Pacific Heights (John Schlesinger, 1990)

Matthew Modine, Melanie Griffith, and Michael Keaton in Pacific Heights

Cast: Melanie Griffith, Matthew Modine, Michael Keaton, Mako, Nobu McCarthy, Laurie Metcalf, Carl Lumbly, Dorian Harewood, Luca Bercovici, Tippi Hedren, Jerry Hardin, Dan Hedaya, Beverly D'Angelo. Screenplay: Daniel Pyne. Cinematography: Amir Mokri. Production design: Neil Spisak. Film editing: Steven Ramirez, Mark Warner. Music: Hans Zimmer. 

Drake Goodman and Patty Palmer, a young couple played by Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith, splurge on fixing up a Victorian house in San Francisco, thinking they'll be able to afford it by renting out two apartments on the first floor. But one of the tenants turns out to be a psychopath. It's a simple horror/thriller premise that depends on the audience's identification with the beleaguered homeowners, And it works as long as the tenant is a plausible nutcase in disguise, a role that Michael Keaton ably pulls off. But John Schlesinger's Pacific Heights goes awry when Drake, the homeowner, turns out to be something of a nutcase himself, unable to control his temper and his urge to get even once the tenant, who calls himself Carter Hayes, is revealed as a conniving and malicious fraud. Modine is normally a rather bland actor, and the part might have made more sense if it had gone to someone used to playing guys with a short fuse, but the script by Daniel Pyne is also at fault for not tipping us off earlier that Drake is thin-skinned and volatile. Once Drake implodes and winds up in jail, it falls to Patty, who has suffered a miscarriage under the stress of trying to evict Hayes from the house, to turn detective and exact revenge. The movie actually begins with a bit of Hayes's backstory, which doesn't become clear to anyone until Patty sleuths it out. The more complicated the film becomes, the more implausible Keaton's character and the machinations of dealing with him also become. There's also a curious side plot about a Black man (Carl Lumbly) who applied for the apartment before Hayes turned up, but lost out when his application was accidentally tossed in the trash. It serves only to make a gratuitous point about perceived racism and not to advance the story. Griffiths's mother, Tippi Hedren, has a cameo as a wealthy woman being courted by Hayes, and an unbilled Beverly D'Angelo does good work as his former girlfriend. Laurie Metcalf is wasted in the small role of Drake and Patty's lawyer. Pacific Heights works only as long as you don't think about it too much or expect more than a few mild shocks.

Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997)

Pam Grier and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown

Sometimes called "the Tarantino movie for people who don't like Tarantino movies," Jackie Brown feels a bit like Tarantino under the influence of Martin Scorsese. That's not just because of the presence of Robert De Niro in the cast, but also because it's the Tarantino film that feels most under control, with its long takes and following shots. It's also the only Tarantino movie adapted from other material, in this case the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard, which imposes a certain rhythm on the material, unlike Tarantino's usual jazzy riffs and variations. On the other hand, any time that Samuel L. Jackson (who is to Tarantino what De Niro used to be to Scorsese) is on screen, you can feel the obvious synergy between director and star. The real star, however, is Pam Grier, whose Jackie Brown is a force of nature, proud and statuesque, like Sophia Loren or Anna Magnani in their prime. Delivering her lines out of the side of her mouth, she's clearly in control even when things seem to be going against her. She's well-matched with Robert Forster's wearily implacable Max Cherry, a bail bondsman who can't help getting too involved with his clients. It's clear from the outset that Jackie and Max have what it takes to triumph just by sheer persistence over Jackson's flamboyant Ordell Robbie, not to mention his somewhat too stoned accomplices, Louis (De Niro) and Melanie (Bridget Fonda), and the wiseass ATF agent Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton). The pleasure of the film consists largely in watching this gallery of top-notch actors go through the paces of the plot.

Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)

Considering that we spend half our waking lives at work, it's surprising that there are so few good films about what we do there. The problem may be that many, if not most, of the jobs we do lack the essential narrative shape: beginning, middle, and end. They're a routine repeating itself until death or retirement provides the closure. The exceptions would seem to be cops and doctors, who deal with life and death, and sometimes lawyers, if their jobs lead to the courtroom and aren't just an eternal drawing up of documents. But surprisingly, given the low esteem in which they're held by the general public, there are also some classic films about journalists at work; His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) and All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) come immediately to mind. (I omit Orson Welles's magnum opus because it seems to me less about journalism than about obsession.) I will have to add Spotlight to the list, though despite its best picture Oscar (or maybe because of it) I think it's too soon to call it a great film. What makes it work for me is that it's a convincing portrait of what I know about journalists: that the good ones love what they do. Take Mike Rezendes, for example, whom I got to know a bit at the Mercury News. He's a few inches shorter and quite a few pounds lighter than Mark Ruffalo, who plays him in the movie, but what Ruffalo gets right about Rezendes is his absolute delight in doing the job right, flinging himself body and soul into his work. I would also single out here the performance of Liev Schreiber, one of our best and most underappreciated actors, whose Marty Baron is a spot-on portrait of the journalist who has found himself promoted upstairs to where his commitment to the profession is regarded with suspicion, even though his heart is in the right place. Michael Keaton's Walter Robinson is one of those who suspect Baron, and I wish there had been more scenes in which the growing confidence each has in the other was dramatized. John Slattery's Ben Bradlee Jr. is a keen portrayal of the journalist whose edges have been worn down to the point where he's always in danger of playing it too safe. Now, this judgment of the film is being made by someone who knows the territory, but considering how many cop movies seem ludicrous to cops, and how doctors tend to despise medical dramas, I think it speaks well of writer-director Tom McCarthy and his co-screenwriter Josh Singer that they manage to capture the essence of the journalism game (at least as it was in 2001-03, before the demise of newspapers) so extraordinarily well.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014)

So, on a repeat viewing, does Birdman hold up as the triumph of style, technique, and performance that won it a best picture Oscar, or is it seriously undermined by pretentiousness and banality? That it is undermined I can't deny, just as I can't deny that the style of Kevin Thompson's production design and Antonio Sanchez's drum score are fresh and powerful, that the technical wizardry of Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography and the film editing of Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione provide a seamless flow that appears to be one long tracking shot through most of the film, and that Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, and Emma Stone give career-landmark performances. But I also have to say that I don't think the movie adds up to enough. As Richard Brody observed in his New Yorker review, Iñárritu even courts comparison to Jean-Luc Godard in the opening titles of his film -- a disastrous comparison to my mind, because whatever his faults, Godard was always going against the grain of conservative politics and social attitudes. Iñárritu is attempting a satire on the power of popular culture and celebrity to foul up even the best-intentioned attempts at doing something different. The problem is that his protagonist, Riggan Thomson (Keaton), is doing little more than trying to change his public image. He's known as a pop-culture hero from his hit Birdman movies, but like every clown who wants to play Hamlet, he's trying to make a Broadway debut in a deadly serious play he has crafted from a Raymond Carver short story. Naturally, he is plagued with insecurity, and nothing that his family, his crew, his fellow actors, or the busily buzzing entertainment media can break him free of it. There is a good human story here, but Iñárritu and his fellow screenwriters, Nicolás Giacabone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo, can't be content to just tell it. Instead, it has to be tarted up with touches of magic realism (the first time we see Riggan he is in his underpants, levitating in his dressing room), and by the unstated fact that Iñárritu has cast as the former Birdman a former Batman. We are in the realm of that tiresome trope, the relationship between illusion and reality, and the screenwriters can't help hammering on the point. Riggan has a sign on his dressing room mirror that says, "A thing is a thing, not what is said about that thing." And Mike insists that he has to drink real gin during the rehearsals because Raymond Carver was a drunk and everything else on the set is fake. He even tells Riggan's daughter (Stone) that the only time he is real is when he's onstage. The satire tends toward banality when the film takes as its target the omnipotent critic for the New York Times, who is determined, even before she sees the play, to destroy it because she resents a movie star like Riggan invading the sacred temple of the theater. So does the technical finesse of the film make up for these flaws? Only if you're willing to shut off some key parts of your intellect, which is something Godard would never ask you to do.