Movie Review – Sleeping with Other People

Director: Leslye Headland

Starring: Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie, Adam Scott

Year: 2015

Let’s take a second to “get real” on the subject of rom-coms.  As bad as they are, we like them.  There, I said it, and I added you into this collective group, so feel free to admit it to yourself.  We like romantic comedies despite all their flaws, and it’s time we own that.  Why?  Probably because they’re romantic & comedic, which are two of our favorite things to see/read/watch/hear/absorb.  We like love and we like to laugh, so any genre that combines those elements is sure to win us over.  Now, we also can’t ignore that 90% of rom-coms are awful.  They are written with almost no realism, pander to our emotional insecurities, and blind us with pretty people talking about sex.  But we eat ’em up anyway because we’re forever searching for that one gem that will actually make us feel something, while not insulting our cinematic intelligence.  Well, look no further, that film is here, and it’s one of the best romantic comedies you will ever experience.

Jake & Lainey met in college and lost their virginity to each other.  A dozen years later, and having not seen one another since, they’ve both become serial cheaters, sex addicts, noncommittal partners, and generally bad people.  Jake can’t stay faithful to his girlfriends and would rather sleep with their sisters than go through the discomfort of breaking up with them.  Lainey can get any guy she wants, but can’t stop thinking about Matthew, the obsession of her life, the addiction of her desire, the last man she should be with, and the only man she wants.  When Jake & Lainey run into each other at group therapy, sparks fly and they make an effort to rekindle that fleeting night they once had.  But their respective issues will keep them from becoming lovers, and a friendship will grow out of a tangled mess of emotions that neither can unscramble alone.

Sound familiar?  It’s basically the plot of When Harry Met Sally modernized to include masturbation, popping Ecstasy, and trying on lingerie.  Sleeping with Other People is a present day, adult, revamped take on that same old premise, that rom-com recipe that we’ve seen a thousand times before.  But the reason it works is the same reason its predecessors do, both the terrible moneymakers and the high-quality icons; it gives us what we want.  Like the genre duds, it’s about love conquering all odds, humor in the face of instability, friends becoming something more, New York City pumping life into every moment; all that cheesy garbage that we love but hate to admit.  But like the best of the best, it also delivers those extra pieces that are so often missing; heart, chemistry, brutal honesty, believability, and, above all, acting.

Sudeikis has literally never been better.  We saw a hint of it in We’re the Millers, that likeability that’s inherent to his talent, that natural humor that can’t be denied.  But he hones that here, creating a character that is uncomfortably honest, someone who’s funny off-the-cuff, throwing in pop references and subtle jabs like it’s nothing.  He needed a co-star though, someone to hit it off with, a compatible partner to keep the funny going, and Alison Brie stepped up.  She wasn’t perfect perhaps, but she was both idyllic & attainable, hot & sweet, the right choice for the role, and someone who played off of Sudeikis strongly.  And we can’t forget about Adam Scott, who played a sort of villain that you just don’t see in rom-coms, an evil darkness that  made you want to vomit.  And Lainey did at one point, after an encounter with Matthew, in a scene that exemplified the bitterness of this film, its deeper aspects that go to a place that we probably don’t want to visit.  Romantic?  Yes.  Comedic?  Hell yes.  But this film is also realistic in a way that the genre doesn’t usually represent, going down to rock bottom when others would simply have had Justin Timberlake look sad.  Drugs, sex, addictions, withdraws, tears, laughs, Weezer; this movie has it all.

My rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Movie Review – Mississippi Grind

Director: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck

Starring: Ben Mendelsohn, Ryan Reynolds

Year: 2015

Sometimes it’s just obvious that a movie has “it”.  Watching the trailer for Mississippi Grind I knew (or thought or hoped or something) that it would be a smash success.  Ben Mendelsohn has been on some kind of roll, playing villains to perfection, bringing a depth of character to the screen that we haven’t seen it years.  And Ryan Reynolds, though he seems to always choose the wrong part, is at his core a phenomenal natural actor.  I’m serious, and I swear I knew it all the way back in the days of Two Guys; Reynolds is a special talent.  He just needed someone brilliant to be his costar, a script that worked with him, a film that set him up to win big.  This movie is exactly what he needed as an actor and exactly what I wanted as an audience member.

Talk about bad luck, Gerry is the epitome of loss.  His wife & daughter are gone, he hates his day job, he’s addicted to gambling, owes big all over town, and is about to have his body pay the bill he habitually can’t cover.  But things are about to take a turn for the lucky, and it’s all thanks to Curtis.  This free-spirited high-roller doesn’t seem to care whether he wins or loses, plays for fun, buys strangers drinks, and befriends a lonely Gerry just when her needed it most.  And since Curtis seems to be such a good luck charm, Gerry decides that it’s high time to hit the Mississippi gambling trail, make all the money he ever dreamed of, pay off all his debts, and finally be happy.  This, of course, isn’t exactly how the story plays out, and this duo will discover that darkness is a companion you don’t ditch easily.

Ben Mendelsohn first, and my take on his performance will be short & sweet; perfection.  He played Gerry to perfection, layered his character like an onion, gave us vulnerability like we’ve never seen before, and completely blew me away.  Next up, Reynolds, in what will probably go down as the best performance of his career.  Curtis was a liar through & through, both to himself and to his friends, but never once was unlikeable.  How do you do that?  I don’t know, but Ryan Reynolds figured it out, and put Green Lantern a hundred miles behind him in the process.  The film was a whole had a great gambling vibe, touched on many American cities along the road trip, presented a cool feel, and yet developed a base of extreme sadness to help audiences understand these two desperate men.  They weren’t heroes in any way, but were relatable in a familiar fashion, depressingly possible, and as real as it gets.  Mississippi Grind is just what its name suggests; a torturous trek down the river, searching for hope where none exists, trying to stay above water for one more day.  But this dark story is presented so well that the film becomes almost necessary, like we needed to see this happen, and like we won’t soon forget what we learned.

My rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Movie Review – Everest

Director: Baltasar Kormakur

Starring: Jason Clarke, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emily Watson

Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Keira Knightley, Michael Kelly

Year: 2015

I recently watched Black Mass, and a negative that stood out to me were the summarized futures at the end of the film.  That’s a standard ploy, whether used in a biography to tell audiences how the story ends or in a comedy to further the humor.  But it bothered me in that film because the movie itself was a summary, not a look at one certain aspect, but a general account of Whitey Bulger.  So running a few words across the screen at the end seems a little pointless; couldn’t your entire movie be summed up that way, in text rather than on screen?  Why did I watch a dramatized representation of true events that I could have read an article about?  Basically, the film didn’t impress me enough with acting/depth/entertainment to become a great film with a summary at the end, coming across instead as an essay on Bulger with good actors hired for the occasion.  I bring this up because Everest does the exact same thing.  It focuses too much on fact & detail, constantly reminding us that this is an account of a true story.  So when the blurbs begin popping up at the end of the film, I didn’t feel like my time spent was warranted, that perhaps I could have watched the entire story in 20 minutes with only still photos and paragraphs, saving myself the effort.

The great Mount Everest Disaster of 1996 claimed the lives of eight people, and raised many questions as to the safety & intelligence of taking non-professional climbers up the world’s tallest mountain.  Commercial organizations began competing for the fees of would-be mountaineers, taking their money in exchange for taking them up Everest.  Rob Hall owned such a company, organizing & leading a group of men & women into a Nepal mountain range, acclimatizing their bodies, and ultimately walking with them to the peak.  But as he put it himself, man isn’t meant to live at the cruising altitude of a 747 jet, and their bodies would begin to die on the journey.  Hall’s job was to get them down before death came from a lack of oxygen to the brain, but the blizzard that struck the team during their descent was something that he was not prepared for.  With an overcrowding of the passes, with costly delays, lack of communication, and bad weather, disaster would strike the mountainside, and some weekend warriors who came to add their names to the list never made it back home.

I could have done with a bit more drama.  As it was, the story felt very sterile, very cold, very factual, like it was trying to make heads & tails of a confusing & dangerous time.  True accounts of the actual events are varied, actually, with many stories not coinciding, proving each other false with each telling.  John Krakauer, the author of Into the Wild, was among the party, wrote a book about the event, but there are a great number of accounts, none of which match up perfectly.  So I can see how the film was attempting to organize events, tell how it likely happened, explain the chaos in a way that made sense.  But in so doing, in trying to recapture the images of the real photographs of that day, something dramatic was lost.  There were no heroes, no amazing survival stories, no hope, nothing that lent itself to a film version of the action.  There was just the truth, or the truth as was imagined by the filmmakers, and this was related in a fashion that was a bit boring, a bit too realistic, and without the qualities that capture audiences.  And so when the summaries arrived at the end, I once again felt cheated out of entertainment, wishing I had either seen a better dramatization of the event or a clean documentary, not something in between.

It was this lack of clarity that bothered me, this position somewhere between fiction & reality that kept me from loving this film.  The visuals were beautiful, and perhaps I could have enjoyed the film more with the sound turned off.  The mountains, the storm, the crevices; it was all stunning, and probably the highlight of the film.  Set against such a backdrop, the dialogue constantly felt unnecessary & recycled, as if the actual participants recounted what they had said and the actors spit it out, whether or not it sounded good on screen.  The actors themselves were fine; Clarke & Gyllenhaal representing the best, Brolin & Hawkes the worst.  But they were given only so much to work with, held to the true detail of the event too strictly, and never allowed to shine.  Perhaps that sounds bad, and it’s not that I want a completely Hollywood-butchered version of the truth, but there needs to be more depth to draw me in, more crisis of character to help me care.  Everest was a beautiful visual, make-you-feel-cold cinema, and something that I liked watching.  But it fell very short of being impressive & compelling, failing to become much more than a documentary, hovering too close to a recounting, when what I wanted was much more.

My rating: ☆ ☆ ☆

Movie Review – Lawrence of Arabia

Director: David Lean

Starring: Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness

Year: 1962

I surely believe in freedom of expression, but when it comes to Lawrence of Arabia, your individual opinion doesn’t matter.  That might sound inherently wrong, but let me try to explain.  This is a movie that is on IMDb’s Top 100 list of all-time greats.  It was nominated for ten Academy Awards in 1963, winning for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Sound, Best Editing, and Best Music, the remaining nominations being Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Screenplay.  It’s a nearly four-hour-long epic shot on the grandest of scales, with armies of camels galloping toward crystal cities with Lawrence in the lead.  Captured on camera.  In the 60s.  With no computers.  Telling a true story with the whole world watching when movies were something completely different from what they are today.  So, no, I can’t judge this film totally independent of its fame, and neither should you.

Based on actual events, and following the brilliant military career of T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia is a story like none other.  We begin during WWI, at a time when British interests necessitate the removal of the Turkish Empire from the Arab world.  Stationed in Cairo, England’s armies would like to drive Turkey east out of the Middle East, taking control of the canals there, and securing their foothold for the remainder of the war.  But without the help of the native Bedouin peoples, there’s no hope.  And so Lawrence is sent into the desert to meet with Prince Feisal, to discover what can be done.  He soon realizes that the clans must be brought together to form one Arab Army, that peace must be forced in the region between feuding tribes, and that as a foreigner to this land he has no idea how this can be accomplished.  But Lawrence is an extraordinary man, a leader by example, and a fearless warrior, able to win a following by daring what no man dares.

It’s incredible to think about how war movies are made today, with thousands of tiny computer people marching across the land, duplicated to appear more than they are.  In this film, what you see is what is.  Camels & horses & guns & fortresses & men; these were staged, set into motion, and filmed, without any pretext and without complication.  These are some of the grandest scenes you will ever see, an unfathomably large execution that I doubt today’s directors have the capacity to pull off.  But it isn’t really the visuals that make the movie, though they are both impression & beautiful.  It’s Lawrence himself, played by Peter O’Toole, a character that deepens with each scene, becomes darker with each death, and by the end can hardly be recognized as the jolly English soldier who set out for the desert so long ago.  The film grows in scale with time, making each new chapter larger & more involved, forcing Lawrence to become something more than just a rallying cry, a governor of men and a chooser of fates.  It’s an excellent character study set against a phenomenal backdrop, a film that takes effort to watch but rewards us in the end.  Did I love it endlessly?  No, and I actually like The Bridge on the River Kwai better, another Lean-directed, Guinness-starring film done five years earlier.  But the claim to fame that Lawrence of Arabia stakes is unquestionable, as is its legacy, becoming something large than any one opinion.

My rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆