by ·Comments Off on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, Andrew Dominik)

I missed the evening show of Manchester by the Sea because I misremembered the start time and got caught up watching Black Mirror episodes. But I still wanted to get bummed out watching a long Casey Affleck movie, so fortunately I had The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford handy. I don’t remember Casey from the Oceans trilogy or Interstellar, so this served as a reintroduction before Manchester, and both turned out to be stunner movies with great lead performances. If anyone is working on a Timothy Carey biopic, I nominate Casey as lead.

I’ve seen this story before, in Sam Fuller’s I Shot Jesse James, in which The Coward Robert Ford shoots his hero/boss Jesse in the back, then lives the rest of his short life as a famous outlaw-killer, reenacting his crime onstage. This movie fleshes out the gang much more, showing a Robert as a starstruck, excitable kid, the runt of the Fords, and Jesse as paranoid and dangerous.

After one last train robbery, the gang lays low. Jesse has a family with wife Mary-Louise Parker, lives in a forest house near Kansas City under a fake name, never got caught. Ol’ Frank James (Sam Shepard) and Charley (Sam Rockwell) make the weasely, weak-sounding Robert feel bad about his Jesse James hero-worship, but Jesse recruits Robert when the rest of his gang starts falling away and he gets nervous that someone will sell him out for reward money, visits old friend Garret Dillahunt and kills him. Meanwhile, Paul Schneider and Jeremy Renner are none too bright, compete for the attention of a teen girl, eventually have a huge falling out and Bob kills Renner and calls the cops on Schneider. Late appearance by James Carville as the governor, Nick Cave as a troubadour and Zooey “She” Deschanel.

Casey and Carville have a psychic battle:

Dominik and DP Roger Deakins don’t overdo the stylistic quirks, allowing the story and actors to do their thing against gorgeous landscapes, but the movie’s got its share of flair – shots with edges blurred like old-timey photographs, an occasional omniscient narrator.

Casey of the Clouds:

A. Cook:

On one side it mythologizes the transitionary period of American history via the fable-building narration and dreamy photography, and on the other it slowly and methodically demystifies the characters that populate it and the falsehood of celebrity. It is this contradiction that is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the film and mirrors the inner-conflict of Robert Ford and his complex relationship with Jesse James.

by ·Comments Off on Arrival (2016, Denis Villeneuve)

Saw this right after rewatching Kubo and the Two Strings over Thanksgiving, noticed how they both refer to a person’s life “story,” then realized this was based on a book called Story of Your Life. So the two movies go together nicely is what I’m saying.

Amy Adams is a linguist and Jeremy Renner a physicist who are recruited by Forest Whitaker to communicate with the aliens whose giant ships have appeared across the planet. We see Adams do lots of linguistics but don’t see Renner doing any physics, and I think Adams’ final language-comprehension-enabled time-reading abilities break some movie paradox laws (she can learn from her future self), but the whole thing is so beautifully done I could care less. Also interesting that the emotional resonance of world peace is much less than the story of Adams’ own doomed marriage and child.

D. Cairns:

Dennis Villeneuve makes beautiful images, perhaps tending to exploit shallow focus a little TOO much, but in doing so he uses it in unexpected ways, sometimes throwing the whole subject of the shot into an artful blur.

Damn this movie being great, because now I have to care about Villeneuve’s Blade Runner sequel. An Advanced Movie, it relies on our knowledge of flashback rules in order to trick us by breaking them. Waited in my seat until the music credit came up. I liked the Jóhann Jóhannsson score but I guess I really noticed the bookending Max Richter piece. This was the academy’s exact justification for excluding Jóhannsson from award consideration, somewhat unfairly.

by ·Comments Off on Mission: Impossible 5: Rogue Nation (2015, Christopher McQuarrie)

Neither of us could recall what happened in any previous Mission: Impossible movie, but it didn’t seem that important. Confusing exposition scenes – afterwards we wondered why the secret accounts stored in the data vault protected by the underwater red box coded by the prime minister’s biometrics had continued to accumulate massive funds for the hypothetical secret project, when the PM thought the project had been cancelled, and if someone was routing that money counter to the PM’s wishes, why he wouldn’t have stored it somewhere more accessible. But the rest of the movie is fab action scenes and Simon Pegg quips, and that’s what we came for.

Evil Simon Pegg:

McQuarrie also cowrote Edge of Tomorrow, directed Jack Reacher. It’s a less distinctive-looking movie than the others, and less ecstatically wonderful than part four. Whichever film critic said this was equal to Mad Max: Fury Road was high. Action scenes could’ve been more coherent looking. Gripes aside, a solid movie with good shootouts and motorcycle chases, an intense-as-ever Cruise and his great comic sidekick Pegg. Jeremy Renner is reduced to a talking head, Ving Rhames is barely in the movie, and Alec Baldwin plays their boss. Swedish newcomer Rebecca Ferguson (Queen Elizabeth in a recent British miniseries) is the latest in a string of interchangeable M:I women, working for three different sides and looking stylish doing it. Simon McBurney is a slimy head of british intelligence and our evil mastermind is Sean Harris, the punk rock geologist in Prometheus, who looks upsettingly similar to Simon Pegg. Katy was annoyed that they keep referring to the IMF (“Impossible Mission Force”) and also mention the World Bank (related to the real IMF).

Definite proof that Pegg and Harris are different people:

M. D’Angelo: “[McQuarrie] found, in Rebecca Ferguson, the first woman to make a real impression in this boys’ club. Every time she removes her shoes, look out.”

by ·Comments Off on The Town (2010, Ben Affleck)

Reminds of Heat in its attempt to build drama with a career criminal’s romantic relationship endangered by his line of work. But here the girl (Rebecca Hall, Christian Bale’s wife in The Prestige) was a hostage in the gang’s previous job – Ben Affleck was supposed to check on her afterward, eliminate her if she knows too much, but falls for her instead. She is traumatized by her heist & hostage experience so it’s no surprise at all when she’s working with the FBI at the end, although somewhat surprising that Affleck manages to escape the huge shootout after their final Fenway Park heist, killing boss Pete Postlethwaite then escaping to Florida.

Solid crime flick, though Ben is better at Boston-accented dialogue scenes and filming criminals wearing weird masks in cool poses than assembling distinguished action sequences. Jeremy Renner (between Hurt Locker and Mission Impossible 4) got an oscar nomination as the hotheaded, trigger-happy second in command (so, the Joe Pesci role), whose druggie sister (Green Lantern’s Blake Lively) the FBI gets to. FBI is led by Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, are very good investigators but not the best marksmen. Small roles for Victor Garber as a banker and Chris Cooper as Affleck’s imprisoned father.