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Out in Theaters: THE FIFTH ESTATE

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“The Fifth Estate”
Directed by Bill Condon
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl, Jamie Blackley, Anthony Mackie, Laura Linney, Stanley Tucci
Biography, Drama
128 Mins
R


The best part about The Fifth Estate was the cheeseburger I ate before the movie. The bun was nicely toasted, hugging two juicy patties each pressed with a layer of cheese, topped with caramelized onions and the gentle spice of jalapeños. It was superb. The movie though was the antithesis of that burger. It was crap. Utter, unadulterated, “pee-a-little-in-your-pants because you’re laughing so hard in its face” crap.

The dead horse-beating script is the easiest clunker to point fingers at for its “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” tactile approach, but that quick analysis fails to recognize the full scope of how truly horrendous every element of this movie is. The consistently confused directing, entirely bumbling, borderline hack acting, and total lack of vision – all backed by one of the worst scores I’ve heard in ages – each land with a thud on the lowest tier of story-telling prowess.  The Fifth Estate‘s saving grace is that it has a good shot at winning the excuse, “It’s so bad, it’s good” from more forgiving moviegoers.

Whether the intent of the movie is to herald the importance of Julian Assange and his brainchild Wikilieaks or condemn him is unclear throughout. Even by the film’s conclusion, it’s hard to decipher if those in charge support Julian’s cause or just can’t stand him – an amazing feat for a movie that stretches well over two-hours. The intention may have been to land in some kind of moral gray zone but somewhere along the line moral complication got mixed up with poor storytelling, and the result is The Fifth Estate.

Wikileak’s contributions to revolutionizing how information is shared was groundbreaking – the way in which that story here is told is anything but. For a film that celebrates innovation, it’s amazing how stale its telling is. Montages set to thumping electronic beats detail Julian typing on a computer, driving in a car, walking down the street, typing even more on his laptop, and opening doors as if it were breathless entertainment. At times, it seems as if Bill Condon bumped his head and woke up thinking he was making a Bourne-style thriller.

Condon also hasn’t quite shaken out of his vampire gloves coming out of the ring of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part One and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part Two as the Assange onscreen is a lot like Bella. Brooding and touchy, he’s a one-note nincompoop with the depth of skinny jean’s pockets…girl’s skinny jean’s pockets. Having a conversation with Assange results in hearing about one of his many accomplishments or an oddly timed confession about the challenges peppering his life.

As if the character written on the page doesn’t already show it in bright stripes, Assange feels that its necessary to inform co-conspirator Daniel Berg (Daniel Brühl) that he’s on the autism spectrum. It’s painful for all the wrong reasons. However little humanity the script affords these characters, the performance is still horrid to watch unfold.

As my friend pointed out, Benedict Cumberbatch does a great SNL impression of Julian Assange, and he really does. But don’t expect to see more than a lazy, played for laughs impression of Assange, as Benedict puts in one of the worst performances of the entire year. His dopey take on Assange is a far cry from a definitive look at a complex character (even if it does wind up being the only one). This is a man you never once feel sympathy for. He’s strange, jealous, and abusive to all those around him. The icing on the cake comes in a completely unnecessary scene in which he dances by himself in a strobe-lit club like a lanky gibbon jumped up on Adderall. Both Josh Singer’s script and Cumberbatch settle with saying, “Look at how weird he is!”

Shame on Cumberbatch for breaking the golden rule of acting. As an actor, you are not to judge your character. You seek understanding. You find what makes the audience connect to your character, not disengage from them. You’re like a lawyer preparing a case for trial. We, the audience, are the judge and the jury, not you. Otherwise, we wind up watching a paper-thin characterization, produced by someone who can’t stand the person they’re embodying. Cumberbatch’s take as Assange seeps this kind of cheap impersonation.

Like a student rushing to finish a research project, recklessly jamming every last bit of information they can on the page, hoping it will make them look more informed than they are, the choice of what to include in the film is simply dumbfounding. Important character information is blasted into the audience without context, relationships start and end hollow, and the actual accomplishments of Wikileaks become buried under a mile of silt. Instead of allowing the story beats room to breath, they fly out in our face, spring-loaded and irrelevant.

With all these scattered bits flying in from nowhere, this is filmmaking as drag-and-drop. Case and point: a romantic angle is shoehorned in. There’s no basis for it, it’s just there, because other movies do it. When the shirts pop off in the obligatory sex scene, you’ll bat your eyes, watching the congress of two stick figures with the sex appeal of listening to your parents talk dirty to each other.

Even from a technical perspective, the film is awful. The score by Carter Burwell works with the surgical precision of a sledgehammer, informing you, “This part’s exciting! This bit’s sad! Drama! Oh, it’s exciting again!” The set design is similarly off-putting as the locations these guys hang out at look inspired by the stark neon sets of Batman and Robin.

Since the 80s, filmmakers have felt that it is their duty to turn “hacking” into an exciting thing. It’s common knowledge that watching someone fire away at their keyboard doesn’t make for the best viewing experience, so they tend towards using visual metaphors to represent the pallid electrical repetition. The Fifth Estate‘s visual metaphor takes us to a giant warehouse, filled with rows upon rows of desktop computers, a metaphysical flair the producers must have thought very cool. However imaginative the sequence may have seemed at one point, the final execution is inexcusably lame, providing for some of the heartiest laughs of this straight-faced film.

With Cumberbatch and The Fifth Estates‘ once promising Oscar odds now shot to pieces, a flicker of hope remains for meat-headed political junkies, pseudo-intellectuals, and those who relish movies that are “so bad, they’re good”. Don’t get me wrong, I actually had a good time watching this, but it was all for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, The Fifth Estate is, without a doubt, one of the worst movies of 2013.

F

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Out in Theaters: CARRIE

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“Carrie”
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde, Portia Doubleday, Alex Russell, Zoë Belkin, Ansel Elgort, Judy Greer
Drama, Horror
99 Mins
R

We all know the delightful bedtime story of Carrie and the Pig’s Blood Prom: strange, loner girl experiences first bloodbath period (literally and figuratively) at school and becomes the target of tampon-slinging ridicule from her merciless peers. Charitable popularite Sue repents and urges hot-stuff boyfriend, Tommy, to bring Carrie to the prom, where she receives an unexpected swine viscus shower and promptly employs telekinesis to exact a wrecking ball of bloody revenge. It’s squarely within the horror genre, but it’s never really been a scary movie. The subject is far more unsettling and grotesque, a step back from jumpy frights and into demented psychology. Kimberly Peirce attempts to navigate the open can of worms within that tender, twisted psyche but stops short, pursuing the studio-brandished sheen of an American Hollywood horror remake.

As the film opens, Peirce provides a new introduction to Carrie. We meet her as a slimy head emerging from her mother’s womb, met with all the warmth and motherly love of a trembling butcher knife clutched by Julianne Moore‘s Margaret – a woman convinced her child is the product of sin and, accordingly, born of the devil. This new scene solidifies the weapon-wielding, love-hate relationship between mother and daughter that will go on to become a through line of Peirce’s retelling of the story while also playing at our natural guardian sensibilities that no baby should be inches from a razor sharp blade. It invites the right type of winches and cringes from an uneasy audience desiring something fresh.
 

Securing Moore as Margaret is a move of inspired casting. Moore’s usual warmth is gone, replaced with jitterish paranoia and a penchant for closet-rearing corporal punishment. The real irony though is that in spite of all of her bible-thumping madness, she is pretty much right on the money all along. Carrie’s abilities may not necessarily be born of the devil but a very easy utilitarian argument could be made that if Margaret pulled the trigger on her infanticide instinct, she would have saved the town a lot of grief and a lot of lives. But tricky debates of this nature are tabled and left wholly unexamined.

Skirting around these deeper philosophical questions that would have made for a much more interesting movie (more of a reinvention than an outright remake) Peirce’s Carrie settles with being largely a paint-by-numbers remake, doused in a blanket of digital makeup from all the wonders of current CGI technology.

Hunched like a troll, the teenage version of Carrie is awkward like a platypus. Corner-standing and slinking seem to be her main primary hobbies around the high school she attends, so it’s no wonder she doesn’t have a Facebook full of friends. In fact, she doesn’t really seem to have a Facebook at all (gasp). 

Following her unsettling shower scene though, Carrie seems to somehow become more confident than she was before, as if her virginal menstration opened up a new chapter in the book de Carrie’s mind. But that probably has less to do with that nasty pool of time-of-the-month blood and more to do with the telekinetic powers that seem to accompany her corporeal transformation into an adult. I don’t know if Carrie’s physical coming into womanhood is supposed to be linked to the emergence of her powers but they definitely both seem to start their flow around the same moment.

At any rate, Carrie goes about wielding her new found powers with the sneakiness of a jitterbug-thumbed high-schooler texting a storm in the midst of Spanish class. That is – how the hell is no one noticing?! She screams and tampons flutter away from her, she’s visibly upset and water coolers crumble like piñatas. While this version really ratchets up the degree of foreboding in the escalation of Carrie’s powers, it fails to take into account the reactions of those around her. It’s as if they’re all used to telekinesis, like it ain’t no thang.

Conceivably, their ignorance could be a side effect of the fact that everyone at this untitled Maine school is pretty much the worst person in the world. Even the English teacher mocks Carrie between takes eye-banging his female students. While I’m sure that opening the floor to debate about the relative ease or difficulty of people’s high school experiences is another can of worms entirely, I’m a homegrown Mainer and I don’t think you could pinpoint any school, Maine or otherwise, where every single person would burst out laughing at you in the midst of the most unfortunate moment of your life. Surely, they’re the next level of “tough crowd”. I’m fully aware that this is a work of fiction and as such everything is amped up a notch for effect but this “everyone is the worst” reality really stood out to me in this version as disingenuous and irritating. 

As Hollywood’s go-to girl for teenage risqué, Chloë Grace Moretz works well as Carrie and is far easier to empathize with than the otherworldly pale Sissy Spacek from Brian De Palma‘s version. She’s more of an ordinary girl under extraordinary circumstances than a full-blown weirdo –  someone who could have been perfectly normal if she wasn’t subject to the manipulation of her Looney-Toon mama.

It’s clear to me that the main issue with this film and with the story, is that it only works if everyone, save for Carrie, is the worst. Otherwise, we’re rooting for a serial killer. Dexter may have proved that that formula can work, but only if it’s done right. I understand that we’re supposed to sympathize with poor Carrie and the ghastly deeds brought down on her but the world in her reality is just so plastic, so invented, and so aggravating. Couple that with the fact that you’re probably going into Carrie already knowing the conclusion and it’s hard to imagine that what Peirce has cooked up will satisfy those who are looking for more than mere updated special effects.

C-

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Weekly Review 28: ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER, OCEAN'S TWELVE, DOG POUND, MOVIE 43, LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

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However inconsistent Weekly Review might be at this point, I’m trying to revitize it…especially since I’m sick at home and have nothing better to do. In the theater this week, I relished the much awaited fall season with screenings of the excellent Dallas Buyers Club and Captain Phillips. Fluffy popcorn flicks (Ocean’s Twelve, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) met with serious dramas (Dog Pound, Life is Beautiful) and big name sketch comedy (Movie 43) and I ended up doling out the very rare, very elusive A+. Find out what grabbed the most coveted grade in this week’s edition of Weekly Review.

Ocean’s Twelve (2003)

Like the bachelor too interested in being suave to realize that that he has dirtied toilet paper stuck to the sole of his show, Ocean’s Twelve is all frills with little of substance making the wheels turn. Unlike the well-oiled machine that was the original Ocean’s film, this one clomps from one plot point to another either not realizing or not caring that it stomps on any sense of cohesion that precedes the scene that we’re in. Too caught up trying to pull a number on its audience, Ocean’s Twelve fails to satisfy those trying to connect the dots as they plot towards a hurried and pale-brained conclusion. All the stars that lend their talent to this massive ensemble still work their tempestuous charm and Steven Soderberg‘s eye for framing is consistently satisfying but they are just wind up as buttercream icing on a rotten cake.  

C-

Dog Pound (2010)

Although some of the characters are sketched a little thin and the ten-dollar guitar score is dependably awful in this Canadian drama about an American juvenile detection center, the narrative is occasionally gripping and always cloaked in thoughtful sentiment. Beginning with the origin of how three new inmates earned their incarcerations, Dog Pound proceeds to examines prison politics from a perspective of lost youth, revealing that no matter what age, prison is hell. Here emotional breakthroughs are as rare as fleeting moments of peace, leaving everyone as a shade of a monster. As a Canadian production laser-focused on American dealings, it can’t escape its own heavy-handed judgement-doling nor will it debunk any common understandings of the U.S. penitentiary system.

C+

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

In a world where the existence of vampires has dictated real world events for centuries, Abraham Lincoln is not only the 16th president of the United States but an axe-wielding scourge of the undead. Sepia tone aside, the aesthetic palette used to tell the story used confuses inconsistency for irony. Over-saturated but thrifty CGI in the big spectacle shots take away from director Timur Bekmambetov‘s otherwise nifty stunt work. A fat-lipped script leads clunky storytelling and pigeon-toed acting to an ineffective adventure story that provides one big step in the wrong direction after Bekmambetov’s exciting big debut, Wanted. For some inexplicable reason, the people here – from the actors to the composer – seem to actually be taking themselves seriously. I guess it turns out that history and vampires don’t blend after all (at least outside of those bestselling books.)

D

Life is Beautiful (1997)

What starts as a quirky, colorful Italian comedy reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin‘s “tramp as talkie” changes gears to become one of the most slyly devastating films of all time. Director Roberto Benigni stars as Guido, an unassuming vagabond champion. He spends the first chapter of the film courting the apple of his eye; a well-to-do beauty known to him only as “princess”. Always one to manipulate souring circumstances to his best advantage, Guido charms his Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) with false serendipity and an uncompromising heart of gold. As their affection for one another grows, so do the antisemitic undertones occupying the political scape closing tighter around them. When WWII breaks out a few years later, Guido’s family is sent packing to an Nazi death camp. Wanting to shield his young son from the true unblinking horror of their situation, Guido convinces him that the whole thing is an elaborate game. Holocaust films are devastating by nature but Benigni’s vision of blind hope brings new meaning to heartbreak. An astounding, towering feat of acting and directing, Benigni finds humor in hopelessness, beauty in bleakness.

A+

Movie 43 (2013)

http://www.chlomo.org/chan/chloe/src/1354316415510.jpg

Essentially SNL with big name stars – if SNL had more of an obsessive focus on ball sacks – Movie 43 is a menagerie of bizarro sketch comedy inlaid with some high highs and really, really low lows. Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts share a twisted homeschooling bit that manages to cull some hearty laughs while real life husband and wife Chris Pratt and Anna Farris “poop on me” scene is painfully unamusing and eyebrow-raisingly childish to boot. But the clunker king of these shorts is the mid credits “Bezel the cat” video with Josh Duhamel and Elizabeth Banks. The scene is truly an embarrassment for all involved. As an entire piece, Movie 43 is boldly scatological, racist, sexist, and purely disgusting but lazy execution and   an elevator of comedic quality really do make it a bad film. And good god did it leave on a poor note.

D-

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Out in Theaters: CAPTAIN PHILLIPS

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“Captain Phillips”
Directed by Paul Greengrass
Starring Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed, Michael Chernus, Catherine Keener, David Warshofsky, Corey Johnson, Chris Mulkey
Biography, Crime, Drama
134 Mins
PG-13

“There’s gotta be something more than fishing or kidnapping people,” Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) pleads to his captors. “Maybe in America,” Somali pirate Muse (Barkhad Abdi) retorts musingly, “maybe in America.” Paul Greengrass‘s harrowing dramatization of Captain Phillip’s 2009 kidnapping is filled with cultural misunderstandings of this nature. Vermont native Phillips fails to understand the true scope of these 21st century Somali pirates’ desperation just as Muse and his ragtag gang of automatic weapon-clutching goons can’t grasp how ridiculous their uncompromising request for a ten million dollar bounty is. On the surface, Captain Phillips may be a nail-biting tension match on par with Greengrass’s Bourne films but these surging politic undercurrents nipping at the frayed seams of a lopsided global economy takes the film to the next level of austere greatness.

As Phillips departs home on a socked in Vermont morning, he and wife Andrea (Catherine Keener) make small talk. Opposite to expectations, their relationship has never quite acclimated to Phillip’s globetrotting work. His departure is a challenge each and every time. But besides the emotional stress that comes bundled with physical distance from his family that rolls around like clockwork, there looms a far greater threat to Phillips: pirates.

Not swashbuckling, rum-chugging, sword-swinging Captain Jack Sparrows that Hollywood has so successfully romaticized but rather pirates born and bred of desperation. There are no “pirate’s life for me” sing-a-longs, no colorful parrots, plank to walk, or skull-and-bones flags, just a ragged sense of urgent necessity fueled by a “do or die” philosophy. Greengrass scrubs any dated concepts of glamor with a lump-throated scene of “woe-is-them” exposure. Pirating is a business and like all businesses, it can only handle so many employees. In this third world enterprise, tattered Somalians are literally begging to join the bandit crew. As easy as it is to paint them as such, they are not the scum of the earth; they’re just the products of a living, breathing dumping ground, scrounging for their piece of the pie.

However you may despise the cold-eyed Muse and his radical tactics at times, there is never an instance where you don’t understand him. This finely tuned balance, achieved through tactful story telling and a deeply humanistic element, is the work of a master. Onward and upward from the utterly fantastic and heart-wrenching United 93, Greengrass has learned even more self-discipline in the past decade. With Captain Phillips, he’s managed to secure a better handle on blending tension, drama, and the cold hard facts. For the wealth of real-life drama originating from the Maersk Alabama kidnapping, Greengrass has harnessed the best elements, like a weathered jeweler cutting down a diamond, and crafted a truly moving story.

Front and center, Hanks puts in one of the finest performances of his career. For all of his great former roles, there has always been a pinch of something disingenuous. Here there’s no shoddy accent cluttering things, no slips into hammy flourishes, no reliance on melodrama to catalyze the impact of his delivery. This is 100 percent raw and real. As Phillips, Hanks delivers a master class in acting, easily revealing his most mature and finely adjusted performance, perhaps ever.

While Captain Phillips falls in a season exploring all brands of survival drama (Gravity, All is Lost), it carves its own niche and is able to get our blood boiling in its own kind of way. While Gravity explored our human fear of claustrophobia and solitude, Phillips overturns the darkest corner of human nature: the fight-or-flight survival instinct within us. Any creature with its back against the wall will battle tooth and nail for its own life, and this is the catch 22 of the Somali circumstance. They believe that they must put their lives in danger ransacking these cargo ships in order to survive, even if that means holding up vessels stocked with emergency aid for those living in Africa. They are literally Robin Hood-ing their own people under the thin veil of collective-interest while they are literally taking food from the mouths of their fellow emaciated comrade.

And while this crew may not be dying in the moment, they are literally rotting away as a result of abject poverty. Their only perceived solution is this kidnapping business – as fishing just won’t cut it in the days of cargo barges constantly scaring off schools of potential dollars. As our entrance to this “other side of the world” mindset, Muse is more than a caricature. He’s hardly more than a sack of bones but he’s downright terrifying at times, reminding us of a once-bullied school child, now clinging to notions of American grandeur that could only be the stuff of dreams. Even his nickname “Skinny” (a tag he despises) fingers poverty and false iconography as the true enemy.

The beating heart of Captain Phillips is the revolution of these two Captains around one another as they fight for their survival only as they best see fit. They both lie to each other, they both make tragic mistakes, they both underestimate each other’s ceaseless zeal but, in the end, they want the same thing and this is the true irony. Both Phillips and Muse covet the American dream. To Phillips, this means responsibility, family, and job security – basically, the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. He’s not asking for much, just what he’s been promised his whole life.

Muse essentially wants the same thing; he just doesn’t know how to go about it. Even more damning, he fails to understand that not every American is a millionaire nor can he really comprehend the value of the American dollar. Just as Phillips can’t quite grasp the grim lack of options presented to these sea-bound desperadoes, Muse can’t help but apply a paradise template to his Americano notions. Their inherent misinterpretation of what each other stands for creates a deliciously polarized character swirl that pulls the tension as taut as a guitar string.

Humanizing his villain is a bold step, especially since we’re rooting against him for so much of the picture, but it’s a skill that Greengrass and screenwriter Billy Ray boldly execute. It’s rare to see an antagonist so despicable and yet so secretly tender. Using the autobiography from the real Richard Phillips as a map, Ray has crafted a believable and yet supercharged hijacking film far and away better than the much celebrated but truly lacking Denmark film A Hijacking.

Greengrass has made a hero story that we don’t quite know how to feel about. Our alliances are set, our convictions are airtight, but there’s a sneaking feeling of something amiss in an American victory that we just can’t put our finger on. He’s not piling on the white guilt but maybe that’s the genesis of the moral frustration, the straw-on-camel tipping point of Western privilege. The one we didn’t see coming.

As a biopic, it’s uncompromising and doggedly raw. As a thriller, it defines “being on pins and needles”. As a showcase for Tom Hanks, it serves as a major highlight for his long and illustrious career. It is, without a doubt, a spectacular achievement.

A

 

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