Some Movies Out This Weekend, November 14, 2014

Some Movies Out This Weekend, November 14, 2014

There are some big ones opening this weekend, folks. There's the off kilter romance, the decades later comedy sequel, the dramatic feature film directing debut by one of our least dramatic media figures, and another dramatic turn – zany makeup and all – from a guy best known for being America's dumb boss. And that's not even everything. As usual, there's so much to see this weekend at the movies.

Beyond the Lights

Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood

Writer: Gina Prince-Bythewood

Starring: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Nate Parker, Minnie Driver, Danny Glover

From a surface glance, this looks like an case of Lifetime's influence stretching to a wide Hollywood release. But for every moment that could be an overwrought mess – in the trailer, at least – it is underplayed. There doesn't seem to be much over acting going on in this enterprise, which is a sign of a good cast.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays a pop star in the Rihanna/Britney Spears mold, with a domineering stage mom played by Minnie Driver. In a bout of depression, she tries to commit suicide, but before she can jump from her hotel balcony, a police officer, played by Parker, grabs her. Then they fall in love.

This sounds dreadful on paper, but there's something going on in this short preview that's enticing. The mismatched couple, the means by which they met, and ideas about duty and ethics are present. That doesn't mean the movie will explore these themes, or explore them well, but it's ripe for drama.

Dumb and Dumber To

Directors: Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly

Writers: Sean Anders, Mike Cerrone, Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, John Morris, Bennett Yellin

Starring: Jim Carrey, Jeff Daniels, Rob Riggle

The sequel I've been clamoring for since I was five years old is finally here. Harry (Daniels) and Lloyd (Carrey) reunite 20 years after their last adventure to Aspen, “California,” which formed the basis for one of the most re-watched movies of my life. Turns out Harry has a daughter he never knew about, and she might be able to help him out with a kidney. He and Lloyd, who is “hot for [Harry's] daughter,” try to find her.

Could be good, right? I sure hope so. I really do love the original. It was one of those movies I snuck my way into watching with my older cousins when I shouldn't have been allowed, and it has stuck with me, probably because I watch it about once a year. But I have seen the trailers too many times. It's one of those weird situations where, if you go to the movies enough, you get stuck with that one film whose preview you see before everything. I can't get that “na na na na” song out of my head, no matter how many times I plead with my brain. And sadly, the trailers all seem to be the same jokes as the first movie, but said in different locations. But I'm holding out hope the rest of the movie has new material to offer.

Foxcatcher

Director: Bennett Miller

Writers: E. Max Frye, Dan Futterman

Starring: Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo

Bennett Miller has made two of the best films of the last 10 years. Capote may mostly be remembered for Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning inhabitation of Truman Capote, but there is some astonishing, austere filmmaking on Miller's part that opens the film up to being more than an acting showcase. Same thing with Moneyball, based on a book about the least cinematic part of baseball: the analytics. Miller made a movie about mindfulness, fatherhood, and outside-the-box thinking that is one of my favorite sports movies.

And now here we are with his third non-documentary, a based-on-a-true-story drama about an mentally unstable multimillionaire John du Pont and his unhinged foray into funding a wrestling team in the 1990s. Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo play brothers, with Tatum being the Foxcatcher Wrestling top prospect and Ruffalo his trainer. There's some disturbing stuff on display in the trailer, and Carrel is in a neat transition in his career where he's developing into a pure character actor rather than a comedic heavy hitter. I'm very excited for this one.

Rosewater

Director: Jon Stewart

Writer: Jon Stewart

Starring: Gael García Bernal, Kim Bodnia, Dimitri Leonidas

In a roundabout way, Rosewater is responsible for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver – if Stewart hadn't been off shooting this movie last summer, Oliver would not have filled in at the Daily Show desk and likely wouldn't have been offered the HBO gig, which is one of the best and most unexpected places for investigative journalism in television – so I am already eternally thankful for its existence.

Now, whether Stewart has the chops to direct a movie, let alone one not in his comedic wheelhouse, I can't be sure. But he has brought with him Gael García Bernal, whose turns in The Motorcycle Diaries, Y Tu Mamá También, and The Crime of Father Amaro, among others, have made him one of the strongest actors of his generation. Rosewater's story – a journalist is kidnapped while covering the failed Iranian “Green Revolution” and held by government forces because of trumped up charges he may be a spy – is a harrowing one. We'll see if the king of late night satire can make this work.

Interstellar Review: Bad Habits Get In the Way of Greatness

Interstellar Review: Bad Habits Get In the Way of Greatness

Interstellar

Director: Christopher Nolan

Writers: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway

When I walked out of the theater after Interstellar ended, a woman commented loudly, “Maybe they'll have translators waiting for us to explain to us what that meant.” Either she wasn't paying attention or she doesn't have working ears, because Interstellar is a movie that fails the old “show don't tell” test at every turn. How anyone could walk out of a theater confused by a movie so burdened by over explanation is astonishing to me. Director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception) has a habit of holding his audience's hands, not allowing his evocative visuals and stellar casts to do the heavy lifting they could. Maybe he isn't sure of the strength of his visual acumen or maybe he doesn't believe in his audience, but either way the result is preventing the audience from being able to make up their own minds about his movies. They tell us exactly the filmmaker's intent, an often suffocating one-way street that takes out a lot of the fun, and sometimes the longevity, from his films.

Interstellar suffers this problem more acutely than many of his other films. Whereas Inception was a movie built like a multilayered puzzle, with completely fictional rules that needed explaining, Interstellar takes place in a possible future for the world we live in, much of it well researched by Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan. The concepts of relativity, space flight, global warming, wormholes, the effects of loneliness, and parenthood are explicated ad nauseam. It's a shame, too, because Nolan, through the use of the camera and his actors, especially conflicted protagonist Matthew McConaughey, makes the emotional effects – emotion being the thing cinema does best – tangible. When McConaughey explains his decision to go on the humanity-saving mission to Anne Hathaway's scientist-astronaut, he makes platitudes about how parenthood is all about making your children feel safe. This was made abundantly clear in his loving – and occasionally truth obfuscating – interactions with his children in the hour or so the (nearly three hour long) movie spends on a dying Earth. We don't need the movie to tell us this, because we're already hard-wired to understand visual stimuli, particularly the kind related to self-preservation. The same goes for Nolan hammering us with information about why the Earth is ravaged by climate change and how it works – we get it with the dust storms, the dying crops, the people dying of lung infections.

And unfortunately, the worst of it is in the space scenes, including a planet on which spending an hour equals seven years in Earth time. The initial mention of it is fine to make sure the audience understands the stakes, but the hemming and hawing McConaughey and company do once they land is exhausting and undercuts the thrill of seeing the existential danger facing them. This continues time and again, all the way through the climax, which takes place in what looks like a box covered in puke green plaid wrapping paper – go see the movie and you won't be able to unsee that description – a scene that could be done in complete silence and it would still be fairly clear, but with more subtlety and, heaven forbid, some ambiguity.

But I mean it when I say go see Interstellar, because, for all its faults and distrust in the audience's ability to stick with it, it remains thrilling and emotionally satisfying – from a full range of emotions. I mentioned earlier how the first hour takes place on Earth, and despite the qualms with explanation, it's not boring. McConaughey's character, Cooper, is a man stuck in a bad situation trying to make the best of it. He's a former pilot and engineer pushed by circumstances into farming, which the conventional wisdom of The People says is the only truly noble occupation in a world where a harshly warming planet makes every morsel necessary – other occupations and ambitions must be put aside to ensure a survival that still isn't likely. He lost his wife because of that deemphasis on grander plans, and he sees things getting worse. His son is locked into a life of farming, too, because of mediocre test scores. His daughter, Murph (played by Mackenzie Foy as a child and Jessica Chastain as an adult), is clearly brilliant and driven to be in charge of her fate. The connection between father and daughter is the crux of the film, and the scene when McConaughey must say goodbye to Murph after deciding to embark on the adventure at the cost of possibly never seeing her again is a doozy, packed with the weight of Steven Spielberg's best – it makes sense, given that Spielberg was originally slated to be Interstellar's director. I got a lump in my throat, which is rare for me in a movie, and even rarer for a Nolan film, given his emphasis on the brain in lieu of the heart.

Interstellar is a solid adventure film despite its flaws, but its disappointment lies in how close it is to being a great one. The bones are in place for sublimity, but its constant insecure – whether that insecurity is linked to Nolan's belief in himself or the audience, I'm not 100 percent on – insistence on explaining itself shoots itself in the foot.

Nightcrawler Review: Thematic Confusion Keeps it from Greatness

Nightcrawler Review: Thematic Confusion Keeps it from Greatness

Nightcrawler

Director: Dan Gilroy
Writer: Dan Gilroy
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Bill Paxton

In Nightcrawler, spectacular performances, pacing, cinematography, and editing combine for a thrilling, satirical indictment of television news. Unfortunately, this mastery of the cinematic canvas serves a theme that is too cynical and confused about how that industry works to be true. It pushes false ideas about the causes of modern television news' proclivities toward violence and sensationalism, only to succumb to the same inclination by using the flashiest tools in the filmmaking box to focus on surface level ideas.

Gyllenhaal is tremendous as the freelance videographer Lou, a sociopath with a can-do attitude, long, greasy hair, and a squirrelly frame that fits his life as a thief. Once he comes across Rene Russo's TV news producer, he finally finds himself a steady gig videotaping the most gruesome crime news in Los Angeles. Writer-director Dan Gilroy shoots the film in a way that is both scuzzy and shiny, perhaps because of his mixed use of both film and digital cameras for different settings and times. He paces Nightcrawler meticulously, with each scene providing an emphatic push to the next, never once stopping as the stakes grow and grow.

Gyllenhaal is a force of nature, one of the year's best characters, but unfortunately he's a false pawn in Gilroy's attempt to portray the media as craven fear mongers only ever in search of a buck -- he goes so far as to suggest they create the violence to get more visceral (re: moneymaking) stories. Everyone with a sense of agency in the film, like Russo and Gyllenhaal, is only out for themselves, desperate to preserve and expand what they have, manipulating each other and their television audience to get everything they want. They brush away suggestions that what they're doing is ethically wrong, and conspire to do the unethical thing at every turn, almost as a form of spite. This in itself suggests Gilroy believes the “good” people in TV journalism – portrayed here by Mad Men's Kevin Rahm – those concerned with doing the right and fair thing for subjects and victims, aren't important to news creation. They get pushed aside, treated as silly nuisances and buzzkills. They are soon kept out of meetings about how to maximize the impact of the violence for ratings, incentivizing the less scrupulous – hello, Lou – to go hog wild in first staging, and later orchestrating the grand finale.

It's a shame Gilroy cares so much about this aspect, which is possibly true in some cases across the TV news landscape, but it overlooks what is a simpler, and much more widespread, truth about broadcast news: All this "if it bleeds, it leads" stuff (as a person with a journalism degree, I'm pleading with you, Hollywood, to stop using this phrase when discussing journalism) is easy. People don't need to centrally process it. They get it, and they get it quickly. It's harder to do the stuff Lou says only takes up 22 seconds of an average broadcast, like covering the complicated worlds of public policy, business deals, and the like. Nuance is hard in an immediate medium like TV, and these news organizations are, I'd argue, lazier than they are malicious. That's a real outrage, one with basis in fact, unlike the false theme of the media's orchestration of violence Gilroy finds more interesting.

And it's disappointing Gilroy and Nightcrawler don't go for the media's throat on the subject of laziness. It diminishes the film's power as satire. Because for satire to work, it needs to be about a real problem. That's why the satirical moments of recent films like The Wolf of Wall Street and Gone Girl work so well. We recognize what they are doing. We're supposed to be outraged by Jordan Belfort going through life like he owns everyone, defrauding thousands, and essentially getting away with it and moving to a career where his horrendous efforts are applauded. We see the Nancy Grace-style host in Gone Girl's recreant attempts to reframe the story for her ratings' purposes multiple times, always relying on gut feelings in lieu of actual facts, and we understand it because it happens in cable news all the time. There is proof of these things in reality, and for all the heightened absurdities of Martin Scorsese's and David Fincher's films, they run in the same circles as truth. Nightcrawler's satire is more guesswork, cynically assuming this is what happens without supporting evidence in real life. It is conspiratorial thinking, probably giving the media too much credit for their abilities to shape stories to their will rather than being able to exploit what they come across as lazily as possible.

Birdman Review: A Baffling and Glorious Mess

Birdman Review: A Baffling and Glorious Mess

Birdman

Director: Alejandro González-Iñárritu

Writers: Alejandro González-Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo

Starring: Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough

When people write about films with mixed reviews, they most often refer to some people enjoying the experience and some disliking it. There are glowing reviews and bitter takedowns contained within the critical reaction, often with little in between. It's a rarer thing to have a movie that deserves both, often at the same time.

Birdman is that film. It is at once dazzling and disastrous. Its storytelling devices are as forceful, and repetitious, as a jackhammer. It has so much to say about aging, the entertainment industry, family, manhood, grace, artistic affectation, insecurity, and ambition, and it doesn't stop making those points over and over again. It suffers from “importance”-itis, where every line that ties into its themes – so, so many – makes itself known, with the music building to bombastic heights so you are absolutely sure you understand what's happening. These are the makings of passable melodrama. However, director and co-writer Iñárritu takes extra steps during each of these moments to call the movie out for its pretension, a wink, a joke that shows he and his collaborators “get it.” It's all part of the plan. It's making a point about silly people pretending they're not silly. But it still seems to mean the initial point.

So which is it? Are these people lying to themselves and deserving of ridicule? Are they striving for something transcendent and therefore worthy of commendation? Is it both? Neither? The movie, and Iñárritu, have no idea, and that's part of the tantalizing and frustrating nature of the picture. It doesn't know what it wants to be, can't choose a path, so it tries to do everything and its failures are as terrible as its successes spectacular. In doing so, Iñárritu is like the baseball player who admires a long fly ball off the bat only to be shocked when it bounces off the wall for a single -- there's value in that, but it's not what it could be.

The stars and their characters fair extraordinarily well given the schizophrenic confines of the narrative. Michael Keaton, in a meta exploration of his own career, plays Riggan, a middle aged former onscreen superhero who throws himself into a stage adaptation of a Raymond Carver story, in which he has invested everything to write, direct, and star. Keaton lets out his unhinged, maniacal side to paint a character breaking under his self-imposed pressure to be more than he is. His daughter, Sam (Emma Stone), is a recent graduate of a rehab program and trying her best to connect with her distant dad as his assistant during the production. Edward Norton is the infuriatingly fickle Broadway star who “pretends” in every part of his life except for his moments of “truth” onstage.

If it were those three wrestling – literally at times – with each other, Birdman would probably be a phenomenal cinematic achievement. Each distinctly represents fundamentally divergent worldviews, and that tension is the stuff of magic. Norton and his artiste affectations, for all their sometimes brilliance, serve as a detriment to getting the play done with the efficiency Keaton's shattered psyche – where his superhero alter-ego talks to him in voiceover – requires. Stone represents the pull of modernity and the wakeup call everyone needs to stop thinking the world revolves around them.

But those three aren't the only focus. There are former wives, current (possibly pregnant) girlfriends, a stressed best friend trying to bring the money together to simply make the show go on, an influential critic threatening to destroy the play sight unseen, and more that pull the film away from its strengths.

It's a shame because the muddled, multi-plotted film achieves so much on the technical side of things, too. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity) again shoots a visual masterpiece, with Steadicam photography, extreme color saturation, and lighting that complements every emotion the characters feel at a given moment. The way he and Iñárritu stitch lengthy shots together to create the illusion that the film is all done in one long take is as ambitious as anything I've seen, period – and it mostly works.

These technical, visual, and performative accomplishments are what make Birdman such a fascinating misstep. If Iñárritu had trusted himself enough to let the visual medium speak for itself, he'd have a masterpiece on his hands. But his constant unnecessary intrusion to clarify what his themes mean actually serves to confuse his message.