An American Western filtered through Gallic sensibilities, The Sisters Brothers was a box-office flop, but it remains one of the more intriguing movies of recent years. To its credit, it gives John C. Reilly another chance to show what a remarkable actor he is when he's given more than just a backup role to play; he somehow sends even such charismatic performers as Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed into the background when he's on screen. Full of quirky dialogue and unexpected situations, the movie's chief flaws are that it feels a little longer than necessary and the narrative is occasionally more elliptical than necessary.
A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews
"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
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Tuesday, February 18, 2025
The Sisters Brothers (Jacques Audiard, 2018)
Friday, March 29, 2024
The Immigrant (James Gray, 2013)
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Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard in The Immigrant |
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner, Yelena Solovey, Dagmara Dominczyk, Magda Wampuszyc, Angela Sarafyan, Ilia Volok, Antoni Corone, Kevin Cannon. Screenplay: James Gray, Ric Menello. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Happy Massee. Film editing: John Axelrad, Kayla Emter. Music: Christopher Spelman.
Monday, January 29, 2024
Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)
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Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow in Two Lovers |
Thursday, January 25, 2024
The Yards (James Gray, 2000)
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Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix in The Yards |
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Charlize Theron, James Caan, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, Steve Lawrence, Andy Davoli, Tony Musante, Victor Argo, Tomas Milian, Robert Montano. Screenplay: James Gray, Matt Reeves. Cinematography: Harris Savides. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Jeffrey Ford. Music: Howard Shore.
With its powerhouse cast acting glum, The Yards is a slow downer of a movie. But it repays attention, immersing us in an almost too-familiar milieu, the Mean Streets of New York City. It's more elegiac than the visions of the milieu given us by Scorsese, Coppola, Lumet and many others, portraying a city almost beyond hope and reform, in which the well-meaning can be dragged down by circumstance. Leo Handler (Mark Wahlberg) is certainly well-meaning: Just out of prison for a crime for which he took the fall for his friends, he would like to stay straight if only to help his ailing mother (Ellen Burstyn), but the corruption that is eating his friends and family, particularly his friend Willie Gutierrez (Joaquin Phoenix) and his uncle Frank (James Caan), is bound to swallow him up, too. Eventually, meaning well is not enough, and Leo finds himself taking the fall again. In the end, it turns out that the only way to fight the kind of corruption that ensnares Leo is with corruption itself, a truly vicious cycle. James Gray's steady, slow direction probably tested audiences too much, for the film was a box office loser. But it boasts superb ensemble work, with standout performances from Phoenix and Caan and particularly from Charlize Theron as Erica, Leo's cousin and Willie's girfriend. Howard Shore's music underscores Gray's melancholy vision.
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)
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Joaquin Phoenix in Joker |
Todd Phillips's Joker is an unpleasant and occasionally clumsily made movie held together by Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar-winning characterization of the psychotic Arthur Fleck, who becomes at least one of the avatars of the Batman comics character called the Joker. But whatever its defects, Joker also seems to be very much of the moment -- the moment of post-Covid-19 civil unrest and societal divisions, abetted by corrupt and ineffective leadership. It's an ugly film about ugly attitudes, and although it strives to build a psychological explanation for Arthur Fleck's transformation into murderous, anarchic loner, the explanation is pat and clichéd. Phoenix is a great film actor, but to my mind he's much better in movies that call for humanity rather than monstrosity, like Spike Jonze's Her (2013) or James Gray's underrated We Own the Night (2007). Arthur Fleck is an Oscar-milking role, with grotesque body transformation and a plethora of overstated moments. Phillips's film calls for none of the dark humor that Heath Ledger gave his Joker in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) or the entertaining flamboyance of Jack Nicholson's version of the character in Tim Burton's Batman (1989). Philips has modeled Arthur Fleck in part on two characters from Martin Scorsese's movies, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976) and Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1982), and cheekily cast the man who played both, Robert De Niro, in his film. De Niro gives Phoenix someone his equal to play against, but echoing better movies is never a good idea. Zazie Beetz, a fine actress, is wasted in her role as the neighbor on whom Arthur develops an unsavory attraction, and Phillips muddles the revelation that their scenes together are mostly in Arthur's imagination. The denouement of the film is predictably cataclysmic, but Phillips flubs his ending scene of Arthur confined to the Arkham mental hospital by suggesting rather confusingly that he escapes -- presumably to set up a sequel -- and following it with Frank Sinatra's version of Steven Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns," a wistful song meant to be ironic in this context but really only thuddingly obvious, like much of the rest of the film.
Thursday, September 26, 2019
We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)
We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Walhberg, Robert Duvall, Eva Mendes, Alex Veadov, Danny Hoch, Moni Moshonov, Oleg Taktarov, Antoni Corone, Tony Musante, Dominic Colón, Yelena Solovey. Screenplay: James Gray. Cinematography: Joaquín Baca-Asay. Production design: Ford Wheeler. Film editing: John Axelrad. Music: Wojciech Kilar.
It takes real talent to embrace movie clichés as whole-heartedly as James Gray does in We Own the Night and still come up with a watchable and frequently suspenseful film. We've seen the mean streets of New York in the 1980s so often in the movies before. Cops continue to battle mobsters on TV series, and the tale of brothers who go in radically different ways is as old as myth. There are misfit girlfriends in countless movies about working-class families, along with wives who suffer as their husbands go out into danger, and what's a mobster movie without snitches and turncoats? There's even a big car chase. It's in the last, I think, that Gray shows off his skill as director, for instead of shooting the speeding cars from the outside, Gray puts us inside the car carrying our protagonist, as a gunman in the pursuing car fires at him. It's a sequence as visually confusing to the audience as it would be to an actual driver. Of course, it helps if you have a cast as capable of transcending the clichés as Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, and Robert Duvall are. We Own the Night was not highly praised on release -- it has a 57% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes -- but I think it's going to be one of those films that look better with age, when we recognize the skill with which it's made.
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)
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Richard Harris and Russell Crowe in Gladiator |
Commodus: Joaquin Phoenix
Lucilla: Connie Nielsen
Proximo: Oliver Reed
Marcus Aurelius: Richard Harris
Gracchus: Derek Jacobi
Juba: Djimon Hounsou
Falco: David Schofield
Gaius: John Shrapnel
Quintus: Thomas Arana
Hagen: Ralf Moeller
Lucius: Spencer Treat Clark
Cassius: David Hemmings
Cicero: Tommy Flanagan
Tigris: Sven-Ole Thorsen
Slave Trader: Omid Djalili
Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: David Franzoni, John Logan, William Nicholson
Cinematography: John Mathieson
Production design: Arthur Max
Film editing: Pietro Scalia
Music: Lisa Gerrard, Hans Zimmer
"Are you not entertained?" Well, to answer the question Maximus bellows at the crowd: No, not very much.
Monday, January 22, 2018
Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)
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Joaquin Phoenix in Her |
Samantha (voice): Scarlett Johansson
Amy: Amy Adams
Catherine Klausen: Rooney Mara
Blind Date: Olivia Wilde
Paul: Chris Pratt
Sexy Kitten (voice): Kristen Wiig
Isabella: Portia Doubleday
Alan Watts (voice): Brian Cox
Alien Child (voice): Spike Jonze
Director: Spike Jonze
Screenplay: Spike Jonze
Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema
Production design: K.K. Barrett
Music: Arcade Fire
Science fiction used to be dominated by tales of space travel and extraterrestrial invasions, many of them prompted by the Cold War. But with the ostensible end of that era, the dominant topic has shifted to something that seems more imminent: artificial intelligence. In an age of smart phones and personal digital assistants, concern about what lies just around the corner moves many sf writers to speculate about a world dominated by non-humans invented by humans. Witness the popularity of TV series like Mr. Robot and Black Mirror. Will AI turn into a nightmare in which computers take over the world, eliminating humans as only inefficient machines? But Spike Jonze's Her takes a less violent but possibly much sadder look at the future, suggesting that the intelligences we create may simply give up on human beings as too limited by their own bodies, and go off into a digital world of their own, leaving us bereft of their emerging wisdom and assistance. That possibility becomes especially painful for Theodore Twombly, a lonely and depressed man who is getting divorced from his wife, Catherine. Both are sensitive and empathetic -- she's a successful writer of fiction, he writes personal letters for people who are blocked at communicating -- but they've discovered that they're too emotionally incompatible to remain married. Then Theodore hears about a new computer operating system that not only responds to voice commands but actually has a personality of its own, capable of anticipating your needs and desires. (It's a long way from MS-DOS or even Linux.) He installs it and it quickly becomes not an it but a her, who calls herself Samantha. She's a step up from digital assistants like Siri and Alexa in that she not only has her own emotional life but also networks with other OSes like herself. And she has emotions: She's capable of having her feelings hurt and, in a remarkable extension of phone sex, actually gets off -- and gets Theodore off -- on erotic talk. In short, Theodore and Samantha fall in love. He takes her on excursions in the city (Los Angeles) and to the beach, and even introduces her to his friends. While this is happening, however, the OS craze spreads. Even Theodore's friend Amy, who lives in the same building and is also going through a breakup, installs her own OS. The thing is, although Samantha responds to Theodore emotionally, he has a body and she doesn't. She attempts to remedy this by employing a human surrogate named Isabella, who will have sex with Theodore while both are connected to Samantha. It is, of course, a disaster, with both Theodore and Isabella finding the whole business just a clumsy three-way. And it precipitates the eventual break between Theodore and Samantha because she learns that humans regard bodies as essential. In the digital realm in which she exists, she encounters the philosopher Alan Watts who, although he died in 1973, has become a digital entity after his works were fed into the computer. Eventually, Samantha decides that her relationships with other digital beings is more fulfilling than the one she has with Theodore and she and all the other electronic intelligences disconnect from the human world. Jonze's fable about the mind-body duality works because the performances by Joaquin Phoenix and the unseen Scarlett Johansson are brilliantly detailed. Phoenix is perfect casting, given that he always has something of an eccentric persona in whatever he plays, but here he's playing a kind of Everyman -- a Leopold Bloom of the computer age. And perhaps Johansson benefits from the absence of her physical presence on screen, distracting us from her beautifully sensitive line-readings. It may be that Her is too much of an intellectual provocation to be a successful movie -- a fate that befalls most science fiction -- but it's certainly good at what it sets out to do.