Wind River

Alternate Title:  Home on the Range

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  A professional hunter and an FBI agent try to solve a brutal murder on an Arapaho reservation in remote Wyoming.

Things Havoc liked: As anyone who listens to my end-of-year podcasts already knows (and that is all of you, right?), last year was a pretty dismal year for movies. It happens. But one of the shining exceptions was the neo-western crime thriller Hell or High Water, a superb film set in the bleak landscape of the West Texas plains, about a pair of brothers robbing banks to try and save their family's farm, while being pursued by Texas Rangers. I waxed eloquently over the virtues of Hell or High Water twice, once during the review itself, and once during the best-of-the-year Havoc Awards, but what I did not know when I was waxing-so was that the writer of that film, a man named Taylor Sheridan, who also wrote Sicario, was in the process of making the leap from writer to writer-director of another windswept neo-western, this time a murder mystery set in the magnificent desolation of North-west Wyoming.

And it's amazing.

Wind River is one of the best films of the year, a staggeringly-good and unflinching character-and-setting study mated with an excellent murder-mystery. Like Hell or High Water before it, it is a film with a tremendous sense of place, specifically in this case the Wind River Arapaho Reservation of Wyoming, a place which, in the dead of winter, is not particularly conducive to human life. Also like Hell or High Water, it is a quiet, subtle film, taking the time to languish over its setting and characters, indulging in the magnificent desolation of the wintry mountains, and punctuating things when necessary with scenes of brutal violence. I was always a fan of Sheridan's writing, his pedigree alone demanded that, but with this film he has vaulted himself into the ranks of excellent writer-directors, a perilous perch that few can ever attain.

Wind River stars Jeremy Renner, an actor I have long admired, as Cory Lambert, a Fish & Game agent who works in the remote Wyoming mountains. Lambert is white, but his ex-wife, and thus his son and daughter are or were Arapaho Indians, and his job as a predator hunter places him in close contact with the inhabitants of what everyone calls "The Rez". I say 'are and were' because Renner's daughter is dead, killed in unknown circumstances, as so many Native American women are, and found in a remote area with no evidence as to how she came to be there. As such, when he discovers the body of another young woman in the snow, raped and dead of exposure, the daughter of a friend of his, he throws himself into the task of finding out what happened to this one girl with the aid of anyone he can find. Make no mistake, this is a tricky role, as it would be very easy to appear as the typical "white savior", or follow the Dances with Wolves trope of the white man being purged of his evil white guilt by becoming an Indian, but the film is too well-made, and Renner too good an actor to fall into these pitfalls. A standout scene early on in the movie has an FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) inadvertently insult the grieving parents of the murdered girl through ignorance and officiousness, only for Renner to show up moments later to ask more or less the same questions, but with a completely different attitude and level of experience with the culture he's dealing with and the people he's talking to. Lest I sound like I'm picking on Olsen, though, she's excellent as well, a fresh-faced FBI agent who knows next-to-nothing about the situation she's been dropped into except for the fact that she knows next-to-nothing about it, which is the most important fact of all. Aware that the only reason she was sent to the Reservation was because crimes there are considered unimportant, she does her level best, conscious of her inadequacy for the task, because nobody else is coming.

But while Renner and Olsen are both very, very good, it's the supporting cast that really sells the film. Gil Birmingham, of Hell or High Water (and the Twilight series, though we'll forgive him for that), plays the aforementioned father of the aforementioned murder victim, a small role that is nonetheless fantastically-well-done, combining existential-grade grief with a practical side generally missing from roles like this one. Graham Greene meanwhile, one of my favorite character actors working,
plays the Reservation Police Chief, whose task it is and has been for years to try and police an area the size of Connecticut with six men. As this is manifestly impossible, Greene's character, like everyone else, simply does what he can do, despite everything, and Greene is exceptionally good at showcasing someone whose choices are cynicism or doggedness, and whose chooses the latter with open eyes despite all evidence to the contrary. There is also an extended flashback sequence involving Kelsey Chow and Baby Driver and Fury's Jon Bernthal as Natalie, the murdered girl, and Matt, her boyfriend, both of whom are superb, as are a host of other more minor actors such as James Jordan. This sequence, though difficult to watch (it involves murder and rape, among other wholesome pursuits), is one of the best scenes of the sort that I have ever seen, a sequence that showcases, without histrionics or dramatic irony, just how the most heinous of crimes can come about through a combination of alcohol, testosterone, group dynamics, and unrestrained escalation. Were the film nothing but this scene, it would justify its existence, but as it stands, it is the jewel in the film's crown.

Indeed, the entire film is remarkably well-made, from the gorgeous cinematography and understated

score, to the brief, brutal flashes of violence that erupt without warning. It calls back, quite consciously, to westerns and crime dramas like Unforgiven, Collateral, or Heat, using referential shot selection and self aware stylism. The soundtrack is all mood-music, western-influenced electronica and rock, primarily scored together by legendary musicians Warren Ellis and Nick Cave (the latter of whom holds the most awesome nickname in history as "Rock Music's Prince of Darkness", bestowed on him by Johnny Cash of all people). The pacing is slower than any of Sheridan's previous works (probably an effect of him directing, this time), but the result is a sombre, windswept, dramatic piece that doesn't luxuriate in darkness or give in to rabid polemic. It's a balancing act that gets more impressive every time I think about it. It's close to being a masterpiece.

Things Havoc disliked: Honestly, there's not much wrong with Wind River whatsoever, at least nothing that isn't clearly done for effect as opposed to sloppiness. Some of the predator/prey symbolism is a bit on the nose for my taste, but that's the risk that comes with shooting movies in the American West, an area rich with scenic mythology and symbolic landscapes. There are also a handful of plot cul-de-sacs that are reasonably well-established before being dropped unceremoniously, such as Renner's relationship with his son, ex-wife, and in-laws, all of whom get time devoted to their setup, all of whom are forgotten about in the aftermath of the film's payoff. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a bit of tonal whiplash on occasion, as the film oscillates between hyper-realistic murder-mystery and sudden, explosive gun battles (I'm not quite sure what the end-game of someone who decides to start a shootout with six cops and the FBI is). But overall, none of these issues mar the film's qualities beyond the occasional quizzical moment.

Final thoughts:   In case I've somehow been unclear, Wind River is a phenomenal film, one of the best neo-westerns I've ever seen, and a strong contender for the best film of 2017. I absolutely love and unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone even casually interested in westerns, thrillers, mysteries, or any one of the fine actors that appear within it. As for myself, I will be watching Taylor Sheridan closely for whatever he does next, as a new filmmaker capable of producing a movie this good can only either continue to make spectacular movies, or can take the Michael Cimino/Tod Browning route, and follow up their breakout hit with a movie so off-kilter that it bankrupts their studio and gets them blacklisted from Hollywood forever.

Either way, it'll be fun to watch.

Final Score:  8.5/10

Next Time:  And now we consider another sober and reasonable film in which Taron Edgerton beats a man with his own arm.

Crimson Peak

Alternate Title:  Alice in Jotunheim

One sentence synopsis:     An American writer who can see ghosts marries an impoverished British Baronet, and comes to live with him and his sister in their ancestral manor.


Things Havoc liked: I just don't know what to do with Guillermo del Toro anymore. Frankly, I don't think I ever did. He's a talented, truly original director who is also frustrating as hell to me as a moviegoer because I simply don't know what I'm going to get from him for any given film. Will I be seeing a movie from the visionary, fantastical, brilliant action-fantasy director who brought me Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy? Or will I be seeing a movie from the cheap, low-concept genre hack who brought me Mimic, Blade II, and Pacific Rim. Admittedly, a director who gives me great and bad movies in alternating sequence normally represents a worthwhile investment, but we exist in a movie landscape that suddenly seems to be replete with visionary Mexican directors such as Alfonso Cuarón or Alejandro González Iñárritu, and inconsistency like del Toro's really begins to mar the experience. I rely on trailers, history, and my own native good sense (pause for laughter), to make my weekly selections, and when the trailer promises a horror film livened only by the promise of a director who in his last picture failed to make giant robots awesome, well... you can see why I put this one off.

And yet del Toro is a talented director, a very talented director even, and while I'm beginning to tire of the old excuse for bad movies that "at least they have good visuals", the fact remains that there's good visuals, and then there's del Toro's visuals. Even in crap like Pacific Rim, del Toro has always had a masterful eye for dressing a camera shot, and that remains the case in Crimson Peak. We've all seen haunted old mansions before, but del Toro's version gives us a mansion that, rather paradoxically for a horror film, is all big, open areas, be they the towering central atrium of the mansion's ground floor, to the barren, snow-swept fields of the surrounding region, sparsely-studded with arcane machinery. Even when the film descends into haunted cellars and spooky corridors, the lighting is ample and the spaces large, ensuring that the area never feels claustrophobic. This is a particularly weird choice for what is ostensibly a horror film, but del Toro seems to want his imagery to provide the necessary thrills by itself, rather than through penning the audience in. Some of the more evocative shots involve the malformed ghosts standing or floating openly in broad daylight, with plenty of room around them to highlight their alien-ness. Forget letting your imagination do all the work, del Toro has created a visually rich panorama, and you are going to look at it dammit, drink in every last drop, and let those images scare or impress you.

Indeed, I'm not even sure that the intention is to be scary, as del Toro seems to go out of his way to replace fright with atmosphere. Elaborate explanations, often established in advance, greet every manifestation of strangeness, from a rich blood-red clay that stains the ground around the manor and bleeds from the very walls, to the arcane sounds and groans that permeate the house. The characters, inured to strangeness like this as they are, consequently pay the presence of such disquieting images very little mind, even when it comes to ghosts clawing their way out of the floorboards or dripping bloody clay down the atrium as they float and moan. In a strange way, this makes sense for a del Toro picture. Pan's Labyrinth had a similar sort of spooky-but-not-scary atmosphere to it, a dark fantasy/magical realism approach completely at odds with the state of most horror films (Evil Dead comes to mind). Indeed that was one of the reasons I loved Pan's Labyrinth as much as I did, for rather than forcing the audience to cringe for jump scares all the time, it let us drink up the world that was being presented, dark though it might be. There's a subtlety to Crimson Peak, for all the haunting and mystery, and it's something I can appreciate.

As with most of del Toro's movies (though not all), the cast is something of an afterthought, but that doesn't mean they're bad at what they do. I love Tom Hiddleston, for instance, even when he's not playing Loki, and this role (a tall, austere, elegantly-charming British aristocrat with a troubled dark past) is the sort of thing that Hiddleston was born to play. As with his turn as Loki, we are never quite sure just what the hell his game is, is he a good guy, a bad guy, or merely troubled and dark (hint, hint). Jim Beaver, of Deadwood (a show you should be watching now), does a fine turn as the concerned father of our heroine, making an actual character out of something that could have been nothing more than a pastiche of an overbearing dolt. But the big surprise for me in the cast was Jessica Chastain, who continues to confound me by following up every boring, acting-free role of hers (Zero Dark Thirty, The Martian, Interstellar), with one that actually showcases some skill (A Most Violent Year, and now this). Nobody's going to confuse her with Meryl Streep or anything, but her role, as the disturbed sister of our favorite Trickster-god, is certainly animated, and involves a good bit of horror-trope acting before it's over.

Things Havoc disliked: So then with all those things, why didn't I like this movie more? Because this is a Guillermo del Toro film, perhaps one of the most del-Toroesque movies I've ever seen. And that means we don't just get visionary-del-Toro, we get the schlocky fanboy-del-Toro too. How else to explain the tone of this movie, which is the most fragmented thing I've seen since the last half hour of Django Unchained? The movie builds atmosphere relentlessly, stacking up visual images left and right, and then... all of a sudden at the drop of a hat, we're in Eli Roth territory, where horrific, violent shit is happening to characters nearby in a manner so over-the-top as to be grotesque.

I mean, I know what del Toro is going for here, and I'm not a prude. There's certainly a place for over-the-top gorey violence in film. I composed a pangyric to Mad Max for nastier stuff than this. And I understand that the intention here is to contrast the reserved, visual world with scenes of shocking horror, the way Pan's Labyrinth intercut all the magical realism and creativity with brutal sequences involving fascists and torture. Unfortunately, this time it doesn't work at all. Pan's Labyrinth maintained a stark division between the realistic scenes of awful horror and the mystical scenes of childlike fantasy, using the two of them as mirrors for one another. Crimson Peak is all visual magic and set-piece imagery, until all of a sudden we're hit with body horror and jump scares for a moment or two, and then back to the magical realism we go. This sort of tonal shift is a terrible mistake, as it drags the audience out of the world by shocking them into a completely different movie every time the film has built a bit of momentum. We simply can't let ourselves sit back and drink up the details of del Toro's world the way he wants us to, because he's already established that at the drop of a hat he's going to pull some hideous jump scare or gore-pile on us, and run off giggling about how he "got" us to let our guards down.

And none of this is helped by the fact that the camera is focused far, far too much on the weakest elements of the cast, among them Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, whom I last saw last year, pairing up with Tom Hiddleston in the far superior dark fantasy/horror film Only Lovers Left Alive. Wasikowska was perfectly good in that film, but this time she's gone full Tim Burton protagonist on us, playing a shrinking violet of a character who insists against all appearances that she's tough enough to deal with what's going on. Her acting is wooden and stilted, as it was in Alice in Wonderland and as I expect it will be in that film's misbegotten sequel, which we shall almost certainly not be considering when it comes out next year. Her character takes an agonizingly long time to recognize that there is anything even slightly odd about living in a house with no roof that bleeds from the walls, and reacts to truly worrisome events or mortal peril like she is being horribly inconvenienced and may have to actually raise her voice. Nor are things improved via the addition of Charlie Hunnam, last seen as the lead in Pacific Rim, where he played a character so boring that I remember nothing whatsoever about him. If nothing else, this film proves that Hunnam is consistent, for I continue to remember nothing whatsoever about him, which is a problem given the amount of time his character is afforded to prat around uselessly. Indeed that description can be thrown at most of the cast, who are so clueless that it takes the better part of a year and the consistent efforts of a concerned party to get anyone to realize that someone whose face was beaten in by multiple blunt force traumas may have experienced foul play.

Final thoughts:    Crimson Peak has some good shots in it, but a collection of good shots does not a good movie make. Bereft of a cohesive tone, and riven with jump scares or body horror shock moments as a substitute for a plot that would serve to amuse any moviegoer for more than a few minutes, the film is disjointed and lackluster. I have certainly seen far worse horror movies in my tenure as the Internet's foremost film expert (pause for laughter), but it does not serve as the return to form for Guillermo del Toro that I was hoping it might, and I doubt that after another couple of weeks, I will remember it at all.

Final Score:  5/10

Next Time:  Stop me if you've heard this one:  Tom Hanks confronts the enemies of the United States in a Steven Spielberg film set in war-ravaged Europe...

Black Sea

Alternate Title:  Nope Nope Nope Nope Nope...

One sentence synopsis:    A group of jobless submarine engineers try to recover a cache of Nazi gold from a wrecked submarine at the bottom of the Black Sea.


Things Havoc liked:  By now, if you've spent any time following this project of mine at all, you know that I tend to have pretty solid opinions on many of the actors that cross our list. Idris Elba is a pimp. Vincent D'onofrio can't act. Liam Neeson kills people in a growling monotone way too much. While I have not yet had much of an opportunity to opine on the subject of Jude Law, this seems to be as good an opportunity as any to remedy that fact. By and large, and with one or two notable exceptions (Gattaca, Sherlock Holmes), Jude Law sucks. He sucks for the same reasons that a lot of actors suck, not that he has a lack of talent, but that his talent is often misplaced, in Law's case in a series of unwatchable leading-men roles (Cold Mountain, A.I., Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) where his instructions from the directors seem to have been "be as bland as humanly possible". However, I've seen actors suffering from Leading-Man-Disease (Matthew McConaughey and Ben Affleck for instance) recover with the application of time, eventually no longer young enough to play bad roles and forced, by process of elimination, to play good ones. Usually this changeover is accompanied by the actor in question spontaneously playing roles filled with grit and dirt and lots of stubble, and so it was that while I didn't see 2013's Dom Hemmingway, the trailers for it alerted me that it was probably time to take a look at Mr. Law once again.

Captain Robinson (Law) is a Scottish (I think) deep-sea salvage expert, veteran of many years' employment, now found redundant and sent home with an impressive resume for a skill that nobody is demanding any longer. Fuming angry at having been cast aside, Robinson contracts with a number of other middle-aged-and-older engineers and experts in the field to go after a semi-mythical treasure nestled in the Black Sea, a German U-boat sunk carrying millions of dollars in gold bullion from the Soviet Union back to the Reich. In the time-honored tradition of caper/heist films like this, a crew of misfits and colorful characters must be assembled to accomplish this task, played in this case by a horde of character actors, including one of my favorites, Ben Mendelsohn (Place Beyond the Pines, Animal Kingdom), and the best thing from last year's Most Wanted Man, newcomer Grigoriy Dobrygin, he of the intense, fiery stare, and terse, laconic dialogue. Law, Mendelsohn, and Dobrygin (as well as a host of actors I don't know) all do a fine job with the material, snarling at one another through thick Scottish, Irish, Yorkshire, or Russian accents, exuding both shady behavior and cool professionalism, even as the film goes through its obligatory course, the natural one in this case for hard men trapped in a submarine under any conditions.

And indeed, the best quality this film has is professionalism. Kevin MacDonald, of One Day in September and The Last King of Scotland (and of my first-ever bad review, The Eagle, though we'll forgive him for that) handles this movie with a sure and competent hand, ensuring that the audience knows enough at any given moment as to what's going on without the need to stop and exposit. Everything is well-grounded in enough realistic-sounding engineering and science-talk, true or not, to keep us on track, some of it seemingly thrown in just for atmospheric purposes. Paradoxically, a movie that plays its material this straight can actually wind up being very hard to predict, as the iron-handed foreshadowing of most films that opt to let the audience understand just enough to catch onto the important plot beats, and thereby wind up highlighting exactly what's about to happen (Star Trek Into Darkness had a particularly bad example of this). In this film, a character will mention in a throwaway line that the air inside a wrecked submarine has long-since turned into chlorine gas, or that a cargo sledge being hauled in by a winch has to keep moving or the suction of the bottom sediment will fix it in place, and we simply don't know if these things are going to be important or not. And yet at the same time, unlike films such as Interstellar, the movie doesn't grind to a halt just so the filmmakers can impress us with their homework assignments, be they relevant or not. All the information we receive seems like something these men in this situation might say to one another. This is not as minor an achievement as it might seem.

Finally, submarining is simply one of those professions I will never do under any circumstances, and like the great sub films of yesteryear (Das Boot for instance), this film gets across very, very well why this is so. A nice twist on the old stories told in these films is that there are no depth charges raining down on our heroes from hungry destroyers up above, but all that means is that some of the other 9,816 things that can go fatally wrong when one is in a submarine are finally given some time to shine. Things go badly (it's a suspense movie, did you think everything was going to go smooth?) in the blink of an eye, generally with horrible consequences for all involved, and the crew must deal successively with everything from undersea cliffs and canyons to fire, electrical explosions, and of course, the omnipresent crush of the sea around them. Most thrillers like to pretend that they are keeping the audience in some suspense as to how things are going to turn out, while simultaneously doing all but screaming at them with megaphones that this character or that one is going to make it or die. This film takes the time to build up a character as important only to axe them in a nearly random fashion, simply to show you that it's willing to do so. You kind of have to respect a filmmaker whose approach to making a thriller is that of a hostage-taker trying to prove his willingness to kill to the police. Joss Whedon would be proud.

Things Havoc disliked:  Straight technical drama like this is fine, only someone churlish would ask for more than a good movie about an interesting topic, and yet filmmakers can get greedy sometimes, and this time I'm afraid to report that's just what happened. It's not good enough, you see, for the men to be trapped on a submarine where things start to go wrong. We also have to have conspiracies and psychotics to tide ourselves over.

I mentioned Ben Mendelsohn a moment ago, who is one of my favorite character actors, and like many such character actors, often gets typecast into specific kinds of roles. In Mendelsohn's case, it's usually someone on the edge of a psychotic break, or who perhaps has already had one, but is not letting it show. So it is here, as Mendelsohn's character, Frasier, is a violent maniac, who picks fights with the Russians for what seems to be no reason whatsoever, and is willing to murder people at the drop of a hat. That such people exist is not the point. The plot does not revolve around Mendelsohn being a killer or a psychotic, he simply is established as such, and then we go on our merry way as though nothing happened. I recognize that psychos do not need good reasons to kill people, that's a staple of film if not reality, but unlike every other element of the film this one is telegraphed waaaaay too directly, as Mendelsohn practically paints a message on his shirt in earlier scenes stating "I am an unstable element on this crew who will balkanize everyone by committing wholly unnecessary violent acts." A little setup isn't so bad, but the problem here is that the audience is made aware of this trait quite a long while before anyone on the crew is, meaning we have to spend a good portion of the film simply waiting for the characters to catch up with us.

And then there's Scoot McNairy, of Argo and Gone Girl, who here plays a character I can't even fathom the reason for. A "company man" sent by the organization setting up this little shindig, McNairy's role in the film is to be the obligatory stick-in-the-mud saboteur who complains at every opportunity that everyone is going to die and insists on doing the one thing that the main characters (and the audience) do not want them to do, preparatory to initiating hammer-weighted conspiracies with the rest of the disgruntled crew so as to force the main cast to play along. These sorts of characters (Burke in Aliens being the ur-example) usually serve as walking-comeuppance machines, designed to make the audience feel good whenever something bad happens to them. Fair enough, but in a crew of dedicated hard-asses already established as being willing to kill for their share of the gold in question, all of whom are inside a submarine beneath the ocean where nobody can tell what they are doing, why does anybody put up with this douchebag? Because the plot requires it? Because if they simply off him in the first hour (as I was hoping they would), then the further disasters he will be responsible for cannot occur? Filmmakers take note: you''re not going to lose the audience if the film allows the hard-assed killers to kill in a hard-assed fashion when the circumstances are appropriate. Their very ability to do this without losing the audience is the whole reason you cast hard-assed killers.

Final thoughts:   Like many films on this project, Black Sea is a movie of limited horizons, simple story about men attempting to perform a complex task, no complications, no Gordian plot-knots. I always feel bad not giving these sorts of films better grades, but I'm required here to tell you all what I actually think, and not what I wish I had thought so as to earn more credibility. Ultimately though, I did like Black Sea considerably more than I expected to, despite manifest issues with characterization and over-complicating the plot. Solid submarine films that do not involve World War II or deep-sea monsters are hard to come by, and good ones harder still. If that's your thing, I'd suggest giving it a look.

And even if it's not, trust me, in Doldrums season, it's best to take what you can get.

Final Score:  6.5/10

Next Time:  The chickens from my favorite movie of this project come home to roost.

The Drop

Alternate Title:  The Sopranos: Endgame

One sentence synopsis:  The bartender of a dive bar owned by the Russian Mafia must deal with violent lowlifes, battered women, the vengeful ex-owner of the bar, and a dog.


Things Havoc liked: I am fast becoming a massive fan of Tom Hardy, torchbearer for the next iteration of Mad Max, who has been uniformly excellent in recent years in films as diverse as Locke, Inception, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and The Dark Knight Rises (we won't talk about Star Trek Nemesis). I am becoming a fan of Hardy's because of his ability to play all sorts of disparate roles to perfection, from a tightly-wound, soft-spoken, Welsh building engineer in Locke, to the voice-distorted, hulking terrorist Bane in DKR. This time around, Hardy takes a stab at playing a New Jersey tough guy(of sorts), by the name of Bob Saginowski (thus marking the first time I have seen someone play a working-class tough guy in a gangster flick named Bob). Bob is the bartender at Marv's bar, a local dive for the working class patrons of whatever section of blue-collar Jersey this happens to be, lives otherwise alone, and seems to be at least partly... "slow" is perhaps the best word. This is his neighborhood, and he knows it well, and does not seem tremendously interested in much else outside it, and yet rather than turning into some kind of gangster-version of Forest Gump, Hardy plays him like a none-too-bright blue collar guy who simply knows where he is and accepts it. As always, this is a complete departure from Locke or Bane or anything else I've seen him play, and he is mesmorizing throughout, particularly as the background of the character and the things he may actually be good at begin to come to the fore.

But of course, the Drop is not famous for Tom Hardy's appearance, but because of that of James Gandalfini, in his last ever role, where (in a daring departure from his previous body of work), he plays a New Jersey tough guy with a thick accent who swears a lot. I kid, but Gandalfini here was playing to his strengths, while improvising just enough to keep it interesting. His character Marv is not a Tony Soprano analogue at all, save for the accent and location, but a frightened, bitter man, who has lost in life and knows it, and desperately wants to get back what he believes is his. The bar he and Bob work at is called Marv's Bar after all, and once it was his, until a Russian gangster (Michael Aronov) applied the right type of pressure to take over the bar. Though Marv still runs the place, it now functions as a "drop bar", where money from illicit activities is gathered and protected prior to collection by the mafia. Marv resents this interference, as anyone would, and yet the film is not precisely the story of his never-ending quest for vengeance, or what happens to those who cross Tony Soprano, but about the limits of what a guy who thinks himself tough may be when confronted with those who are truly ruthless. The toadying obsequiousness that Gandalfini displays around his bosses, and the bitter anger he offers when they're not around are wonderful to watch, clashing as they do with Bob's more pragmatic approach to everything.

And that's more or less it. The Drop is not a complex film nor a particularly violent one, but a superb exercise in staged tension and subtext, as Bob (and Marv) deal not only with the gangsters in question, but with Nadia (Noomi Rapace, in a much better turn than Prometheus), a local waitress whom Bob meets by chance, and Eric (Rust and Bones' Matthias Schoenaerts), her low-life ex-boyfriend, with whom Bob becomes entangled after he discovers an abandoned puppy in Nadia's trash that once belonged to Eric. The characters stare at one another and say very little, as in the best gangster movie tradition, in dark houses, a dark bar, the dark of night, or the slate grey of an overcast sky. Every situation is allowed to build, carefully amassing tension and building towards inevitable payoffs. The film maintains this measured, gradual approach the entire length, producing one of the more well-crafted thrillers I've seen in quite some time, an impressive feat for first time director Michaël Roskam, who has clearly seen his share of crime dramas, and deconstructed what makes them tick quite well.

Things Havoc disliked: Given the tightness that the film maintains around its central characters and story, I am left confused as to the purpose of Detective Torres, played by The Fast and the Furious' John Ortiz. His character is the token cop, a catholic (of course), who keeps tabs on our main character at confessional and who seems to be following the action with reports and briefings and all the usual stuff. Yet nothing really is ever done with this character, as he has practically nothing to do except occasionally show up and exposit information at our characters. I suppose every gangster film must have a cop in it, but it's generally only polite to give him something to do. The main thrust of the film is simply the interaction of Bob and Marv and the low-lifes and damaged people that surround them. The police have nothing to do with that, something confirmed by the end of the film.

Otherwise, all I can really point to is the fact that The Drop, as was probably inevitable for a freshman outing, is a very simple film, perhaps a bit too simple, given the runtime. It's not that it gets boring, far from it, there's just a limit to the horizons a movie that spends this much time on the question of who owns a dog can possibly have. I don't demand that every gangster film I see be the Godfather of course, but there's no end to the wonderful, triple-crossing fun you can have in movies like this, and this film, desiring as it does to avoid all the cliches of the genre, is left with a very plain story. Some may not prefer that.

Final thoughts:   I on the other hand have no problem whatsoever with being given a simple film done well once in a while. Too many directors, authors, actors, get airs about them, that they all must produce Coppolian works of earth-shattering weight and dizzying complexity for anyone to notice them, and that there is no room in their careers for subtlety or craft. Not that a big film is a bad thing, by any means, but there is room in film for a movie like this, a very simple, very effective, very tense thriller, which simply produces a number of characters about which we know little, and then lets us get to know them over the course of self-contained events that make logical sense. The Drop is one such movie, a tightly-crafted, finely-acted, highly effective thriller, about which there is not a vast amount to say, except that I wish all of my first-time directors could produce work of this caliber.

Now if he can avoid making a sophomore film like Under the Skin, we might actually be onto something.

Final Score:  7.5/10

A Most Wanted Man

Alternate Title:  Diablo Ex Machina

One sentence synopsis:    The head of a secret German counter-terrorism team tries to entrap a terrorist financier by manipulating a Chechen refugee and his lawyer.

WARNING: This review contains spoilers. There was little option but to employ them given the issues that arose. You have been warned.

Things Havoc liked:  Phillip Seymour Hoffman's passing earlier this year caught him in the midst of his customary massive workload, allowing us the next year or so to watch him in the various films that were still under production when he died. I've contrived to miss a number of these, boring indie fare as they seemed to be, but this one I was interested in, as John le Carré spy thrillers have a decent pedigree on film, and the subject of this one looked particularly interesting. Hoffman plays Günther Bachmann, a dumpy, middle-aged spy, as are basically all of le Carré's protagonists, head of a secret group of clandestine bagmen tasked with penetrating networks of terrorist cells both domestically in Hamburg and elsewhere. As anyone who has ever seen a John le Carré film or read a book of his can tell you, Hoffman was made to play a leading role in one of his books. Wandering about in a perpetual half-stooped slouch, Hoffman looks like nothing but another governmental middle manager of the type that seems to grace all the bureaucracies of Europe (and elsewhere). His character almost never raises his voice, doesn't scream or chase people, not even in the midst of enhanced interrogations, and looks ill-at-ease when called upon to report to formal superiors. His techniques rely on patience and surveillance, turning one asset after another to exert pressure against the next one. The skill with which he manipulates people caught in compromising circumstances is impressive, and by the end of the film, when four people are in a room discussing crime, three of whom are actually working for Hoffman, it all seems perfectly natural.

But Hoffman's merely one of many in this cast. Rachel McAdams, an actress I have successfully avoided up until now, actually does a fine turn as Annabelle Richter, a young immigration lawyer who allows ignorance and idealism to drag her way too far into a case she does not understand the particulars of. Watching her squirm as Hoffman plays her like a violin is exquisite, but not as exquisite as Willem Defoe, one of the weirdest men in Hollywood, here playing perhaps the most normal character he has ever touched, a bank manager whose father was involved in unscrupulous business, and who must do what he can to cover himself and his institution against liability and governmental interference. Iranian veteran actor Homayoun Ershadi, of Zero Dark Thirty and Agora, plays Dr. Faisal Abdullah, a seemingly-pro-Western Arab of means and influence whose secret funneling of money towards terrorist cells touches all of this off, his character only ever betraying bare hints of what he must actually be plotting. But the best of the bunch is unquestionably unknown Russian actor Grigoriy Dobrygin, whose character Issa is a scarred, skittish, half-Chechen trauma victim, who seems to be up to no good when we first see him, and only slowly do we realize is nothing but a scarred, broken refugee, scared and confused by his surroundings. The film plays a brilliant game with this character, using shot construction and expression to give us Westerners the unmistakable impression that we are looking at a Terrorist, only to pull the rug out from under us when he proves interested in nothing of the sort.

If I sound like I'm just reciting actors and their roles though, bear in mind that this film basically IS the actors and their roles, and the situations that such characters are inevitably going to be placed in by virtue of being around one another. We watch as Hoffman watches, as the characters are slowly ensnared in his web, turning them one by one into "assets" to be employed in the furtherance of his cause. And what is that cause? Not the destruction of his enemies nor the death of the aforementioned people, but information. We see Hoffman and his coterie use the Lawyer to get to the Banker, the Banker to get to the Doctor, and the Doctor to go on and get to others, penetrating further and further along until he can reach the actual source of the evil he seeks to fight. Along the way, as best he can, Hoffman does try to do his best for his assets, if nothing else because a carrot and a stick have more persuasive power than the stick alone. The Lawyer wants her client given refugee status. The Banker wants to have his past unexamined by society at large, and as these are things that are secondary to Hoffman's goal, he can get them in furtherance of it. Le Carré's stories are usually like this, procedural spy thrillers that eschew the Bond-esque escapades for realistic investigations on just how intelligence work is properly done.

Things Havoc disliked:  The problem though, is that this is not the only thing that le Carré's stories are usually like. And here's where we unavoidably get to the spoilers, because one of le Carré's other conceits, from as far back as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, is that everything to do with the United States is evil.

I mentioned spoilers above. I'm serious.

No, I'm not trying to turn this into another nationalist screed. I'm well aware of US intelligence's less-than-spotless record when it comes to the work we have done, both in the Cold War and the War on Terror. But there's a difference between wishing to point out the CIA's failings, and being obsessed by them. Zero Dark Thirty did the former, showing enhanced interrogations, unapologetically, and showing that they were useless wastes of time and effort to torture undeserving people for no gain. But this film has nothing whatsoever to do with the CIA, save only for the character of Martha Sullivan, the German Station Chief for the CIA played by Robin Wright. Initially this character is somewhat mysterious, as she appears only once in a while, and there mostly to bring up backstory about the main character and bounce ideas off of him, as well as provide the audience with some sense of the ticking clock going on back in Berlin. Fair enough. But in the last ten minutes of the film, this character suddenly morphs into Snidely Whiplash, who swoops in to wreck the operation, beat up everyone with goons, kidnap and destroy people's lives, and all for no conceivable gain whatsoever.

It would be one thing if this trainwreck were the product of ignorance, mistakes, or other elements established somewhere in the film, but it's not. It's instead the inverted equivalent of a Deus Ex Machina, wherein an outside element not previously established suddenly shows up in the middle of nowhere to ruin everything, irrespective of what any of the characters have and have not done up until this point. And why is this somehow an acceptable thing to throw into a movie that had been so scrupulously realistic until this point? Because the element in question is the CIA, and the CIA is axiomatically evil. They need no establishment, no motivation, no background, no characterization, nothing. To le Carré and his filmmakers they may as well be the Nazis, a plot device assumed by all to be evil without need for any such detail-work. A film interested in showing off the ways in which the CIA interferes with domestic intelligence would be one thing, as would one where the interplay between Hoffman and Wright led them to this state. This film however, is so intent on ensuring that the CIA gets mud thrown in their eye, that ultimately, the film would rather do that than actually tell its story, and literally breaks the entire narrative just so that they can make a cheap, smug point about how dumb, stupid, and recklessly evil the Americans are. So evil, in fact, that there's no need to even establish them as so. Their nationality does that well enough. The movie goes on as normal until an evil American who has nothing to do with anything suddenly destroys everything, and then it is over. Curtain up. Credits roll.

Final thoughts:    I don't hate this film. Indeed I quite liked this film up until the very end. What I hate is the underlying assumption behind it, that the need for ideological pie-throwing in the direction of the CIA is sufficient, by itself, to absolve the film from actually telling its story. It's as though le Carré, or Dutch director Anton Corbijn (whose last film, "The American", also suffered from this defect), feel that all they need do is stand on stage and say "Americans, AMIRITE?!" in order to get independent or European film critics to praise his daring exposure of the corruption that lies in the heart of those barbaric cretins from across the ocean. That said, as I once mentioned to a friend of mine whose hatred for a failed ending on an excellent video game was getting the best of him, a film that does everything right except for five minutes of its runtime is still a good film, even if it picks the worst possible five minutes to screw everything up in.

A few years back, I reviewed le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a film that I thought was highly confusing and erratic, albeit good despite. This film is considerably clearer than that one was, but all that managed to reveal is that sometimes an author's proclivities are best left opaque.

Final Score:  6/10

The Rover

Alternate Title:  Madder Max

One sentence synopsis:    A violent, dangerous drifter pursues the men who stole his car through the post-collapse Australian outback.


Things Havoc liked:  A year before I started doing these reviews, I saw an Australian gangster film called "Animal Kingdom" by a first-time director named David Michod. It was a wonderful little film, sparse and twisted and intensely realistic, and more than that, it managed to star several actors I don't like (Joel Edgerton, Guy Pierce) and make me like them despite our history. As such, when I learned that Michod had returned to the screen with another movie about bad people doing very bad things in the middle of Australia starring a pair of actors I couldn't possibly care less about, I knew I had to be there.

I've made no secret of my distaste for Guy Pierce in these reviews. He nearly ruined Iron Man 3. He wore terrible old-person makeup in Prometheus. He made The Time Machine, Lockout, and Two Brothers. And while obviously there are roles of his I have liked (Memento, LA Confidential, The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert), my distaste for his smug leading man schtick remains firmly intact. This role, however, is like nothing I've ever seen from Pierce. Eric, the main character of the film, is a murderous, violent demon, quiet and barely controlled, a sociopathic monster whose inclinations towards summary action are given free reign by the dire circumstances that society has fallen into. Yet Pierce does not play the character as a screaming maniac, but rather like a villain from one of Ralph Fiennes' better performances, Coriolanus perhaps, or even Schindler's List. Quiet, monosyllabic, and yet deeply disturbing, Pierce evidences a raging ferocity through nothing more than expression and eye movement, staring into the depths of people's souls like a drilling augur before killing them with ruthless, entirely non-cinematic efficiency. A scene early on where he attempts to buy a gun from a group of carnies, only to remorselessly murder them at the first sign of difficulties, cements the tone of the character nicely. Protagonist or not, this character, and men like him, are not victims of the fall of civilization, but the reason for it. And in the absence of the law, they are let loose to do as they would in pursuit of objectives that may well make sense only to themselves.

But Pierce, for all that I hate him, has been good in films before. His co-star, Robert Pattinson, of Twilight, has not. And yet moreso even than Kirsten Stewart, I wanted to give Pattinson another shot, as there were hints, I felt, that Twilight was not a fair means to judge his actual abilities. And while Stewart was simply not up to the task of headlining her second chance (Snow White and the Huntsman), Pattinson is on a completely different plane of existence here. Unrecognizable from his chaste pretty-boy persona in the Twilight series, Pattinson plays Reynolds, a redneck miner with a southern accent captured early on by Pierce's character and forced to take him to the hideout of his brother and their gang of car thieves. Lisping and confused, Pattinson plays the character like a victim of some kind of mild retardation, a damaged, naive, unfocussed loser, so dependent on others for direction that he willingly becomes Pierce's accomplice, despite the fact that Pierce himself seems to want little or nothing to do with him. Stuttering, limping, and simpering like a whining dog, Pattinson's performance is, astonishingly enough, the best thing in the entire movie, reminding me somewhat of Leonardo DiCaprio's turn in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which is not a comparison I make lightly. Indeed, I must admit that it occurred to me while watching this movie, that before he became the well-known and well-respected actor that we know today, DiCaprio had to make such teenage masterworks as Titanic and Romeo+Juliet.

The Australian outback is a punishing, unforgiving place, as anyone who has seen Mad Max can tell you, and consequently needs little to transform it into a perfect setting for a gritty, brutal movie of violence and death. Yet aware of this as he is, Michod decides against the usual tropes of post-apocalyptia, of souped-up cars worn by men in gimp masks and famous landmarks crumbling amidst the open waste. What exactly happened to render things so bad is not stated outright, but seems to have been less nuclear war and more stock market crash. Some facets of society still exist, the Australian military, the mining industry, precisely those you would expect to continue on in the aftermath of anything short of total annihilation, hardened and sharpened to a brutal edge. Money still circulates, though the Australian dollar is hinted as having become worthless, and shopkeepers will take nothing but US from behind their armored, gun-covered storefronts. Revealing comments, like one of Pattinson's that travel times are longer thanks to the lack of road maintenance putting a limit on people's effective speeds, or the doctor who takes care of dozens of dogs abandoned by their presumably-deceased owners, are the stuff of the collapse here, not lurid Emmerichian images of the Opera House in ruins. The shots are long and desolate, as much a western as an apocalypse film, as characters walk across barren plains into sharp sunrises, or loom menacingly before dark corridors in buildings full of armed men. The violence, when it erupts (and it does erupt) is fast and brutal and entirely uncinematic. People simply are shot and die and are then dead and the movie goes on, in the best traditions of any society-breakdown film.

Things Havoc disliked: I've got nothing against a movie that doesn't stop every five seconds to explain itself, but unfortunately, that only works if the movie doesn't leave major questions in its wake, and this one unfortunately does. Early on, after Guy Pierce has confronted the men who stole his car and is beaten unconscious for his trouble, he awakens on the side of the road, alive, and lying next to the thieves' original car, fueled and intact, with his money and his guns still on his person. Given the general tenor of this film, the question begs itself, why is Pierce still alive, let alone in possession of all the tools necessary for him to enact his crusade for revenge? It's not like the men who subdued him have been established as being possessed of particularly strong moral codes against killing, and the question as to why they have left him in this state is simply never answered, not even with a throwaway comment about how it would be 'wrong' to kill him out of hand or something. Similarly, characters find one another in the midst of the outback via methods that are never established, tracking them effortlessly over trackless desert to precisely the right locations, all without any indication as to how. I understand the desire to do away with the obligatory establishing material in favor of simply telling the story and implying the rest, but some establishment is required in order for the film to make sense. Another sequence early on had Pierce carrying an automatic pistol in one shot, and in the next, prominently carrying a revolver instead. After a minute's confusion and whispered conversation with my neighbor, I managed to construct a reasonable explanation for why Pierce suddenly had a different gun, but the fact that it was necessary for me to effectively stop watching the film for a minute and consult with friends in order to follow what was happening is not a good sign insofar as the film's editing is concerned.

There's also a simple question of pacing. The Rover is a slow, deliberate film, allowing tension to build out of empty spaces and unspoken lines, which is fine, but the tendency here is to push it a bit too far. Characters can never actually say anything without hemming and hawing for five minutes, and have to spend at least ten seconds of pregnant silence between every single short or monosyllabic line they pronounce. Used sparingly, this is an efficient technique, as evidenced by dozens of films including Unforgiven. But used constantly, all it serves to do is make most of the movie feel like padding as nobody, not even brooding loners staring into the campfire with rage-laden eyes, speaks like this constantly, and anyone who does would be so unsettling as to rapidly put anyone else off of their attempts to engage them in conversation. As it stands though, characters react to an wild-eyed, armed psychotic, visibly on the verge of a breakdown, whose words are clipped and quivering with rage, by smiling sweetly as though nothing is the matter and permitting him to walk about their homes armed and unsupervised. Given the state of society and the fact that everyone is so constantly on-edge against the predators that roam the roads, this is like making a Godzilla film wherein soldiers have been battling giant monsters for the better part of a decade, and then making everyone dismiss loud booming footsteps which shake the very walls as nothing but thunder, while stacking their weapons in another building and going back to sleep.

Final thoughts:  The Rover is a stark, well-acted thriller of a movie, an attempt to do Mad Max without the camp, but it's problems like these that really hold it back. Taken by themselves, the performances on offer here from Guy Pierce and Robert Pattinson are worth seeing in any context, but unfortunately the context in question is just not good enough for a full-throated recommendation. Michod's first film, Animal Kingdom, was damn near a masterpiece. It garnered Jackie Weaver a deserved Oscar nod for her turn as the matriarch of an Australian crime family after all, and yet this time round, Michod's lack of experience at the rest of the business of moviemaking is unfortunately on display. I will continue to watch this man's career with interest, as Rover was at least good enough to prove that the first film was not a fluke, but the systemic flaws of script, editing, and general pacing (something that seems to bedevil an awful lot of the films I see, Hollywood and otherwise) keep this from being anything but a niche recommendation.

But then, if all you're looking for is the exploits of a crazy man in the Australian outback killing people, you might still want to check this film out. It's not like that genre is overflowing with examples.

Final Score:  6/10

Evil Dead

Alternate Title:  How are the Mighty Fallen

One sentence synopsis:   Five young adults go to a cabin in the woods to enjoy a pleasant evening's conversation on the mysteries of life. (I wish.)

Things Havoc liked: I've never been a big fan of horror flicks. For one thing, I don't think any of them are scary so much as just gory, and while there is indeed artistry to gore, it's rarely found in the found footage dead teenager movies that one has seen over the last 20 years. Classics like Alien, The Exorcist, or the more recent Cabin in the Woods notwithstanding, this genre is wasted on me unless something different can be done with the material. That said, one of the few directors who ever managed to make horror entertaining to me was Sam Raimi, specifically in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, a pair of utterly classic comedy-horror movies starring the irrepressible Bruce Campbell. The very reason I liked them is indeed that they weren't the usual parade of horror movie cliches, the jump scares and over-the-top gore effects and teenagers backing into dark rooms one by one in search of a killer who will, obediently, kill them. Instead they were hilarious, slapstick-filled, rip-roaring pastiches of Z-grade horror shlock. Raimi went on to do bigger and (occasionally) better things thereafter, while Campbell went on to become the reigning king of B-Movies and star or co-star in awesome television shows. But as horror grew continuously stupider throughout the 90s and 00s, I occasionally looked back on those movies wishing that there was something else like them out nowadays. As a result, while I can't say I was looking forward to Evil Dead, I had some hope that with both Raimi and Campbell returning as producers, there might be some semblance of the magic of the old films here, something that would take me back to a memory of better times.

Things Havoc disliked: There was not.

Okay, admittedly, this movie has one of the better premises for five young men and women to go into the woods to an isolated cabin from whence there can be no escape (one of the characters is a Heroin addict undergoing an enforced withdrawal courtesy of her friends), but the mere fact that such an excuse has to be invented is indicative of the major problem here. Evil Dead is a movie about five young men and women going into the woods to an isolated cabin from whence there can be no escape.

I mean, is it really necessary for me to say anything else at this point? The original films were parodies of this sort of movie, mocking the pretensions of the Cabin Fevers and Friday the Thirteenths and all the other schlock horror movies that did nothing more than assemble a cast of young twenty-somethings and killed them in increasingly gruesome ways. Long before Scream thought itself original by pointing out that, *GASP*, horror movies are generally contrived exercises in nauseating stupidity, Evil Dead 2 took this notion for granted while crafting a hilarious slapstick romp around them, while Army of Darkness took the premise and ran with it straight off the Cliffs of Insanity, becoming a movie that was half Dragonslayer, half Ghostbusters. And after twenty-plus years and a budget thirty times the original, this is what Evil Dead now has to show us? This formulaic, paint-by-numbers five-man-band film in which the characters die in predictable, gruesome ways after making the most boneheadedly stupid decisions known to man? This is what Evil Dead has been reduced to? The tagline for the film declares that Evil Dead is the most terrifying film you will ever experience, but even if that had been true, whose fucking idea was it to remove the comedy from Evil Dead? Is the world not well-enough supplied with Dead Teenager movies as it is that they need to raid this franchise of all franchises? How can Sam Raimi, who practically invented the art of the horror-mockery, possibly hope to make a movie like this not 12 months after the release of Cabin in the Woods, a film that riotously skewered this exact movie premise. Is there really a single living soul in America who expects that a film in which five young people with no personalities are stranded in a spooky cabin, they will all come out the next day fresh and renewed, and ready for the challenges of a bright future?

And yes, some of this might have been forgivable (I guess) if Evil Dead actually lived up to the tagline, but this movie is neither terrifying, nor frankly even competently done. The basics here are all wrong. At times, characters die by simply being hit in the head with a door, while others linger on after being stabbed, mutilated, beaten, and shot repeatedly with a nailgun. Makeup effects, while visually gruesome, are terribly inconsistent, with characters' injuries changing or disappearing between scenes, whenever the plot "forgets" about the hideous compound fracture that someone sustained not five minutes earlier. Moreover, in grand horror film tradition, the characters are all the stupidest people alive. Even after evil forces are clearly seen to be at work, they walk alone into dark rooms and then spend long periods lingering over minute details on a wall or window while turning their backs on objects or corpses they should really not be turning their backs on. One sequence near the end of the film has one of the characters repeatedly wedge themselves into increasingly confined and inescapable spaces on purpose while being pursued by evil demons and undead monstrocities, only to be astonished when they find great difficulty in escaping from the evil forces that afflict them. Other characters do incredibly stupid things (read the evil book, pick up the evil object, summon the evil monster) for no reason whatsoever and then compound their stupidity by refusing to tell anyone else that they have just done these things. Within half an hour of the film's beginning, I informed my viewing companion that for the rest of the film, I would be rooting for Satan.

Final thoughts:    Evil Dead is the Richard Nixon of horror movies, a film that was once idealistic and hungry to stand out now reduced to a crumbling, reclusive ruin, aping the movies it once sought to pillory in quest of some quixotic drive I can scarcely guess at. The film is not atrociously made, but given its history, for Raimi to produce a film this generically awful is a measure of how tired he has become. Evil Dead II, for all its shlock, was a film that brimmed over with life and humor. Evil Dead, the remake, is a moribund piece of cinematic garbage, made all the worse for its association with a film series that was once great.

Final Score:  3/10

Zero Dark Thirty

Alternate Title:  The Hunt for Oscar Bin Laden

One sentence synopsis:   A CIA analyst tries to locate Osama Bin Laden and assembles a SEAL team to strike what she thinks is his hideout.


Things Havoc liked: Katherine Bigalow has established herself as the reigning queen of ripped-from-the-headlines modern military-espionage films, having transcended her mediocre-to-decent directing career (Point Break, Strange Days, K-19) with 2009's Hurt Locker, a movie which catapulted her into the A-list of Hollywood directors and garnered more awards than I can reasonably talk about here. That said, I was not tremendously eager to see Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow's take on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, as I was simply not interested in what I assumed would be another Hollywood take on the politics of the War on Terror.

Well consider me officially stupid. Zero Dark Thirty has nothing to do with politics, with pat excoriations of the villains of the last ten years, or really with anything that its many, many critics seem intent on accusing it of (we'll get to that subject). What it has to do with is procedure, the long, slow, agonizing process of a CIA agent trying to hunt down and find Bin Laden in the face of great care taken by he and his handlers to ensure he cannot be found. Said Agent, named only "Maya" in the movie and based, apparently, on an actual agent still undercover with the CIA, is the narrative focus of the first two thirds of the film, as we watch her single-mindedly and even obsessively hunt for clues to Bin Laden's whereabouts for more than eight years, operating from both Pakistan and Virginia. Maya is a cypher, entirely work-focused, hinted to be almost entirely without a personal life, and utterly relentless in her search, casting aside the advice of friends and the objections of bosses alike as she tracks down Bin Laden, step by awkward step. Yet the search itself is portrayed with more care than perhaps any procedural sequence in any film I've ever seen. The obstacles Maya encounters seem both real and reasonable, and we get an excellent sense of just how a CIA analyst manages to do their job, sifting through mountainous piles of data to distill the solution they are looking for. The people Maya has to push through are not carbon-copy "unlistening idiots" but reasonable CIA agents with reasonable objections to Maya's obsession, several of whom even question if Bin Laden is relevant anymore on the stage of international terrorism. She threatens and cajoles her way through such obstacles, not in scenes of screaming insanity (okay, mostly not), but in sequences that we can imagine happening. At one point we meet a new boss of her station, who approves her demands for more resources with the comment that he was told by his predecessor it's just easier to give her what she wants.

And what does she want? Why to find Osama of course, and the process of finding him is an involved one. We see scenes of torture, waterboarding and beatings and other such activities, but the film makes clear fairly early on (though not clear enough for some) that torture is not yielding useful results, and that more subtle methods will be required. The film is then about these methods, as associates of Bin Laden are laboriously identified, tracked, pegged to this part of Pakistan or that part of Libya, their cover identities are penetrated and their movements monitored. All the while, the War on Terror rages on around Maya and her small coterie of co-workers and associates, claiming the lives of more than one, and placing her in some (though thankfully not belabored) jeopardy from the other side. The overall picture we get of the CIA is a group of people, some right and some wrong, but all doing what they think is best to try and stymie the acts of ruthless men who wish to kill Americans. Their work is neither dramatized nor shoehorned into someone's idea of the politics of the world, and as with last year's Argo, it is a refreshing sight to see. The addition of such actors as Mark Strong, Jason Clarke, and James Gandolfini (finally not playing Tony Soprano) helps cement this as one of the best procedural spycraft films I've ever seen, particularly late in the process as teams of CIA men are working on the ground in Pakistan to try and trace a cell phone, all while options are being rationally considered and discarded by officials back in the US.


Things Havoc disliked: I've avoided, until this point, mentioning that Maya is played by Jessica Chastain. I've done this because, frankly, she's just not that good.

I know, I know, this is insanity. Chastain has been nominated for Oscars and just finished winning the Golden Globe Awards. I know. But I have to call these things like I see them and Chastain is way, way off course with this one. I can forgive that she looks about 22, but I can't forgive that she acts like she's 22. I said above that the movie is about careful, controlled work used to ultimately bring Bin Laden down, but in between scenes of said work, we get scenes of Chastain trying to act tough to her superiors, to the detainees, to anyone who gets in her way. Everyone reacts to her like she's some firebrand spy who can destroy the reputations of those who cross her, yet all we see is a child throwing a tantrum. Her efforts to appear driven just come across as petulant, consequently forcing us (or me at least) to constantly imagine that the other actors are reacting to someone else who is delivering their lines in a more reasonable manner. At one point, she begins a process of writing passive-aggressive notes on the glass office door of her boss at the CIA to protest why nothing is being done to follow up on one of her leads, something I could understand if she did not continue to write said notes even after her leads are being followed up on by the boss in question, as though he had done nothing at all. I don't pretend to know how the CIA works, but I would not expect to remain long-employed if I engaged in behavior like that, not even in Government.

There's also the issue of the last third of the film. This would be the part that deals with the actual raid on the Bin Laden compound, a raid presented in an extremely realistic manner and (it appears) in real time. I can appreciate the artistry of such a sequence, and the skill that no doubt had to go into producing it, but the fact remains that while this raid is presented, I'm sure, with the greatest of fidelity to the real raid, the film is not actually about this military operation, and shifting over to it for a full 45 minutes is jarring as all hell. Having spent an hour and a half watching a set of characters search for Bin Laden even as terrorists try to strike back at them, we are now suddenly in the company of an entirely new set of characters, none of whom we have met before or know anything about, as they laboriously clear the compound room by room, ultimately shooting Bin Laden down (spoiler alert) and returning to base. As we know that the raid happened and was a success even before sitting down in the theater, I am left with the question of just why the sequence was given so much prominence within the film. Real military operations are systematic affairs, neither flashy nor terribly interesting to watch, and this one consumes a full third of the movie's run-time, all to get us to a point that we knew, going in, we were going to get to from the beginning.


Final thoughts:   I don't want to give the impression that I hated this movie, for I did not, nor that its flaws were crippling, for they were not. But a movie being touted as a strong contender for Best Picture awards must receive higher standards of scrutiny than the rest of its fellows, and Zero Dark Thirty is simply not the masterpiece that it is being described as. That said, it has also been the recipient of a great deal of political criticism, accused of being either an endorsement of torture (a laughable claim to anyone who has actually seen it) or pro-Obama propaganda about the inhumanity of the Bush Administration (an even more laughable claim). This would normally be the place where I respond to such criticism, but as I mentioned in my Django Unchained review, I don't tend to consider seriously the objections of people who have manifestly never seen the film in question. Zero Dark Thirty is, ultimately, an very good movie, but however it does on Oscar night, it is not destined to be remembered by me as one of the highlights of 2012.

Final Score:  7/10

Cloud Atlas

Alternate Title:  The Story of Us

One sentence synopsis:  The lives of a group of people cross again and again throughout the past, present, and future.


Things Havoc disliked:  Yes, I know that normally I start with what I liked, and leave the whining until later, but this time I had to get something out of the way:

I don't like it when movies decide they're too smart for you. I don't like it when they go out of their way to be impenetrable, artifice-laden slogs. I don't like having to disentangle a movie from the pretensions of their authors, and I absolutely hate it when the movie compounds this issue by playing around with the basic language of cinema for some bullshit 'cognitive effect' dreamed up by an overindulged 'artiste'. Setting, character, shot selection, coherent editing, narrative flow, these are not optional elements in a film, they are the mechanisms by which the fever dreams of a cinematographer's imagination can be translated for the rest of us, and films which abuse these elements for the purposes of showing off how superior they are tend to arouse my ire.

Cloud Atlas, based on a novel by David Mitchell, is an unfilmable mess, worse by far than the Lord of the Rings adaptations ever were. The novel consists of six different stories told across time and space, linked together by the fact that many of the characters in each one are the re-incarnations (I assume) of one another. I am forced to assume this, as opposed to knowing it, because while in the film version of this novel, these characters are played time and again by the same actors, what is actually going on is never, ever explained. Some gestures are given to magical birthmarks, some to deja-vu, some to spiritualism and some to God, but we are clearly meant to simply sit back and accept the central conceit, something that would be much easier to do if it were made clear at any point if the characters played by such actors as Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Kieth David, or Hugo Weaving (to name only the ones I recognize) are meant to literally be the same person brought forth in a new time and place, the descendents thereof, or something else entirely. I just finished the entire movie, and I couldn't tell you the answer.

Indeed, I can't tell you a whole hell of a lot about this film, not even if I had the time to sit down and parse out the various narratives of this story one by one. Part of the problem is that the stories are tied together so closely and with such rapid shift from one to the next that we scarcely have time to get our bearings in terms of what is actually happening in one tale before we're whisked off without warning or hesitation to another. Worse yet, several scenes actually have the temerity to flash-forward within the same (or even a different) narrative, further confusing everybody as to just what's happening. And as though that wasn't enough, one of the larger narratives takes place with the characters speaking some kind of post-apocalyptic argot that's effectively incomprehensible. And since subtitles (or, you know, English) would spoil the majesty of whatever brilliance the filmmakers are deigning to place before us plebeian swine, I still have no idea what most of the characters in that sequence were saying. Of course, this would be the one plot thread where the directors decide to actually slow down and linger for a time.

You can therefore imagine my frustrations as I sat through this interminable (three hour) movie, completely lost as to what was going on, who the characters were, what they were doing, and even what words they were speaking to one another. What greater point the movie was trying to make was only dimly perceptible beneath layers of artifice, confusion, and artistic chaos. And all I could think of as I sat there, was that eventually it was going to be my task to come home and try and make sense of this mess to the rest of you.


Things Havoc liked:  And then, around the 45 minute mark or so, something very strange began to happen...

Each of the six stories that we are told here, taken in and of itself, carries a different theme and a very different tone, all this despite the actors occurring and re-occurring within each one. Some of these actors, like Hugo Weaving or Halle Berry, are constantly playing the same basic character archetypes (slimy villain and intrepid explorer, respectively), set down in settings as varied as a 19th century ship, 1970s San Francisco, or the distant future. But what began to dawn on me was that other characters, particularly those that Tom Hanks portrays, are not. Hanks portrays, at times, a violent thug who brutally murders people in a drunken rage (his cockney accent leaves something to be desired), at times a nebbish scientist dragged into doing the right thing against his will, and at other times a cowardly fisherman trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world of cannibalism and death. He's not alone. Jim Broadbent goes from a murderous, virulently-racist ship captain one moment to a conniving book publisher trapped in a mental hospital, while Jim Sturgess and Korean actress Bae Doona go from demure Victorian aristocrats to fire-breathing rebel leaders in an Orwellian superstate. Once this became apparent, and it took some time, it dawned on me that what was being represented here was not a specific set of characters, replayed through the ages like broken records. What was being represented was a range of human experience. And how some people, for better or worse, can change over time, and some people, for better or worse, cannot.

This recognition, such as it was, was the first of many within this film's enormous running time, and as the movie moved on, I became more accustomed to what it was trying to tell me, and more importantly, how it was trying to tell it. What appeared at first to be maddening artifice slowly evolved into a different language entirely than the one I was used to experiencing in movies. The overlap between the stories, I came to realize, was not based on tone or scene tension levels (action scene links to action scene, for instance), but based around something else entirely, specifically the relationships between all of the various characters at given moments, and the resonances, not repetitions, that their interactions had as they rippled across time and space itself. And once I had gotten over my confusion, even in the slightest degree... what a tremendous landscape this film unveiled before me.

Every element to this film, taken by itself, is done extremely well, with great fidelity to the style and times required. The pastoral periods, be they pre-civilized or post-apocalyptic, are shot in glorious, vibrant color, while the futuristic dystopia setting has dark, gritty cinematography livened by bursts of bright visual effects, ones that honestly resemble Tron more than they do the Wachowskis' famous Matrix trilogy. The cinematography changes too, from broad canvasses appropriate to adventure films for the 1840s scenes, to a blocky procedural style for the 1970s segment, and to a more modern caper-flick Scorsese-inspired set of sweep-shots and held takes for the sequence taking place in the modern day. The major linking factor through all this is the truly incredible score, written by co-director Tom Tykwer, a score that somehow manages to make the same piece of music work for adventure, action, romance, and inspirational scenes all at the same time. It is able to do this because, as with everything else in the film, the important element isn't what scene is currently playing, but the overall tapestry of human experience that the movie is trying to portray, and a score appropriate to that will by definition be appropriate to every scene that represents it.

Indeed, Cloud Atlas might be one of the boldest films ever made, a sprawling, elaborate spectacle, both visually and in the sheer complexity of its narrative, which twists and turns around itself like a helix, filling every scene, every shot with detailed references to other stories, past or future. It's true that none of the individual stories that comprise this enormous offering are terribly nuanced by themselves, but taken in summation as they are, the stories buttress one another to produce a larger, more universal narrative, reflecting the themes of power, love, abandonment, indifference, and hope. Life, at times, is not terribly nuanced either, and only when combined with the stories of the lives of everyone that surrounds us does it acquire definition. This is not the sort of re-incarnation story where we see characters play out the same tale over and over again with changes of costume and scenery. Every story, every relationship, every moment of this film is unique to itself and yet rhymes in a strange, almost rhythmic way with moments and scenes scattered across creation. The various tracks that the movie jumps between with such frequency are not actually individual stories, but elements of a larger, cohesive whole, simultaneously unified and multifold, a record of human experience throughout the ages, and the ways that the black evils and selfless kindnesses that we do for one another resonate with people we never meet, whose lives we can scarcely imagine.


Final thoughts:  If the above sounds inane, meaningless, or like a particularly bad bout of over-analysis, then I apologize, but this is a film that defies easy description. Some critics have savaged the film for being a plodding bore, others for being overly full of itself, and some even for being horribly racist (several actors change their ages, genders, and even races for some of their characters, not always with the most convincing of effects). And yet, if I am to be brutally honest with everyone, I can't possibly describe it in terms other than near-rapture. I've seen dozens, hundreds of films in my life, both before and during this grand experiment. And yet I cannot name more than a handful of movies that have left me with such a feeling of awe and wonder as this one did. All the complaints I leveled against it in the beginning are true, and remained true throughout the movie, and yet at some point, I simply began to perceive what this film was trying to show me, and like an incomparably intricate Swiss clock, every element simply slid into place. What response it will generate from others, I cannot possibly speculate, yet the passion, heart, and empathy of the film are so strong as to be overflowing, all without once veering into maudlin or mawkish sentimentality. It is, without question, one of the greatest films I have ever seen.

'We are all connected to one another,' says one of the characters in this movie repeatedly, and indeed both the narrative and the thematic hearts of the film are encompassed within the above statement. This film's subject matter is no less than the interwoven nature of our lives, not in some basic tit-for-tat sense, but in all its glorious, majestic complexity. It shows us as we are, billions of individual threads dancing around and between one another, forming iterative patterns much greater than ourselves, simultaneously newly minted and long-worn. When revealed in all its glory, the resulting tapestry is vast beyond scope, yet infinitely detailed, a fractal pattern repeating itself forever, and each time in a manner wholly new. We call the result History.

Final Score:  9.5/10