Wall Street Wolves

Martin Scorsese is back with The Wolf of Wall Street in what looks like a return to gritty form.  Muse Leonardo DiCaprio stars, but it's the large and eclectic supporting cast that's most interesting-- it includes newly awesome Matthew McConaughey, the somehow prestige friendly Jonah Hill, plus Jean Dujardin, Jon Favreau, Kyle Chandler, Spike Jonze and Rob Reiner.  Looks like a boys only club this time, but then again, I suppose, if it's Scorsese at his best, that won't particularly matter.  Terence Winter (TV's Broadwalk Empire, The Sopranos) adapts from the novel by Jordan Belfort.

What do you think?

The Great Gatsby

"Is it too much?" asks a nervous Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the first section of Baz Luhrmann's "Spectacular Spectacular" retelling of the often told F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby.  The much in question refers to the abundance of flowers that enshroud a living room like a hanging green house that he has anxiously over-prepared for his first meeting in many moons with his longtime obsession and love, Daisy-- played this time by Carey Mulligan.  Of course it's too much, and much can said about the movie itself with its artifice dripping off the walls and burning the holes of the retinas of its audiences.  Yet in that very nature of being too much, Luhrmann and team bring such a forceful and unrestrained visual aesthetic to The Great Gatsby, that in it's over-the-top cartoonish, blaring third dimension, cornucopia of colors spectacle of sight and sound, they uncannily sum up a modernized look at the too much that was the Jazz Age house of mirrors that Fitzgerald was commenting and ruminating about at such rigorous detail.  There's certain hints in the text that demand the Luhrmann Red Curtain Trilogy treatment.  The problem is that while Fitzgerald was in loathe of the artifice while Luhrmann cannot help himself but be ever encapsulated by it.

Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (which he co-wrote with Craig Pearce) is the fourth cinematic rendering of one of the essentials.  Ever thirty odds years or so, Hollywood summons the courage (despite past mistakes) to hopefully get it right.  The novel has tripped many up before, what with Fitzgerald's somewhat plotless prose evoking near sacrilege status for re-invention along with characterizations that read largely more like ideals than thinking, breathing human beings.  The much maligned 1974 version directed by Jack Clayton (written by Francis Ford Coppola) tried to put a stately touch to the material, but flatlined with the drama, evoking nothing more than a pretty 1920s-era (by way of the 1970s) postcard.  Baz Luhrmann does do something radical with the entombed novel, dubbed by many as the Great American Novel, but it's largely just on the surface.

Mind you it's a maddeningly beautiful surface.  For the parties that mysterious nouveau riche billionaire Jay Gatsby throws in the attempt to impress and finally court his longtime love Daisy are a marvelous old-new concoction that serve Luhrmann, the purveyor of Spectacular-sized entertainment as well as the auteur in a manner that gets right into the trenches of the feeling the Roaring Twenties might have evoked for the flappers and all else.  Criticize the filmmaker all you wish for including hip hop tracks to deejay the festivities, the anachronism achieves a blissfully lurid experience coupled with the marvelously decadent production design and costume numbers (each handled courtesy of Luhrmann's partner in more than one ways, Catherine Martin, who will likely be seeing a few more Oscar nominations come her way.)  Filtered together and edited into a sort of blended stew, there's intoxicating and rich high that's achieved.  As Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" hums, fireworks alight the Long Island bay just outside in a perfect symphony of noise and colors.  Bravura and, in at least at the very beginning, digs sharply into the meglo-madness that Fitzgerald was all enraged about in the first place.  Of course, the party must come to an end at some point.

There's the trickiness of the narrative to get through as well.  As in the novel, the film is narrated by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), this time a la Moulin Rouge! writing the past events in the invented sanctuary of a sanitarium, driven blistering mad by alcoholism and anxiety by what he's experienced.  He's the cousin of Daisy, the prim epitome of old world beauty.  Newly rich in the fortunes of the era, Nick is the also the West Egg neighbor of Jay Gatsby, he is quickly immersed into the hedonistic foreign world of spectacle, glamor and all that which inspired surely a great many soap operas.  Mysteriously befriended by Gatsby as a sidekick to lure Daisy back-- she lives at the other end of the bay in East Egg, directly across Gatsby's grand estate, symbolized by a blinking green light, on which he is frequently staring at.  Part of the narrative struggles of The Great Gatsby preside in the fact that in essence it will always be Nick's story, his memories, an expression of which can encumber the plot as our surrogate is just that-- his burdening plight has little consequence to the tale itself.  Luhrmann tries to correct this, but Maguire's bland and plucky portrait offers little insight.  The likable performer is tad too old for a character this readily eager, and it suggests in an unflattering light his most furtive cinematic period nearly a decade ago before Spider-man became his calling card.

Ushered into pull of this singular Jay-Z-scored take of Jazz Age, Nick becomes foil for Gatsby, and compatriot to Daisy's troupe of Old Money regulars-- golf champ friend Jordan Baker (newcomer Elizabeth Debicki) and her sketchy husband Tom (an excellent Joel Edgerton.)  Tom comes in tow a mistress on the side from the poor section of town-- a woman who has the forthright to call during meals-- Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher.)  There's a sequence early on where Nick travails with Tom to a hotel room for assorted shenanigans that at first reads as a scene that may have at first been written atop the Elephant suite in Moulin Rouge!.  So assertive in its debased debauchery, The Great Gatsby takes its time (more so in its overly generous two-and-a-half-hour running time) to settle and breathe from its arch "too much"-ness.  The biggest problem is that when it does so, the drama has run out of steam.

Which leads to perhaps the most nagging concern when trying to adapt The Great Gatsby in the first place.  It starts with the title character himself-- an oblique image of elegance and refined beauty (and a role that suits and tailors an actor like DiCaprio, at least on the surface of things, like a fine toothed comb), but he's merely that-- an image, a symbol, a sacred totem of a lost boy who reinvented himself as a gentleman seemingly for nothing more than to court another beguiling specimen.  Of course, there's a dark belly that scratches that elegant surface (and everybody knows it), but it's still a hardly tangible character to flesh out.  Daisy is even more difficult.  Herself, relegated to a mere supporting idea of beauty and idealism in what is supposed to be a his and her epic romantic drama, can really only a tease, a glimmer of femininity in an adaptation done correctly, a mere cipher can only do so much in her part of a star-crossed love affair.  And Luhrmann's take closely hews Fitzgerald's narrative, visual aplomb taken aside.  The leading actors, themselves finely coiffed and perfectly bred, offer only a whisk of interpretation themselves, which may work for the artifice, but stalls anything close to drama.

It's unfortunate as the supporting characters, while many of whom are given significantly lesser roles than in the novel, create vivid and exciting portraits that feel lived-in to Luhrmann's master set piece as well as grand ciphers to Fitzgerald's world as originally created.  Edgerton is absolutely watchable and rich as Daisy's philandering husband, opting big to match the set design, but distilling a hard Old Money flare to his line readings.  Fisher, as well as Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) as her cuckold dim bulb of a husband are reduced so greatly in the film, that the third act drags along on the wisp of circumstance, but the two actors game as can be.  Dedicki as Jordan is vivacious and offers plenty of presence despite limited screen time-- in the novel she's upgraded to Nick's lover, here she's more of first mate which plagues a question only round aboutly hinted at-- may the great romance of The Great Gatsby truly lie in Nick's eternal fascination of Gatsby himself.  That may have been the cork needed to wipe the cobwebs of the dusty masterwork in the first place.

That may have been something.  Alas, Luhrmann seems only interested in the unlocking The Great Gatsby in familiar ways, perhaps afraid of offering, ahem, some sense of narrative discovery to a property nearly one hundred years old.  I certainly hope it doesn't seem like I'm hating on this grandly shaped film, because I quite enjoyed it, I just wasn't immersed in it the way that only a compelling drama can.  There's a singular, bewitching, maddening beauty to The Great Gatsby, of which Luhrmann excels in driving at.  There's also a twinge of possibility of what it may have been had the filmmaker partook dramatic license to the same degree on which he does visually.  B-

Django Unchained

The unveiling of a new Quentin Tarantino film seems akin to that of what a space launch might have been as enthusiasts tend to salivate eagerly for first contact.  It's nearly hard to believe that the once-upon-a-generation has been toiling away at it now for twenty years, as Django Unchained, his eighth feature debuts on the anniversary of Reservoir Dogs.  In the space, the cinematic language and molding that Tarantino has invented-- re-sculpted and transcribed from his on cinephilia as the narrative of video store clerk to iconoclast would go-- has vitalized modern American cinema.  It's that penchant for language, for words strewn about casually but mightily, matched with the wiz bang eye for spectacle and genre mash-ups that allure the fans of the past while connecting the fans of today.  Within single and broader strokes, Tarantino, with that eye and sense that everything can be learned and cultivated through the prism of a movie screen, always supplies his baggage and his fandom to his work, unleashing a new generation to terms like "spaghetti western" and "grindhouse."  That his exploits have grown past novelty, and his own filmmaking powers and gifts have improved and delighted through the years is the violent, yet succulent gift left for his audience.

The first notable thing about Django Unchained, a revenge flick set in the Deep South a few years before the Civil War, is the inevitable comparisons it shares with his his last feature, Inglourious Basterds.  Both set in turbulent, oppressive time frames, and both designed as revisionist-history fairy tales.  Perhaps Tarantino had such a blast rewriting the past as he presented a murdered in cold blood Hitler, he wanted to go back further-- Django Unchained is ultimately a tale of former slave who gets to get a whole lot of white dudes.  However, the comparisons end in tone, execution and refinement.  Basterds through its bombast and at-times comic absurdity with an elegant refinement and sprawling characterizations, some moving, some ridiculously anachronistic, but underlined with a sensitivity to its subjects and the period.  In Inglourious Basterds bests stretches, Tarantino achieved an artful humanism to his grisly non-factual show.  Django, on the other hand, is messier and grind-ier, tackling slavery with the same transgressive aplomb, but with a seemingly unfinished veneer.  It's both a simpler revenge fantasy and more daring in it's broadly comedic strokes.

Django (Jamie Foxx) begins his revenge fantasy in the opening bout as he's rescued while miserly navigating through a chain gang.  The mystery savior is Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a former German dentist-turned American bounty hunter.  He needs help in identifying three nasty men, who happened to Django's former owners.  The first sequence, a delicately worded elongated one is striking in its Tarantino-isms, and especially in setting up the first confrontational and assaulting tone.  As Django is sold to Dr. Schultz, who informs of his abolitionist ways, shoots the white leaders of the chain gang and unearths the other members to do as they will and head to safer territories, as he embarks on a journeyman quest with Django, eventually becoming his mentor in the killing and cashing-in business.  The upfront and grisly depiction of slavery is a daring do for Tarantino, but also one for Hollywood-- there's a through line, if one wants to see it-- from Birth of a Nation to Django Unchained; it's in the eyes of the beholder if that's a good thing or not.

Tarantino reverts his tale into a buddy film between the Dr. Schultz and Django, with the promise that once their job is done, the ex-dentist (with a tooth-laden atop his bunker to boot) will free him.  Instead, Django becomes a natural shoot, and comes closer to partner in the bounty hunter game.  An early sequence reveals the nastiness of the period with, one assumes, an accuracy of spirit, if not tone, as Django, liberated with the thrills of dressing himself and riding horseback side by side a white man, setting the South into a flurry with each step.  The first stop is to bigwig plantation owner Big Daddy (Don Johnson) where the first bounties are conveniently hanging around.  Django makes such an impression, that the duo are quickly thwarted into the night by a group lead by Big Daddy in an early incarnation of Klan members.  Tarantino uses this as mileage to lump around with the films strangest joke about the members arguing over the inadequate masks before meeting eventual slaughter.

Django Unchained finally rests out the films real plot in a dialogue where Django reveals he has a wife, and his mission is to rescue her and run off as free; Schultz agrees to help.  Her name is Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) and is owned by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the Hans Landa of the Deep South.  The centerpiece scene of Django Unchained lies at Candyland, Candie's grand plantation, and one of which that lies on the conviction and fortitude and multi-layered capacities that defines the film, but more importantly what it could have been.  The scene in question, is a long one, one consisting only of dialogue, the directors forte.  The key players have gathered for a dinner, each with their own agenda, and each seemingly unwitting of the others or the hands being dealt.  Django and Schultz are trying to convince the sale of a black male fighter from Candie (with the hopeful extension of Broomhila, quietly serving behind), Candie, all grandiosity with flowery language and oddly incestuous puppy eyes at his sister, is in for the greed or the pleasure, finding himself smitten by Django's fortitude and charisma.  As counterpoint, it's Steven (Samuel L. Jackson), Candie's in house possession, and an interesting case study in himself, who becomes the smartest man in the room.

What evolves is a pure Tarantino medley of violence, but what's missing the emotive current that bridges these characters together, or to the audience.  For all the actorly precision and grandstanding around, there's little on terms of performance.  Waltz and DiCaprio billow colorfully and madly to the rafters (DiCaprio, for instance, is the loosest and most free associative he's been in his entire career, relishing the ham provided and calling out the hope that a great character actor may actually exist bellow his movie star glow) while Foxx projects consistent bad-assery but the main characters are surprisingly rote and one-note by design, neither granted nor advised to flesh out the meaty patches of dialogue.  Washington is sadly just window dressing, itself a nagging transgression.  It's Jackson who has the most interesting character, one of a not-quite freed man, who is given license to behaving above the simpler subjects.  His loyalty and psychology could be a movie in its own, but the bombast takes over the quiet shades of character as Django Unchained unravels its simple tale of fantasy revenge.

But there is something different about Django Unchained that's harder to finger.  It appears shapeless, lost in itself and perhaps a bit hurried.  For a film with a nearly three hour run time, the climax is a race to the finish.  It's not that the film drags necessarily, but it's messy and perhaps a bit unsure of itself, despite all the bravado.  I'm no doubt sure there's a great movie in here somewhere, there's glimmers of one all over the place, but this ain't it.  C

The Great Gatsby teaser

Baz Luhrmann returns this Christmas with his adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in 3-D.  If he can turn his Moulin Rouge! magic on here, than Baz will rue all the talk that this can't work...

Until then, I remain skeptical.

J. Edgar

As glossy awards bait, J. Edgar seems merely impeccable what with the actorly demands of a role like it's infamous titular character.  He's a historical icon, one with a sketchy, hard-to-pin-down set of modus operandi, one with a distinctive, authoritative voice who, for better or worse (and the film offers no set conclusions on either side) was one of the most influential Americans ever.  Coyly directed by Clint Eastwood, with his typical no-frills approach and dark lighting and exhaustively scripted by Dustin Lance Black (Milk), as a feature this significant creature of history is given a dreary and dry biopic.  While Leonardo DiCaprio hems and haws his way, and fairly gracefully more often than not, through the meaty difficulties of J. Edgar Hoover, he alone can hardly save the film from the doldrums it inevitably succumbs to.  In the end of this very long, not so accomplished film, one may walk away knowing even less about the enigmatic man, the father of the FBI, than before, and the shy stance it takes on tackling one of the most cutthroat men of American politics.  Perhaps this may have been the one case where Eastwood's famous directing needed more focus, more takes, more impulse, more something...

The dithering biography begins with Hoover writing his memoirs, giving dictation and telling his stories to a cute young ghost writers (all male) all the while espousing the hype and grandeur of not only his celebrity, but of his brain child within the Bureau of Investigation, which would become the FBI.  While notions and credits are giving his way, like the very nature of criminal investigation that Hoover spear-headed, and while accomplished as it is, there's an unlikable aura and sting of social awkwardness and confusion that overcomes Hoover.  This is naturally and wonderfully projected by DiCaprio's performance, but stymied by the bullish and at-arms-length approach given by director and screenwriter.  DiCaprio is game for the ugliness, pettiness, and megalomania associated with the icon, a man who kept everyone's secrets, and was hated by many, while keeping a stern fragility all to himself.  The actor game fully goes for the awkward rumored homosexuality that battled the core of J. Edgar (Armie Hammer plays his male companion, his right arm name at the FBI, a sly and gentile man named Clyde Tolson.)  The actor, however foolishly handled, runs with the silly mother-issued subplot (Judi Dench plays his proud mum), and the even-flimsier awkward romancer at the (Naomi Watts plays Helen Gandy, his future secretary and comrade; the two first meet on an awkward date.)  The actor handles the roles with an aplomb that elevates the dreary picture, but also alienates from it as well...he's never judgmental of his J. Edgar, and seems to relish the challenge, all the while Eastwood and Black snooze on the pedigree, hoping that that is enough.

There's no passion, no fire, just an endless blithering of facts.  Some should be quite compelling...J. Edgar proved a diverting pleasure in small doses in Michael Mann's recent John Dillinger film Public Enemies, however Eastwood seems to have little finesse or control over the film, nor the audience's waning attention spans.  The distance, and non-committal approach, the lack of judgement, or simply letting the man off the hook grows tired and is frankly offensive.  If not a complete white-washing of history, there's at least a grudge to be held that Eastwood's J. Edgar is only doomed with loneliness, never once a fight of consciousness, no matter how much DiCaprio tries to texture him.  D+  

J. Edgar artwork

Can't help but be a tad nervous about this one...

J. Edgar Trailer