Zero Dark Thirty

Of all the Oscar-nominated films of 2012, none was as controversial as Zero Dark Thirty.  There were a few different reasons for this (most of which boils down to election-year political babbling), but the element that received the most discussion --- intelligent or otherwise --- revolved around the film's portrayal of torture as an effective interrogation tactic.  I certainly will not be as eloquent as some of those articles, but I will try to address the issue in a small way.  First things first, though.  I went in to Zero Dark Thirty as the final film in a marathon of Best Picture nominees.  I had high hopes, even though I wasn't in love with Kathryn Bigelow's last film, The Hurt Locker.  I heard that this was a film that asked a lot of tough questions and did not give comforting answers.  America has been fighting its War on Terror for over a decade now, and we still haven't gotten a movie that (in my mind, anyway) makes an awesome statement about it.  It may be a lot to ask of a movie, but that was what I was hoping for with Zero Dark Thirty.

Zero Dark Thirty is the somewhat true-ish tale of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden (played by the always delightful Ryan Reynolds).  Maya (Jessica Chastain) is a fresh CIA recruit in 2003, newly assigned to the task force that is trying to track down Bin Laden.  Right out of the gate, Maya is confronted with the harsh reality of torture.  One of her new coworkers, Dan (Jason Clarke), spends a good amount of time at a Black Box site, interrogating detainees.  Dan and his subordinates threaten, badger, and offer the occasional kindness in their quest for information --- aaand they also torture the shit out of their prisoners, too.  Waterboarding, humiliation, sensory deprivation, and just general abuse are some of the more colorful ways Dan elicits information.

Above: Dan, scraping some "torture juice" off his shoes

While no one is willing to dish on Osama Bin Laden, Dan and Maya managed to trick one detainee into naming a courier that delivers messages to Bin Laden. In and of itself, that little morsel of information doesn't mean much, but over the next few years, Maya is able to piece together a small piece of the larger picture.  If she is correct, and this courier is trusted with an important job, then that means he actually meets with the elusive Osama Bin Laden.  If that is true, then all Maya needs to do is track down this courier (who she does not have a picture or real name of) to find Bin Laden.  It's as easy as combing through literally tons of intelligence reports for a single clue over an eight-year span, while negotiating changing political and professional priorities and surviving a terrorist bombing.

She went in a novice and left a female David Caruso.  YEAAAAHHHH!

If nothing else, Kathryn Bigelow does an excellent job subverting expectations with Zero Dark Thirty.  This is less of a war movie or a manhunt than it is a police procedural.  In that regard, it's a pretty solid one.  Jessica Chastain fills the role of the obsessive person who just knows that they're right capably, and Bigelow does a good job making her look like the most capable person in the room at any given time.  When it finally gets to be Zero Dark Fifteen-ish, Bigelow shifts gears and reminds audiences that she knows how to add tension to military scenes.

What I found most interesting about Bigelow's approach to the material was that it felt surprisingly light on judgement.  The torture scenes seemed to affect the characters just as much as suicide bombers, or the final assault on Bin Laden's complex.  This could easily have been a propaganda piece, like The Green Berets, but Zero Dark Thirty strove for a much more documentary feel.

As a movie that is, essentially, a procedural with documentary tones to it, Zero Dark Thirty is not a great spotlight for acting.  Jessica Chastain was pretty good as the emotional core of the film, but even her fairly rounded character exhibited frustration more than anything else.  She did morph into a convincingly bad-ass intelligence agent, but I felt that the personal investment of the character --- which was mind-numbingly large --- didn't translate into her performance. 

Jason Clarke was impressive in a supporting role; the more I see of Clarke, the more I like him and truly believe that he's close to a breakout role.  He had one of the more despicable parts in the film, but he gave it some unexpected humanity, too.  Most of the rest of the film was filled with bit parts, and many of them were played by character actors.  Still, in the cast of thousands, there were some familiar faces.  On the political side of the plot, Kyle Chandler was (once again) a bureaucrat, Mark Strong was a sneakier type of bureaucrat, James Gandolfini was kind of a military bureaucrat, and John Barrowman essentially acted as Jessica Chastain's hype man with his sole line.  All of those are good actors, but only Mark Strong had an opportunity to show off any (which he did).  On Maya's team, Harold Perrineau made a very brief and very welcome appearance and Jennifer Ehle was pretty good as the intelligence character that always seemed to be wrong.  When the story turned to the military side of things, Chris Pratt and Joel Edgerton were the face of the strike team.  Pratt was surprisingly engaging as a slight goofball, while Edgerton played his part more through glaring than with dialogue.

Their haircuts match their characters

Okay, I've covered the plot, the direction and the acting.  What about all that torture?  On the one hand, I can agree (to an extent) with the argument that acceptance can be construed as condoning.  I honestly don't get where people are coming from when they say that the overall message here is that torture was necessary to find Bin Laden.  At worst, this film takes an indifferent stance on the issue.  Of course, the message is not that torture did no good, either; information gleaned through torture did eventually lead to the film's climax, but the methods are not shown as heroic or even necessary evils.  As with so much of Zero Dark Thirty, it would be so much easier to derive meaning and intent if this film had given in to machismo or back-patting nationalism.  Instead, the audience is subjected to extended periods of unpleasantness as the detainees are tortured on-screen.  If there is a message in Zero Dark Thirty about torture, I would argue that it is closer to "torture sure is messed up, right?" than anything else.

I was not sure how I felt about Zero Dark Thirty when it ended.  It certainly did not live up to my expectations, but that is not a bad thing.  This was a substantially different film than I was expecting, and I respected the emotionally-neutral choice of tone.  I would have preferred something that asked questions instead of simply reported issues, but that would have fundamentally altered Bigelow's documentary-feel.  I wish it had felt more immediate, though.  I was so separated from the emotions of these characters that the exits of Kyle Chandler and Jennifer Ehle had no impact on me, much less anything that happened to Jessica Chastain.  Everything just felt too impersonal.  That can happen in procedural dramas, but the main character's charisma or brilliance helps keep things exciting as the audience is drip-fed clues.  Chastain was at her best in conference room scenes, convincing bureaucrats to believe her.

There was a shocking amount of whatever you want to call this

For Zero Dark Thirty to work as a procedural, her best scenes needed to be her putting the pieces of the puzzle together.  This is a movie that could have done more, but also could have been truly insufferable.  Instead, it landed somewhere in the middle for me.

8MM

You never can tell which Nicolas Cage is going to show up in his movies.  Will it be the Academy Award-winning actor?  Usually not.  Will it be the dead-eyed action hero?  You've got a decent chance of that, but Vegas odds are always on Nicolas Cage, the ridiculous over-actor.  When you combine those odds with the chances of a post-Batman and Robin Joel Schumacher directing a good movie, you get 8MM.  Of course, Cage and Schumacher could have theoretically teamed up for an over-the-top action romp, full of ridiculous explosions and tough guy dialogue; it wouldn't have been very good, but it would have been watchable.  Instead, this is a movie about snuff films, which are by definition not full of hilarity.

Yeah, that's how I react to Nicolas Cage movies, too.

Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) is a private detective that specializes in seedy cases in which his photos and research frequently end up as evidence in divorce proceedings.  I bet his wife loves his job.  One day, he gets a call to visit a new widow.  Her late husband left her a vast fortune, but she found something odd in his safe: an 8MM film that depicted a rape culminating in what appears to be murder.  The widow wants Welles to find out whether the murder was real or staged, no matter the cost.  After assuring her that snuff films are just an urban legend, Welles agrees to take the case, expecting to uncover a privately-financed movie with some fancy special effects.  What he finds does not support that theory.  Welles does some boring grunt work and manages to stumble across a missing persons photo that resembles the girl from the movie.  As odds-defying as that it, Welles manages to track down her family, discover evidence in her bedroom that neither her family nor the police found, and learn that she went to Hollywood.  As earth-shaking as that concept may be --- a runaway girl who starred in a porn film went to California?  Gasp! --- Welles quickly realized that he did not know how to dig any deeper into this case without help.  Enter Max California (Joaquin Phoenix).

...and he works in a porn shop?  Chick magnet!

Max is a failed musician and belly shirt aficionado who works the counter in a dingy sex shop.  Welles hires Max to help him enter the pornography underworld and the two begin to piece together who could have made a snuff film and who would have acted in it.  Hint: if you see a recognizable actor being questioned by Nicolas Cage in this movie, he's probably involved in the snuff film.

I'd be sweating bullets, too, if this was the best role I could get.

The acting in 8MM is definitely not for fans of subtlety.  Nicolas Cage spends a lot of time grimacing and looking tired.  I don't blame him.  His character had to watch hours and hours of low-budget weird porn before he found enough clues to track down the killers.  Joaquin Phoenix was a little better, but that's just by comparison, and his character's costumes were pretty ridiculous.  I'm not saying that people in California don't wear baggy leather pants every day with their proto-Ed Hardy T-shirts, but there isn't a scene in this movie where I don't want to smack Phoenix just on general principles.  James Gandolfini was fine as a low-life porn producer and Peter Stormare was his typically slimy self as a high-end low-life porn producer, but this is a film that relied heavily on Cage and Phoenix.

Creepy: a new fragrance by Peter Stormare

There are a few other actors in small roles, but none of them have any great impact on the quality of the film.  Anthony Heald is unsympathetic (surprise, surprise), Catherine Keener is kind of bitchy, Norman Reedus is a loser with a bad haircut, and Chris Bauer wears a gimp outfit.  It is worth noting that Bauer's character, The Machine, has occasionally popped up in the sports world.  San Francisco Giants closer --- and professional sports' most entertaining personality, since the retirement of Shaquille O'Neal --- Brian Wilson is apparently a fan.  You can spot Chris "The Machine" Bauer's likeness at around the 4:20 mark.


So...that's kind of weird.  Anyway...

There's really not much that goes right with 8MM.  Director Joel Schumacher placed himself in a tough spot.  The obvious trapping that comes with making a movie about snuff films is that the movie winds up being as exploitative as the snuff films themselves.  I will give Schumacher credit for not falling into that trap.  However, to avoid seeming exploitative, I think 8MM loses its teeth. 

If this isn't a movie that is meant to shock you, then what is it?  A ludicrously tangled mystery?  An expose on pornography's seedy underbelly?  An argument for the banality of evil?  You could choose any of those, but none make this a satisfying movie.  The mystery is too easily untangled, possibly because the mystery focused on "Who made this snuff film?" instead of "Why was this snuff film made?"  The dark side of porn is a potentially disturbing focus, but 8MM just has Cage wander through a couple creepy basement VHS flea markets; nothing is really said or done about anything but this one particular snuff film.  Perhaps sensing that this movie is neither shocking nor captivating, Schumacher changes the tone of the film, transforming Cage from an investigator to an avenger in the final act.  It is here that the bad guys explain themselves, and that explanation --- which is meant to be chilling --- is simply underwhelming.

Less sensual than it looks.

Personally, I can't think of a story that involved snuff films that I would have enjoyed.  Maybe that's just me, though.  I assumed that 8MM would try to be disturbing and maybe take a stand on the issue (murder is bad, perhaps?).  It doesn't.  It's a detective story where the audience is only allowed to see snippets of what Nic Cage is reacting to; that means that Cage's acting needs to convey our disgust for us, and he turns in a very melodramatic performance that undermines that notion.  I'm not saying that I need to see the damn titular movie --- not seeing a prized object can work wonders, as in The Maltese Falcon and Pulp Fiction.  The script and the acting weren't anywhere near where they needed to be to pull that off, though.  Hell, Cage's character lost his private detective credibility in the beginning of the film, when he hides his smoking habit from his wife by spraying air freshener, just like a fifteen year-old.  Hint: change your clothes and hide your ashtrays, too, dumbass.  If he can't do that convincingly, how is the audience supposed to buy into anything else he does in this film?

This movie just plain sucks.  There is nothing quite like a film that is trying to be edgy and watching it fail.  I would have enjoyed laughing at 8MM, but it is a joyless train wreck that is at least thirty minutes too long.  Nicolas Cage does a poor job acting, which is not terribly surprising, and he appears to have no fun doing it.  His character is stupid and without charm.  The script is surprisingly dull and the supporting cast is mostly unmemorable.  This is a surprisingly bad movie with a surprisingly bad story, and I went in with low expectations.  The only redeeming quality this film has --- aside from a surprising second life in sports interviews --- is that it was too draining and incompetent to earn my hatred.

The Taking of Pelham 123

Woo!  Let's hear it for remakes!  WOO!  Yeah...I may be overcompensating.  Let's hear it for train-based thrillers, then?  Woo...?

In the mid-70s, Walter Matthau starred in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.  While making a movie about criminals with a master plan was certainly not new at the time, the sarcastic and light-hearted tone of the main characters added some unexpected levity to a subject matter that would normally have been deadly serious.  It is that tone, more than the crime itself, that made One Two Three a success.

Fast forward thirty years or so, and it is naturally time to remake this movie and update it to modern times.  The Taking of Pelham 123 (check it out --- the numbers aren't spelled out any more...edgy!) makes a few important departures from the original film.  Four armed men seize control of the New York subway train leaving Pelham station at 1:23, led by a man who will eventually identify himself as "Ryder...with a Y" (John Travolta).  Ryder alerts the on-duty train dispatcher, Walter Garber (Denzel Washington), and demands $10 million in ransom for the hostages he has.  The city of New York has one hour to comply before Ryder starts killing hostages.  That's all well and good, and the mayor of New York (James Gandolfini) is willing to pay the ransom, but how does Ryder expect to escape?

I am not the biggest fan in the world of Tony Scott's direction, but the man has made some pretty good movies over the years.  This might not be one of them.  The movie has plenty of scenes shown in fast motion, often followed up with extremely blurry slow-motion shots.  Is it because the camera is showing things passing by from the train's perspective, and then slowing down to show something important?  No, I think it's done simply to look cool.  And it does, it just doesn't have anything to do with the story or characters, and that irritates me.  The rest of his direction is fine, I guess.  I think he hasn't been bringing out the best in Denzel in their past few collaborations, but even mediocre Denzel is still pretty solid.

This is the third time Tony Scott has directed Denzel Washington, after Man on Fire and Deja Vu, and I am very surprised that they keep working together.  Sure, Man on Fire was awesome, but Denzel is capable of a lot more than what Scott demands of him in these thrillers.  Yes, he was fine in this movie.  His character was changed significantly from the original film to add depth and moral ambiguity, and Washington conveys those differences well.  It's just not a great role in a great movie.  John Travolta is partly to blame for that.  I hate it when Travolta plays villains.  For some reason, playing morally bankrupt characters gives him a license to overact and deliver incredibly stupid lines.  It all began back in Broken Arrow, and he has managed to find the most ridiculous lines in every mean character he's played since.
(Link) View more Riley Hale Sound Clips and Vic Deakins Sound Clips
This movie's winner for my "John Travolta 'Yeah...ain't it cool' Award" is:

"[Walter Garber] sounds sexy.  He'd be my bitch in prison."

Thanks for the insight, John.  Basically, Travolta misses the mark on being sinister and instead is an over-animated egomaniac with a "cool" mustache. The supporting cast is full of really good actors, but their characters aren't too spectacular.  James Gandolfini is the best of the bunch, with Luis Guzman and John Turturro playing pretty vanilla characters that are there just to propel the plot.  That really disappointed me, since I like all three actors.

I would also like to call out Brian Helgeland's script.  While Helgeland is capable of some pretty great work, he leans more toward bad writing.  This isn't one of his better efforts.  Since the movie is a remake it's easy to see what was changed in the script.  Helgeland added copious amounts of profanity, unnecessary car crashes, and the typical movie stereotype of New Yorkers (you know...loud-mouthed jerks).  Personally, I think the writing matches up pretty well with Scott's jittery camera work, but it's not terribly thrilling and just turning up the attitude of the bad guys doesn't fix that core problem.  And what was with changing the names of the bad guys?  In the original, the villains had code names, so they couldn't be identified; they went by colors, an idea later copied in Reservoir Dogs.  Instead of sticking with the original smart idea (and drawing comparisons to Dogs), he came up with..."Ryder with a Y"?  What, am I supposed to infer that this train rider is a rebel because he's only sometimes a vowel?  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  My least favorite thing about the plot is Ryder's motive. SPOILER: Ryder is already rich, and doesn't need the ransom money.  He already has $2 million, and it's been invested in gold for about a decade.  This is all just to make him obscenely wealthy.  What a boring motive for a villain.

This isn't a bad movie, but it's just not that great.  They updated a movie by removing all the charm from it, replacing it with random F-bombs and Travolta-stache.  The cast is very talented, but the script isn't very interesting, which is hard to do with a heist movie.  It is fast-paced and manages to keep the puzzle pieces falling slowly enough so that there is always something to learn, but it's just not enough.  This is just a bland product with some good ingredients.

True Romance (Director's Cut)

Continuing with my mini-theme of romantic movies that I actually like, in honor of Valentine's Day, I bring you True Romance.  Directed by Tony Scott and one of Quentin Tarantino's first professional screenplays (I can never figure out if this came first, or Reservoir Dogs), True Romance is a blend of crime, action, Tarantino dialogue, and true love.  This film also boasts one of the all-time greatest supporting casts, with some of the most memorable scenes highlighting supporting characters that you will ever see.

Clarence (Christian Slater) works at a comic book store (awesome!) and, for his birthday, has decided to catch a triple feature of Sonny Chiba movies at a local theater (awesomer!).  While watching the movies, a busty blonde named Alabama (Patricia Arquette) comes in and spills her popcorn all over him.  Clarence is very gracious about the whole thing, possibly because of her cleavage, and the two strike up a conversation.  They end up getting some pie after the movie (awesomest!), which eventually leads back to Clarence's place for some sexy sexy time.  Of course, this isn't as perfect as it seems.  It turns out that Alabama is a call girl, hired by Clarence's boss to sleep with him as a birthday present.  Clarence doesn't mind at all, insisting that he had had the night of his life; the two abruptly declare their eternal love for each other and get married in the morning.  Aww.  The rest of the movie has the two getting to know each other and finding out that true romance means compromise.

The "crime" part of the story begins when Clarence chooses to confront Alabama's pimp, Drexl (Gary Oldman).  He doesn't really have a solid reason for this, it's just his inner alpha male (which is personified by an imaginary Elvis that gives him advice) needing to prove itself.  The short version of the story has Clarence killing Drexl and leaving with a suitcase of Alabama's clothes.  When he returns home and tells Alabama that he just killed Drexl, her response is "That's so...romantic!"  I guess Clarence married the right gal.  The suitcase he brought with didn't have his new wife's old clothes, though; it was filled with uncut cocaine.  Not knowing what to do with a suitcase of coke, Clarence and Alabama do the only sensible thing they can think of: they go to California to sell it to move stars.  Unfortunately, the late and unlamented Drexl was selling the drugs for the mob, and they are not as forgiving as you might think.

The first thing you notice about True Romance is the dialogue.  It still sounds fresh and funny today, but it really sticks out against the rest of 1993 Hollywood.  To put it in perspective, the nominees for Best Picture that year were The Fugitive, The Remains of the Day, The Piano, In the Name of the Father and Schindler's List, none of which were particularly renowned for their rapid-fire creative vulgarity.  And while you might recognize some echoes of Tarantino's dialogue from this movie in Pulp Fiction, it's still good stuff.

The script is definitely this film's strongest point, but the astonishing supporting cast is a close second.  This movie has so many recognizable actors in it, and most of them have surprisingly meaty roles.  Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken share one of my all-time favorite scenes, and it's just the two of them talking.  Brad Pitt is hilarious as a worthless, pot-smoking roommate; he was actually offered the role of Clarence, but it conflicted with his filming schedule for Kalifornia --- he just picked Floyd, who originally had no lines, out of the script and ad-libbed all his stuff.  And Gary Oldman's performance as Drexl is so good that I usually watch it two or three times before continuing with the rest of the movie.  I don't know whose idea it was to make this pasty-white pimp pretend that he was a black man, but it's pretty damn funny; Oldman doesn't let his character become a joke, though, and turns out a frightening performance.

Just those four performances would be enough for most movies, but this film is overflowing with larger-than-life supporting characters.  Chris Penn and Tom Sizemore (before he was a train wreck) did a great job as detectives.  Bronson Pinchot and Saul Rubinek play obnoxious Hollywood types almost to the point of becoming caricatures, but they're still entertaining.  James Gandolfini has a good scene as (what else?) a mob enforcer.  Even the normally talentless Michael Rappaport looked good (because he was playing a talentless actor).  And then there are the bit parts!  Samuel L. Jackson has a brief but entertaining scene where he discusses the universal nature of oral sex, Val Kilmer plays Clarence's imaginary Elvis (whose face is never shown, thanks to some truly awful makeup), and a young Kevin Corrigan has a small non-speaking role, too.  On the whole, this supporting cast is good enough to star in three or four solid movies; all together with a clever script, True Romance is a movie that has no boring scenes, and every minute has an actor you recognize in it.

Of course, all that support would be worthless if the main actors are no good.  And, to be honest, half of them aren't great.  Patricia Arquette, while very white-trash hot in this movie, does not do a good job.  In fact, I would argue that she sounds like she has some sort of mild retardation.  For some reason, her character is given a voice-over at the beginning and end of the movie, too, and they're not great either, even with a good script.  Christian Slater, though, does deliver his lines well, giving Clarence a cocky, roguish attitude that matches the tone of the picture perfectly.

Tony Scott directed this movie, but it was before his work in Enemy of the State, so it doesn't have all the 360-degree, fast-motion establishing shots that his last decade of films have had.  Instead, he plays it pretty simple and lets the script do most of the work.  Nobody's monologue is interrupted by unnecessary camera cuts, there are no fancy split-screens or anything like that.  Aside from some particularly violent fights scenes, Scott doesn't really take the opportunity to show off, and the film is better for it.  I disagree with giving Alabama bookend voice-overs, but that's a small price to pay.  Really, aside from a better soundtrack, I don't see how this movie could be improved by having Tarantino direct it himself.

This is a fast-paced crime movie with lots of overly-clever vulgar dialogue. If that's not your thing, then catch a Katherine Heigl movie instead.  This is the first time (and only time, so far) a Tarantino script had anything resembling an actual romance in it, and while pretty unconventional, it works.  There is no point in the movie where I wondered why these two characters were together, and that adds a lot of heart to the mix.  This isn't your typical romantic comedy, but Clarence and Alabama's unquestioning, immediate, and confident love for each other is unusually refreshing.  It's simple and untroubled, and that's perfectly fine in a movie like this.  Even with Arquette's mentally challenged performance, True Romance remains one of my favorite films of the 1990s, and one of the few that deserve ten stars.