Killing Them Softly

America is not a country. It’s a business. Now fuckin’ pay me!

So ends the film, Killing Them Softly. I’m not going to tell you who said that line, or the circumstances surrounding it. What I will tell you is that Killing Them Softly opened last November 30th, and was directed by Andrew Dominick who also wrote the screenplay which was based on the George V. Higgins 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade.

Now Cogan’s Trade was set in Boston and in the 70′s. Dominick’s film is set in 2008 and in or near, an unnamed city, which as it turns out is New Orleans – but you’d never know it from the buildings, bars, or restaurants.

Dominick sets up a theme within the movie that is that the US economy was tanking in 2008 – we have Obama, Bush, and McCain telling us as much as we see and hear them on the TV’s which show up in all the bars throughout the movie.

While things were going south on Wall Street and Main Street – the same thing was happening within organized crime. Times were tough. One mobster, Markie Trattman played by Ray Liotta, was running a protected poker game. Which he decides to rob himself by bringing in two outsiders. We learn this in flashbacks.

Now no one would be dumb enough to take down a protected card game, so Trattman went undetected. He had to take a beating but basically he walked.

Top: As Johnny Squirrel Amato
Bottom: As Johnny Sack Sacrimoni

Then, in the present, another underworld figure, Johnny ‘Squirrel’ Amato, played by Vincent Curatola (Johnny Sack in the Sopranos) decides to take down another of Trattman’s poker games. He correctly figures that Trattman got away with it once, but would never ever be able to convince anyone that he wasn’t involved in the second heist. Only Amato hires two ex-cons who look like they lack the smarts to make it happen.But they do pull it off and get away clean.

The mob decides that something must be done. The mob’s middleman, called Driver and played by Richard Jenkins meets with the hired gun, Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt). His job will be to find the two mutts who pulled the job, and to get them to roll over on who sent them. But Jackie doesn’t want to do a double. So he calls in another gunman, Mickey, played by James Gandolfini, once known far and wide as Tony Soprano.

There’s your set up.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Trek Into Darkness was directed by J.J. Abrams who not only already has, but will continue to attract deep pocket producers and studios for big budget film projects. By 2016, Abrams will have helmed 3 Star Trek movies, one Mission Impossible film, and the next Star Wars: Episode VII. So we can say his name and game are working.

Star Trek Into Darkness opened Wednesday night, and I caught the Thursday morning show here in Sarasota. I saw the 2D version rather than the more costly 3D IMAX Experience – but strictly speaking, that was more of a function of timing than expenses. I must tell you that the last Star Trek film I actually went to was Star Trek: The Voyage Home, released in 1986 – and that event happened because of a chance encounter with actress Catherine Hicks.

So let’s get it out there up front. I’m not a devotee of the original TV series or the Star Trek films. However I will admit to spending more time watching Deep Space Nine as well as Babylon 5 than I did Star Trek. But back to Into Darkness.

As the film opens – I was immediately thrown off by a chase which seemed to be lifted straight out of the original Indiana Jones – you know when Indy is racing through the jungle pursued by the locals wielding spears and blow-guns with poisoned darts. Only we weren’t on Earth, and the indigenous people chasing them looked like the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, only with charcoal ash colored skin. While Captain Kirk and his crewman raced for their lives – Spock had some things to do inside an active volcano.

Yes – inside a working volcano. Hot, hot, hot it was, but Spock didn’t even get damp. Not to spoil anything, but this is just the first 10 minutes of the film so it all works out and that’s your opening which also included the USS Enterprise submerged on the bottom of the ocean like any atomic powered submarine.

I thought the Enterprise was a space ship – but hey, what do I know? From there we have no place else to go but up, both literally and figuratively.

And despite that somewhat less than awesome opening set piece, the film does markedly improve. The USS Enterprise hardware is great looking as are the CGI manifestations of London and San Francisco. The main players: Chris Pine as Kirk,

Zachary Quinto as Spock,

and Karl Urban as Bones looked and sounded very much like the originals. That means I give kudos for the writing and the casting, as well as the acting. Keep in mind that the looks are very much more suggestive than exact – but still; it is amazing when you see them in motion rather than just photo stills. Chekhov, Sulu, Uhura, and Scotty didn’t fare quite as well as the others.

Baz Lurhmann’s Gatsby – It’s not History, It’s Art

Didion: American teenagers still get marched through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) early in their high school careers, told that this is a “classic.” I haven’t read it since then, so it was a revelation to find how much I remembered its contemplative mood. Gatsby is still as inscrutable, and Daisy as shadowy as I remember. It’s a beautiful, evasive book punctuated with moments of the most spectacular clarity of prose and insight — all the better for being so slim and accessible to high school kids.

Ask Jordan Baker to come up. I need to talk to her privately

Told through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a well-to-do Midwesterner whose job selling bonds has landed him a house out on the shores of Long Island Sound, the story fixates on Carraway’s fantastically wealthy neighbor, Jay Gatsby. Rumors fly about him: he might be an Oxford man, or a murderer, or perhaps just a liar. As if to cultivate those tales, Gatsby throws lavish parties and uses oddly unpopular expressions like “old sport.” But as we learn early on, part of this is a show for the benefit of Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan, who lives with her lout of a husband across a small bay from Nick and Gatsby, and who had a short romance with Gatsby years ago when he was a poor serviceman stationed in her hometown of St. Louis. Famously — memorably — Gatsby stands at the edge of his property in the evenings, gazing out across the water to the green light at the end of the Buchanans’ pier, longing for her and hoping that his new wealth and status might be enough to win her back.

Jack Clayton’s 1974 film with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Sam Waterston emphasized the gauzy, sun-lit aspects of the tale, and the grandeur of Gatsby’s house, but critics generally felt the film was better at conveying the surface appearance of the tale than the book’s melancholy soul.. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby famously complained that “the sets and costumes and most of the performances are exceptionally good, but the movie itself is as lifeless as a body that’s been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool.” It may have got the 1920s/ Jazz Age look right, but it failed to capture the classic Americanness of this story.

The song Isn’t It Romantic? by Rodgers & Hart didn’t come along until 1932, so it is not in the film

All the more reason for a new interpretation. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire in the three core roles, does Baz Luhrmann’s much-anticipated film achieve what Clayton’s could not?

You must tell Tom that you never loved him…

JMM: Great question, Didion. Upon publication in 1925, the book sales were tepid: about 20,000 copies sold in the 1st year following publication. In contrast, the book has sold about 405,000 copies in the first three months of this year. And that number would not include the copy I bought late in April, after not being able to acquire one from my nearest public library.

But before we launch into a discussion of the film, I’d like to point out that the budget/cost of this film was in the West Egg-ish neighborhood of $127,000,000. One would have to be quite creative to spend that much money on a movie. And just think of the clothing and accessories tie-ins with Prada, Tiffany & Co, and Brooks Brothers. I don’t think I’ll be trotting off to Brooks Brothers to pick up a straw boater at $198 a pop. How about you? Will you be going in for the 1920′s look?

Didion: As long as I can score a new tiara, I’ll be all set. You know how us professors get paid so lavishly that a visit to Tiffany is, like, yawn.

So I’m curious, JMM — tell me your thoughts about the relationship between book and film. Obviously, literary adaptations are always tricky; directors want to make films that anyone can see, from big fans of the book to those who’ve never read it. Do you think Luhrmann succeeds?

All that glitters may not be gold, but it will be Gatsby

JMM: Yes, he succeeds. As you said above, the book and its titular character Gatsby are inscrutable which to me means that it is subject to many interpretations — almost as many as the number of bits of confetti and streamers that fell during the Gatsby soirees.

I think the transfer of the literary to the screen was well done. Especially if you consider that the charm of the book is less the story, and more the excellence of the writing.

Didion: I agree with you in part. I felt Luhrmann succeeded with the overall look and the vividness of the characters — no one is going to say, as Canby did about the previous version, that this is lifeless — but I disliked the hyperactive melodrama of the film. It missed, to me, the book’s soul: its narrator’s desire for something real behind all that glitz.

JMM: Yeah, in the film, the Carraway character was either in awe, or watching with stunned amazement – or busy twirling a glass in his hand – but isn’t that what makes the book so difficult to film – the charms of Nick are all his internal discoveries rather than something he actually does?

Nick to Gatsby: [you're better] than the whole damned bunch together

Didion: That’s exactly right. Nick wants to believe that Gatsby really is “worth the whole damn bunch altogether,” as he shouts to Gatsby across the lawn. But the film doesn’t quite show us that Gatsby is anything more than an imperfect invention. Luhrmann couldn’t quite commit: are we supposed to attach to Gatsby? or are we supposed to see through him, and thus become aware of Nick’s naivete?

Renoir

Directed by Gilles Bourdos, the film Renoir is set in Cagnes-Sur-Mer, France, where famed French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir spent the summer of 1915. He’s already an old man, wheelchair bound, and suffering greatly from rheumatoid arthritis. His home and studio (atelier) is set there in the south of France, and Renoir is supported by a staff of women who take care of him and his young teenage son. Renoir’s wife had passed away recently.

We will come to learn that Renoir’s staff is composed of women who were hired on originally as models and stayed on to become maids, or hired as maids and then became models. Renoir had two older sons both of whom were currently engaged as participants in World War I which raged on further to the north in France.

Enter a beautiful young woman, Andrée (called Dedee) and played by the stunning Christa Theret.She’s smart, she’s calculating, she’s aggressive and Renoir is impressed. She not only becomes his model, but she also becomes his muse or inspiration.

That’s the end of Act I.

The Company You Keep

Robert Redford has assembled a stellar cast of well known actors for his new film The Company You Keep. Once more we have Redford starring in a film about the search for the truth. Only this time, unlike the classic 1976 film All The President’s Men, Redford is not portraying an intrepid reporter. He is instead the person that everyone is looking for.

Rather than having two reporters, like Woodward and Bernstein, we have just one reporter, a Ben Shepard, played by Shia LaBoeuf. Shepard works for the Albany Sun Times instead of the Washington Post, and when we meet him, he is being reamed out by his editor Ray Fuller, played by the always great Stanley Tucci, for missing a story of national importance that happened nearby.

Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon) has been apprehended by the FBI. She has been wanted for more than thirty years as a suspect in a bank robbery that went bad, resulting in a by-stander being killed. At the time, Solarz was a part of the Weather Underground, a radical off shoot of the SDS.

Solarz and other members of the bank robbers went off the grid and were never captured. They assumed new identities and basically had hid in plain sight for the last 30 plus years. Since the nearest FBI office was in Albany, Shepard was sent by his editor to get the story and Solarz agreed to an interview.

And that sets the story in motion. Solarz was never in favor of violence, and now that her own children were adults, and her own parents had passed on, she felt it was time to turn herself in. Shepard digs away and discovers that another suspect in the same bank robbery, one Nick Sloan, had taken on the identity of Jim Grant, a practicing attorney in the Albany area.

And that sets Redford’s character in motion.

In setting up the story, that’s about all you need to know.

Emily Blunt

Sorry for the bait and switch. If I had entitled this review Arthur Newman, there’s a distinct likelihood that no one would read the review.

As it is, no one is seeing the movie either. The film opened in 248 theaters across the country on Friday the 26th. The film took in just $108K – an average of $435 per theater. That’s not per day, that for the weekend. In fact, I was one of just three people to see it in the 11:00 AM show. Three people!

Arthur Newman stars Academy Award winner Colin Firth and Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt. While I did like Firth in The King’s Speech, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and A Summer in Genoa – he’s not an actor that I feel I would have to rush out and see any thing he does.

On the other hand, Emily Blunt is something else entirely. This is the sixth film I’ve seen her in over the last few years; The Adjustment Bureau, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, The Five Year Engagement, Your Sister’s Sister, Looper, and now this one. I guess she’s some one I would pay to see act , and have done so often.

Firth plays Wallace Avery – a man quite dissatisfied with his current life. He was good enough to become a pro golfer, but wasn’t able to make much of an impact, at least as far as winning. Too many of his putts spun out – the word on the tour was that he lacked heart. His desk job at FedEx wasn’t to his liking either. He wasn’t much of a husband or a father. His wife divorced him six years ago and his son despises him. Arthur is miserable.

So he decides to fake his own death, assume a new identity, Arthur Newman, with forged documents, and make a new life for himself. So off he goes heading for Terre Haute, Indiana for a job as a golf pro at a country club. Soon enough he runs into Michaela (Mike) Fitzgerald, played by the winsome Ms Blunt. She hasn’t much of a resume either – she’s a drifter, a thief, and has a family with a history of paranoid schizophrenia.

Now don’t these two sound like a fun couple?

From the trailer (below) you might think so. They break into people’s homes, sleep in the beds of those homes, try on the clothes they find in those homes, all on their slow journey toward Terre Haute and personal discovery. So you’re expecting a road movie, a romantic comedy, a good-looking couple of tricksters, and more. Basically what you get is the road. And just the road.

Wallace Avery/Arthur Newman is a guy at odds with himself. He’s made mistakes in his life and apparently nothing excites him (not even a current girl friend played by Anne Heche). As he sees it: why not start over – what exactly do I have now?

42

“Rounding third, Jackie Robinson heads for home, sweet, home” – Red Barber, the Dodgers radio announcer calling a home run hit by Jackie Robinson on September 17th, 1947.

While this home run didn’t have the historical impact of the famous Bobby Thomson HR, called ‘the shot heard around the world’, that would be hit 4 years later, or the cinematic thunder of the HR hit by Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs in the 1984 film called The Natural – the Robinson HR was no less majestic. And if not quite the pennant clincher for the Dodgers, it was the climatic scene of the new bio-film 42.

We should point out that the film 42 is not to be taken to task for the few liberties taken that aren’t quite historically accurate. Because Robinson, had so many accomplishments as a player, but none were greater than the fact of being the first Negro to play in baseball’s Major Leagues. Thereby changing the game forever. This far overrides anything else. The film does not depict his whole life and we learning nothing of his successful collegiate athletic career or even anything more than he served as an Army officer in WWII. You can only do so much in a two hour film.

The film begins with Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) telling his stunned office staff that he was going to go against the grain, against the code, and against the unwritten rules and have the Dodgers be the first MLB club to have a black player. While Rickey was certainly brave and a bit idealistic, he was also a business man. He figured a black player would be a draw and as George Steinbrenner of the Yankees would mention some 35 years later – Rickey knew that having a black player on the team would ‘put fannies in the seats‘, and money into the Dodger’s bank account.

What he didn’t know at the time was just who that player would be.

Robinson, at that time, was playing shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro baseball league. So Rickey had Robinson come in for an interview prior to the 1946 season. He liked what he saw and he signed Robinson a contract with the Dodgers’ AAA affiliate in Montreal. Robinson played that whole season in Montreal and in the spring of 1947 he competed for a spot on the Brooklyn Dodgers and won a job.

And as they say, the rest is history. And that’s the key element to the film. We’ve seen the man enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. We’ve read the accounts of his playing career. But what I am sure of, is that most of us aren’t old enough to know what it must have been like for Robinson.

When Rickey tried to race-bait Robinson in his Brooklyn Dodgers’ office in downtown Brooklyn during that interview, his goal was to see what the man was made of.

Jackie Robinson: You think I’m a player who doesn’t have the guts to fight back?
Branch Rickey: No. I want a player who’s got the guts *not* to fight back.
Jackie Robinson: You give me a uniform, you give me a number on my back, I’ll give you the guts.