The Ides of March

When I first saw the poster for Ides of March, several things came to mind.  First of all, I thought that was a pretty cool poster; it can be disarming how much two handsome men can fit the same mold and yet look different. 

***Too...much...handsome...for...one...screen...!***

The second thing I noticed was the stellar cast; three Oscar winners, some great character actors, a rising star and...Evan Rachel Wood.  Finally, I noticed the release date and the filmmakers; Fall is typically when most Oscar bait comes out and George Clooney directed and co-wrote this picture with Grant Heslov, his co-writer on Good Night, and Good Luck.  This kind of looked like Clooney trying, once again, to make Important Movies with Capital Letters; while I like Good Night, And Good Luck and Syriana, neither one was much fun to watch.  Great dramas don't have to be fun, but if you're aiming for greatness, you've got to hit it out of the park, or else you underwhelm your audience.  Would Ides of March finally be Clooney's political movie masterpiece?

Flag pin: check!  Political importance: pending

Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney) is running for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States against Senator Ted Pullman (Michael Mantell).  Stephen (Ryan Gosling) is the idealistic and instinctively brilliant junior campaign manager for Governor Morris; the senior campaign manager is Paul (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who has experience and political savvy.  Both candidates need to win the official support of crazy ass Senator Thompson (Jeffrey Wright), who controls enough delegates to sway and clinch the nomination for either candidate.  Pretty cut and dry so far, right?  Stephen is a rising star who both legitimately believes in his candidate and is getting to show off how awesome he is, every time Governor Morris says or does something clever in public.  As the campaign heats up, though, both Stephen's idealism and his fantastic career suffer enormous setbacks.  Can he fight back and save what is rightfully his, or will he have to sacrifice one for the other?

Production note: there are a lot of corded phones in this flick

If there is one thing that The Ides of March is not lacking in, it is acting talent.  I kind of have a thing for Ryan Gosling right now (ever since I saw Drive), and he has a good handle on the whole charming-but-occasionally-coldly-manipulative thing here.  George Clooney turns in a similarly effective performance; it was kind of cool seeing him turn on the "public face" charm and then, in private, have a different attitude.  Both men were good, but not great, in similar roles.  What impressed me most in this film were the dueling performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, who played Senator Pullman's senior campaign manager.  Both turned in terrific performances; I really liked Giamatti's resignation toward being a spider-like bastard and Hoffman's uncharacteristic explosion took me by surprise.  The rest of the cast was solid, but nothing extraordinary.  Jeffrey Wright gave another good small performance as a fairly unlikable character. 

Mostly for his attitude during the "Yo Mama" jokes part of political speeches

Marisa Tomei was effective as a tough reporter.  Evan Rachel Wood was pretty good as a Morris campaign intern.  You might recognize Max Minghella's eyebrows from The Social Network; he plays a similarly small role here.

While the acting is good, the best parts don't get nearly enough attention.  I seriously loved Giamatti and Hoffman as heartless dueling chessmasters, but this movie needed either Gosling or Wood to be the characters that impressed. 

...and it wasn't going to be her bipolar character

This is one of the problems I have with George Clooney as a writer/director.  While I appreciate his apparent modesty when in the directing chair (his only major role in a picture he directed was in the comedy Leatherheads), I think he tends to value the theme of his movies more than the performances.  The Ides of March looks pretty good and is told in a competent fashion, but it felt like Clooney was holding back for most of the film.  I was more than willing to wait for the hammer to drop, but when it did, I was left cold.  For reasons that elude me, it seems that George Clooney expects audiences to be shocked by political backstabbing and corruption.  Maybe someone should tell him that Watergate was almost forty years ago now; Americans haven't trusted their elected officials to be anything but bastards for decades.

Moments later, at least one man would have a knife in his back

That's not to say that The Ides of March is a waste of time; it's just not as excellent as it should be, given the talent involved.  Here's what I liked:

• while Clooney is an outspoken Democrat, this film doesn't target (or even mention) Republicans, which makes this a lot less abrasive than it might have been
• Ryan Gosling's crazy eyes when he finds out Governor Morris' secret are priceless
• I loved Giamatti's character when he explained his motives

"Well, Stephen, I'm made entirely of bastard molecules"

Here's what I didn't like:

• Really?  That is the scandal facing Governor Morris?  Couldn't they try something unique?
• Evan Rachel Wood's character's motives confuse me.  SPOILER ALERT: Maybe I just don't understand pregnancy (which is very possible), but I have trouble imagining a seemingly carefree young woman essentially demanding sex from a handsome man when A) she knows she is pregnant B) is freaking the hell out about being pregnant and C) her new sexy time partner is not her baby daddy.
• That title sucks so much.  Sure, they were clever enough to set Election Day on March 15, but did they have to use this title?  While slightly literary, the only people who want to watch this film will know exactly what the title refers to --- if they weren't going to be subtle, they might as well have titled the movie "Political Betrayal: The Movie"

And to be completely honest, I would not have minded any of those flaws too much if the film had only had a better message.  The Ides of March is not an expose, but it has the feel of one; if they had focused on the betrayal and built up Stephen's idealism more, this could have (maybe) been a great film. 

Stephen, in mourning for his innocence

Sadly, it's stuck in that limbo of "pretty good," where a lot of movies get forgotten.

The Social Network

...or, as Maddox has pointed out on his Facebook page, at all; Facebook has a limit of 5,000 friends.  Way to go, marketing people.

The Social Network is the semi-biographical story of Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and brains behind Facebook, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires.  After his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), broke up with him for completely understandable reasons, Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) does what comes natural for a computer nerd; he gets drunk, blogs about what a bitch Erica is, and does some computer programming.  If that isn't what you do when you're heartbroken, maybe you didn't go to Harvard.  Mark's programming is pretty genius, even though he's drunk; he hacks into Harvard's varied databases and finds pictures of basically every girl on campus --- his impromptu website pits random Harvard girl against random Harvard girl, with the users voting as to which girl is hotter.  It's just a harmless drunken prank until Mark's site crashes Harvard's network after only two hours online, and not anywhere near peak using hours.  This gets Mark placed on academic probation for hacking the school's databases and in the doghouse with just about every woman is Massachusetts.  It also plants the seed for a website that will encapsulate the college experience.  People want to know who's doing what, with whom, and see the pictures, right?  Well, Mark designs the website that can do all that and more!  Along the way, he manages to royally piss off his closest friends, as well as the Harvard upper crust that dangled social elitism before him.  But why does Mark do all this?

The Social Network has two amazing things going for it.  The first is the script by Aaron Sorkin, writer of The West Wing and Sports Night (one of my favorites).  The other is Trent Reznor's score.  Before I go into Sorkin's writing, I have to show my appreciation for the music.  While I am a fan of Nine Inch Nails, I did not expect to be fully aware of the score in this movie; it is really good, and the story fits Reznor's traditional themes of rage and not fitting in like a glove.  Sorkin's script is about what you would expect from the man; it is fast-paced and witty.  I really like Sorkin, but he has a tendency to go for the witty instead of the heartfelt.  This movie is full of razor sharp barbs from Zuckerberg, but it is surprisingly sparse on heart.  That is nitpicking, of course; when you have a script that is this charming and witty, it sometimes feels like a low blow to point out that there really isn't much of an emotional core to the film.  Even without any moments that really hit home, this is a very entertaining script that manages to make business deals and computer programming both fun and thrilling.  Kudos to Sorkin.

I have no problem with the acting in this movie.  I generally enjoy Jesse Eisenberg (ever since the wonderfully abrasive Rodger Dodger), and it's nice to see him in a film that separates him from Michael Cera's geek-chic.  Eisenberg really showed off his promise here, delivering some truly fantastic dialogue (which I knew he was capable of), as well as displaying the most emotional depth I have seen from him, to date.  Eisenberg really carried the picture with his successful portrayal of the too-cool-for-school Zuckerberg, although there are several notable supporting cast members, including Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara, Justin Timberlake (as the founder of Napster), Rashida Jones, and Brenda Song (who you might know from The Suite Life of Zack & Cody...or not).

How lucky is this jerk to be played by a former boy-band heartthrob?

Actually, Garfield gave a pretty solid supporting performance, but his character was painted as the nerd among nerds, which made him less likable.  I thought the antagonists were played decently well, too, even if Armie Hammer got credit for both of the Winklevoss twins; to play twins, a body double was used for one of the characters, with Armie's head transplanted on in post-production.  Armie was okay, as was Max Minghella as the Winklevoss's supporter.

That is part of the problem I have with The Social Network.  As much as I enjoy Eisenberg's performance, I was not terribly impressed with the rest of the cast.  It's not that I doubt the talent of up-and-comers like Andrew Garfield (the next Spider-Man) or Rooney Mara (Lisbeth in the American version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).  I just don't see Sorkin's script as a launching point for either talent.  This is a film that focuses almost solely on the main character.  It was fun to watch, granted, but seeing somebody be a clever asshole for two hours doesn't carry the weight of a character that actually forms relationships within a film.  There is a moment, toward the end of the film, that tries its best to make up for the lack of emotion in this movie, but it is just too little too late for me.

I'm not going to lie...Facebook is pretty addictive, and the story behind it is pretty interesting.  I acknowledge that this film over-dramatizes parts of the story, and I am more than willing to agree that this is a timely film.  Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that the film is totally successful.  I think this movie wanted to be so much more important than it really was (kind of like Sorkin's Charlie Wilson's War) that it lost sight of what made it special in the first place.  This shouldn't have been a film about how cool or clever or appealing Mark Zuckerberg is/was/should be; it should have focused on the importance of friends and the irony of a social networker losing his only friends.

David Fincher is turning out to be a pretty reliable director (I haven't seen Zodiac yet, though), which surprises me.  I thought he was only able to tell fractured narratives, but The Social Network was pretty appealing.  I'm not a huge fan of the narrative split between present and past --- it kind of takes away the drama when you know the gist of what will happen --- but I liked the way Fincher handled the story.  It definitely would not have worked nearly as well as a chronological narrative.  He handled the actors pretty well, too.  I was a little worried about him after the horriborning The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but it looks like David Fincher, prestige picture director is here to stay for a while.

The Social Network might end up being one of the definitive movies of this generation.  That's kind of sad.  When you take a step back, this is a movie about emotional disconnect and business distrust; that may be a sign of the times, but it sure as hell isn't reassuring.  The script is pretty fantastic, but the lack of appealing secondary characters hinders this story.  It's a good effort, but it yearns for greatness that it doesn't quite reach.