Anomalisa

Posted on January 7, 2016 at 5:39 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity and language
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Peril and unhappiness
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 8, 2016

The “Fregoli delusion” sometimes called the delusion of doubles, is a rare disorder that makes people believe that everyone else in the world is in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise. When Michael Stone (David Thewlis) checks into the Fregoli hotel in this stop-motion animated film from Charlie Kaufman (“Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation,””Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), we begin to understand why it is that everyone else we have seen in the film’s first few moments including the passenger sitting next to Stone on the airplane and his cab driver, have the same face and voice (Tom Noonan).

Even his wife and child speak with Noonan’s voice.

Michael checks into the hotel on a business trip. He will be the speaker at a conference on customer service. He has written an acclaimed book on the subject. He teaches customer service representatives, the subject of near-universal frustration and derision. He tells them “Each person you speak to has had a day.” He tries tell them to be aware of what is special about each individual, but around him everyone seems the same. And Michael himself, as he speaks of humanity, is, well, a puppet. Literally. This stop-motion animated film is remarkably realistic with one of the most authentically awkward sex scenes in cinema history. But the figures themselves, expressive as they are and fluid in their movements, are frankly artificial, with clear breaks on their faces at eye level so we can see how the various face parts get swapped in and out to create emotions.

Michael calls a former girlfriend and they meet for a painfully clumsy conversation. And then he happens upon two other hotel guests, women who are in town for the conference and looking forward to hearing him speak. One is Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a shy woman, self-conscious about a scar on her face, and often second-guessing herself or making self-deprecating comments that anticipate being judged a failure or a bother by those around her.

She thinks that if he is going to make a pass at anyone, it will be her friend, and clearly the friend (who, like everyone else, has the voice of Tom Noonan), does, too. But it is Lisa Michael invites back to his room. She is an anomaly, he tells her. Something about her voice. Anomaly. Lisa. Anomalisa.

The film is beautifully designed. Michael’s hotel room and the hotel bar are masterpieces of bland and yet somehow sinister anonymity. An encounter with a hotel employee who has an office so enormous it must be traversed by golf cart is reminiscent of the daffy between-floors half-level ceilinged office in “Being John Malkovich.” Any writer is in a sense a puppetmaster, and we have seen Kaufman’s fascination with puppets before; in “Being John Malkovich,” John Cusack’s character was a puppeteer and the various characters in essence used actor John Malkovich (playing a version of himself) as a puppet when they took over his consciousness. In “Synecdoche, New York,” Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character was a playwright trying to maintain control over an increasingly uncontrollable narrative. Here the puppets give Kaufman the greatest possible control over the way the story appears and the way it is told. Stop-motion is so exacting that only seconds of footage are completed each day and the sex scene alone took six months to complete. It also allows him to explore issues of memory, identity, imagination, and loneliness. Dream-like images demonstrate through both illustration and contrast the reality behind the platitudes in Michael’s speech. Just as a raw and needy reality keeps bursting through his remarks, the anguish and hopelessness he feels — and the fear and hopefulness that Lisa feels — transcend the plastic pieces of the dolls who are, it must be said, acting.

For a brief moment, it seems Michael has found something extraordinary. But when he tries to find a way to stay with her, the Fregoli syndrome — or maybe just his terror of genuine intimacy — kicks in. By that time, our own connection to these characters, as artificial as they appear, or, perhaps because of the oddness of their artificiality, is surprisingly warm and intimate.

Parents should know that this film includes very explicit sexual situations and frontal male (puppet) nudity, very strong and explicit language, drinking, and adultery.

Family discussion: What does the name of the hotel tell us about the story? Why did Lisa’s voice change?

If you like this, try: “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” by the same screenwriter

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The Revenant

Posted on January 7, 2016 at 5:35 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity
Profanity:	Some strong and racist language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense, graphic, and disturbing violence including arrows, knives, guns, sexual assault and prolonged animal attack
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	January 8, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	April 18, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01AB0DX2K

In the 1820’s, ladies of fashion liked fur trim. And, true then as now, men like money. So frontiersmen went on trapping expeditions into the wilderness of the young country of the United States of America (played here by British Columbia and Alberta, Canada). The rewards for bringing back fur pelts are significant. The risks, including attack by the Arikara Indians, are dire.

A frontiersman named Hugh Glass was the guide for one of these expeditions. According to lore, he was savagely attacked by a bear and left to die by his companions, but survived and made it back over 250 miles to the nearest fort, intent on revenge. The story has been told — and embroidered and adapted — over the years, reflecting each era’s perspective and concerns. This version is based on the novel by US Trade Michael Punke (who, as Deputy US Trade representative and Ambassador to the World Trade Organization is restricted from promoting the film). As co-written and directed by “Birdman’s” Alejandro González Iñárritu it is a story of resolve. As often with Westerns, it is a way to explore the fundamental contradictions of the American spirit: determination, vision, courage, but sometimes without any regard for the damage they can cause.

Both Iñárritu and his Director of Photography Emmanuel Lubezki won Oscars for this film. They filmed only in available light, meaning they had to limit themselves to just moments of filming each day. As the director told Deadline, they created “little-by-little jewel moments; that’s the way I designed the production…But those locations are so gorgeous and so powerful, they look like they have never been touched by a human being, and that’s what I needed.” They filmed under conditions so arduous that Will Poulter, who plays real-life frontiersman/trapper Jim Bridger, told me that no acting was necessary to show that they were freezing and exhausted. The bear is CGI (and the bear attack is truly horrifying), but almost everything else was really there and really happening, including diCaprio’s hacking coughs (he had the flu).

The cinematography is the most stunning I have ever seen, perfectly focussed throughout the depth of field, even across endless vistas. Second only to the visuals is the movie’s real theme, not revenge or even will, but law.

When there is no structure, no church, no police, courts, or jail, no lawmakers, no appeals, how do you decide who is in charge and what to do? The film’s most fascinating moments are the ones where we see characters across the continuum on those questions, with one in particular who is still deciding where he fits in, decide what they should do, what they must do. In an early scene, the Indians attack and the frontiersmen’s response is: pelts payload first, and every man for himself second. Wounded men are left behind without a second’s hesitation.

But when Glass (Oscar-winner Leonardo DiCaprio) is critically wounded in the middle of nowhere, Captain Henry, the leader of the expedition (Domhnall Gleeson) is certain what he is owed. Because he has been an essential and honorable part of their expedition (and, unstated but evident, because no one is shooting arrows at them at the moment), he decides two men will be left behind to care for him until he dies and then give him some semblance of a Christian burial. They are John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Bridger (17 years old at the time). Glass has a teenage son (Forrest Goodluck), from his marriage to a Native American woman who was killed, and he stays with his father as well.

But Fitzgerald becomes impatient and commits a terrible act of cruelty while Bridger is away from the campsite, then lies to him about what happened. Glass is left for dead. As Glass, Fitzgerald, Henry, and Bridger deal with the consequences of these actions, we see the beginnings of a society and culture. Some day, the pristine landscapes explored by Glass and Bridger would be covered with roads and cities and we will try to re-create them by filming in other countries to show us what we were. But the story of the struggle for justice, always the great work of this country, is a story we will keep telling forever.

Parents should know that this film includes extremely graphic and disturbing human and animal violence with many explicit and disturbing images of dead bodies and wounds, murder of family members, sexual assault, brief nudity, some strong language, and racism.

Family discussion: How many different views about law and morality do you see among the characters? What should the group have done with a severely injured member?

If you like this, try: “Touching the Void,” a documentary about an extraordinary story of survival in the wilderness

The Big Short

Posted on December 10, 2015 at 6:16 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity
Profanity:	Constant very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Fraud, corruption, economic upheavals
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	December 11, 2015
Date Released to DVD:	March 15, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0177ZM3LO

Director Adam McKay is so obsessed with the 2008 financial meltdown that he inserted a series of charts and graphs and statistics about it over the closing credits of the silly buddy-cop comedy, The Other Guys. Yes, there was a villain played by Steve Coogan who was up to some financial jiggery pokery, but only the most careful viewers of that film could have deduced that what McKay, best known for raunchy Will Ferrell slob comedies, secretly yearned for, as Michael Caine might say, was to blow the bloody doors off the Wall Street bankers who treated the American economy like a bull treats a china shop.

We’ve had sober documentaries like The Flaw and Oscar-winner Inside Job and the superb drama Margin Call, all outstanding, insightful, and illuminating and essential companion pieces to this movie. But “The Big Short” has several advantages in telling the story. First, by giving us someone to root for, however imperfect the heroes of this story are, it keeps us emotionally connected to the story. Second, because it is in most respects a comedy, McKay has a wider range of tricks on hand to make us understand what happened. This fierce, fiery rant of a film is going to make you understand that the people we entrusted with our economic stability were truly despicable and truly stupid. It is funny and infuriating and then funny again and then, when he tells you that the bad guys went to jail and the big banks were broken up — no, just kidding, they weren’t — it is monumentally infuriating.

I’ll add a footnote below to give my own very short explanation of what happened.* (And one thing they got wrong.** Pretty much everything else is literally right on the money.) Or, you could listen to Margot Robbie talk you through it, as she sips champagne in a bubble bath. Yes, McKay knows what gets people’s attention and he uses Robbie and other celebrities to come in and explain the parts that the bankers intentionally did their best to obfuscate, using words guaranteed to put everyone to sleep so they could pick our pockets a little while longer. Ryan Gosling also serves as a guide, playing a real-life insider who saw that the mortgage-backed securities were going to tumble down like a Jenga tower.

The real-life acronym used by the bankers during this period was IBGYBG, which stood for “I’ll be gone; you’ll be gone,” meaning that if they could just keep passing the hot potato of economic Armageddon going around the circle a couple more times to collect the fees, they could get out before it all came tumbling down. And many of them did. As Michael Lewis notes in the the book that inspired this film (subtitled The Doomsday Machine), and, if you don’t remember anything else, remember this: the heroes of his book, the small group that bet against the bankers, made fortunes. But so did the people who lost that bet. Everyone on both sides of these deals made a lot of money. Everyone else across the country lost a lot of money, jobs, and homes.

As noted, Lewis’ book and McKay’s movie (the Oscar-winning script is co-written with Charles Randolph of the underrated “Love and Other Drugs”) wisely allow us to enter the story via the scrappy little group of misfit toys who figure out that the game is cooked, that it can’t stay that way, and that there has to be a way to bet against the other side. This grown-up Bad News Bears bunch (two of them barely qualifying as grown-ups) have a couple of things going for them. First, they are skeptics. Actually, they are cynics. They assume everyone is lying to them and just about everyone is cheating them. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), who insists on being called Dr. Michael Burry (he’s a neurologist-turned investment manager) and Mark Baum (Steve Carell) are both men who were already inclined to be skeptics and then faced terrible pain and loss that disabused them of the sense that life was fair. Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) and Charlie Geller (John Magaro), two young partners literally running an investment firm out of a garage, had made almost $30 million finding unseen risks but were so naive about Wall Street that they did not know what the requirements were for being able to trade as an institution and not as an individual. These guys were all outsiders. (All names are fictional except for Burry.)

The second thing they had going for them was that they were not just willing to do their homework; they insisted on it. While the money gusher was going, no one else wanted to check the math (and no one was getting paid to do so). But, in some of the most entertaining moments of this riotously entertaining film, these guys who did not believe what they were told, went to check it out. Burry unpacked the securities to examine each of the hundreds of mortgages they contained to see if they were as secure as promised. They were not. Baum’s colleagues (Rafe Spall and Hamish Linklater) went to Florida to see the homes that were mortgaged. They were abandoned. Baum’s guys spoke to the mortgage brokers who happily explained that they preferred to give mortgages to people who had no possible means of paying them. (Max Greenfield is superbly sleazy in this role.) “They’re not confessing,” one of Baum’s partners says in amazement. “They’re bragging.”

By the time a stripper explains to Baum that she has mortgages on five houses and a condo and has been assured she can refinance when her adjustable rate jumps up, he begins to see the potential in betting that these securities will fall as people like this cannot pay the mortgages. When he goes to a convention of financial types working in this field (Byron Mann is almost deliciously corrupt as the arrogant and ethically vacant Mr. Chau), he knows he is right.

At the same convention, Shipley and Geller are jubilant when they are able to make a big bet against the bankers. And then they get a reality reminder from their their mentor, played by co-producer Brad Pitt. He could not take the corruption of Wall Street any more and left for a life somewhere between disaster prepper and artisanal farmer, wearing a face mask when he goes to town and urging everyone to get colonics. He met the young investor when they were walking their dogs. He reminds Shipley and Geller not to be so happy. When they win big, it will be because the economy is collapsing, causing real, devastating pain.

This is an outstanding film, with sensational performances by a brilliant ensemble cast. It is one of the best of the year and the most important as well.

Parents should know that this film includes constant very strong and crude language, vulgar sexual references, strippers, nudity, and extreme widespread fraud and corruption.

Family discussion: What made just these men able to see what so many other people did not? How did they verify their analysis? Will it happen again?

If you like this, try: the book by Michael Lewis and documentaries about the financial meltdown including “The Flaw” and “Inside Job” as well as feature films “99 Homes” and “Margin Call”

*Here’s what happened, without the jargon or the bubble bath. As you see at the beginning of the movie, Lewis Ranieri, now one of the wealthiest people in the world, came up with the idea of essentially crowd-funding mortgages. He took lots and lots of mortgages, bundled them into bonds, and let big institutional investors, like pension funds, buy them. It was a great investment for them because pension funds need a safe and secure source of income to pay retirees and these were safe and secure — much more than stocks — because people almost never defaulted on their mortgages and because so many mortgages were bundled up together that even if some did default it would have almost no impact. These bundles of mortgages were so popular that the banks ran out of safe and secure mortgages to put into bonds. And so, they started pushing mortgage brokers to issue more mortgages, and that meant giving mortgages to people who would not otherwise have qualified. (Some people will tell you that the government was at fault for pushing home ownership on people who could not afford it. They are wrong. Most of the pressure was coming from people who wanted to buy mortgages, not people who wanted to buy houses.) So, the formerly safe and secure bonds started filling up with less and less safe and secure mortgages. And the people responsible for differentiating the risk of the bonds, including the rating agencies, decided to just keep rating and selling the new, less secure securities as though they were exactly the same as the earlier ones. All of the “formulas” (sometimes called “algorithms” or “models”) used to justify this were bunk. Imagine it this way: there’s a vineyard that makes superior wine that everyone wants to buy and there are strong legal and economic incentives to buy it. But you only have so many grapes, so you start watering it down, still selling it at the same price, and getting the people who rate wine to continue to give it the same rating. Then you run out of water so you start blending it with turpentine, and all of your projections show that it is just as good and will still sell just as well so you price it that way and assume there is no risk.

Here’s the important part: everyone at every part of this conveyer belt of increasingly risky securities all being treated as though they were not risky was being paid based on the number of transactions, not the quality of the transactions, a sort of very big, very expensive game of tag, where there was never any “it” until finally “it” was everyone.

**Actually, because of the immense lobbying power of the bankers (see 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown) the SEC had no authority to regulate these mortgage-backed securities. The agency that should have had jurisdiction was the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. When then-Chairman Brooksley Born suggested that they might look into some kind of oversight, Congress and the then-Treasury Secretary made sure she could not. Also, there are post-employment restrictions that prevent SEC staff from going to work for the people they supervise.

The Letters

Posted on December 3, 2015 at 5:46 pm

Mother Teresa, the Albanian nun who devoted her life to “the poorest of the poor” in India, is one of the foremost figures of the 20th century, and on the way to being recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church. Some people are disturbed by discovering through her published letters that at times she felt doubts about herself, her work, and even about God. But it was that same resolute honesty that compelled her to follow her calling and it would be more disturbing if she never doubted or if she doubted and did not feel she could express it. Her accomplishments are even more impressive once we learn how fiercely she wrestled with God.

In “The Letters,” Juliet Stevenson plays Mother Teresa, from her early days as a nun to establishing her own order. At first, in the convent in India, she is teaching young girls in starched uniforms who sit quietly and are eager to learn. But she receives “a calling within a calling” and believes she has been called on by God to work with “the poorest of the poor.” Reconciling this determination with her vow of obedience and her dedication to humility is not easy. Persuading the people that she hopes to help that all she wants is to help them, not convert them, is not easy.

The tall actress Juliet Stevenson does a fine job as the tiny nun. Some people may object that the movie caters to those who are already believers. It does not question Mother Teresa’s greatness or her tactics and it elides over some of the controversies concerning the expansion of her operations and whether her faith-based approach was always best for the people she was helping. Some viewers will find the film slow, though for me that was one of its strengths. Writer/director Bill Riead makes sure that its quiet power is more like a prayer than a biographical portrait, a calling inside a calling inside a calling and one that its subject would find most suitable.

Parents should know that this movie’s themes concern work with the “poorest of the poor,” with extreme deprivation and illness.

Family discussion: What is the best way to help the “poorest of the poor?” Why did Mother Teresa want to help people who were not Catholic?

If you like this, try: “The Life Journey of Mother Teresa,” a documentary

Chi-Raq

Posted on December 3, 2015 at 3:37 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong sexual content including dialogue, nudity, language, some violence and drug use
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	A theme of the film is gang-related violence, guns, shooting, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	Race and gender issues are the theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	December 4, 2015
Date Released to DVD:	January 25, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B017W1P79I

“WAKE UP!” Laurence Fishburne pleads at the end of Spike Lee’s incendiary movie, “School Daze,” not just one of Lee’s best films but one of the most important films of the 1980’s. He was not talking to his fellow students. He was not talking to the camera. He was talking to us in the audience. He was telling all of us to rise above fear and petty differences — and fear of petty differences and stop hurting each other.

That message is even more urgent now, and so “Chi-Raq” is an even more powerful call for all of us to wake up, and it is Lee’s best non-documentary film in many years. It is more than a film; it is an anguished wail of grief and fury and the most important film of 2015.

We call the great Illinois city on the shores of Lake Michigan Chicago, but as the opening lines of the movie explain, for the residents of a South Side community with more violent deaths than the US military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is Chi-Raq. In the film a little girl is killed by a stray bullet in a gang-related shooting. She is collateral damage. The week I saw the film, there was a funeral in the very community where it is set for a nine-year-old boy who was a deliberate murder target as an act of reprisal against his father. Even the ultimate symbol of Chicago gangster violence, Al Capone, never went that far. This is not a documentary and the mode of storytelling here is heightened, but there can be no credible claims that what it portrays is unfair or exaggerated.

They feel completely isolated from any kind of help from the outside. Businesses are afraid to come into their community, so there are not jobs or services. The government does not help. The newspapers do not tell their story. Their news is reported by rappers, and in a sensationally dynamic scene in a club a rapper known as Chi-Raq (a fierce Nick Cannon) tells the truth about what they see all around them.

Lee, working with co-screenwriter Kevin Willmott, brilliantly positions this vitally contemporary story as an updated version of a play written in 411 BC, “Lysistrata,” by Aristophanes. Just as the savvy strategist of almost 25 centuries ago plotted with the other women of her community to bring an end to the Peloponnesian War by withholding sexual favors from all of the men, “Chi-Raq’s” Lysistrata (a sizzling performance by “Mad Men’s” Teyonah Parris) sits down with the women from the opposing gang (to continue the classical themes, the gangs are the Trojans and the Spartans) to get them to pledge that there will be no loving until there is no more shooting. The heightened classical overtones include a narrator/chorus who has a Greek-sounding name Dolmedes — inspired by the Blaxploitation hero Dolemite and played by Samuel L. Jackson in a series of natty, brightly colored suits. And then there is the dialog, all in verse, somewhere between rap and iambic pentameter, which actually have a pretty broad overlap.

Lee makes it clear that this is a widespread, even universal problem as women around the world join forces with Lysistrata. And no one escapes responsibility for the carnage, with a searing climax of tragedy and redemption. We see a mother (Jennifer Hudson) scrubbing her little girl’s blood off the street. We see people tweeting the details of a shooting as it happens. Lysistrata is inspired not just by her namesake but by the real-life Nobel Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, who brought the Christian and Moslem women of Liberia together to stop the fighting in their country. Lee is very clear about who is to blame and who is responsible for making it better: all of us.

And when we see mothers holding pictures of their children killed by guns, we are seeing real mothers, holding pictures of their real children. All of the flash, music, sex, and spectacle are balanced with moments of intimacy, connection, and poignancy, and all are anchored in Lee’s passion for his community. That reality makes this a rare movie that can change the conversation.

Parents should know that this film features gang-related and other violence with tragic outcomes including characters injured and killed, explicit sexual references and situations with nudity, smoking, drinking, and drug use.

Family discussion: What is the best way for the community, the government, and business to stop gang-related violence? How can a movie like this make a difference?

If you like this, try: “School Days,” “Do the Right Thing,” and “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” and read “Lysistrata”