Lone Survivor

Posted on January 9, 2014 at 6:00 pm

Director Peter Berg is as good as it gets when it comes to putting a particular kind of male chemistry on screen. If he was writing instead of filming, he would dunk his pen in testosterone, beard stubble, and sweat. Whether it is the small town Texas football community of “Friday Night Lights,” the disastrous bachelor party of “Very Bad Things,” or the aliens and explosions of the under-rated “Battleship,” Berg understands the rhythms of guy-talk that circles around the still core of pure masculinity. There are nearly as many f-words per minute in this film as in the record-breaking “Wolf of Wall Street.” But there the language was used to show off, to convey bravado, for shock and awe. Here the heirs to a long tradition of colorful military argot almost have air quotes around the language. It’s almost a mirror image; on Wall Street, they use bad words to seem tougher. These Navy Seals use bad language with irony — they know that no words can be as tough as they really are or express what they have really seen and done. For them, the inadequacy of even the most provocative language is the joke.

This is the true story of a disastrous Navy SEAL mission in Afghanistan, based on the book Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 by Marcus Luttrell. We know from the title and from the earliest moments of the movie that Luttrell, played by Mark Wahlberg, will be the only one still around at the end of the movie. And so, we steel ourselves, knowing we will spend just enough time with the characters to become attached to them before they are sent off on a doomed mission to take out a ‘bad guy” in Afghanistan and start getting killed.

As in most military dramas, real and fictional, there are archetypal characters. There’s a new addition and a hardened vet. And there is Luttrell, a medic, a witness, like Ishmael in Moby Dick the survivor who carries the stories of the others with him.

This is not “action violence,” with super-effective weapons on our side and endless just-misses from the enemy, along with exciting explosions and instant death. This is messy, dirty, blood-gushing and agonizing wartime violence. Berg pays tribute to these men by showing us that their courage, dedication, and skill were unparalleled and the tragic stupidity of war presented them with a series of awful choices and unthinkable danger. At one point, when they have been spotted by (apparent) civilians, including a young boy, they stand there and discuss their options — let them go and risk having them tell the enemy where they are, tie them up and risk having them die of predators or starvation, or kill them, preserving the mission but putting into question the larger issues, from what happens when it gets reported on CNN and what we are fighting for if that is who we’ve become. That may be the most heartbreaking moment of the film — until the end, when we see the real faces of the brave young men who died. They knew what they owed us. Perhaps this movie will help remind us what we owe them.

Parents should know that this movie includes constant wartime peril and violence with many characters injured and killed, children in peril, guns, explosions. There are very disturbing and graphic images of characters being hit with bullets, many sad deaths, as well as constant very strong and sometimes crude language.

Family discussion: What elements of the training and briefings were important to helping the SEALS do their job? What more did they need? Who was right in the discussion of what to do when they were “compromised” in being spotted by civilians?

If you like this, try: “Act of Valor,” with real-life Navy SEALS playing fictional versions of themselves and “We Were Soldiers,” about the early days of the American involvement in the Vietnam War.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Posted on December 24, 2013 at 6:30 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for sequences of strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language throughout, and for some violence
Profanity:	Constant very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Every possible kind of substance abuse
Violence/ Scariness:	Peril including a crashed helicopter and a sinking ship
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, insensitive treatment of little people
Date Released to Theaters:	December 25, 2013
Date Released to DVD:	March 28, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:	0345549333

Jordan Belfort is a selling machine the way a shark is a killing machine. Every single element of his being is optimally designed for just one purpose, with no extraneous or pesky attributes like a conscience to slow him down. And so, when he interrupts the story right off the bat to make sure that we see the color of his Lamborghini was white (like in “Miami Vice”) not red, he knows it will encourage us to believe that he cares about making sure we get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It’s his version of it, anyway, as told in his book, The Wolf of Wall Street.

Belfort actually doesn’t spend much time on Wall Street, but those magic words make for a better sales pitch. The man knows how to tell a story. He gets a job on Wall Street at age 22, a “smile and dial” position where he is supposed to get 500 people a day on the phone and ready to talk to a broker who will pitch them some stocks. A senior broker (a still painfully skinny post “Dallas Buyers Club” Matthew McConaughey, perfectly capturing the insanity of people who make a ton of money pretending they understand something that makes no sense) takes him out to lunch. He tells the waiter to keep the liquor coming, and explains to Belfort the key lesson: brokers are not there to make money for the clients — they are there to make money from the clients. He also advised Belfort to keep his lower half, uh, relaxed, and his upper half, uh, stimulated. This is advice that Belfort will take, uh, to heart.

But first he has to lose his job when Wall Street firm collapses following what we then called a crash back in October of 1987, but now, having recalibrated following far greater financial disasters, we call a momentary dip. Belfort then discovers a whole new world of not-quite-legal penny stock brokerages on Long Island (director Spike Jonze has a very funny cameo as his new boss) and soon he is running his own boiler room operation out of what once was a car repair shop. This was, in fact, the inspiration for the terrific movie “Boiler Room,” starring Giovanni Ribisi, Ben Affleck, and Vin Diesel. He gives his firm a made-up name, brilliantly constructed to sound established, solid, and vaguely familiar: Stratton Oakmont.

Here Belfort learns two more important lessons. First, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. A story in Forbes that calls him a reverse Robin Hood, stealing from the poor to make money for himself, gets him an avalanche of job applicants eager to join his Merry Men. Second, too much is never enough. Belfort does not fall into every possible kind of addiction and substance abuse; he embraces it. There are mountains of drugs and hookers in this movie, plus a helicopter crash (while Belfort was high), sinking a yacht “suitable for a Bond villain” that once belonged to Coco Chanel (while Belfort was high), midget tossing and a crazy-hilarious conversation about the parameters of midget-tossing (and, in passing, the ethics), a near-naked marching band in the brokerage, and then more drugs and hookers. This is all in the book, and screenwriter Terrence Winter told Joe Nocera of the New York Times that “when he interviewed the F.B.I. agent who finally nailed Mr. Belfort, the man said, ‘I tracked this guy for 10 years, and everything he wrote is true.'” That includes the macabre but over-the-top hilarious scene of a drug overdose that leaves Belfort incapable of standing or speaking coherently that comes at the worst possible place and time. The cocaine and ludes are not nearly as powerful as the most intoxicating substances of all: greed mixed with testosterone and pure id.

“Is this legal?” Belfort cheekily asks us as he explains what he is up to? “Absolutely not!” He knows we are not interested in the details. We are too busy being dazzled by the excess and how much fun everyone is having with it. By now, Belfort has left his pretty first wife (big-eyed Cristin Milioti, the mother from “How I Met Your Mother”) for a second, spectacularly beautiful wife he calls “The Duchess of Bay Ridge” (Margot Robbie, nailing the accent and the attitude). He has houses, horses, Coco Chanel’s yacht, and two security guards, both named Rocco. He is taking a hospital’s worth of pills and a “Scarface”-load of cocaine. And an FBI agent (“Friday Night Lights'” Kyle Chandler) is looking into his activities. We know he’s serious because he has one of those cork boards with pieces of paper thumb-tacked onto it to keep track of the case.

Like his “Goodfellas,” Scorsese’s storytelling here is utterly mesmerizing, with brilliant performances in every role. DiCaprio is electrifying. If Stratton Oakmont was still around, there would be a line of eager applicants around the block tomorrow. In smaller roles, Rob Reiner, as Belfort’s father and compliance officer, “AbFab’s” Joanna Lumley as a willing accomplice and “The Artist’s” Jean Dujardin are stand-outs, and Jake Hoffman (son of Dustin Hoffman and Anne Byrne) is just right as shoe designer Steve Madden, whose company was taken public by Belfort’s firm. In one brief but key scene, Stephanie Kurtzuba beautifully creates a complete and compelling character who tells us a lot about her life and about Belfort as well.

And like “Goodfellas,” this is the story of a ruthless entrepreneur that illuminates the best and worst of the American spirit, big dreams, ambition, energy, focus. We know Belfort is a crook who exploits the trust of people who don’t know better but we can’t help being sold ourselves because he makes it look like so much fun. And we know that while he spent less than two years in jail, where he played tennis and came out to a lucrative new career as a motivational speaker and got to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a Martin Scorsese film, the real Wolves of Wall Street will love this movie. And then they’ll go back to their hundreds of millions of dollars, houses, horses, and two security guards named Rocco who, along with the loopholes they made sure stayed in the laws, will protect them from even the slap on the wrist faced by Belfort.

Parents should know that this film has NC-17-level content with extremely explicit and mature material, with explicit sexual references and situations including orgies and nudity, extensive drinking and drug abuse, crooked dealings and fraud, constant very strong language, peril, and some violence.

Family discussion: Why were Belfort’s colleagues so loyal to him? Why were the customers so willing to be cheated? Was justice done?

If you like this, try: “Boiler Room” (also inspired by Belfort), “Goodfellas,” and “Wall Street” and Michael Lewis’ books Liars Poker and The Big Short.

American Hustle

Posted on December 19, 2013 at 6:00 pm

“Some of this actually happened,” the movie’s opening shot deadpans. It is true that the United States government both threatened and paid a con man to help them con some bigger fish and then accidentally ended up conning some of the biggest fish ever caught — six US Congressmen and a Senator. David O. Russell directed and co-wrote “American Hustle,” the story of 1970’s fraud, insanity, and betrayal, plus a lot of “what were we thinking” hair and clothes and a rockin’ soundtrack, from “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road” to “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” “Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?” and the inevitable “Horse With No Name.”

The storyline has so many layers of double-cross, lies, betrayal, grandiosity, and sheer insanity that the audience may feel they are getting lost, but in a way, that is the point, and of course, that is the decade for it. I mean, look at the home perm on Bradley Cooper, who plays the hotdog FBI agent Ricky DiMaso as something of a cross between Starsky, Hutch, and Huggie Bear.

And then there is the hair on Christian Bale as Irving Rosenfeld. It can perhaps best be described as an edifice. As the movie begins, we are treated to the painstaking assembly of his pompadoured comb-over, remarkable to witness and a dead-on detail that lets us know who we will be following for the rest of the film. He is a phony, he is all about making the surface look better than it should, and he will do whatever it takes to put forward the image that will sell whatever he is trying to sell. Ascot, check. Pinky rink, check. Briefcase full of cash, check.

Flashback. Rosenfeld is the master of at least half a dozen medium-sized scams when, at a party, across the room, he spies a beautiful woman. It is Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams). They share a love of Duke Ellington and a talent for re-invention. “My dream” she tells us, “more than anything, was to become anything else than what I was.”

They cook up an almost-legal scam, taking up-front fees on the promise of using their connections to obtain loans from some vaguely defined “London connections.” All is fine until they get busted. And DiMaso, intrigued by their world of deception, persuades them to work for him to bring down some big-time criminals.

But things get complicated and messy. DiMaso’s boss (a terrific Louis C.K.) is reluctant to have federal officers engage in criminal activities, even to catch other criminals. One of the great joys of this film is when the boss keeps trying to tell DiMaso an ice-fishing story that never gets to the point because the hotheaded DiMaso keeps interrupting him. Rosenfeld is married to an unhappy, volatile wife named Rosalyn (a dazzling performance of astonishing depth and mesmerizing assurance by Jennifer Lawrence) and stepfather to her son. He has to find a way to resolve things with the FBI, the mob, and the politicians.

The unfinished ice-fishing story is the point. This is not a nice, linear explanation for what happened. This is a bunch of stories that intersect in a maze of all seven of the deadly sins plus a few that should also be on the list. Brilliant performances by everyone in the cast (including Alessandro Nivola as an FBI official and an unbilled guest star as a guy from the mob) and a witty, insightful script are what hold it together. Lawrence makes us furious at and sorry for her character at the same time, and she is sizzlingly funny.

The purpose of this film is not to illuminate the particular events of Abscam. It is to meditate on the irrepressible American enthusiasm for self-invention and the thicket of betrayal and damage that can be the result. It is about the stories we tell, even the ones like the ice fishing story that never get to make a point. Russell himself can’t resist tweaking the details, making the characters more interesting and sympathetic than they really were. But that wouldn’t be a good story.

Parents should know that this film has very strong adult material including constant bad language, explicit sexual references and situations, nudity, drinking and drug use, extensive criminal behavior and betrayal.

Family discussion: Who are the biggest con artists in this story? How do the characters determine who deserves their loyalty? Was justice done?

If you like this, try: “Flirting with Disaster,” “The Fighter,” and “Silver Linings Playbook,” from the same director

Saving Mr. Banks

Posted on December 13, 2013 at 5:17 pm

For most of this story, Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) and P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) are on opposite sides. He has been trying for twenty years to persuade her to let him make a movie based on her books about the magical nanny, Mary Poppins. She needs money, as her agent reminds her, which is why she has very reluctantly agreed to leave home and fly to Los Angeles to talk to him about it. But she cannot bear the idea of losing control of the characters who mean so much to her and she abhors everything about Disney and California, including sunshine, cheerfulness, twinkling, music, and calling people by their first names.

But there is one moment when, in the midst of some obvious culture clash jokes, there is a quiet moment that shows they are both on the same side. Disney tells Travers that he was in her position when someone wanted to pay him for Mickey Mouse and he simply could not bear the agony of allowing anyone else to make decisions about a character he had created. Travers says that Mary Poppins and the Bankses are her family. But in a very real way, the character these artist created are their own very souls. “We restore order with imagination,” Disney tells her. And, engagingly, throughout the film we see the process, the inspiration, the despair, the triumph, the necessity of creating art, from a father soothing his little girl with a story to songwriters puzzling out a way to show Mary Poppins’ upside down world by having the tune go up as she sings the word “down.”

We all know how it turned out. Disney’s “Mary Poppins,” celebrating its 50th anniversary next year, is one of the beloved and honored family films of all time, with five Oscars (Best Actress, Song, Special Effects, Score, and Editing) and eight more nominations. But anyone who has read the books knows that there are some major departures from the Travers version, and that the fears she expressed — as documented in tape recordings of her sessions with the screenwriter and songwriting team — were more than justified.

Some people have criticized this film as Disney’s burnishing of its own brand, with its founder portrayed as a decent man who is just trying to keep a two-decade old promise to his daughters to make a movie from one of their favorite books. Amy Nicholson writes in LA Weekly that “Saving Mr. Banks” is “a corporate, borderline-sexist spoonful of lies.” She says that Thompson’s “Travers is as unpleasant as a pine needle pillow, and she’s as far away from the actual woman as ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ is from being a real word” when in fact she was a “a feisty, stereotype-breaking bisexual.” I think this is a misreading of the film’s attitude toward Disney, Travers, “Mary Poppins” (the movie), and what it means to be a creative person in a world that is very imperfect when it comes to assigning monetary value to art (see also: “Inside Llewyn Davis”). To come to Nicholson’s conclusion, one has to assume that the movie wants us to believe that Disney somehow outsmarted Travers by improving her work. On the contrary, the movie makes it clear that the movie Mary Poppins was very different from Travers’ idea of the characters, moving them several decades earlier, for a start, and, crucially, as indicated in the title of this film, transforming an episodic storyline about children’s adventures with a magical nanny into a story about parents discovering the importance of being close to their children. It is Nicholson who underestimates Travers by suggesting she was somehow snookered. She made a decision that it was worth it to her to let that happen to get the money she needed to be as financially independent as she wished. As is shown in the very first scene, she could have made money another way — by writing more books about Mary Poppins, for a start — but she chose to consent to the movie, and then to make absolutely sure that no American would ever touch her characters again.

While the cute culture clashes and Travers’ resistance to Disney’s brand of pixie dust are featured in the movie’s trailers, the film itself devotes a substantial amount of time to Travers’ childhood, clearly taking her very seriously as a woman and an artist. We see her as a child dearly loved by the father she adored (a superb Colin Farrell), a man of great imagination and charm, but, perhaps in part due to those same qualities, not able to manage life as a banker in the far reaches of Australia. As we see him sink from manager at a bank to manager at a smaller bank to teller, fans of the Poppins books will remember her description of what Mr. Banks did at the office (it is not coincidental that he shares a name with his profession). He “made money.” Meaning that, at least in his children’s minds, he sat at his desk cutting out coins each day. Some days he was able to cut out many, and the family was quite comfortable. But other days he was not as productive, and there were fewer coins to go around.

We can see the origins of this idea and many other Mary Poppins book details in Travers’ past, a seemingly bottomless carpet bag, a crisp “spit spot” from an imposingly organized woman who arrives to put the household in order. But the most telling detail from the past is the key to the invention of Travers’ most important character: herself. Her name is not P.L. Travers at all. Nor is she Mrs. Travers, despite her insistence that Mrs. Travers is what she prefers to be called. The Australian girl who would grow up to be the ultra-English P.L. Travers is named Helen Lyndon Goff, called “Ginty” by her dad. His name was Travers Robert Goff. She took his first name as her last name and put a “Mrs.” in front of it to create the character she chose to be. This revelation, and Thompson’s brilliant portrayal of Travers show us a woman whose most important creation was the character she pretended to be — or became.

And of course Disney, too, played a character, the folksy host who was going to entertain you no matter how hard you tried to resist, and very well aware that these qualities were his best assets as a businessman. He insists on taking Travers to Disneyland (beautifully recreated as it was in 1961). Disney is persuasive enough to get Travers onto the carousel and canny enough to tell her the truth — that getting her on a ride won him a $20 bet. And he tells her a story about his childhood, showing that just because he promotes an idealized vision of the world does not mean that he is unfamiliar with its harshness and disappointments.

Thompson gives one of the best performances of the year, showing us the insecurity and humanity and wit of a woman who is far more complex than she wishes to appear. Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak as the song-writing Sherman Brothers and Paul Giamatti as the limo driver are all excellent as characters who underscore the theme of art as a path to meaning. The glimpses of the “Mary Poppins” movie are so entrancing (okay, I had to come home and watch it again and am still humming “Step in Time”) that it is easy to be temporarily distracted from the bittersweetness of the story. Hmmm, where have I heard that idea before?

Parents should know that this film includes the very sad death of a parent, substance abuse, a suicide attempt, tense confrontations, and some disturbing images.

Family discussion: What did Walt Disney and P.L.Travers have in common? What do you learn about her from her relationship with the driver? How can you take details around you and make them into a story?

If you like this, try: the Mary Poppins books by P.L. Travers and the Disney musical film and the documentary “The Boys,” about the Sherman Brothers

Ten Lessons from Schindler’s List

Posted on December 8, 2013 at 8:00 am

Steven Spielberg’s film about Oskar Schindler and the 1200 Jews he saved from being killed by the Nazis came out twenty years ago, based on the novel by Thomas Keneally (originally titled Schindler’s Ark). Keneally happened on the story when he stopped in a Beverly Hills luggage shop and chatted with the owner, who turned out to be one of the people saved by Schindler. Keneally later wrote Searching for Schindler: A Memoir, about his research, writing the book, and his dream of “an Oscar for Oskar” that came true when the movie was made in 1993.

The anniversary is just one of many good reasons to remember Schindler and ten of the lessons from the film.

1. Even if you cannot stop a great wrong, you can do something that will be very meaningful.

2. Heroes are not always exemplars of integrity and sacrifice. Oskar Schindler worked for the Nazis and was for much of his life an opportunist and self-promoter. Keneally once said that what interested him about Schindler was “the fact that you couldn’t say where opportunism ended and altruism began. And I like the subversive fact that the spirit breatheth where it will. That is, that good will emerged from the most unlikely places.” No one is perfect.

3. And a related lesson — sometimes a person’s faults are assets when it is time to rebel against authority.

4. Schindler was able to save 1200 people by insisting that they were essential employees in his business and contributing to Germany’s wartime efforts. This shows that people in business can — and must — make as much or an even greater contribution to the public good as government and non-profits.

5. The Nazi camp commander played by Ralph Feinnes shows us how a soul is destroyed by evil. The more corrupt he becomes, the more he must wall himself off from any sense of compassion or decency.

6. This movie was made half a century after the events it depicted and nearly 20 years after Schindler’s death. Sometimes it takes a while for us to be able to begin to understand historical events.

7. Some historical events are so enormous and so tragic they can never be fully understood. The best we can do is tell as many different pieces of the story as possible. The story of a small group who were saved must help us better understand the reality of those who did not survive.

8. As we reach the end of the time when living witnesses will be able to share their stories directly, it is even more important that we make sure that these stories are remembered. Making this film inspired director Steven Spielberg to create the Shoah Foundation and an archive of interviews.

9. Even a child can save a life with quick thinking and courage.

10. To quote the line from the Talmud in ring given to Schindler by the Jews he saved: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.”