plus a Bill Irwin-voiced faceless box of metal robot who gets all the best lines) towards strange new worlds. There they find moments of peril and thriller plotting, including a late-arriving big name put to great use in a twist a lesser actor wouldn’t sell nearly as well.

The screenplay’s construction is clever in its use of the theory of relativity’s stretching space travel time to tell two connected stories on vastly different tracks. First, the tense interstellar mission spanning what feels to the characters like weeks. Second, a decades-spanning story for those left on Earth, like Cooper’s kids who grow up to be Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck, wondering if their father will ever return or if he’s lost in space forever.

This is the film’s animating anxiety, not the potential end of humanity, but a broken family trying to pick up the pieces. They’re separated by time and space, in need of reconciliation and reunion that may never come. That’s the big beating heart at the core of the film, for all its spacey wonder and eventual squishy mumbo jumbo conclusion. The stars are an impressive backdrop, and the tense spaceship maneuvers and equation crunches are gripping outgrowths of, moments as simple as a father weeping while watching his children grow up fast from afar. The people in the film are representations of ideas more than round characters, but the talented cast breathes life into them and the feelings shake through. It’s a testament to the level of craft on display that the film can routinely verbalize every idea, and then feel them, too.

It’s Nolan’s most humane film, building on the metaphors for grief that drove Inception, working towards greater heights of narrative tension as expression of character needs. In the end, these twin, sometimes fumbling, impulses towards scientific and emotional exploration lead the film into a resolution that’s partially an explosion of abstract images, but more often an overly literal explanation that actually doesn’t make much sense. But the journey there is often stirring and exciting, overwhelming and marvelous with powerful images and sensations. I couldn’t help but admire the overreach of the final moments anyway, as it turns sci-fi loops that resolve the story tightly where I might’ve preferred a greater sense of poetic ambiguity. It’s a film of great ambition, a big, uneven, intensely personal vision that sneaks up and overpowers my objections.

Smell of Success: THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

His first day working on Wall Street, young stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) accepts an offer to go to lunch with his boss (Matthew McConaughey). Over a martini meal, the older, richer man imparts his basic rule of business: move your clients’ money to your pocket. Not long after that, the firm goes bust in the stock market dip of 1987. Out of work, Belfort doesn’t doubt that core ethos of finance his boss told him. Instead he gets right back in the game, building his own firm bundling penny stocks with blue chips and getting wealthy clients to buy. There are huge commissions off these risky bets. Belfort explains this to us in the narration that runs through The Wolf of Wall Street, but often stops and sneers that it’s all too complicated for us to understand. He has utter contempt for anyone with a paystub south of his. For him, complaining about his yearly salary consists of annoyance that it was just shy of a million a week. To celebrate an earnings milestone, his firm orders a marching band and strippers to march around the offices. As the bacchanal erupts, a secretary is held down and her head is shaved. She’s paid $10,000 for it, told to use the money to buy breast implants. Though Belfort announces before hand that she’s in on the joke, the camera hangs back and watches her clutching the stack of bills, her face awash with turbulent mixed emotions.

Martin Scorsese’s film is a raucous look at Belfort’s rise and the atmosphere of carousing frat boy cruelty that followed his addiction to greed and the enabling economy that allowed him to funnel ever more money after his other addictions: booze, cocaine, sex, pills, power. What Belfort and his crew did to accrue their massive fortunes was legal, at least for a while, and they felt entitled to it, pumping up stock prices artificially before selling them for a huge profit. They worked hard at all this quasi-legal money moving and partied harder. Belfort tells us “money makes you a better person” and really believes it. To him, wealth is proof he’s doing something good. The film sets up some opposition to his suffocating solipsism: his father (Rob Reiner), a blustering guy who tries to pull him back, at least when he’s not too tickled by the unrestrained behavior; and an FBI agent (Kyle Chandler) who is sure something is up with the brash new firm and steadfastly investigates. But the humanity etched on these paternal faces doesn’t sink into our narrator. Only Scorsese, with juxtapositions and cutaways, like to a quickly glimpsed crime scene photo of an employee’s future suicide, can cut through Belfort’s cheery smugness. His mindset, the aspirational affluenza of the gospel of prosperity, of monetary might making right, is not just his. It is a poisonous boil on the American psyche and Scorsese is working on a satirical lance.

It hardly feels like taking your medicine. This is probably the most entertaining way of making a movie about insufferably smug, endlessly hungry fattening cats, as a wild, boisterous comedy in which the joke is on them. Stretching out over two hours and fifty-nine minutes, this epic tragicomedy follows Belfort, his business partner (Jonah Hill, with frightening grin of gleaming white oversized chompers), and his hometown buddies (P.J. Byrne, Kenneth Choi, Brian Sacca, Henry Zebrowski, Ethan Suplee), recruits into the ground floor of his new brokerage firm. As the business quickly grows, they find more ways to funnel money out of their clients’ pockets and into theirs, treating everyone else as property. Belfort trades in one wife (Cristin Milioti) for another (Margot Robbie) and though he tells us he feels bad about it, it’s only for a moment. He and his colleagues abuse and bully their employees, sneak money into tax shelters and down ratholes, pop pills, slam back beers, and call in prostitutes. The screenplay by Terence Winter who, between work as a writer on The Sopranos and the showrunner of Boardwalk Empire, knows a thing or two about criminal entrepreneurism, constructs a screenplay that hurtles forward with digressions and debaucheries and still manages to make sense of how the firm got off the ground in the first place and how it worked its way towards insane profits and a legal implosion. It's all about business as an outlet for unchecked id and how that takes morality and responsibility completely off the table.

The film is loose and freewheeling, growing bigger and overwhelming in its implications. It’s about an entire system that allows such an operation to thrive, a system with a massive disincentive for the greedy and selfish to behave responsibly. They squirrel away large amounts of money in whatever way they want in order to fuel whatever drunken high they’re chasing this week. There is no stopping people who have no guilt, no shame. Even when Belfort has a setback, his confidence carries him through. Once you are filthy rich, you can unapologetically monetize even your most shameful wrongdoings. A key sequence finds Belfort fuming about a magazine hatchet job that labeled him “the Wolf of Wall Street,” writing in no uncertain terms about his firm’s grey-area ethics and frat house atmosphere. He’s angry right up until he arrives at work and finds the lobby stuffed with résumé waving young jobseekers, phones ringing off the hook with prospective clients. His buddies start calling him “Wolfie” affectionately as they generate an ever more powerful cult of personality around their fearless immoral leader.

Full of irredeemable, unapologetic, and unstoppable characters, Scorsese’s masterful command of cinema keeps the whole thing slamming forward with energetic momentum. In his typical style, the film is painted with big bold strokes, a mix of rattling soundtrack cues, varied film stocks, speeds, and aspect ratios, finding rich nuances within. His collaborators bring welcome touches, from Thelma Schoonmaker’s swaggering edits – sloppy without feeling careless – to Rodrigo Prieto’s sleek, sunlit cinematography. This is a film that is taking place in the bright light of day, barely legal acts crossing over the line easily and with little negative consequence in the immediate future. The first time crack is smoked in the film takes place in shadow, Hill and DiCaprio huddled in the dark corner of the frame. But once the high hits they leap away, the camera tracking them into the harsh midday sun outside. They can get away with anything, anytime. The film is vulgar, dripping with sex and drugs and yet little pleasure. It’s a monotonous mechanical need for them and the film circles endlessly overconsumption of one kind or another that sends them spiraling down until the next high.

The Wolf of Wall Street is loose and rattling in its structure. Some scenes as assembled seem to stretch too long and others clip along too quickly, but there’s such an elemental cinematic pleasure seeing Scorsese operating on such a huge scale, developing his theme strongly and confidently and then noodling around, finding dozens upon dozens of variations over the runtime. He watches DiCaprio’s unhinged performance as it wriggles around in all manner of debauched positions, squirming out from under scrutiny to do bad all over again. He clashes with his second wife as Robbie’s strong performance reveals welcome unexpected depths. The trophy wife is not as shiny and shallow as she first appears, forming a key element of the time-release poison pill bitterly dissolving under each scene in the final stretch. Their final scenes together are utterly devastating, one of the few times the film brings his steamroller of desire to a dead stop. The sweep of the film threatens to feel unformed at times, and yet it all comes together in such a clear statement of purpose.

Belfort’s ego is too big to fail. The movie (the events, not the point of view) is based on his autobiography. The final shot finds a group of people eagerly awaiting his insight, desperate to learn his tricks, wanting to become his kind of success. Whatever catharsis I found when some level of legal comeuppance is at long last dealt out in the final minutes of the third hour, is squashed under his unapologetic opportunism, his ability to turn any misfortune into shameless profit. And then there’s the sense that, though this wolf may no longer stalk on Wall Street, the rest of his pack is still out there, as insufferably untouchable as ever. It can’t be a coincidence that a scene of jaw-dropping dehumanizing negotiation – the guys agree that, when it comes to the entertainers hired for an office party, “If we don’t recognize them as people, just the act, then we’re not liable” – devolves into the guys goofily reciting the famous “one of us” chant from Tod Browning’s Freaks. They’re joking about the people they’ve hired, literally scoffing at the plight of the little guy. But it’s clear that Wall Street can be more freakish than any sideshow horror. 

Die Another Day: DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

Far and away the best reason to see Dallas Buyers Club is Matthew McConaughey. His acting has been the best it’s ever been these last 18 months. He’s an actor of range and talent his early typecasting had done much to hide. After his Dazed and Confused early breakout performance and toiling in roles as idealistic young lawyers (A Time To Kill, Amistad), he became a star on the back of leading shallow shirtless lunkhead roles in increasingly exasperating comedies. But now, after his wide range of interesting supporting roles as of late, he’s grown into a career that’s varied, fascinating, and consistently excellent. With roles as a small-town prosecutor in Bernie, a sleazy hitman in Killer Joe, a strip club proprietor in Magic Mike, a fugitive in Mud, and reporter in The Paperboy, he made great movies (the first three) and less than good movies (the latter two) better for his being there. He went from a name that was no added value to a film’s promotion to a name that causes my attention to perk up when I see it in the cast of an upcoming project.

In Dallas Buyers Club, McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof a hard-drinking horndog who spends his time gambling and carousing when he’s not picking up day labor as an electrician to supplement his rodeo income. But he’s clearly ill, gaunt, sickly skeletal. McConaughey inhabits this diseased frame with painfully thin confidence, his swagger and charisma shining through so strongly I was afraid all the more that he’d break right in front of our eyes. The soundtrack picks up some high-frequency whines as he winces, overcome with pain as he squints and hopes it’ll pass quickly. It’s after a workplace accident that his blood happens to be drawn and flagged for further testing. The doctors (Jennifer Garner and Denis O’Hare) bring him the sad results: he has HIV. It’s the 1980s and HIV/AIDS is a mystery disease and treatment is fragmentary and rare. It’s widely assumed to be a disease affecting only gay people, so Woodroof, faced with a death sentence, reacts in a homophobic huff. It’s a mistake, he says, storming out of the building.

But what if it’s not a mistake? That’s the question that haunts Woodroof as he comes to accept the diagnosis. Told the best the hospital can do is offer him a spot in a clinical trial that may or may not help him, he researches treatment options, finding useful supplements that are unavailable in the States. The Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved these apparently helpful substances, so Woodroof sets out to get some, figuring he might as well help his fellow HIV/AIDS patients in the process. Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack’s screenplay relays the events as a sort of big-pharma medical heist story with a libertarian anti-FDA bent, smuggling meds through a loophole and getting them to those in need. Woodroof sets up a Buyers Club, selling memberships that entitle dues-paying customers as much medicine as they need. By not charging for the unapproved chemicals directly, he’s able to avoid directly breaking the law.

It’s the story of a man outliving his initial 30-day diagnosis, an angry prejudiced man thrown by circumstance into a culture he barely knows and doesn’t understand, but is initially certain he hates anyway. An early scene, shortly after his diagnosis sent gay slurs flying off his tongue in denial, finds his friends shunning him, spitting those same slurs back at him. He’s clearly crushed by this betrayal and that association, but soon his hospital roommate, a transgender man named Rayon (Jared Leto), becomes his business partner and friend. They have a fun and unlikely buddy chemistry that feeds into the film’s heist-like patter, even though their gaunt appearances and oft-ragged voices are clear indications that no matter the good they do, the end to their stories won’t be a cure. Even as they get these goods around the law, the FDA is sniffing around, circling, looking for a reason to shut their operation down. It’s about perseverance in a fight between bureaucracy and urgency, between funereal paranoia and hope.

The screenplay leans on speechifying and easy lessons, but has performances so electric that there’s a sense of liveliness to it all. Director Jean-Marc Vallée is hardly a subtle director. Why, the opening scene cross cuts a distractedly shot sex scene with a panting horse nearly throwing a rider in the rodeo, as if to make completely sure even the least observant audience member immediately gets the metaphor for risky behavior as HIV danger. There’s no room for subtlety here with filmmaking that’s largely only functional. But Vallée trusts his actors to put across this material, letting them express complexities of emotions in scenes that give them full attention. McConaughey runs away with the film with his frighteningly wiry intensity, balancing charm and disreputability, acting circles around Leto’s impressive-in-its-own-way look-ma-I’m-acting roller coaster of laughing, crying, flirting, and coughing.

It’s a film that’s largely a safe, solid, moralizing based-on-a-true-story message movie with plentiful generic uplift and triumph-in-the-face-of-adversity good feelings. But the acting is so strong, from McConaughey especially, that the performers manage to make it worthwhile. It might’ve seemed irredeemably phony if it were not for such a solid lead performance holding the whole thing together. If you want a more comprehensive, deeply felt, fully contextualized look at the 1980’s fight against the AIDS virus and those who would deny full opportunities for help, I’ll point you to last year’s excellent documentary How to Survive a Plague. But if you want to get a glimpse at the subject while appreciating yet again why McConaughey has become one of our most reliably excellent actors, here’s your chance. He sells everything down to the smallest moments, making subtlely out of broadness. I particularly like a scene in which he accompanies Rayon to a gay bar looking to recruit new Buyers Club members. He silently gives beefcake photos on the wall the side-eye, as if to suggest a man who is almost, but not quite, willing to loosen his bigotry in order to help his fellow man.

Flash, Dance: MAGIC MIKE

With Magic Mike, director Steven Soderbergh continues to explore the ways in which society’s institutions can both enable and thwart ambition by turning people into products. Here he (from a screenplay by Reid Carolin) tells a story of an ambitious thirty-year-old man, Mike (Channing Tatum), working three jobs, none of them the one he most desires. He wants to make custom furniture, a way to take his passions and creativity and spend his time getting paid for something he loves to do. Instead, he’s working mostly low-paying jobs, getting paid all in cash. He can save up enough for a down payment on a loan for his dream business, but can’t get one with his bad credit. The economy has had him stuck in place for six years now in a vicious cycle of saving to no avail. Still he works. He has a mobile detailing business when he’s not haggling for better pay at his construction job. It’s there that he meets an aimless, mostly unemployed twenty-year-old guy, Adam (Alex Pettyfer), who is on his first and last day on the job. Mike feels sorry for Adam and invites him to come help out at his third job, where he works only weekend nights, where he makes most of his money: a strip club.

There, under the watch of drawling manger Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), Mike and his co-workers, guys with names like Richie (Joe Manganiello), Ken (Matt Bomer), Tito (Adam Rodriguez), and Tarzan (Kevin Nash), perform goofy choreographed routines with silly props. Their performances look like nothing more than racy dance numbers until they slip off just enough clothes to scandalize and titillate the screaming audience of sorority girls and bachelorette parties. For their audience this is not about nudity or dirtiness so much as it’s about the naughtiness of escaping the norms of everyday life. Either way, it looks like easy money to Adam who is currently crashing with his older sister (Cody Horn), and so the movie turns into one of those melodramas wherein the older veteran, frustrated with his life but making it look so easy, takes the naive new guy into the fold of a business rife with temptations. Soderbergh takes it all in with his usual patient, clinically observant cinematography, which steers the film away from easy predictability.

Like Soderbergh’s 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience, this is a film about people living under a cloud of economic uncertainty, trying to get by with the money they can get selling themselves. It’s essentially an R-rated backstage drama that starts as goofy fun of a sort and then grows progressively darker as the full implications of the business sets in. It doesn’t go exactly where you’d expect, tracking not simply the younger man’s descent from naivety into jadedness, but the veteran’s growing disillusionment as well. Here’s a guy who feels like he’s been doing everything right, getting a job or three, working hard, saving up, and still he can’t get ahead, can’t find a good foothold. There’s talk of moving the club to Miami, where, we’re told, the real money is. But would that really change the situations of these men in a significant way? More money for the same objectification may not be the healthiest thing, especially as several are already suffering from mostly well-hidden substance abuse issues. The first performance of the movie, one dancer ends up passed out backstage. Later, a groupie with a pet pig is eager to pass out ecstasy. “I’m not my lifestyle,” Mike protests to Adam’s sister, who is both charmed and repulsed by his flirtatiousness.

What’s best about Magic Mike is the generous way Soderbergh has of drawing terrific performances from the entirety of an ensemble. He finds exactly the right ways to use his performers to best accentuate their skills, to draw out aspects of their personas in interesting ways. The tension between Tatum’s charm and blockheaded athleticism is used to flesh out a portrait of a man who allows himself to be objectified despite larger goals, much like his own early film roles hid his deeper talent. McConaughey’s near self-parody “alright, alright, alright” becomes a sort of incantation of sleaze, his mostly shirtless wardrobe a form of wiry narcissism. The other actors, convincing all, even stand-up comedian Gabriel Iglesias as the club’s DJ, float in and out of the story, creating a vivid portrait of this world filled with details both funny (one dancer throws out his back and shuffles off the stage after a heavyset woman leaps onto the stage and into his arms) and sad (another dancer brings his wife to a party and urges the new guy to feel her up).

The film is, in contrast to its high-energy burlesque on-stage and its funnier moments, so low-key about its off-stage melodrama that by the end it feels uncommitted and, when the film ends with its thematic cards still up in the air, the lack of resolution is at once bracing and frustrating. Still, the film is so well acted and crisply directed that the characters’ (and, by extension, the film’s) uncomfortable tension between enjoyment and depression becomes notable. As the credits roll, some characters have made tentative steps towards self-improvement. Others are left, maybe to thrive, perhaps to wallow, in their disreputable career choices. Why shouldn’t the end be so unresolved? It fits right in with the sense of economic despair that hovers around in this story of easy money and uneasy decisions.

Good Ol' Boy: BERNIE

Like Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, Richard Linklater’s Bernie is a based-on-a-true-story film that takes its stranger-than-fiction facts and plays them as dark, character-driven comedy. Also like Soderbergh, Linklater is a director who debuted in the late-80’s in independent film and has spent his career dabbling in different genres. What makes his work so strong and distinctive across genres is not his virtuoso stylistic touches, but his strong, steady focus on characters and a keen eye for the ways in which people relate to one another. From early successes like Before Sunset and Dazed and Confused, to more experimental works like Waking Life, to big studio hits like School of Rock, he’s a director with a sharp sense of interpersonal dynamics and an ability to fit his shaggy observational tone into highly entertaining packages.

Bernie reteams Linklater with his School of Rock star Jack Black. That film is a career highlight for the both of them, a Hollywood comedy in which they embrace a formula – goofball grows up by unwittingly learning from time spent with little kids – into which they can inject a welcome authenticity and emotion behind the laughs. Though Bernie has plenty of laughs, the two of them are up to something much trickier, a dance of tones that is often very funny, but much more complicated and darker. Black plays Bernie Tiede, an assistant funeral director in the small Texas town of Carthage. He has a natural ease in his chosen profession. He’s a master at preparing the bodies, guiding bereaving families through funeral options (or just helping older couples planning ahead, pick out just the right casket), and even steps in to read scriptures or sing a song when necessary. He does this for the local Methodist church as well, singing his heart out to all the great old hymns to much adulation from the congregation.

What earns Bernie the respect and love of the townspeople is his incredible generosity. He’s a giver, not a taker, quick to lend a hand or to drop by unannounced with tokens of appreciation or care packages. He’s especially good with the weeping widows of the town, bringing them baked goods or baskets of fancy soaps, dropping by to make sure they’re doing fine in their trying time. He’s a real people person who seems perfectly comfortable in his own skin. Some wonder about the man who seems uninterested in “normal” things. He’s a source of much speculation, but it’s all so innocuous to the townsfolk. Why, he’s Bernie! Everybody loves Bernie! And it’s easy to see why. Black could easily have played the man as a bundle of comic tics, but he really digs deep and makes Bernie a fully believable eccentric. It’s a fantastic performance. Black seems to walk differently, carries his weight in a ramrod-straight posture, and puts on an accent that can only be described as a lisping Texan drawl, but he comes across as a man so genuinely nice and even-keel that you’re surprised when little flashes of annoyance and despair crack through.

Bernie’s so sweet and caring, and it all seems so honestly and truly genuine, that it invites much affection reciprocated back at him. Still, beloved as he is, it’s very much a surprise when the meanest lady in town (Shirley MacLaine), lonely and bitter and, to the locals, a legendarily ornery creature, lets him dote on her after her husband’s passing. She’s filthy rich and quickly lets Bernie into her life as something of a surrogate son and servant to help her spend her money and pass the time in her remaining years. They take vacations together, attend local plays and concerts, and marinate in high culture. Soon, though, she has him waiting on her every whim, doing her laundry, giving her rides, sorting her pills, and even clipping her toenails. But Bernie’s such a nice guy he won’t tell her no, even when she gets increasingly jealous of time he spends away from her. Why, he can’t even focus on his lead role in the local civic theater’s upcoming production of The Music Man. But they seem to enjoy each other’s company. “No one’s been this nice to me in fifty years,” the old woman says in a poignant moment that reveals some of the deep pain behind her outward nastiness.

I dare not spoil where their increasingly co-dependent relationship spirals down to. Needless to say, the community is increasingly curious about just what brings and holds together the nicest man and the meanest woman they know. Linklater tells the story as a flurry of gossip through which the real story peeks through by filming townspeople, both actors (like a surprisingly subtle and funny Matthew McConaughey as a lawyer who breaks through the town’s innocuous curiosity with his aggressive skepticism) and actual Carthage, Texas locals, talking to the camera in documentary-style talking-head interviews about their town in general and Bernie in particular. He’s a showy character, but he doesn’t seem to be faking it. The townspeople have a lot of theories, and lots of convictions, about who Bernie is and what he did or did not do to that mean woman, but no one can say for sure what went on in Bernie’s mind. In that way, it becomes a film about storytelling and about the interpretation of facts that allows it to transcend a mere docudrama and become something stranger, funnier and, funnily enough, sadder. In this film, fiction (of the film and of the real-life townspeople’s speculations) and nonfiction (both the true story and the real people interspersed with the actors) sit side-by-side, inescapably intertwined.

It’s such a great small-town portrait, a film about a town that picks-a-little talks-a-little like Meredith Wilson’s small-town Iowa, always chattering about this and that and who’s doing what. It’s a place where assumptions become pretty hard to shake. The people have such a fierce protection of those who are genuinely liked and a sharp condemnation of those who aren’t, that it’s easy to see how interpretations of things as simple as fact get all twisted about. This is a film about American eccentrics that allows for the beauty of local color and the joys of colloquial aphorisms and thick regional accents. There’s relaxed, nonjudgmental appreciation of the eccentric in all of its characters, both real and those who are real but played by actors.

It’s a film that’s laughing with its characters and ready to turn quickly into effective pathos when the emotions run raw. Like in the writings Sherwood Anderson or Garrison Keillor, there’s a great sense of place and the way communities interact to embrace or reject the collection of wonderful characters that inhabit and odd incidents that occur within its boundaries. This is a film about the stories that townsfolk tell about themselves and about their town, but most importantly it’s about Bernie. He’s such a fascinating character; it’s easy to wonder to what extent he’s in denial about the relationship he has found himself in. Black plays his complexities expertly. The writing in this film from Linklater and co-writer Skip Hollandsworth is so sharply funny and darkly moving that it can’t be written off as mere condescension or poking fun at real people and real events. It’s a complexly clever and moving film about the way we draw assumptions about people and how hard those assumptions can be to shake. Why, at the end of the film, one local woman insists, “Jesus himself couldn’t change [her] mind about Bernie.”

Catching Up on 2011: Twists and Turns Edition

In Gregg Araki’s Kaboom, Thomas Dekker stars as a college student who harbors a crush on his dumb surfer roommate (Chris Zylka).  He - Dekker, not the roommate - is a troubled guy, trying to figure out who he is and find his place in the world. Chowing down in the cafeteria, he confides in his best friend (Haley Bennett). They chat about the usual college topics: relationships and classes. Their rapport has a lived-in chemistry. They have fun being with each other and, consequently, they’re fun to watch. Around this little R-rated collegiate comedy spins an increasingly paranoid frenzy of plot that includes missing persons, a jealous lesbian witch (Roxane Mesquida), people in animal masks, a flirty party girl (Juno Temple), a doomsday cult, a pot-fueled prophet (James Duval), and the End of the World. It’s a fevered concoction, like a messy, madly uneven collaboration between David Lynch, Richard Kelly, and Diablo Cody. It’s also distinctly Araki, harkening back to the mix of tactile sensual imagery and commitment to heightened cartoonish grotesquery that he was deploying early in his career in wild, scattershot efforts like 1995’s The Doom Generation. He’s dialed back the intensity in the interim and, though it shares the DNA, Kaboom benefits from Araki’s more mature, experienced eye. The film’s no less of a mess, but it feels significantly more considered in its choices, a kind of careful craziness, a kind of tidy disorder to be found. It’s a sexy, vibrant jumble of weirdness and hilarity that is uneven but entertaining right up until its rushed climax that sucks the fun out of it all. To a certain extent, this feels like a deeply strange, very funny, sometimes creepy, often brilliant TV show with one or two seasons shoved into 80 minutes. With a complicated narrative structure of interwoven and overlapping hallucinations, amorous fantasies, drug trips, and bad dreams that culminates (spoiler!) in a literal apocalyptic explosion, the film keeps Dekker at the center, grounding it all. On a plot level it may be crazy and unsatisfying, but the metaphor rings true. To searching college kids floating around in hormonal ennui, the stakes of self-discovery can seem downright cataclysmic in proportions. 

A sturdy ensemble anchors The Lincoln Lawyer, a fairly standard legal thriller, the kind with twists that are only surprising to someone who has never experienced a legal thriller of any kind, not even an episode of Law & Order or a thick, forgettable airport novel. The script from John Romano, from a novel by Michael Connelly, gives Matthew McConaughey a rare suitable role that finds a way to channel his default sleaziness into an actual character. He’s an L.A. defense attorney working out of his car when he’s hired by a rich guy (Ryan Phillippe) who needs to beat an assault charge. The problem is that McConaughey begins to have good reason to think that his client really did brutally beat a prostitute and feels sick about defending him. He thinks his way through the criminal justice system, trying to alternately outwit and work with prosecutors (Marisa Tomei and Josh Lucas), cops (John Leguizamo and Bryan Cranston), an investigator (William H. Macy), and an inmate (Michael Peña). It’s all a slick bore. Now, this might sound like nitpicking, but the thing that most bugged me about this mediocre entertainment were the wobbly little zooms that director Brad Furman would drop into scenes for no apparent reason. A standard dialogue scene would be humming right along and then, zoom, we zip a little closer to the person talking. Sometimes, the zoom would take us back a few inches, just to mix things up. While I’ll admit that it’s definitely a minor stylistic tick and certainly not one that pervades every scene, it’s also indicative of a larger failing of Furman’s. This is a film that feels as if it’s breathlessly trying to become a better movie, but just can’t make it. Every little tick in the style just struck me as an empty gesture, a failed attempt to make the uninteresting interesting.

Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue, handsome and clean-cut in a way that invites easy empathy) is a young man who leaves the family business, a mortuary run by his father (Rutger Hauer), to attend seminary school. Flash forward to just before he is scheduled to become a priest. He’s lost his faith. He’s not sure he believes in God anymore, even (or is that especially?) when he witnesses a freak accident and kneels over a dying woman, reluctantly giving her the last rites. The head of his program (Toby Jones) asks him to reconsider his decision to abandon the church and gets him to agree to a trip to Rome where he will enroll in a class for exorcism training from the esteemed Father Xavier (Ciarán Hinds). Once there, he finds he still has his doubts. Aren’t the possessed simply mentally ill? He’s taken under the wing of a grave master exorcist (crinkled, latter-day Anthony Hopkins) and finds much to test his doubt. This is Mikael Håfström’s The Rite, which screenwriter Michael Petroni claims, in line with a dubious horror tradition, to be suggested by a true story. It coasts a bit too far on its easy pop-psychological pseudo-religious conflict, but has such a tremendously oppressive sense of somber, suffocating Catholic dread that I couldn’t help but be jangled about. The actors are fantastic all, matching the film’s earnestness and solemnity. It’s an essentially standard paranormal creeper, in many ways just shiny trash, but the deathly unsmiling tone of the film, matched with the high production value, especially the sleek cinematography from Ben Davis who photographs Vatican City in gorgeous, ominous ways, creates a tone of overwhelming skin-crawling danger. I fell into the film’s mood, matching its earnest approach with an unexpectedly earnest response. There’s a creeping sense of an invisible, evil spiritual threat that set my teeth grinding and my feet bouncing. It worked on me. Handsomely mounted and scarily serious, the film’s an effective freak-out.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is a leaden, slightly misogynistic, romantic-comedy reimagining of Dickens’s Christmas Carol. Matthew McConaughey, in full smarmy “heeeey there” drawl, is the romantic Scrooge who shows up at his brother’s wedding (Breckin Meyer and Lacey Chabert play the bride and groom) and makes everyone unhappy until a visit from three ghosts - you know the drill - makes him stranger but ultimately more pleasant to be around. Will he also learn that Jennifer Garner really is the love of his life? Take a guess.

This is a particularly uninvolving movie and a dumb, slow, uneven one as well. There’s no wit or imagination to the proceedings, no human spark. The characters move about as plot delivery devices, talking only in vapid generalities. The movie is not even particularly well-shot, often resembling a bad sitcom at worst with hacky passionless workmanlike framing at best. Director Mark Waters has directed two pretty good comedies - Mean Girls and the remake of Freaky Friday - but seems unable to make this material into anything worthwhile. Maybe it's the ghosts; his Just Like Heaven didn't really work either, but at least it had some nice moments.

Ghosts is the kind of movie where I found myself scrambling to get an entry point into the material to no avail. It’s too bland, too vanilla, too predictable, and too predictably bad. The best I could find was the welcome presence of screen veterans Robert Forster and Anne Archer as the bride’s parents. They haven’t been in anything good in a long time, but they bring some class and dignity with them and are miles more compelling than any other characters in this wreck. Their wrinkled, twinkly faces don’t grace the screen often enough, and their characters are left in the background most of the time. That the best moment the two of them are allowed is shoved in the margins of the end credits is a shame. I would have followed those two out of this movie and into a better one if I could have.

The biggest problem with the movie, beyond the general lackluster scripting and execution, is McConaughey himself. He drawls and leers and is expected to gain our sympathy throughout his ordeal. That doesn’t happen. He just drawls and leers some more until there’s a mad rush in the third act to make us believe he changed. The movie still would have been bad had this been handled better but shouldn’t an attempt to moralize and sermonize have a better grasp on its own message? The point the movie ends up making is: objectify women until it doesn’t make you feel good. How’s that for a take-home lesson? Aesop it ain’t.

This is a fairly terrible time at the movies. It is not good that the best I can say for it is that it didn't make me churn with anger. When the woman sitting behind me changed from repeating lines to her group to predicting lines for her group, I knew the movie was a particular brand of bad. That she still seemed to be enjoying herself was merely depressing. I should have just seen Star Trek for the third time instead.