Monday at the Movies - January 2, 2012

Welcome to the first installment of "Monday at the Movies," the first of what should be a more frequent way of updating the blog without the time-consuming aspect of full reviews. Full reviews aren't gone by any means, but they'll be more infrequent and saved for special occasions (good or bad). Check back each Monday for a look at what The Cinema King's been up to and what he's thought during his travels.

(This post will be a bit longer than usual, since I'm playing "catch-up" on the movies I've seen in the last month or so. Christmas is a great time for the movies.)

Fail-Safe (1964) – I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m in love with Sidney Lumet’s work, and this was a bit of an unusual choice for a New Year’s Eve movie choice. But as always with Lumet I wasn’t disappointed. The film’s treatment of measures to prevent an accidental attack on Moscow in the height of the Cold War still carries all the tension it must have fifty years ago, due in large part to Lumet’s capacity to induce anxiety via his careful manipulation of the camera. High marks also to Henry Fonda, who brings his trademark integrity and earnestness to the role of the troubled President of the United States, who has to convince the Russians that the bombers are not sanctioned while wrestling with a number of impossible moral conflicts – which are then asked of the audience at the film’s startling and alarming conclusion. While the film becomes a bit heavy-handed when the President deplores the policy of mutually assured destruction, Fonda’s intense delivery sells it in a way akin to Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). If this film doesn’t grip you and hold on until the very end, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) – Stieg Larsson’s runaway bestseller gets a stellar treatment here in the hands of director David Fincher. The book was addicting like very few I’ve ever read, and the film doesn’t disappoint. Fincher keeps the plot moving (despite a few tweaks from the novel) in a quick and cerebrally engaging way, but the real star here is a career-making performance from Rooney Mara as the troubled hacker Lisbeth Salander, who embodies the character and all her subtle quirks opposite a typically stoic Daniel Craig. The suspects in the disappearance under investigation – Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, Joely Richardson – all do good work, especially Skarsgard who never disappoints (see Pirates of the Caribbean, Thor, and Mamma Mia for a sense of his range). I’m willing to forgive Trent Reznor for stealing last year’s soundtrack Oscar from Hans Zimmer, because the music here is suitably unsettling, creating a mood perfectly complementary to the visuals Fincher crafts. The film might leave some cold because it’s not standard Hollywood/awards season fare, but it’s a movie which requires thoughtful engagement and a critical understanding of the “man’s inhumanity” theme that pervades the work.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) – I can’t remember the last time I saw a straight action film, one that didn’t play games with the audience or deliberately try to subvert the genre with a series of improbable twists. Pixar veteran Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) does a fine job with this fourth Mission: Impossible film, which fortunately doesn’t require the first three installments to make sense. The acting doesn’t accomplish much beyond providing bodies to live out the film’s action sequences; it’s impossible, for example, to forget that Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise and not Ethan Hunt. But those action sequences are something else indeed, thrilling and exciting in the best escapist tradition. Kudos to Bird for yanking the breath out of my lungs even in moments when I knew that they wouldn’t kill the star, and if the franchise continues like this (even with Jeremy Renner, who seems to be groomed for taking the reins) I may have to accept this mission.

Panic in the Streets (1950) – This, my first experience with the legendary director Elia Kazan, wasn’t a knockout. The premise is promising: investigators have 48 hours to find the murderers of a plague victim before they infect New Orleans with the disease. Richard Widmark is more than capable as a public health official, and a young Jack Palance is appropriately ominous as the murderer, but the film suffers from a split focus, never finding a balance between pursuer and pursued. There are long stretches of film where we don’t see Widmark, for example, a problem which drops a lot of the tension in the film. Compounding this problem is a dated and distracting misunderstanding of germ theory, which makes some of the film’s twists a bit, shall we say, inaccurate. Perhaps in the 50s it held up better, but as the second installment in a TCM double feature with Fail-Safe, Panic in the Streets didn’t raise much commotion for me.

Rango (2011) – I had extremely high expectations for director Gore Verbinski’s first animated film. And being a big fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the inclusion of Johnny Depp as the star was icing on the cake. Unfortunately, I think my high expectations were insurmountable for the film, which ultimately disappointed me. The story of a thespian chameleon who becomes the sheriff of the town of Dirt, Rango flirts with the western genre without ever doing anything productive with that sporadic flirtation. Depp’s voice acting is first-rate, giving life and nuance to Rango, and the other voices (Isla Fisher, Ned Beatty, Bill Nighy, and Timothy Olyphant channeling Clint Eastwood) do good work, too. But the story is a bit weak, overladen with scatological humor and other jokes that try too hard. I’d love to have seen what the film would have looked like in the hands of a more capable screenwriter (i.e., someone from the Pixar stable).

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) – Not everyone was in love with Robert Downey Jr.’s second outing as the master detective, but I was – although not initially. Downey and Jude Law still have excellent chemistry as the eccentric Holmes and his straight-man partner Watson, but the scene stealer here is not Stephen Fry as Sherlock’s brother Mycroft (who’s quirky but doesn’t quite gel) but Jared Harris as archenemy Professor Moriarty. Harris is a calm yet psychotic counterpart to Holmes’s intellect, evenly matching our detective at every turn. While the first half of the film struggles to find its footing, the second half rebounds from the uncertainty with a compelling Holmes-v-Moriarty cerebral match that spans several nations. It might be spoiling something to say that the film adapts “The Final Problem” among others, but it’s not spoiling anything to say that director Guy Ritchie does a good job adapting the source material to his own unique style and sensibilities. The standout feature, though, is once again the vast amount of infectious fun that Robert Downey Jr. seems to be having, and I can’t wait for the next film.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

The Social Network (2010)

I think we can all agree on two things: David Fincher is a solid filmmaker (even though I'm probably the only person on the planet who isn't keen on Fight Club [long story], I'm considering giving it a second watch), and The Social Network is kind of a step out of bounds for Fincher, whose filmography - including Se7en, Zodiac, and The Game - reads more like a list of "creepiest movies of our generation" than an application to direct a biopic-of-sorts about the founders of Facebook. But Fincher's nothing if not dextrously versatile, and The Social Network adds another notch to Fincher's "here's what I'm capable of" belt.

The Social Network is a highly unflattering portrait of the people who claim to have "invented" Facebook, arguably the most high-profile Web site since Google - the antisocial and nominal founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), his financier and best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Napster founder and Facebook's demi-PR guy Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), and rowing team twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), who claim intellectual property rights - and the lawsuits that divided all of them. The film cuts between legal depositions of the main characters and the events they describe, methodically and deliberately leaving the audience to interpret what went wrong and who (if anyone) stole from whom.

Fincher does a solid turn directing here, deftly keeping the pace moving as characters register slights as betrayals and as alliances crumble under the weight of paranoia and profit. Though the film's first cuts between testimonials and actual events are a little jarring for those who didn't follow the Facebook news feed (pun intended), Fincher quickly sorts out who's after what but wisely refuses to spoonfeed us a good guy/bad guy dichotomy. True, the film and its Aaron Sorkin screenplay cast Saverin in a more sympathetic light than Zuckerberg receives, and the Winklevosses are portrayed as jock heavies more than intellectual heavyweights, but it's not clear by the end of the film how we're supposed to feel about the whole thing.

In particular, the film functions a great deal like Cobb's top at the end of Inception (the significance I won't reveal, so as not to spoil it for the DVD-waiters); it means whatever we project onto it, particularly the ambiguous final shot, scored at least somewhat ironically to The Beatles' "Baby You're A Rich Man." It seems, in the opinion of this reviewer, that The Social Network is a kind of light jeremiad against the ugly irony of using the Internet as a way to increase, not detract from, social interaction, and it appears more than slightly condemning of the sort of person who creates something only for public acceptance and the label of "cool." To these people, money is secondary to status, which also subordinates (again ironically) human companionship. One could, of course, read the film's ending as hopeful; title cards let us know that everyone got a little bit of what they wanted all along, but the uncertainty etched into the film's closing cut-to-black is more wobble than topple. It's a testament to Fincher's skill, then, that the ambiguity that pervades the film is more conducive to interpretation than to accusations of waffling.

Fincher also does a fine job pulling together a few "rising stars" (I use the term somewhat skeptically), giving me faith in at least some of the careers-to-be. Jesse Eisenberg, of course, is the undisputed star here, and for good reason; I've decried him as "the B-List Michael Cera" for his turns in Adventureland and Zombieland, but here he's starting to come into his own. The simultaneous wave of revulsion and sympathy you'll feel toward Zuckerberg by the end is equal parts Fincher and Eisenberg, with the latter now wielding a more promising future than his character. Andrew Garfield is more sympathetic as Saverin, pulling out all the stops on the road to pathos by plausibly depicting all the ambivalent feelings of his best friend's so-called betrayal; reminiscent of a young James Franco (wow, how old does that make me, then?), Garfield's making me less nervous about his front role in the Spider-Man reboots (that and the rumored casting of Emma Stone as Mary-Jane). Justin Timberlake's performance is a little more complicated, however, as I'm not sure if it's Timberlake or the character that's a touch hammy; while Sean Parker is flashy and flighty, my perception of Timberlake is much the same. So it's unclear to me whether what I'm seeing is either very poor or very convincing acting.

Maybe this is just me reading a little too much Gail Simone and other feminist theory, but I'm a bit disappointed with the treatment of the female characters in The Social Network. This is a boys'-club movie, with the facts forcing an aspect on the men of the story, but all the female characters are fairly one-dimensional and ultimately little more than impetuses for men to act. Case in point: Sean Parker's introductory scene finds him in bed with a Stanford girl, a fact we learn from a lingering shot of her panty-clad derriere; we learn her name (Amy), her major (French), and little else. Though Amy is an inconsequential character in the big scheme, she's indicative of the role of women at large in the story, which is a shame when you have such a talented female cast on board. I'm dying to see Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but it's a shame that all she does as Erica Allbright in this film is break up with Zuckerberg and incite him to start an online revolution after his heart breaks (well, maybe). Brenda Song finally gets a chance to break out of the Disney playhouse (after the unfortunate departure of Ashley Tisdale, I gave up on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and Song's ditzy heiress London Tipton), but she's essentially window dressing as Saverin's girlfriend Christy Lee; while she's certainly very pretty, Christy isn't asked to do anything else but hang on Eduardo's arm. We're told that she's psychotic and controlling, but there's only one scene where she's allowed to be that - her last one, which is unfortunate considering how well she does in it. And Rashida Jones, of The Office and I Love You, Man (whose misogynistic title, curiously, gave her more material than here) fame, is credible as a second-year legal associate who delivers the film's closing monologue - and eulogy of sorts - with sangfroid and aplomb; sadly, that's the first time she does anything more than offer meaningful glances and eat a salad. Ultimately, the film hinges on what Erica Allbright will do next, but it's too little/too late for a film that's so masculine-dominated.

This is not to say that The Social Network is anti-feminist or flawed beyond salvation. It's merely a disappointing (and for this reviewer, distracting) sin of omission that doesn't really hurt the finished product. Fincher does such a good job with the rest of the movie that he almost atones for the negligible treatment of the fairer sex. What Fincher has made here is a work that examines both a particular true story and the nature of "true stories" themselves; wisely, the movie is credited as "based on" a book about the true facts rather than on the "true story" itself, which invites a whole host of questions about what's true and what isn't. Like Rashomon, The Social Network suggests that truth is subjective, and (like Lost) argues that who the characters are and how they interact with each other is ultimately more important than what they're doing.

If nothing else, the film might lead a few viewers to go home and deactivate their Facebook profile, so unflattering is the creation myth behind the social networking site. As for the movie itself, though, I can do little else than invoke the already-labored Facebook pun and state simply, "Like."
With content friendly for the Facebook generation, The Social Network is rated PG-13 "for sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language." The film implies more than one sexual rendezvous with nothing shown beyond hasty disrobing to the undergarment level; characters abuse marijuana, alcohol, and cocaine frequently, and approximately three F-bombs are dropped.