The Big Short  2015 Adam McKay
It’s long been obvious to any thinking person that the 2007 economic clusterfuck was the inevitable flowering of a diseased system. The Big Short makes excellent use of this organic metaphor, following a handful of American investors along the sub-prime food chain, delineating the mechanisms that allowed both the housing market to face-plant and those investors to bet on precisely that outcome.  On paper the thing is one and a half hours of everything that bores and displeases me; bro ensembles, splainin, Ryan Gosling, coke weasel shit, forth-wall riffs and pube-twisting cameos.  But McKay returns the human flesh to what so often seems like a skeletal, Meccano fiasco, using impeccable pacing to drag us up and down the focal plane from micro to macro understandings, in a quite sophisticated and even entertaining process.  It’s definitely unsettling, being entertained by all these sludgy parasitic shenanigans, but I’ll cop to being sucked in.  It really does squeeze those lemons into something tartly satisfying.

Christian Bale flirts with the idea of munching scenery as Michael Burry, hedge-fund weirdo, but ultimately restricts himself to nibbling the curtains.  Everyone else is fine (even Gosling) with special mention going to Steve Carell as the kind of permanently-disgusted/morbidly curious playerhater that many of us can relate to.  Brad Pitt nearly butterfingers the gravitas he was going for with a beardy mumblecore delivery, but oh well- when was the last time you watched something specifically for him?  Shit, Kalifornia?  Fight Club, maybe.  He’s better at picking projects than he is at acting in the fucking things and The Big Short is another of Plan B’s finer moments.  

Narcos  2015
​Chris Brancato/Carlo Bernard/ Doug Miro
You’ve probably been swatting away the buzz around this Netflix series for a while now but don’t let that positive word of mouth put you off.  Narcos tracks the rise of Pablo Escobar from shitkicking cash-n-carry pirate to head of the world’s premier blow cartel and the personal prerogatives that dragged Colombia to the brink of sociopolitical collapse using an unusually digestible blend of unvarnished fact and folkloric embellishment.  

This sort of treatment can go so, so wrong and Boyd Holbrook’s DEA gringo voiceover, molester moustache and inert stylings were difficult to swallow for the first few episodes.  Fortunately, Netflix offset his plomo with a deliciously apposite Pedro Pascal and a solid gold supporting cast- Paulina Gaitán and Stephanie Sigman are perfect as wife and mistress respectively and Wagner Moura’s Escobar is probably the kind of Pablo the latter aspired to.  Awesome too was the decision to film almost everything in Spanish and in Colombia itself, the language and landscape delivering so much more nuance than any bullshit transcription could possibly have provided (we’re still walking around saying drogas and tranquilo at each other). 

Refreshingly, Narcos doesn’t try to dredge any moral dichotomy out of a conflict that saw a cartel kingpin elected to office and death squads with presidential imprimaturs. The current series chart the entirety of Escobar’s inevitably bell-shaped course and there are some small moments of lag and déjà vécu amid an otherwise fairly breathless trajectory, but that's a petty complaint.  Encouragingly, it felt like Netflix was taking an anti-GoT stance by holding sexual violence to a single non-gratuitous incident and keeping the rest of the brutality contextual; there’s no way or need to exaggerate the kind of depraved shit Colombia endured anyway.  

Casual voyeurs won’t get too much joy from Narcos but fans of addictive narrative, coherent visual style and total immersion should definitely inspect.  Another two series are slated for production: muy impaciente.

Sherpa 2015 Jennifer Peedom
As a New Zealander, I feel a particular edge to the criticisms of the Himalayan climbing industry’s exploitation of Nepal’s tribal porter contingent.  Hillary's famous ascent of Everest, his lifelong commitment to charitable work in the region and the calamitous dismantling of New Zealand's own labour protections pertain directly to expedition companies replete with Kiwis.  So it was chilling indeed to watch an expat rationalise his duplicitous treatment of Nepali labourers, given the price the latter have already paid to maintain their stake in what is effectively the only game in town. 

Jennifer Peedom’s timely snapshot of the infamous 2014 Everest climbing season centres around Phurba Tashi, a veteran Sherpa facing tearful pressure from his family to quit the mountain despite their financial dependance on his paltry wages.  After an avalanche cuts a fatal swathe through both climbers and porters Tashi and his fellow Sherpa down tools; what unfolds is a pretty unseemly summary of the imperiousness, entitlement, indifference and contempt that blight the modern industry.  If you find pay-to-play climbing distasteful and exploitative, Sherpa will not disabuse you of those assumptions.  Fabulous cinematography and the kind of unassuming inquiry that invites spoiled fuckwits to unload on camera are the icing on a sobering cake.

10 Cloverfield Lane  2016 Dan Trachtenberg
Random chick ends up in a dodgy survivalist’s basement as an intergalactic (you bloody well know it’s an alien scenario so don’t bother clutching any spoiler pearls) invasion begins, forcing her to choose between ducking fallout for a decade or busting her way back into whatever reality awaits.  

Full disclosure- we weren’t expecting much from that dusty premise (JJ Abrams shit: the eyeroll is implied) and if we hadn’t been so hard up for a Friday night watch we would never have bothered.  I wish we could somehow monetise that eerie prescience because 10 Cloverfield Lane didn’t deliver any more than a less stupidly entertaining iteration of the rather scrawny mechanics employed by its splashier predecessor, Cloverfield, which kept us quiet with wrathful tentacles and the promise of urban effacement.  You know- running, jumping, darkness, the tenuousness of human association stuff blah blah?  Budget redux time. 

Imma do right by my Lovecraft people and tell you there’s not much Cthuloid DNA awaiting your patient indulgence of this subterranean fuckery and let’s face it- what else were we hoping for?  I salute Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s earnest turn as the interred ingenue (she had fuck-all to work with) and slow-clap the discreet tenor of all those potentially gross interpersonal dynamics.  John Gallagher Jr is actually pretty good as her unlikely consort and John Goodman does a great twitchy John Goodman impression but we already knew that.  The rest is all join-the-dots kinetic resolution of a problem you won’t really give a shit about. Technically, 10 Cloverfield is well-executed, at least until the final sequence which looks like it was filmed inside a rhino's arse at midnight after ten production designers bolted in ten different directions rather than decide what the monsters were going to look like.  We wanted explicit visual payoff, for fuck's sake.  We got a wet fart in a shared raincoat.

​It wasn’t spectacularly terrible.  Just… less worthwhile than almost anything else we could have been doing.  

Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)  
​Sometimes you just have to drag your lazy brain away from Godzilla for the 567th time and force it to contemplate something a little more demanding.  We weren't breaking our necks trying to watch Knight of Cups because... you know... Terrence Malick. We acknowledge the challenge he poses to the casual viewer, happily declare ourselves Malick apologists and didn't think it was really possible to be ambivalent about his work- a shiny badge of honour in our estimation.

That being said, audible narration almost always annoys the shit out of me and a thick crust of random decorative/pointless hos over anything is going to piss me off too. But then what's not to like about wandering ocular direction, atypical structures and hey, Christian Bale so... have we finally arrived at an equivocal reaction to Malickian produce?  Hells bells.  I think so.

Knight of Cups dangles like a stoned chimp from the titular themes of prodigality and purpose, Bale's Rick the incurable player rolling through his glitzy midlife terrain with equal helpings of angst and passive élan; women, family, friendship and privilege both buoy and constrain him; the promise of opportunity pinches his cheeks then recedes with the same tides that blur everything else he could or should be doing.  The universe withholds its most crucial directives except in the kind of frustrating allusions encoded in tarot; earthquakes and club nights are alike in their significance.  Rick parties and dawdles and fucks and regrets.  All that would be fine if Knight of Cups wasn't exactly like the experiences he's immured in- remotely visual, anaesthetised, tautological.  There is just too much maundering and ambient, chiffon-fuzzed fuckery.  If someone had taken some heavy-gauge shears to this thing, we might have been happier, but then... it would be just like everything else; literal and cursory.

No one does wandering/pondering like Malick, so don't listen to all the jelly haters- it's not like KoC is a waste of your valuable time.  I doubt anything he ever does will enjoy that dubious distinction.  If it's taken you a while to get over yourself and rent the damn thing, hit the button or you'll miss stuff like Terrence using the utterly incomparable Emmanuel Lubezki like a charmed bird on his hand, seeing it all and explaining everything, rendering sound and even performance largely redundant.  Even if you're not into all that temporal tapioca you might as well glide disembodied though LA and Vegas on the slick scales of a VIP pass or get your head dunked in a cold breaker- what the fuck else were you going to be doing?  The swoony ride is well worth the price of admission.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens  (J.J Abrams, 2015)
I’m old enough to remember the original original SW release; I wasn’t jerking off to its awkward, nonsensical, sexless juvenilia back then and I'm not jizzing my pants over the prospect of more, so yeah, I think it's fair to say this is a disinterested assessment.  Despite all the screechy fangasms, SW:TFA is just a lukewarm rehash, repackaging the first trilogy into a contemporary launchpad for the endless instalments to come, cleansing the central concepts of their less palatable nerdscurf whilst pandering to the infamous conservatism of the fanbase with a truly stunning lack of creativity.  Reiteration is a perfectly acceptable device, but christ on a fucking cracker, man, this shit was straight-up déjà vu bromide.

Booting Lucas from his own goofy-arse oeuvre was always going to be a good decision.  Abram’s middlebrow extruded vanilla stylings haven't exactly stolen my heart either, but he is a perfect fit for this pedestrian material- there, I said two nice things.  

Star Wars seems thematically and tonally archaic these days and not in a good way.  Stripped of their novelty, the gallactical faux-politics are laughably moribund; the Rebel Alliance is still a wee bit rebellious and it is rumoured that they do plan to flip off the oppressors from a prudent distance in the fullness of time, going forward.  But hey, the Empire seems to have pulled finger and rebranded- they've got yes, another Death Star blowing shit up from afar; the monstrous and cowardly injustice of it all etc etc.  Whatevs.

Deadpool (Tim Miller, 2016)
Why don't I just say what I really mean and tell you this tiresomely self-referential, five-year-old internet meme/microwave dinner with the plastic melted into it type-thing bored the everliving shit out of us?  

It really, really did. Ryan Reynolds is blessed with the comic timing of a dugong, killing jokes like they're a fucking threat to his family; maybe it's just that I'm not a sheltered fourteen year old boy but I found the alleged darksided humour dated and embarrassingly harmless.  If the writing did occasionally get there, very few spontaneous smirks survived Reynolds' insecure bugfuck delivery.

The action was mediocre, the story retrograde-retarded, the origin shit made me wonder what we'd done to deserve it and there was no sign whatsoever of the saucy gayness and dodgy adult themes that I was promised. Which strikes me as A: fatal shortchanging of such a proprietary fandom or B: karmic redress upon numbnuts with no fucking taste.  Just don't fall for the oversell. Deadpool is nowhere near as clever or subversive as you might be hoping.

This titanic discrepancy between the two leads howls at you from their first shared frames but that wasn't my first clue that Slow West would piss me off.  It's also incredibly derivative and I can't help but wonder what sort of critical reception this twee, indulgent bollocks would have attracted had a woman been responsible.  Then I remember that a chick could never have gotten Slow West green-lit in the first place.  Phew, eh?
​      
And can I just say that as a New Zealander I’ve had it up to my tits with our local landscapes (in this case someone's shitty pine plantation and back-country sheep block) being lazily passed off as everything from Mexico to the Himalayas?  Slow West scrapes that budget visual barrel to the extent that I expected to see someone wander into shot scratching their arse in a fucking Swandri, and all while no one can get a specifically, authentically New Zealand story funded.  The NZ Film Commission that bankrolled this obtuse shite wouldn't throw five bucks at Flight of the Conchords.  Fuck you, NZFC, seriously.  Both thumbs down.

Sicario (2015, Denis Villeneuve)
I was crossing all the toes and fingers in anticipation of this one.  Sadly, Sicario isn’t as good as you’ve probably heard, which gives me no pleasure.  If it had preserved the clean procedural tension of the opening half hour we would have been fine, but from the moment the camera started to linger on an overkill number of corpses decomposing behind drywall a cheesy, manipulative flavour kicked in and it was a downhill drag from there.  Sigh.  Emily Blunt is Kate, FBI SWAT boss battling southern-state drug cartel activity sucked into a murky, border-busting Special Ops initiative by Josh Brolin's CIA spook, who is in turn facilitating the mysterious Alejandro (Benico Del Toro) in some sort of personalised revenge trajectory wherein their interests more or less align.  

If the utterly depraved dynamics of the continental American drug war are really news to you, Sicario might possess more of the galvanic momentum it was obviously striving for.  In lieu of that shock value we both felt it offered little in the way of novel perspective or characterisation to relieve that sense of no-shit-sherlock redundancy.  It stumbles from the moment it veers away from impersonal momentum into the organisms involved, defying logic and resorting to laboured misogynistic diminution to make its feeble point.

Josh Brolin's CIA guy is the self-regarding median douche he always brings to the fucking table, which was annoying.  But it's Emily Blunt who really made me want to kick the screen.  Blunt has never sold me anything; as the Young Victoria she couldn’t even stand there in a fucking dress without pissing me off with that complacent duckface.  She is too static, too leaden, too self-conscious and projects all three deficits here as the FBI agent with an er… heart of naive gold.  Despite her character riding the pointy end into contra-cartel action on the daily, she remains a delicate principled flower, apparently, requiring male protection and supervision at every juncture.  Not since Jason Bourne has someone seemed so utterly fucking baffled by their own trajectory but you know… bitches be crazy.  The story so palpably aches to trail breathlessly after the macho Del Toro, wrong’d, ambiguous antihero, that Blunt’s hapless nark feels as superfluous and derisory to the audience as she does to her fellow protagonists.  Benicio is mmmgood but I wish someone would really twist his arm and make him work all that recessed potential.

I can see why generic male critics creamed their pants over Sicario. ​It’s everything they want movies to be- sneakily androcentric, essentially uncomplicated whilst affecting complexity, technically praiseworthy, vaguely familiar (it rips chunks out of Zero Dark Thirty and even The Usual Suspects with gay abandon) and reductively cynical.  

Everest  (2015, Baltasar Kormákur) 
Even if you're profoundly disinterested in the technical achievement it represents, Everest's fantastically pin-sharp and gin-clear cinematography is the best reason to watch this otherwise pretty standard disaster/survivor yarn dramatising portions of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer's fatal 1996 expeditions.  That, and Jason (Zero Dark Thirty) Clarke, who I had no fucking idea was Australian although that does explain his decent Newzullindish (not sure why our idiom seems to defeat virtually everyone; it's just a flattened affect, off-British variant, ff's.)  He is committed, buyable and engaging as the doomed Hall, as is Jake Gyllenhaal, who always delivers when relieved of the lead.  Then there's Josh Brolin, who always brings the Josh Brolin, no matter what.

Disappointingly, it is the consistently awesome Emily Watson who shits the tonal bed with her cringeworthy accent and overwrought fretting although, to be fair, Keira Knightley really takes the sloppy hysterics cake; thankfully she is relegated to smallish servings.  And that's all there is to Everest, really.  Don't go in expecting Tolstoy and you might find it moderately diverting.  

I'll award a consolation gold star for the eschewal of cheap pain-porn and stupidly villainous characterisations in its handling of a multi-axial tragedy that attracts vituperative revisionism and partisan dick-waving to this day.  Having read a number of opposing narratives, Everest doesn't seem like a particularly outrageous distortion to me, but then I find the whole concept of scrabbling over sacred mountains monstrously egotistical and deeply offensive.  Sorry.

​That feels better.

Madame Bovary  (2014, Sophie Barthes)
In many ways, life really is an Unlikable Olympics, wherein every stripe of twat and derp gets in your face, and then you die.  Flaubert was right about that, and about us largely being volunteers in our own tours of miserable duty, but I flip flop as to Madame Bovary’s absolute entitlement to canonical status and am thusly unusually amenable to the arguments posed by each new interpretation.

Which leads me to ponder why anyone would take such a blunt set of hedge shears to some of MB’s most important elements, recklessly isolating its characterisations and setting them adrift presumably in the pursuit of… brevity?  Economy?  Dunno.  It’s not the kind of arc that can be topped and tailed; MB is like a longbow, the power of its draw dependant on the integrity of its whole.  I’ll leave the precise nature of the omissions for you to discover, but I’m still struggling to understand the point of this Rose Barreneche/Sophie Barthes edit and its cropping of that fatal curve.

So much rested on Mia Wasikowska’s portrayal and while her paintbox of low-fi pretty and naturalistic tics and grimaces is a good start, it is largely the recipe she presented in Fukunaga's Jane Eyre and I'm not sure these two ladies share much more than pinched viscera.  The guys are unspectacular.  I don’t get Paul Giamatti’s weirdly atonal inclusion as mouth-and-trousers Homais.  Lloyd-Hughes forms an okay husband out of the reduced material he was handed and Logan Marshall-Green as posh cad/budget Tom Hardy rendered himself essentially pointless by turning in something closer to rising damp than callous smoulder.  Ezra Miller looks too much like someone way too into Ezra Miller and that shit is distracting.  Rhys Ifans is captain obvious as the procurer of ruinous luxury, but then that’s all he ever does.

San Andreas (2015, Brad Peyton)
Dude.  There's like these science people and they, I don’t know, detect shit and they’re detecting lots of whatever that shit is and like all this stuff happens something something faulty, and then earthquaking, like, everything in California is fucked because it's the superquake, the one where California just like goes boom into the Atlantic or some shit and there’s this other science guy and he’s on that... that dam, you know, the old one, you know, that really big one, and then there's the earthquake, right and that shit is just gone like boom, then The Rock has a hot daughter and she gets totally wet huh huh huh yeah I'd let her suck it brah, and his wife is like, on this building that is going down and needs rescuing and then they get this boat and go all the way up a tsunami totally and after that they just like cruise through all these other people needing help but its fine because it’s their daughter and she’s with these randoms and she says all this shit about what to like, do but hey lucky her dad’s there.  

​It's an earthquake movie.  There were few-to-no expectations.  But even recreational drug use could not and did not make San Andreas right, and I don’t say that lightly.  Especially cretinous cinematic floaters like this one always make me nervous because I feel they really are reflective of the ambient human plasm, and that sluggish corpus does not typically respond well to ridicule.  Incidentally, it was almost interesting to witness the two weirdly insistent and creepily prescriptive gender models San Andreas presented.  Millennial Girlpower Exemplar can know things, but must repay that indulgence with tittays, hypercoloured eyeballs, scrupulously polite accessibility and ultimate helplessness.  Her mother can only hope for guidance from her Conventional Retrograde Patriarkhēs and his powerful ocean-besting righteousness. 

No stars.  Please leave your physics in the foyer for collection prior to event.

Southpaw (2015, Antoine Fuqua)
From the moment Jake busted out all that bug-eyed mugging in that generic Vegas ring, I knew which way this thing was headed despite the initial industry buzz.  Gyllenhaal is such a naughty pony; though we often enjoy his performances, he has highly questionable, even wilfully bad taste in projects, regularly plunging from the heights of Donnie Darko and Nightcrawler into steamy poos like this one.

Jake is Billy the heavyweight champion who came up hard; his supportive wife, loving daughter and luxe estate complete him.  But oh no- at the top of his game he loses it all- no one understands his pain, the man came took his money and shitty Fitty took his game.  He cries alone in the shower.  Tragic strings enclose him.  Helpful voiceovers delineate the skullfuckingly obvious, over and over again.  Billy must re… rebuild.

Had enough?  We’d had enough after five minutes.  I may be old/ not the target demo/ have seen this retarded parable twenty times elsewhere, but I'm also as bloodthirsty and immature as the next punter and yet Southpaw's mouthbreathing spectacle still insults and displeases me.  And leaves me wondering things like just how Rachel McAdams and Gyllenhaal could sort through a presumably dizzying array of projects then settle on this one?  Why did Forest Whitaker pack his dignity when he knew he’d never get to wear it?  Perhaps it suffices to say that this was originally intended as a vehicle for Marshall Mathers.  Yes- Eminem, who recused himself only because his lyrical muse just wouldn't let him be great as a totally convincing heavyweight boxing champion and dragged him away in mid-shoot to write another stunning opus.  Sure, Jan.

Southpaw looks somewhat expensive while managing to feel like it was shoplifted from the Two Dollar Store by hoodrats.  Every fucking genre cliché is dragged screaming let me die in peace from overdue retirement and stuffed into a narrative bucket wherein they writhe like greasy, tormented eels to no good purpose.  There is.  A fight training.  Montage.  The incessant didactic commentary made me want to punch myself in the fucking face repeatedly.  The thing rolls ponderously over the top of the talent that may have redeemed it even though there are a thousand obvious ways this jejune orgy could have been tilted or reframed to make it worthy.  McAdams is excused; she acquits herself even in this blighted context, as do most of the supporting players, but it's only when he's sat with the utterly reliable Whitaker that Gyllenhaal reminds us why we bother with him at all, alluding to just how circumstantial and reactive his magic seems to be.  Carby old Fifty Curtis Jackson Cent plays mediocre-shady exactly like someone who really has cheated a few dipshits out of their lunch money in his time on earth.  Golf clap?  

It's fucking horrible.  We laughed like ghouls and rolled around in agony all the way through this feckless shitfest whilst simultaneously mourning those two squandered hours.

But when has that ever stopped me?  Caution: the following may be garbled.

We have been watching season II of True Detective.  I had a casual-to-complex relationship with the first series i.e. nonplussed by universal moans of critical pleasure despite all the jumbo-sized shortcomings but impressed by Nic Pizzollato at least trying something stylistically and somewhat in earnest.  Which confuses me because I see exactly the same jumbo shortcomings in this new series while the public response seems so diametric this time around.  Scary to think that novelty can be such a driver of perception. 

Like I said, despite its many flaws I don't hate-hate TD2 and don't feel the need to drag it as hard as other commentators.  Squandered casts and subcutaneous misogyny are so fucking ubiquitous that their discussion feels passé at this juncture, so I'll just go straight to the arse-puckering dialogue and wondering aloud how that shit makes it through what are usually tortuous and overpopulated editorial, rehearsal and directorial processes.  

Fundamentally I just don't get why so many writers struggle with dialogue.  A viable character always speaks for themselves and that's all there is to it.  While you could justifiably conclude that Pizzollato's never conversed with an adult human female, he is obviously talented and his instincts are sound.   It's just that his most profound and deeply passionate observations so often flounder in the mouths of his human creations.  His stuff is Batman in reverse- all real places and intelligent ideas but so few definitive protagonists.  I fucking loathe Mathew McConaughey's oxygen-gobbling cymbal-banging and though he got all the damn credit, it was the soupy lowland ambiance, the stinky majesty of TD1, so instinctive and well chosen, that provided placental support for those moments of stunningly poetic truth about death and loss when he almost killed them with his bullshit, breathing for them, salvaging their integrity.  I appreciated these narrative pearls to the extent that my admiration has outlived the memory of the words involved and the pompous clunk of their delivery.  

TD2 assures me that is probably a merciful omission.  We can, I think, throw some blame at the cast.  Taylor Kitsch looks like he's perpetually gambling with a wet fart but there's something uniformly alimentary about all of their deliveries and that's a directorial problem.  Vince Vaughn is a bream-faced one-expression mofo who couldn't sell me a straight line if both our lives depended on it, and he's allowed to squeeze his utterances past something hard and overdue like a constipated sybil.  Colin strains manfully enough to give us a whiff of for-real crazy skid mark, Rachel comes at it from the other end with some cocksucker strep-throat stylings and their performances carry the whole thing.  If the creative team (so tellingly overburdened with executive producers) were shooting for visceral, they ended up with brown splatter.

Pizzollato should probably also decide if he wants his evil to be cynical/rational/explicable or occult (in both senses of the word).  It's like he's always trying to wed the two strains without paying for the reception and that's cheesy and appropriative.  I wish he'd drop his detectives in a deeper hole because there is a point to be made and that is bad people are all the same colour no matter how they got that way.  

We could bitch about the baffling, undisciplined plotting but I think I'll just call that shit character driven, avoid eye contact and change the subject, lol.

It's not like we're going to quit watching 2/3s of the way through, though.  

Now I've shot my cognitive wad, so it'll probably be a lipstick review this week.  Oh go on- you like those too.  Soothing.  Sooooooooothing.


I fucking hate panflutes.

Wild at Heart. So stupid and threadbare and yet so utterly, comprehensively glorious in its chunk-blowing emotional impact and motherlode of gross eternal truths.  So many eternal truths are at least vaguely disgusting, don't you think?  Love is a negotiated chokehold and its exigence can be the most humiliating force on the planet; no real good can come of it.  There's always a whiff of Bobby Peru in the only kind of sex worth having; it doth liberally mock the meat it feeds on, making you a fucking slave to the slippery vagaries of genitalia- is that not the dumbest thing in the world and also seething with functional blerg?   

A lot of people were mad at WaH back in the day, waaaay out of proportion to any offence its artless dumbness should have inspired, which tipped me off to the real reason for the foaming at the mouth; all surrealist drag aside, Lynch (praise be upon him) was bitchslapping us with too much holistic, discomforting authenticity and that shit catches in a lot of perceptual windpipes.  Wild at Heart is the feral, airless passion, the witless devotion and the trip to the clinic afterwards.  They don't make them like that any more.

I first saw it with someone more Sailor than Sailor and it reminds me of him, always fondly, sometimes agonisingly, but he would have hated to be the cause of my avoiding an earthly delight and so I watch the damn thing anyway and am always glad I did.

Laura Dern was so great as Lula and never gets any credit for what was a fantastically instinctive performance- brittle, unfortified, slutty and stainless, the like of which we almost never see in these dry times with all the meta-meta bullshit and watchful posing that latterly passes for performance.  Dern extruded Lula from her own darn flesh. You need to stand in front of a mirror and try it yourself in order to truly appreciate her achievement.

Twenty five years.  Wild at Heart stomps that time down into an arm's length, so that it just seems like the distance between you and the overloaded ashtray into which you flicked your Camel, back when you still smoked.  It reminds me to fuck and to be fucked, to embrace intoxication in all its many forms, and that my beard-scissors hairdo is a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.

Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014) 
So, Birdman.  A visual ouroboros, an infinity loop through the muertos colours, infernal passages and moments of surreal exultation that is the neurotic middle aged mind and its buckshot-tattered ego.  There is so much muscular excellence to recognise and ponder.  Stunningly ambulatory direction and a welter of technical superlatives?  Check.  Chowder-chunky script?  Passive-aggressive obscurity and incisive performance?  Yep.  Interesting fuzzy demarcation and a shitload of surgical-grade intergenerational metacritique?  Super grown-up admissions about the shabby unspoken pointlessness and delusionality of it all?  In spades.  But also- heavy overworking, glutinous staginess, rubber band fatigue from all that visual flow and, for me personally, a certain verbose chewiness largely centred around Keaton's part because his acting has always rubbed me wrong. 

Nevertheless, as a writer I bend the knee to any script that can make helpless, squirming subjects of such a self-regarding cast.  It is a fucking beast of a thing, applied with the kind of gobsmacking assurance that makes everything else you've seen lately look fragile and equivocal and christ, I love to see that.  Last night as the credits popped I felt a little assaulted and decided I was impressed but unmoved; on mature reflection, there is so much multifactorial accomplishment in Birdman that it doesn't matter if you're unresponsive to its inhabitants.  It probably works best as a commentary even if that's not all that was intended.  It is a spectacular achievement and we need a lot more of this shit.  See it, support it.

Exodus: Gods & Kings  (Ridley Scott, 2014)
Oh Christian Bale.  I love thee well but you done fucked up by taking that cheque.  Everything you heard about this gigantic pendulous fupa of a thing is true; the monolithic multilateral offensiveness, new and exotic forms of hammery (intentional and unintentional) inexplicable miscasting (quite apart from the blatant racism of their selections, also- Joel Edgerton: ha ha); I could go on until you begged me to stop.  Bad design and art direction always bunch my undies and Exodus is a comprehensive craft fail on top of all that conceptual scatology, heaving with anachronistic props, ridiculous wardrobe, horrific makeup, cheesy, uneven effects, and the wrong horses, dammit.  In short, a complete disregard for the incredible cultural and aesthetic achievements of Egyptian civilisation.  

Which fits right in with its next level-embarrassing spirit of tastelessness and appropriation, running the spectrum from generalised brownface to lifting sequences wholesale from 300 (there are some breathtaking moments of plagiarism).  Scott’s frankly inexplicable doting on his own material (who the fuck quotes Gladiator with a straight face?) is also in evidence, underscoring precisely what sort of blithe narcissism is at work here.  That someone with their head stuffed so firmly up their arse could miss the ineffable brown coating their own output is a mystery for the ages.  Go home, Ridley- you're drunk.

I should have resisted the urge to spectate this bollocks.  I loathe christianity.  It's all just a good crop of potatoes waiting to happen as far as I'm concerned, and I'm reminded by toxic tripe like Exodus that the obsessive cruelty and gloating relativism of organised religion is never more succinctly limned than in the very legends that it treasures.  So if you're looking to wean yourself off that shit, brave the genital-numbing boredom and treat yourself to this hot, stinky slice of no-star Mosaic realness.  If you're still religious, call me at home.

A Most Violent Year  (J C Chandor, 2014)
A Most Violent Year reminded me that both Issac and Chastain probably went to very expensive performing arts schools.  Like, constantly.  Their slightly malfeasant NYC fuel oil distributors circa 1981 were so thickly redolent of their credentials that I had difficulty distinguishing this thing from some sort of advanced performance module, and from that observation you can possibly guess the trifling nature of my response.  The film is fascinatingly academic to the point of perversity, eschewing lowbrow hooks like its fucking life depended on it.  We should indulge this kind of wilfulness when it is serving up the good shit (see Birdman), but AMVY didn’t feed me much more than highly polished collegiate exposition; it swung and missed.  

That’s the danger of staging a piece with such narrow, parochial specificity.  A premise that offers so few intrinsic attractions can only ever be what you make of it, and in this case that is: not enough.  The characters are not adequately delineated.  There is a puzzling blindness to successful, organic emphasis, something I've seen so often lately and in a bunch of really disparate films.  I know they’re trying to be all angular and challenging but it just feels like a string of missed marks.  And so wilfully difficult becomes charmless, murky, period off-noir, pulling focus onto the mechanics of performance in lieu of the sleight and glamour of successful characterisation.  Both leads go the distance with the kind of sheer force of will and projection that should have sold me their characters a hundred times over.  Still no dice.

There are moments of masterful framing and diggable flow.  I appreciated the even handed spread of authentic sleaze.  But (and I've complained about this before) can we please give the nicotine stain filters a big fucking rest?  Why, when we sit down to something 20th C, do we have to look at it through fucking yellow cellophane?  A Most Violent Year isn't unreconstructed shite by any means; just don't expect to be enthralled or transported.

NIGHTCRAWLER   (Dan Gilroy, 2014)  While contempt doesn't begin to describe my reaction to what masquerades as dramatic social commentary these days, there is just so much dingy misanthropic gold in Nightcrawler that all notions of voyeurism are subverted.  Jake Gyllenhaal and his tadpole stare are Lou, the low-ball sociopath who takes up chasing lurid footage on spec for local LA news stations (if it bleeds, it leads etc), accompanied by Rick, his hapless apprentice.  As his professional stock rises Lou butts heads with veteran rival Bill Paxton and courts Rene Russo's Nina, sleazy editor and principle client, until his drive to capture footage shifts from the reactive to the creative.  

That none of what devolves feels particularly outlandish is a pretty effective indictment of our prevailing reality and while Nightcrawler is a critique, Gilroy is canny enough to impose hypnotic choreography on all that yucky verité, keeping everything tightly kinetic and smoothly lineal in the process of crafting reportage into fable.  The nocturnal vehicular footage rewards both the action gourmand and the technical/aesthetic connoisseur and we appreciated the contrast drawn between the drab banality of violence and its conflation into monetised spectacle.  In fact, we appreciated most of what Nightcrawler was shovelling.

I have time for Gyllenhaal because he (more often than not) rewards indulgence with the kind of off-kilter shit that he pulls here, although in absolutely nailing a supporting turn that could have gone so very wrong, Riz Ahmed almost jacks his thespy thunder.  Paxton brings a lot of... standard Paxton, and I can't decide how I feel about Russo's numbed Nina; she did good without knocking me out of my shoes, and that was all that was really required.  Brief moments of uneven tonality are the thing's only real defect, the ultimate scene striking us as a bit of glib disappointment after the stunningly angular catharsis that precedes it.  But don’t let this deter you; if Nightcrawler leaves you feeling like you’ve been licking tar, it has a point, and you won’t be able to drag your eyeballs off it.

DIRTY WARS  (Richard Rowleycor, 2013)  Despite its generic title and relative lack of fanfare, Dirty Wars sets itself apart in a genre obsessed with embedded access by mining the sinister lack of scrutiny enjoyed by one of the American military's most reprehensible tentacles, JSOC, or Joint Special Operations Command.  If that sounds like an acronym you couldn't satirise, the reality as explored by veteran war journalist Jeremy Scahill will wipe that cynic's smirk right off your face.   From Afghanistan to Yemen and Somalia, Scahill's poignant attempts to penetrate JSOC's truly terrifying political and operational impunity and to make sense of the horrific scale and limitless scope of their arbitrary carnage comprises a profoundly moving and disturbing experience.  Beautifully filmed under terrible conditions, thoughtfully constructed and deeply personal, Dirty Wars benefits greatly from its human pulse, dismantling distance and objectification to unite us with those at the opposite end of a process that victimises us all.  Mandatory viewing.

THE IMITATION GAME   (Morten Tyldum, 2014) For a biopic, The Imitation Game sure as hell knew how to ballroom dance around a subject without ever making meaningful contact.  Most literate adults are already aware of the whole Alan Turing / Enigma encryption / gay and persecuted / Bletchley Park milieu blah blah etc. etc., and if you number amongst them, don't expect to be goosed with any stunning insights or novel interpretations.  Or moistened by gobsmacking performances; for once, the paucity of heavyweight gongs afforded TIG (despite the relentless campaigning) hinted at method behind the fillum establishment's madness, and it's my opinion that the adapted screenplay Oscar was massively undeserved.  In trying to scrutinise such highly unconventional personalities and their accomplishments through plain vanilla goggles, this movie squandered such an amazing critical mass of historic material that I'm as much saddened as annoyed.

It's just too low-functioning.  And never grows legs, staggering all over the place breaking shit in the attempt, welding a mass of laughably stock characters, clichéd assumptions about gender and sexuality and a dirty-windscreen view of history into something lumpen, pointlessly fractured and even sort of amorphously offensive.  From the drippy private school scenes of romantic awakening to Alan's streaking away from his problems across a field of dewy Englishness, The Imitation Game just felt like a gently wafted, scone-scented Cumbercentric fart, with a side of Kiera Knightley as Kiera Knightley: privileged vintage crumpet. You might have guessed by now that I'm not down with either Knightley or Benedict's shtick, but I like to think of that prejudice as something deeply rooted in their respective creative realities.  That the latter was medium-competent in 12 Years a Slave just underlines the embarrassing distance between Tyldum and Steve McQueen.  Thumbs down.

Whiplash.  A gifted jazz drummer attempts to negotiate the demands of an American university studio band, battling his father’s deadweight legacy, his own expectations and the punishing whims of a dictatorial instructor.

It’s a familiar scenario and not the kind of thing I would usually drag myself across town to see due to prejudices I will presently enumerate, but then, you know… universal acclaim, etc etc.  Is it good?  Yes and I have little hesitation in conceding that.  Did it deserve all those award noms?  Yes, and here comes the caveat- because most of them were technical.  From a technical POV, Whiplash should have slurped up every darn gong going because the photography was primo and the cut and flow were dense with the elegance and dynamism essential to the successful communication of so many non-visual elements.  The thing is paced with the kind of brilliantly reactive, staccato precision you might expect from a gifted musician, testament to the obviously polymathic vision of Chazelle- he penned + directed this off the back of his own experiences- and the tightarse talent of his crew.  There is very little narrative flab and the arc is okay as far as its conventionality allows.  Whiplash is a slick and solid view, I doubt you’ll regret your investment in its 106m minutes and I say that as someone who fucking hates jazz (at least the kind pursued herein). 

However.  Whiplash also made me seriously want to vandalise a place of learning.  My personal reaction to a flying chair from a peremptory instructor would comprise immediate cabinetry-based escalation, and if your respect for the judgements and hierarchies of a creative establishment are as deficient as mine, you’re not going to come in your pants over the dynamics detailed here, despite the bilateral nature of the struggle.  

Andrew the percussive arsehole is well documented and probably honestly intended.  But arseholes are like flint; ubiquitous, and whilst you’ll sometimes get a spark from knocking two of them together, you might just have known one too many of the buggers (talented and otherwise) to really care about this Andrew or his piano bar bête noire.  The flipside of that is my enduring distaste for the popular artist-as-tortured-douchecanoe trope, pandering to audience expectation and nourishing destructive notions about the talented- that they are somehow infernal, that marginalisation and exploitation are their due and even their masochistic intent.  Every artist feels that blowback to some extent. I may be oversensitive about that shit, but fuck, whatever, man.  *flips desk and storms out*

Neither Teller’s nor Simmons’ performances moved my sympathy or insight needle, despite the feting they’ve both enjoyed, the latter in particular serving up the kind of watchful, slightly greasy polish that slid a little bit past apposite and a few feet into stock.  Luckily they did more than enough to shade out Paul Reiser's droopy dad, because that shit was a cheap blot on the proceedings and god, just horribly cheesy.  Melissa Benoist's girl-as-garnish bit part was shiny and engaging and may have been even moreso had she been given enough to work with.  Should have been born a dude, I suppose.

Pecking at something so roundly praised can sound like pure contrarianism but Whiplash really isn't a glistening nugget of spotless perfection and it falls to the sturdy independent reviewer to point that out.  If it was reaching for a wee bit of subversion in the midst of all those band aids and sweaty deference, it ended up punking out, and for the worst reason- a tidy denouement, the restoration of an equilibrium without ever seriously questioning the value of that balance.  Which is why I regard it as something lying a little south of brilliant.  It did make me sit through a fucking lengthy freestyle drum solo, though, and for that reason alone I look forward to Chazelle's future work.

SNOWPIERCER (Bong Joon-ho, 2013) 

Sounded promising, didn't it?  Unhappily, Snowpiercer is a really awful hackneyed, explosive techno-shart of a thing that just does not work, on any level, and reminded me why I've never been a fan of Mod Asian cinema's penchant for 'whimsical' arbitrary bullshit.  Did everyone else really enjoy SP as much as they publicly professed?  Insert Mugatu GIF here, because god damn, we passionately hated virtually everything about it.  From the incredibly lazy and I'm just going to say it, retarded, premise, the peanut-headed lead (Chris Evans, human adult contemporary station) an unbelievably ponderous and literal progression, the swishy sub-sub-Matrix, jazz-handed, violence-inducing violence and an unforgivably hammy Swinton, the thing schlumps along toward the kind of denouement that deserves dragging on a chain behind a car.  Oh but it's an allegory!  Like Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a fucking allegory.  

Don't believe the hype.  If you're even passingly familiar with/fond of the genre you'll find it neither challenging nor clever.  I'll say it again- whimsical arbitrary off-fucking-broadway panto effluent.  Study the screencap up there and tell me I'm wrong.  Look at the Swinton.  LOOK AT HER.  

We were both bored and angered.

THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY (Hossein Amini, 2013)
 
When their grift goes bad in 1960's Greece, two grand-touring shysters (Kirsten Dunst and Viggo Mortensen) find themselves reliant on another wayward American (Oscar Issac) to get them out of the country, their tenuous association tightening into a fatal tailspin.  TTFoJ is an arrestingly beautiful thing, to be sure, blessed with a top(ish) shelf cast, gilded locales, outstanding photographic and technical values.  It's also reassuringly adult, played out over a framework of grown-up tensions, potentials and frustrations, guile and desperation morphing into affinity and back again.  

All this should be a recipe for solid-state awesomeness but it's just too polite.  So much tasteful choreography in the face of everything we know about cornered people clawing at each other.  That's a genre issue as much as anything, as is The Two Faces of January being rather overly familiar, though I'm not one to kick at a flick for riffing on venerable themes or wearing honest homage on its sleeve.  Performance-wise, Dunst and Issac delight both the eye and the critical faculties, their entanglement offering a display of charisma and professionalism that spills out over the limitations of the material- always a pleasure to behold.  I was less sold on Mortensen's crusty instigator, but I often find Viggo a bit like a hermit crab poked once too often when he senses deficits in the material and have come to suspect this stubborn opacity is less the product of disinclination than (dare I suggest) creative insufficiency.  

It is an indictment of our current cinematic climate that something so six-out-of-ten/adequate outshines so much else.  TTFoJ exhibits few of the really penetrating personal quirks and twists that distinguish the blue ribbon stuff in this genre and upon which such distinction is so utterly dependent.  I felt very little in the course of my observation, the soft-focus genericism at work here unfortunately transcending the sum of its more decent elements.  And does everything circa the Bosphorous have to end in a dramatic foot chase through a jewellery quarter?  One more thing; Oscar Isaac is fucking dreamy.  The Two Faces of January is a honey-coloured num-num moderately deserving of your Sunday afternoon.

AMERICAN SNIPER (Clint Eastwood, 2014)  

The title says it all, really, doesn't it?  Uninspired, tone-deaf, witlessly pedestrian; if American Sniper was a puppy, it would crawl in a circle, not that such considerations would ever halt an oscar campaign.  

When precis tell you who they are, believe them: Kyle the Murican gets mad at all the spooky foreigners blowing up his homeland for no reason, dammit, joins the military, clips randoms from Iraqi rooftops and eventually catches one himself (did I spoil the ending for you?  Whilst children are apparently legitimate grist to the gratuitous sadism mill, Kyle's death-by-the-sword is discreetly veiled out of a respect accorded no one else.)  

But you don't have to wade through the politics to smell what's cooking here; this isn't (all) claw-handed liberal bitching and our audible recoil has probably obscured the fact that American Sniper is just a crap MOR movie, considered dispassionately.  Every lol cliché is dished out in an endless brown buffet; boring Hurt Locker-retread action, sinister bloodthirsty dirka-dirkastanis, horrifically inadequate interpersonal sequences and dipshit private imperatives that are a perfect microcosm of the wider political fuckfest.  Sienna Miller is neither recognisable nor memorable as the virtually nameless Standard Issue Home Incubator Unit.  Bradley Cooper serves up all the charmless, chook-eyed monotone a mouthbreather could wish for in their favourite homicidal simpleton.  And the whole thing looked like it was filmed through a fucking coffee filter by a team of Ambien-chugging nematodes on a really tight budget.

It may not sound like it, but I don't hate absolutely everything Eastwood does just because I suspect he's a pointlessly conservative arsehat gliding on a greasy slick of masculine privilege.  I had some time for Mystic River (in spite of everything) and still enjoy Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (with robust caveats), but they hung heavily, nay- exclusively- on individual performances and when you look at the rest of his efforts, American Sniper nestles right in the midst of the truckload of unsubtle bollocks he's been shovelling for a long time.  What we have here begins with thematic toxicity and ends with directorial fail.  

Clint the peekaboo jingoist is calling American Sniper an anti-war piece now.  Wonder if that's the kind of language he used to get it green-lit.  Conclusion- we watched it so you don't have to.

Sometimes the endless potential of strange fiction is a garden, rampant and fertile, and sometimes it is a featureless void, deprived even of convention’s drab landmarks.  That you see either one or the other is down to the eye of the beholder as much as the nature of the material presented, which is why critical judgements can be dismissed as subjective and even biased opinion.  Sometimes opacity and absence are intelligent devices and as welcome as any immediate, spectacular disclosure.  And then there’s those times when any single thing you can think to say about a story is an egregious spoiler… which to me is something that elbows past discretion and burps into your ear about fatal insubstantiality.  

I was so looking forward to Under The Skin that I was determined to ignore my own skeptisicm’s sardine breath and white knuckle it through any nagging preemptory suspicions.

Damn you, suspicion.  You’re so often right.  So spoiler alert; Scarlett Johansson is a nameless alien predator inhabiting a busty (is there any other kind?) earthgirl’s corpus.  That shouldn’t ruin the film for you, unless I then blurted out that’s all, folks, and rolled credits.  Which is what someone might as well have done twenty minutes into the thing because Under The Skin isn't really the piece of brilliantly-executed originality that I was sold, and this is obvious right from the stuttering opening sequence.

What is an Alien Scarlett to do?  She roams with a purpose, walking around on her hind legs, taking jerky notice of her new incarnation, finding all the onboard buttons.  She is abetted in securing human meat for a devouring plasm by a number of silent companions, using the crude mechanics of desire to secure her victims and inviting us to contemplate the circular universality of predation, the ugly relativity of morality and the visitant experience.  

All of which would be fine things indeed if Alien Scarlett could offer much to our scrutiny.  I suppose she looks a bit wonky when wide-angled from below, and lipstick application is an arcane thing, but little is confessed or projected beyond Johansson’s terribly obvious surface.  Her performance feels so rootless and under-directed that I fought the urge to feed the poor thing lines in the hope it would prod her out of wandering and pouting.  And taking off her shit, jesus.  That Under The Skin was penned and directed by dudes is a notion that intruded pretty quickly and the volume of lingering and tenuously-motivated nudity had even my male partner chuckling; yes, we get the whole tangled web of visual reference thing, but they just should have called it Here’s Some Tits so you Wont Admit it was Boring.  That doesn’t put you off, does it?  Sigh.

It was boring, and for the worst reason- latitude.  There was so much of it that everything seemed to droop and flatten out in all directions.  A lot of that's on Johansson's performance, but let's pin this shit where it really belongs; Glazer should have gone with an unknown for the lead and spent the money nailing down some flapping edges, since there were plenty of them.  For example- the massive challenge to tone posed by warty Scottish verité in the face of Johansson’s lacklustre otherness- an experiment that required much stronger oversight.  The two performance styles just did not clash and spark like they should have, leaving the first looking just stupidly inept (whatever the truth around the local performances- there's that pesky skepticism again) and the second foolishly mannered.  The predator’s obscurity could have been fine but there is peril in that sort of silence; it devolved into a dull second act and a denouement that had me A: discounting its literal probability right from the start and B: laughing out loud through a mouthful of popcorn and wondering exactly what it was that made black jellybeans so fucking delicious.

It could be argued that the nourishing of the plasm itself is worth the price of admission and it does provide the most satisfying sequences, hiving off in a cute, if wilfully arbitrary stylistic riff that infuses the strangeness of dream horror into the mundane choreography of physical congress, alluding uncomfortably to the relationship they’ve always enjoyed.  But these scenes and indeed everything else of fleeting value stick out like dogs’ bollocks against an arc that flounders into sketchy production values, fumbled emphasis and patience-baiting repetition.  And I could mutter something about Under The Skin’s best moments feeling... overly cribbed... but whether you consider such things knowing homage or cheap pastiche is best decided privately.

So yeah- not a dead loss, but a big disappointment.  That the thing was shamelessly oversold in the midst of a weird-shit drought is not exculpatory and nor was it a contribution to our shared impression of generalised paucity and tediousness, and those are harsh words indeed from people with a lot of time for digression, rough edges and honest imperfections.  That, and there is a wide stripe of insistent and quite icky cruelty in UTS that is neither explicitly motivated nor especially revelatory, leaving me with the need to wash my mental hands a few times afterwards and as there's no compelling reason to subject oneself to it, the sensitive and empathetic should probably consider themselves warned.  If you’ve sipped Johansson’s Kool Aid you might enjoy her stilted antics, but she’s so much like McConaughey in her single-trick fuckery that I just couldn’t lie back and take it, especially in something so utterly dependant on finesse and transparency.  She could have slapped us all with the delicious prismatic irony of her very presence in this thing- if she’d had the chops to testify on her own behalf.  Apologists might ponder that, if nothing else.  A lot of people seemed to love Under The Skin, because... I don't know... bewbs?  I'm told they're popular.

Sigh.  Those obligatory Oscar watches, eh?  Dallas Buyers Club isn't something I was gagging to wrap my corneas around.  I'd already formed an opinion, scraped like gilt with my magic mental teaspoon (I trust that thing implicitly) from the reactions of others and let's just say the result hadn't frogmarched me to the cinema.  But in the interests of this review I swept the old intellectual desktop clean and gave it a chance.

Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) is a skanky electrician rolling round Texas rodeos in the mid-eighties.  He contracts AIDS, is given a month to live and sets about obtaining alternative treatments for himself and others with the help of the transgendered Rayon (Jared Leto), who gives him entrée to the queer community he despises.  His entrepreneurial efforts set him against the medical establishment and more importantly the American Food and Drug Administration, who prosecute and sanction him at every turn.  A simple, cogent premise that could travel in a dozen riveting directions, right?

I'll speak first to my fellow beady hypercriticals and say depleted palette.  Because a lot of you will know what that means- code brown, my friends.  Arthouse lite.  Fincher institutional colours/take my secretive genius seriously filter.  It's such a Pavlovian cue now and fucking everyone's doing it, so note to filmmakers everywhere; enough with the backed-off sepia and faux-polaroid anachronistic foolishness.  It's played out, mmmokay?

Overworked stylistic flourishes do have a value in that they refer, perversely and rather ruthlessly, to both narrative deficits and dodgy performances.  Dallas Buyers Club features both.  While Woodroof's persistence and native resourcefulness are explored, the story is undercooked and overlong; in a word, flabby.  Sometimes boring, and without even using that grind to put us into his skin or really serving the matter to hand.  There is at least some laudable ambiguity around the morality of Woodroof's modus, but I felt that was something dumped in front of me and left to languish, bereft of the examination it possibly deserved. 

At the heart of the film's problems is the division of attention.  Too much was/is lavished upon the two leads, who can't really reward or sustain that scrutiny while everyone else is reduced to walk-on cardboard, including token chick Dr Saks (Jennifer Garner).  She bangs a wall with a hammer in frustration (I shit you not), but then I've yet to see Garner even come close to transcending the mediocre material that seems to be her lot.

McConaughey's performance is adequate, if you accept that you're only going to get the very few things he can do, regardless of what is actually required (exhibit A: True Detective).  Leto is typically, terribly thirsty, tooth-achingly self-conscious, running out of stunt queen moves halfway through his role and just tapping out and going limp when shit gets real.  That he could not rise to the dramatic opportunities posed by parental confrontation and pointy-end mortality tells you... well, everything you need to know.  

It's not all his fault; as a character, Rayon is superficially recognisable, but also a sloppy pastiche of workhorse clichés and lazy framing, a microcosm of this thing in the round and here's where I go into mini-rant mode.  No one would argue that clichés are without value or even authenticity; they are one of the founding structures of any subcultural expression after all.  But in the game of militant personal identity, attendant clichés are also knowingly subverted, kicked around and punted into the stands rather than regarded as the kind of gospel suggested by these hamfisted depictions.  So many extrinsic observers of otherness miss this glaring subtext.  Let loose without an ounce of subtlety or irony between them, McConaughey and Leto look like the mugging goons they are.  Two fucking Oscars, my arse.

Anyone with even a passing interest in the AIDS crisis and the establishment's response knows the FDA and successive political/medical administrations have been major villains in the tragedy that is still unfolding.  Dallas Buyers Club could have gone a lot further into those still trackless woods and profited greatly from the telling of such dreadful and complicated things.  But it's just not that kind of film.  After all the hype and oversaucing, DBC is still a B-, and that's only because I'm in a good mood.

Documentaries.  If you watch them as often as we do, you've probably been burnt by the fake hype and masturbatory/flea circus productions that tend to infest the genre and may well be averse to the prospect of yet another hand-held omphaloskeptical exposition.  I take an extremely dim view of anything that brings the idiom into disrepute and subject them all to one criteria- is it informative and absorbing beyond the constraints of its subject matter?  Whether you are specifically interested in the topic to hand or not, Jiro Dreams of Sushi surpasses this requirement.  

Most of all, it rejoices in a worthy protagonist.  At eighty-five, Jiro concerns himself with something far more abstract than the glistening morsels fashioned so lovingly in his renowned kitchen, namely excellence, that most elusive of beasts.  “Once you decide on your occupation, you must immerse yourself in your work.  Fall in love with your work.  Never complain about your job.  You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill.  That's the secret of success.  And is the key to being regarded honourably.” he assures us.  With seven decades in the game, three Michelin stars, an unimpeachable reputation and two adult children committed to his legacy, you could be forgiven for thinking that Jiro might have actually overtaken the standard to which he aspires.  But his ambivalence is obvious; slices of sea creatures and gobbets of grain both express his devotion to deliciousness and stand eternally between him and objective perfection. 

Jiro Dreams of Sushi employs a simple blend of observation and direct inquiry.  The perverse stoicism of Japanese masculinity, the hypnotic beauty of sushi preparation, the wood, the knives, the glorious lacquerwork fish, the octopus softening in its own protesting slime; all are grist to the visual mill.  And in this largesse lies a deeper purpose; illuminating the practise of excellence for its own sake.  Within the context of traditional Japanese society excellence is enviably quantifiable.  To be pronounced shokunin- an artisan, a guardian and exemplar- and more personally, to regard yourself as performing at the peak of your ability, is the goal to which Jiro, his sons and apprentices aspire.

To the contemporary observer, excellence is an anachronistic concept almost bereft of authenticity, and against this expectation Jiro's way seems at first like little more than submission to a conservative doctrine.  But the tension between orthodoxy and the personal militancy of virtuosity is the true heart of the matter and the thing I've thought about for weeks afterwards.  Jiro's badarse skill set and the lifelong grind of acquisition are both plainly illuminated, challenging the idea that excellence is too costly to achieve as well as being too provocative to value.

Tokyo is conveyed as I recall it personally; a melange of the baffling and the prosaic, a grittily industrial and perfunctory matrix studded with oblique slashes of beauty and strangeness.  Jiro's atelier quietly navigates this increasingly complex ecosystem, both gently predatory in their pursuit of the produce on which they depend and utterly subject to the vagaries of their supply.  This increasingly fraught aspect of sushi's destiny as both cuisine and artform is something I would have liked to hear these veteran exponents explore in a lot more depth; the moments devoted to the worsening crisis of supply and the environmental catastrophes behind it are frustratingly brief, given the fundamental consideration paid by shokunin to their materials.  

I could also complain of a painfully tasteful score that sometimes abolishes the sounds of the kitchen itself when the small wet patter of the morsels folded in the master's hands is something we almost leant forward in order to appreciate.  Curious also is the seemingly obligatory emphasis on interpersonal dramatics that may or may not exist, especially when Jiro's sons seem pretty down with filial duty and primogeniture, quietly resisting the attempts to frame them as downtrodden or malcontent.  And can I just say that I hated the promotional image, suspecting it referred to the unfortunate vein of poke-it-with-a-stick tourism that runs through so many similar explorations, despite their positive intent?  It's a weird lapse that almost dissuaded me from viewing this otherwise rather polished and engrossing effort.

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI is available on iTunes.

Ever sat down to a movie you've heard nothing about, full of exemplary talent and a premise that's not too played-out?  You know- that feeling of pleasant, hopeful expectancy- you're settling in, the opening shot's going okay, cue music... then a song starts wheezing away over the top of it all and it dawns on you.  You're experiencing a taste-level indicator and the arrow's pointing downwards.  That first whiff of corn.  And then the thing unfolds and you can't decide if it was a solid idea that got smothered in cheesy development, or a cheesy kernel of a thing that almost got off the ground with far more help than it deserved.  I always suffer a pavlovian clench when I see that thirsty Scott Free animation fronting anything these days and Out of the Furnace just reinforced that response.  A flick that hadn't pinged my radar despite heavyweight backers and my fondness for the cast is always a dodgy prospect.  Oh well.  It was a slow Tuesday night and we took the plunge like the thrillseekers we are.

Plotwise, here tis; hardworking do-right guy Russell (Christian Bale) tries to keep his shit together in a dying mill town while his troubled veteran brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) entangles himself, with the aid of loan shark John (Willem Dafoe), in a bare-knuckle fighting ring run by psycho hillbilly Harlan (Woody Harrelson), attempting to exorcise demons and make rent.  Russell's girlfriend (Zoe Saldana) bails when he goes down for a DUI, taking up with the local cop (Forest Whitaker).  Things go from bad to worse, etc. etc.  It's a basic-bitch scenario that could have gone either way; it's absolutely possible for worse arcs than this to be buoyed by an especially nuanced script and transcendent performances.  Or they can be dragged by their own lugubrious weight in spite of any such advantages.  It pains me, but in this instance I nominate door number two.

Out of the Furnace isn't a dead loss, and that makes its shortcomings all the more perplexing.  The cast delivers, the production values are high and the dialogue, such as it is, is well handled.  But (as seems to happen so often lately) what could have been so much more boils down to a lacklustre narrative poncing around in expensive, finely-wrought visuals, top-shelf players and noble intentions, signifying little.  It almost gets off the ground a couple of times and you assure yourself that it surely must, only to watch it lapse back into blerg, adhering grimly to the conventions of its pedestrian trajectory instead of stepping off into something more.

Ultimately, Out of the Furnace is sunk by two related defects.  The plot is a shower of romanticised bollocks, for one.  As a resident of a formerly industrial barrio, I can shoot holes in that shit all day.  In reality, all of these characters would be skinny-fat, rat-faced, mullet-greasing xenophobic meth monkeys, not just Harrelson's 'inbred'.  Such is the peril of voicing a complex story via sympathetic/at least absorbing characters amid poverty and generational decline; the latter are such depressingly universal experiences that you can't swing and miss about any of it, really.  The drug-buying scene; oh honey, no.  Tweaky Appalachian hood rats do not generally adopt you and take you back to their cook house, even if you do respeck their whip.  Your struggling heroes probably don't perform spontaneous tokens of reverent personal decency and everyone knows dignity and principle are the first things dumped on the verge when socioeconomic shit gets real.  And don't get me started on the tattoos.  Which leads me to the second point- the wet-dream cast as a bone of contention.  While Harrelson, Dafoe and Saldana (if I see one more token woman-as-passive-adjunct in the next month, I'm going to choke somebody out) can do low-end, Bale in particular is a poor fit for deprivation, trying his best to disguise that physical noblesse that is so fundamental to his onscreen presence.  Whitaker just sort of shuffles around stolidly.  Affleck girns and slouches and affects volatility but never gets there, hampered by inconsistency of characterisation in a script that can't seem to decide if he is inarticulate or not.  See that squishyface he's trying for on the poster?  Disney ghetto.  The clunky touches don't stop there; the spliced fight/hunting scene that had me girning and slouching (the dewy-eyed deer; it burns!) is quite emblematic of the film's failings as a whole.

Watch Out of the Furnace on a slow night, by all means; it's a dog, but we didn't hate-hate it.  The superlative visual tour of America's arse-end alone is worth your rental dime and since I just pecked the eyes out of it for you, you can leave your critical faculties in the charger.

What do you tell someone about a Cohen Brothers movie?  You'll love it, trust me.  Not at all formulaic.  Action packed.  Stuffed to the gills with loveable rogues.  That would be a pretty universal no.  Ever met someone who can articulate precisely why they pay to see one?  Again, no.  Even so, what I'm about to say is tantamount to blasphemy- Barton Fink and No Country for Old Men bored me more than anything, I think them overrated and the prospect of more Cohenic genius feels... like being invited to spectate hot sex between two people I dislike.  Ambivalent.  I'll confess also to feelings of confusion and dismay at the promise of folk music; to not knowing when they're taking the piss because it all looks like a pisstake to me.  And you know, it got so much darn festival oxygen... I'll cop to scowling at that too. 

To the uninitiated, it's probably most useful to declare the Cohens consistent, if nothing else; consistently adult, consistently juvenile, consistently earnest, sarcastic, innovative, reiterative; simple and complicated.  Inside Llewyn Davis is all of these things, and... sort of... less.  Though fortunately more than the sum of its parts.

Davis is a folk singer and human ingrown toenail shuffling between couches in Greenwich Village, 1961, down to his last hundy after losing his offsider to suicide.  The narrative doubles back over itself in a series of loops familiar to anyone afflicted by the creative impulse; getting dicked by your representation, arbitrary rejection, the desultory mining of played-out friendships, petty rivalries, the bloodied perversity, the weight of your own limbs as you drift inexorably toward the prospect of abandoning the only thing that keeps you breathing.  The universality of both these unhappy truths and their masochistic savour lie at the heart of ILD's success.  There is no catharsis, no wind machine, no mercy, no gilding of the dour lily that is Llewyn himself- that wight at once too good and too darn faulty to prevail- only the karmic spiral and moments of painfully intimate identification.  Full marks to Oscar Isaac for delivering such perfect and unlovely pitch; he is excellent in all respects.  As are Goodman, who refines that glorious shit with every innings, a grunting Hedlund and his mesmerising dirt lip and others comprising a top-shelf constellation of minor players.  Both Mulligan and her character are less convincing; I know Jean is supposed to thwacketh with bitter wings, but her delivery felt too screechy and uneven to be convincingly screechy and uneven, if you know what I mean.  It felt stiff, a little tone-deaf, and while one might lay this at the feet of the writing in this instance, tone and assurance are problems I've had with many of Mulligan's performances, except for her work in McQueen's despondent Shame. 

As with most of their previous stuff, Llewyn Davis enjoys the faintest spritz of eau de magical realism, or at least a whiff of its metaphorical cousin once removed.  While some find this flirtation charming, I find it slightly craven and even cynically appropriative at this stage, utilising its devices and traction without incurring the scorn so often flung at the genre.  Would it kill the Cohens to quit their borrowing and go the whole hog, just one darn time; to bite off something more than they might be comfortable chewing?  And while yes, we see the sweaters, irksome are the punches pulled instead of landed squarely on the face of the matter to hand, given Llewyn's potential as a weapon and indulgent folk's low-hanging fruit.  Too much tee hee, not enough burn.

Visually, ILD benefits inestimably from typically beautiful, if understated compositions and a soft, depleted palette, an autumnal Kodachrome that is such a relief from the garish treatments trotted out of late (serves me right for fucking myself in the eyes with shit like Pacific Rim.)  Aurally, it profits from some fine vocal performances from the players themselves, which impressed me retrospectively.  I'm clueless as to the depth and value of the oeuvre's in-jokes, but I'm sure there are plenty of easter eggs arrayed for the cognoscenti.  The Cohens' artless and/or cruelly puerile delight in directing our attention to every curious tic and bizarre convention they've observed is a guilty and eternal pleasure.  And of course, anyone who can exploit Justin Timberlake's conceit to the extent that he'll submit to being the panto horse's arse like he does here deserves marshmallows in their hot chocolate; the spectacle is all the more amusing for the victim believing himself privy to the whole spectrum of ironic implication.  Do you think he ever really sees himself?  Lol.  Me either.   

Flicks like Inside Llewyn Davis will always present critical challenges.  Working obscure subject matter into wilful gold can be its own reward and just as gratifying to a thoughtful audience.  It can seem petty to castigate a mature modus for being, well, mature, but it's important to question when and if peak Cohen has tipped over into just preaching to a bunch of breathless converts.  Superfans will probably lap up every umber moment with some sort of artisanal spoon, and now that I've kicked it around in my head for 24 hours, I'm more convinced of ILD's subtle merits than when the credits were rolling.  Not sure if I would have had the nerve to try and sell this story to anyone myself, but that's why I'm not a respected auteur.  The fact that they sold it to me is a peculiar achievement.   Inside Llewyn Davis is available on iTunes now, at least in NZ.