Triple Frontier (J.C. Chandor, 2019)

 

Cast: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal, Adria Arjona. Screenplay: Mark Boal, J.C. Chandor. Cinematography: Roman Vasyanov. Production design: Greg Berry. Film editing: Ron Patane. Music: Disasterpeace. 

Mark Boal’s screenplay for Triple Frontier was kicked around for several years before it was finally made. Originally planned to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who directed Boal’s Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker and Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty scripts, it was going to star Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp. When that fell through, other directors and other stars were talked about, including Channing Tatum, Mark Wahlberg, Will Smith, and Mahershala Ali. That it wound up starring Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, and Pedro Pascal is a pretty good indication that filmmakers now have a solid roster of male actors to call on. All that cast shuffling and script massaging may have taken a little toll on the final product, which is a pretty good movie that doesn’t quite have the kinetic charge it needs. The story is about five veterans of the Special Forces who get together to assassinate a South American drug lord and steal the millions he has stashed away. The triple frontier of the title is the Tres Fronteras area where Brazil, Peru, and Colombia come together. The five men have all fallen on hard times after leaving the military. Affleck’s character, nicknamed “Redfly,” the former leader of the group, is trying to make a living selling real estate and struggling with a failed marriage. “Ironhead” (Hunnam) ekes out a living making motivational speeches to new recruits. His brother, Ben (Hedlund), gets a battering as a cage fighter. “Catfish” (Pascal) is a pilot whose license has been suspended because the plane he was hired to fly was loaded with cocaine. Only “Pope” (Isaac) still has military ties: He’s a hired gun for law enforcement organizations. With such varied backstories, the characters in Triple Frontier ought to be more involving, especially when their plan initially succeeds but then falls apart in a grueling attempt to haul the cash they scavenge across the Andes to their escape vessel. There are echoes of much better movies in this one, such as The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948). But Triple Frontier, despite the hard work of its fine cast, seems muddled – and even, dare I say, muddied by the gloomycam cinematography.

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)

Carey Mulligan and Ryan Gosling in Drive

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, Kaden Leos, Jeff Wolfe, James Biberi, Russ Tamblyn. Screenplay: Hossein Amini, based on a novel by James Sallis. Cinematography: Newton Thomas Sigel. Production design: Beth Mickle. Film editing: Matthew Newman. Music: Cliff Martinez.

I wasn't surprised, in reading about Drive after I watched it, to find the film being compared to Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy of the 1960s. Both, of course, feature a protagonist with no name who has a slight oral fixation -- a cheroot in the case of Clint Eastwood in the Leone films, a toothpick in the case of Ryan Gosling in Nicolas Winding Refn's. And both are taciturn and impassive, Eastwood with his squint a little more consistently menacing than Gosling with his bland, unemotional mien. The difference is that Gosling makes us sense that there's something going on deep inside, behind that façade, but we won't really know what it is until he stomps a man to death in an elevator late in the film. With Eastwood it's more a matter of what you see is what you can expect to get. I admire the style with which Refn pulls off his story, with the occasional casting against type, as with Albert Brooks as a thug, and the effective use of actors who can play almost anything, namely, Bryan Cranston and Oscar Isaac. The risk of concentrating on style is that everything remains on the surface, and that's the real problem I have with Drive, that it feels superficial if occasionally witty, as in its use of pop songs to comment on the characters and action. The repetitions of "A Real Hero" are, I think, meant to be ironic: There's nothing especially heroic about Gosling's driver, except that he does what he does to help Carey Mulligan's Irene and her young son. But when he finally boils over into an act that amounts to overkill, she's forced to question his character. Still, the movie is a cut above most recent attempts at neo-noir.

At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2018)

Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Niels Arestrup. Screenplay: Jean-Claude Carrière, Julian Schnabel, Louise Kugelberg. Cineatography: Benoît Delhomme. Production design: Stéphane Cressend. Film editing: Louise Kugelberg, Julian Schnabel. Music: Tatiana Lisovskaya. 

Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate is less a dramatic biopic than a series of conversations about art and madness centered on the figure of Vincent van Gogh. Willem Dafoe got yet another well-deserved Oscar nomination for playing van Gogh as a man who walks the line between genius and psychosis. Schnabel's contribution to this familiar story is to introduce a recent theory that van Gogh's death was not a suicide but instead a mishap, the result of a random gunshot when the artist was being harassed by a couple of young hoodlums. Van Gogh, in this theory, claimed he shot himself perhaps to protect the perpetrators but also as a kind of acknowledgement that he had reached a terminal point in his life. But what matters most in the film is art, explored in conversations between Vincent and his brother, Theo (Rupert Friend), his fellow artist Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), and near the end of the film with a priest, played by Mads Mikkelsen. It's an often fascinating film in its re-creation of 19th-century Paris, Arles, and Auvers-sur-Oise, and its deft matching of scenery and people with the corresponding places and faces familiar to us from van Gogh's paintings. To my mind, cinematographer Benoît Delhomme overuses the hand-held camera to the point of inducing a kind of nausea, but perhaps the intent was to suggest the instability that van Gogh tried to turn into fixity by painting it.

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Cast: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, Oscar Isaac, William Hurt, Mark Strong, Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Mark Addy, Matthew Macfadyen, Kevin Durand, Scott Grimes, Alan Doyle, Douglas Hodge, Léa Seydoux. Screenplay: Brian Helgeland, Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris. Cinematography: John Mathieson. Production design: Arthur Max. Film editing: Pietro Scalia. Music: Marc Streitenfeld.

Did the world really need another Robin Hood movie? From the lack of interest at the box office, it would seem not. At least Ridley Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland tried to give us something slightly different: a prequel, in which Robin finds his identity and mission and only at the very end goes off into Sherwood Forest with his Merry Men, presumably to rob from the rich and give to the poor. We've had a sequel before in Richard Lester's 1976 Robin and Marian, in which the aging couple find an end to their adventures. (Interestingly, the Robin Hood of Lester's film, Sean Connery, was 46 when it was made, the same age that Russell Crowe was when he made Scott's. Lester's Marian, Audrey Hepburn, was 47, and Scott's, Cate Blanchett, was 41.) Unfortunately, the prequel doesn't give us much that's new or revealing about the characters: The villains, King John (Oscar Isaac) and the Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew Macfadyen), remain the same, with an additional twist that they're being duped by another villain named Godfrey (Mark Strong), a supporter of the French King Philip, who is plotting an invasion now that the English army is still straggling back from the Crusades. Robin is a soldier of fortune named Robin Longstride, who has been to the Crusades and is making it back with the crown of the fallen Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) as well as a sword he promised the dying Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge) he would return to his father, Sir Walter (Max von Sydow) in Nottingham.  When he does, Robin meets Marian, no longer a maid but the widow of Sir Robert. On the way, he has gathered a retinue comprising Little John (Kevin Durand), Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), and Allan A'Dayle (Alan Doyle), and in Nottingham he will add Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) to the not terribly merry company. They'll take part in repelling the French invasion, which Scott makes into a kind of small scale D-Day, to the extent of borrowing unabashedly from Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), including some landing craft whose historical existence has been questioned (along with much else of the movie's history). Robin and his fellow soldiers, including Marian, who arrives disguised in chain mail, save the day, but their hopes for a new charter of rights that has been promised them by King John are dashed when he proclaims Robin an outlaw. So everything seems to be set up for a sequel that will culminate at Runnymede and the signing of Magna Carta, but the film's flop at the box office put paid to that. Robin Hood certainly has some good performances, which you might expect from its cast packed with Oscar-winners and -contenders, but it feels routine and a little tired. It also resorts to filming much of the action with the now too common "gloomycam," in which fight scenes always seem to be taking place at night, so you can't tell who's killing whom.

Che: Part One (Steven Soderbergh, 2008)

Benicio Del Toro and Demián Bichir in Che: Part One

Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Demián Bichir, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Rodrigo Santoro, Julia Ormond, Oscar Isaac, Ramon Fernandez, Yul Vazquez, Santiago Cabrera, Édgar Ramírez. Screenplay: Peter Buchman. Cinematography: Steven Soderbergh. Production design: Antxón Gómez. Film editing: Pablo Zumárraga. Music: Alberto Iglesias.

Subtitled "The Argentine," the first part of Steven Soderbergh's epic portrait of Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Benicio Del Toro) covers the revolutionary's life from his first meeting with Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) in 1955 through the success of the campaign in Cuba to Che's address to the United Nations in 1964, proclaiming a "battle to the death" against American imperialism. With a less coherent narrative line than the one in Che: Part Two, the first film feels more scattered and just a little superficial, but it has a strong feeling of actuality in any given sequence.

Star Wars: Episode VIII -- The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017)

Adam Driver in Star Wars: Episode VIII -- The Last Jedi

Luke Skywalker: Mark Hamill
Leia Organa: Carrie Fisher
Kylo Ren: Adam Driver
Rey: Daisy Ridley
Finn: John Boyega
Poe Dameron: Oscar Isaac
Snoke: Andy Serkis
Maz Kanata (voice): Lupita Nyong'o
General Hux: Domhnall Gleeson
C-3PO: Anthony Daniels
Captain Phasma: Gwendoline Christie
Rose Tico: Kelly Marie Tran
Vice Admiral Holdo: Laura Dern
DJ: Benicio Del Toro

Director: Rian Johnson
Screenplay: Rian Johnson
Cinematography: Steve Yedlin
Production design: Rick Heinrichs
Film editing: Bob Ducsay
Music: John Williams

Fun but just a little bit frustrating. As I said in my comments on Episode VII: The Force Awakens, we need more backstory -- about Ren's fall to the dark side, about Poe Dameron, Finn, and Rey. We get snippets of Ren's story, including Luke's threat to kill Ren when he sees him going bad, and of Rey's, including a revelation that her parents were no one in particular -- which may be unreliable information on both counts. Poe and Finn go their separate ways in The Last Jedi, essentially into subplots that add texture but not substance to their stories. Instead of establishing Poe, Finn, and Rey as the heroic triad comparable to Luke, Leia, and Han, which is what The Force Awakens might have led us to expect, The Last Jedi makes them seem relatively ineffectual. I think the episode suffers a bit from "middle film" syndrome, the need to continue a story without providing the resolution that presumably will arrive in Episode IX.

X-Men: Apocalypse (Bryan Singer, 2016)

Oscar Isaac is one of my favorite actors. I loved his work in Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013), A Most Violent Year (J.C. Chandor, 2014), Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015), and on the HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero (2015). He even managed to stand out in all the whiz-bang and nostalgia of the latest Star Wars installment. But I sat through the entirety of X-Men: Apocalypse without realizing, until his name appeared in the credits, that he was the one beneath all the makeup and prosthetics as En Sabah Nur, aka Apocalypse. Which makes me wonder: Why bother? Casting an actor of such skill and versatility in a role that could have been played by anyone willing to sit through hours of applying and removing body paint, silicone, and foam latex seems to me a waste of valuable resources. But I guess the same thing could be said about the entire film if you ignore the return the producers got on their estimated $178 million investment. When a film this size feels routine, something has gone awry, and X-Men: Apocalypse is nothing if not routine. There are things I enjoyed about it, like the special effects when Quicksilver (Evan Peters) rescues almost everyone from the explosion that destroys the institute. The trick of seeing everything as Quicksilver sees it -- i.e., as time standing still while he moves at superspeed, dashing from room to room to haul occupants to safety -- is nicely done. And there are good performances from Peters, from James McAvoy as Charles Xavier, Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr, Jennifer Lawrence as Raven, Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Nightcrawler. I enjoyed seeing Sophie Turner (as the latest iteration of Jean Grey) in something other than Game of Thrones and Hugh Jackman in an unbilled (and extremely violent) cameo as Logan/Wolverine. But there's a kind of heartlessness and thoughtlessness about it, too often characteristic of the superhero blockbuster movie genre, that my experience amounted to a kind of déjà vu. I just hope Isaac got paid well.  

Star Wars: Episode VII -- The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015) revisited

When I blogged about seeing Star Wars: Episode VII -- The Force Awakens, to give it its full and exhausting title, 10 months ago, I was more involved in the novelty of seeing it in a theater and in 3-D than in commenting on the film itself. "I look forward to seeing the movie again, but this time in the comfort of my home and on a smaller 2-D screen," I said then, predicting that it would "play just as well there." So the time has come, and Starz is running it almost every day on one of its many channels, so I availed myself of the opportunity, and I think I was mostly correct. The flat version is less awe-inspiring than the three-dimensional one, but I've long since got beyond the excitement of having lightsaber beams waved in my face, and to my mind the added depth of the images is counteracted by a sense of their insubstantiality: Is it only the force of long habit and familiarity that makes two-dimensional films seem more like documented reality? The 2-D Episode VII stands up because J.J. Abrams knows the grammar of film: the cutting and pacing that has brought excitement to movies ever since Griffith and Eisenstein and other first learned to use them. In 3-D there's always going to be something a little disorienting about the shift from a close-up to a long shot, for example. Perhaps a grammar of 3-D will be developed that lets filmmakers use it as effectively as they do in two dimensions, but that time has yet to come. As for the film itself, it had to do two things: It had to tie the new material to the core trilogy -- I mean Episodes IV-VI, of course -- and it had to whet our appetites for more new stuff. It succeeds on both counts, partly by bringing back Han (Harrison Ford), Leia (Carrie Fisher), and, albeit briefly, Luke (Mark Hamill), and the leitmotifs of John Williams's score, but also by pretty much shamelessly borrowing from what's now called Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977). (I will always call it just Star Wars.) As I said in my first post, VII is pretty much a remake of IV: Both have "the young hero on a desert planet, the messenger droid found in the junkyard, the gathering of a team to fight the black-clad villain, and the ultimate destruction of a giant weaponized space station." VII also echoes the Oedipal conflict of the subsequent episodes of the core trilogy, with the conflict of father Han and son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) echoing that of Darth Vader and Luke. What we have to look forward to is some account of Ren's (or Ben's) fall to the Dark Side and some resolution of that character's patricidal act. We also have to find out who or what Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) is. Is there a little old man lurking behind what seems to be a hulking hologram, like the Wizard of Oz? And what are the backstories of Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Finn (John Boyega), and Rey (Daisy Ridley)? And what accounts for the luxury casting of the ubiquitous Domhnall Gleeson as the relatively secondary figure General Hux? And why waste a beautiful Oscar winner like Lupita Nyong'o in voicing Maz Kanata -- another character whose backstory needs to be told? So our appetites are whetted, and not just for further adventures of Luke Skywalker.  

A Most Violent Year (J.C. Chandor, 2014)

Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac in A Most Violent Year

Abel Morales: Oscar Isaac
Anna Morales: Jessica Chastain
Julian: Elyes Gabel
Andrew Walsh: Albert Brooks
D.A. Lawrence: David Oyelowo
Peter Forente: Alessandro Nivola

Director: J.C. Chandor
Screenplay: J.C. Chandor
Cinematography: Robert Levi, Bradford Young

In a movie that might have been called "Do the Most Right Thing," Oscar Isaac plays yet another ethically challenged protagonist. Abel Morales is not as cranky as Llewyn Davis or as politically savvy as Nick Wasicsko, the beleaguered Yonkers mayor of the 2015 HBO series Show Me a Hero, but he's another little guy who deserves better than the forces opposed to him will allow. He's no moral paragon: He couldn't have built a successful heating oil company in New York City without bending a few of the rules -- and without the help of his less-scrupulous wife, Anna. It's 1981, and Morales is on the brink of a big deal, purchasing property on the East River that will enable him to eliminate some of the middlemen in the business. But then everything starts going awry: His trucks are being hijacked and the district attorney has decided to make him a target in his exposé of corrupt practices in the heating oil business. It's a gritty urban tale, the kind that the movies haven't seen much of lately, demanding an audience that doesn't ask for a lot of glamour and knows how to wait patiently for things to unfold. As director and screenwriter, J.C. Chandor resists the temptation to reveal too much too swiftly, building a quiet tension as we begin to bring the story into focus. He also handles action well, as the title suggests, although much of the violence is latent. Best of all, he showcases some fine performances, not only from Isaac and Chastain and Oyelowo, but also from Albert Brooks as Morales's attorney, Elyes Gabel as one of the victimized truck drivers, and Alessandro Nivola as one of Morales's mobbed-up competitors. There are moments when the script's depiction of Morales's determination to go as straight as possible seems a little too much like forcing him into the good-guy role, and the climax is too melodramatic, but on the whole it's a solid movie.

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015)

Screenwriter Alex Garland's debut as director has a lot going for it: a tightly provocative and suspenseful Oscar-nominated screenplay (also by Garland), a superb trio of stars, and special effects that don't overwhelm the story. The effects won Oscars for Andrew Whitehurst, Paul Norris, Mark Williams Ardington, and Sara Bennett, overcoming competitors with far more flash and dazzle: Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller), The Martian (Ridley Scott), The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu), and Star Wars: Episode VII -- The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams). For once, special effects were kept on the human scale, largely to present Ava (Alicia Vikander) as the ambiguous cross between human being and robot on which the screenplay's exploration of the ethics of artificial intelligence depends. Ava (whose name is a variant spelling of "Eve") is the creation of Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a superwealthy tech genius who made his fortune with an Internet search engine not named Google, which he uses as the software for his experiment. He lures a young coder, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), to his isolated retreat on the pretext that he wants Caleb to apply the Turing test on Ava. Nathan's unstated aims are far more extensive, and Caleb sees through them quickly. But neither of them is quite as quick on the uptake as Ava. Gleeson is convincingly geeky as Caleb, and Isaac, in yet another performance that establishes him as one of our most chameleonic actors, evokes the self-absorption and questionable ethics of any number of tech billionaires. But it's Vikander who steals the honors with Ava's sly mixture of naïveté and nascent cunning. The only thing I can fault Ex Machina for is a conventional sci-fi ending that feels out of keeping with the intelligent questioning of the middle part of the script and seems too much like a setup for a sequel.

Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2013)

The flashback is a time-honored storytelling device in movies, but if virtually the entire film is a flashback, it better have a purpose for its existence. In Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950), for example, the film flashes back to tell us whose corpse is floating in that swimming pool and why. Inside Llewyn Davis starts with Davis (Oscar Isaac) performing in a Greenwich Village club, then being beaten up for some unknown offense by a man outside that club. The film then flashes back to several days in the life of Davis in which, among other things, he becomes encumbered with a cat, learns that a woman (Carey Mulligan) he knows is pregnant and wants him to fund an abortion, travels to Chicago to try to find a well-paying gig, tries to give up his music career and rejoin the Merchant Marine, and then finally returns to the night he performed at the club and was beaten up, whereupon we learn that he had cruelly heckled his attacker's wife the night before. Is there a meaning to this method of storytelling? If there is, it's probably largely to make the point that Davis is caught in a vicious circle, a spiral of depression and self-destructive behavior. Llewyn Davis is a talented folk musician in a business in which talent alone is not enough: As the Chicago club-owner (F. Murray Abraham) tells him after he performs a song from the album Davis is trying to push, "I don't see a lot of money here." Davis doesn't want a lot of money, just enough to pay for his friend's abortion (which it turns out he doesn't need) and to stop couch-surfing, but every time he is on the verge of making it, something rises up to thwart him. In the movie's funniest scene he goes to a recording gig to make a novelty song, "Please Please Mr. Kennedy," which his friend Jim (Justin Timberlake) has written about an astronaut who doesn't want to go into space -- or as Al Cody (Adam Driver), the other session musician, intones throughout the song, "Outer ... space" -- but he signs away his rights to residuals because he needs ready cash. Of course, the song becomes a huge hit. As unpleasant as Davis can often be, his heart is really in the right place: Not only does he agree to fund his friend's abortion, even though the baby may not be his, he conscientiously looks after the cat he accidentally lets out of the apartment where he has been sleeping, and when the cat escapes again he nabs it on the street -- only, of course, to find out that the cat he has picked up is the wrong one. Are the Coens telling us something about good deeds always being punished? Are they telling us anything that can be reduced to a formula? I think not. What they are telling us is that life can be like that: random, unjust, bittersweet. And that, I think, is enough, especially when the lesson is being taught by actors of the caliber of Isaac (in a star-making role), John Goodman (brilliant as usual, this time as a foul-mouthed junkie jazz musician), and a superbly chosen supporting cast. The Coens always take us somewhere we didn't know we wanted to go, but are glad they decided to take us along.

Star Wars: Episode VII -- The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015)

I don't see movies in theaters anymore: Before yesterday I think the last one I went to was The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012) which was kind of a family outing. And I hadn't seen one in 3-D since the last time the process was in vogue, back in the 1950s. But I had to see this one not to be culturally retrograde, and I'm glad I did. To sidetrack to 3-D, I'm not sold on its necessity, partly because the process itself is distracting: I'm always conscious of the screen itself as a kind of frame that cuts things off as they are whizzing into and out of it. In regular old 2-D the frame works to contain the action so you can concentrate on it. I found myself distracted whenever anyone walked into the frame because I was momentarily unsure whether they were part of the film or just someone entering the theater after getting some more popcorn. I think that's why it's a process particularly suited for fast-paced action but not much else. But the movie gave me everything else I wanted, including the warm fuzzy feeling of being reunited with Han (Harrison Ford) and Leia (Carrie Fisher), whose grizzled maturity gave a gravitas to the film. It recaptured the feeling I had back in 1977 at the NorthPark theater in Dallas when John Williams's music struck up and the introductory crawl stretched away into space. Episode VII is essentially a remake of Episode IV, if we must call them that, with the young hero on a desert planet, the droid found in the junkyard, the gathering of a team to fight the black-clad villain, and the ultimate destruction of a giant weaponized space station. It's nice that the hero this time is a woman (Daisy Ridley) and that her cohort includes a black man (John Boyega), both of whom are great in their roles. Oscar Isaac shows once again that he's something of a shapeshifter as an actor: I knew he was in the movie, but I almost didn't recognize him at his first entrance, after having seen him recently as the thwarted Yonkers mayor on HBO's Show Me a Hero (Paul Haggis, 2015). He has the ability to play callow and boyish as well as bitter and brooding, as in Inside Llewyn Davis (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2013). I look forward to seeing the movie again, but this time in the comfort of my home and on a smaller 2-D screen. I think it will play just as well there, thanks more to the smart screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan, J.J. Abrams, and Michael Arndt, and to the well-directed actors, including Adam Driver's Kylo Ren, than to the technological whiz-bang.