Bad Advice

Here’s a recipe for success in a movie: an original script by Cormac McCarthy, Ridley Scott behind the director’s lens, and a cast that includes Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz. So, what went wrong with The Counselor? My expectations were high, so it came as a surprise that, given these ingredients, the movie was not better; more so because I am a Ridley Scott fan. The Counselor is not a bad movie, but it is far from one of Ridley Scott’s better films.

It’s not easy to pinpoint where the flaw lies. It could be that it resides in part with the script itself. Despite how good Cormac McCarthy can be, this seems to be “another take” on a theme well developed in No Country for Old Men. The impossible yet true inhumanity of the drug cartels; greed, greed and more greed that is so voracious as to end up devouring the people possessed by it, driving them to irrationally blind and deadly choices. In The Counselor, however, the story is somewhat confusing and doesn't completely add up. There is a lot of dialogue and too much preaching on morals and lessons to be learned, coming from the most immoral of characters; even Machado’s trite “caminante no hay camino” is recited by a “wise” guy (in both connotations) played in a very corny manner by the singer-actor Rubén Blades.

Javier Bardem and Michael Fassbender

It’s also not just that there is more dialogue in the movie, there is also much less suspense. So while in the amazing No Country for Old Men film adaptation by the Coen Brother’s the main character fights for his life and tries to outwit and outrun his destiny in a thrilling manner, in The Counselor it seems all he can do is try to reason with the unreasoning, and cry. Cormac McCarthy’s style dominates the movie and Ridley Scott sort of just fills it in. It’s hard to find Ridley Scott’s directing here and, with a script like this, it might have been hard to spark more life into the film.

The actors, on their part, with the exception of Cameron Diaz, seem to be reading their lines and come off as rather in-congruent with respect to who they are supposed to be. So the corrupt lawyer and the drug money launderer, played by Fassbender and Bardem respectively, act and talk like your average teenagers in lust and love (“Oh my goodness”, says Fassbender to Cruz at one point in the movie, “are we having phone sex?”).  Brad Pitt is also in the movie, and his character, a middleman for the drug cartels, is also border-line ridiculous. Can someone who has managed to have millions of dollars in off shore bank accounts really be that gullible? 

Cameron Diaz is a surprise in this movie and the exception to the shallow acting. She’s not an actor that I much admire, but she lives her part here and conveys her heartlessness with those icy stares; she’s a woman worthy of fear. Her acting, and the great cinematography by Dariusz Wolski, carry the movie along from set to set (good set design), as we follow this counselor who has sold his soul to our modern day Mephistopheles and is unable to save his beautiful and innocent girl along the way, like in Goethe’s oeuvre. This counselor not only doesn't dole out any good advice, but is also really bad at taking it. 

Check ‘em out

Gordon-Levitt, Brühl, Cumberbatch

I started the Fresh Cuts section in this blog to give a bit of additional information and suggestions to fellow movie goers on films that I don’t write longer post about -so don't forget to check on the tab Fresh Cuts tab on this blog updated regularly to get movie ratings. I have recently seen some very good movies that would merit posts, but time isn't always on my side. In two movies, in particular, Don Jon and The Fifth Estate, I am extremely pleased to report the wonderful talent that has come to age in three thirty-something artists: Germany’s Daniel Brühl (who was born in Catalonia,Spain but has resided in Germany from an early age), England’s Benedict Cumberbatch and America’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Check out not only their more recent work, but some really good stuff done when they were younger. Brühl’s recent Rush, The Fifth Estate, Inglorious Basterds and earlier Good Bye, Lenin!  & The Edukators; Cumberbatch’s recent Fifth Estate, 12 Years a Slave, Stark Trek into Darkness and earlier Sherlock (can’t wait till that starts up again), Amazing Grace; Gordon-Levitt’s recent Don Jon, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, 500 Days of Summer and earlier Brick, Manic.

Worlds Collide

The Best Actor category at next year’s Academy Awards is going to be one of the toughest vote of all for the members of the Academy. Adding to the already amazing list of actors that should be nominated, including Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale or Forest Whittaker in The Butler, are now Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi for their remarkable acting in Captain Phillips.

Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, two Bourne, United 93, Greenzone) has directed a very good movie, using his as-close-to-reality-as-possible style (including his signature hand-held cameras, much to this motion-sickness suffering movie fan’s despair). He has wisely gone beyond the real Captain Phillips’s memoir to give us a glimpse of the life of the Somali pirates that kidnap the Captain and has subtly yet convincingly dove into some very deep issues facing our modern world.

There is, to begin with, the clash of two worlds, the western first world, embodied in Captain Phillips and his crew, and the extreme poverty and violence that plagues much of the third world, above all places like Somalia, where war lords have absolute control over the lives of men and women. Those are fishermen violently turned pirates that take over the ship. They have no more control over their life than the men that they kidnap at gun point.

He also addresses the strife of the everyday people trapped in a world run by “bosses”. In the case of Captain Phillips and his men, it is the corporation that owns the ship, its cargo and its crew; the corporation that, knowing there are pirates in the waters where their fleets sail, don’t even bother to hire armed security guards, so a ship the size of city blocks, carrying millions in cargo, has less security than an armored truck. In the case of the Somali men, their lives are literally controlled at gun point by the war lords for whom they rob and kidnap. Muse, the character amazingly well played by Abdi, tells Phillips about the last ship they kidnapped and got 3 million dollars for, to which Phillips, seeing the ragged and impoverished state of the Somali fisherman responds: “So, what are you doing here?.” Both men’s fates have been determined for them way before they are trapped together in the claustrophobic lifeboat where we spend a good time with them as they come to realize each other’s plight.

It is the acting that tells the story. Tom Hanks is superb. So much so that I’m sure the real Captain Phillips wishes he had actually been like him (there are stories told by the real crew of the ship that he wasn’t as heroic as his memoir and the movie paint him to be). Hanks works with his eyes and every muscle on his face to convey Phillips’s thoughts and feelings, and he carries us through the ordeal, having us hold our breath along the way, up until we share his final moments of shock, panic and pain at the realization of what has happened. I truly feel this is his best acting to date.

Barkhad Abdi’s acting is no less impressive. This Somali-American actor was hired, along with his fellow Somali-American friends, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I lived near the Minneapolis Somali neighborhood in Minnesota for years and was aware of the thriving community there. It is a place so very far from the fisherman’s town shown at the beginning of the movie. Abdi, however, probably knows to heart the adversity many Somali people face in a country still run by war lords. And he brings that knowledge to the screen. His feat is doubly impressive because this is his first feature film. There is a heart-breaking moment in the film where Abdi’s character tells Phillips that there no going back for him, his is a world of extremes in which he has no control. This is another of Greengrass’s accomplishments, the “bad buys” are not the cardboard figures you need to hate; they are the complex human beings imprisoned in a world with such deep divides that their lives are worthless, not only to the navy ships, helicopters and seal teams that come to rescue one man, but to their own people back home. 

Lost in Space

2001:A Space Odyssey - Alien - Wall-E

Alfonso Cuarón stands on the broad shoulders of the great science fiction movie directors of the past to achieve his feat in Gravity, his latest film. Here and there in this movie we perceive little bits and pieces of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, against which all science fiction films are measured, given that Stanley Kubrick's film was made in 1968; Riddley Scott's Alien, against which all women-heroines-in-space-defeating-the-odds films are measured, since that film was made in 1979...there's even a little idea-steal from Disney's Wall-E, as movie viewers that have seen both films will realize. Although Cuarón's film  is not technically science fiction, given that the science he shows in the film already exists, it ends up playing that way because of how implausible everything that happens in the movie is. This detracts from its great visual and cinematographic achievement.

I went to see the film both because I've enjoyed Cuarón's films in the past and because of the outstanding reviews it received from practically all the major critics. I was disappointed  While it is absolutely true that he has done an amazing job transferring the experience of the gravitylessness space to the viewers, everything else in the movie is weak. The dialogue is as cliche and corny as they come and the same can be said of the characters that say the lines (you yearn for all the silence in Kubrick's 2001). George Clooney's character, Matt Kowalski, is old fashioned suave macho, straight out of a Hemmingway novel or Clint Eastwood western. He doesn't skip a heartbeat, not even when he's floating off into deep space; he plays his country music and gives Dr. Stone, Sandra Bullock's character, calm survival tips. 

Sandra Bullock in Gravity

Sandra Bullock, the one that has the critics handing her an Academy Award already, reminds you with her acting how much better a comedic actor she is than a dramatic one (her best film this year in my opinion was The Heat alongside Melissa McCarthy). She's supposed to be the very intelligent medical technician out in space, but has to be reminded by the always debonair Clooney character to not gulp up the little oxygen in her tank by panicking. To be sure, she is no Rippley (Ridley Scott's heroine in space character from Alien), just maybe a more somber version of her role in Speed, where she had to drive that bomb-rigged bus to safety. We have read, in newspapers and magazines and the movie reviews, how Bullock and Clooney had to be tied into their space suits for hours on end in order for director Cuarón to use his new technology to get the gravity less effect of the movie. It is maybe this that everyone is admiring, the actors'stamina while making the film under duress  Strange how Kubrick got such great effects without that much effort way back 45 years ago.

Alfonso Cuarón is a good director. Children of Men, a true science fiction, is a much better movie than this one, despite not being as technologically sophisticated in the making. There the story line is unique, there's a message to be gained (the extremes of anti-immigration policy), and the acting was really much better, in particular Clive Owen and Chiwetel Elijofor. He has also made various other good films, including Y Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Children of Men

 However, in Gravity it seems Alfonso Cuarón got caught up in playing with the new technology (we saw it in XD - 3D) and forgot that a movie is also about a good, original story (a plausible one, if it's not science fiction), realistic acting, and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of a message or lesson to be learned; all the missing elements that end up weighing this movie down.