The Counselor

Posted on October 24, 2013 at 6:00 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for graphic violence, some grisly images, strong sexual content and language
Profanity:	Very strong, explicit, and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drugs and drug dealers, drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Very graphic and disturbing violence with characters injured and murdered, decapitations, guns, sexual violence
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	October 25, 2013

Cormac McCarthy’s spare, bleak, and very literary prose has made for some compelling cinema, most effectively in No Country for Old Men and The Road and the adaption of his play for an HBO movie, The Sunset Limited. In his first original screenplay, he shows his flair for dialog that is half gangster, half poetry, but he is still more writer than visual story-teller. He needs to learn to trust the audience. If you show something, you don’t have to tell it, and you certainly don’t have to tell it more than once. Some good ideas and some gorgeous talk get lost in an awkward, over-the-top, you’ve got to be kidding me mess. Other writers are better at adapting his ideas for film than he is.

Michael Fassbender plays the title character, a handsome lawyer with a lot of low-life clients and a gorgeous girlfriend (Penélope Cruz) who adores him. What he does not have is a name. We never hear him called anything but “counselor.” He does have — a very bad combination — a plan to get a lot of money very quickly, some friends and clients involved with some very bad people, and a wildly unrealistic notion that he can veer off of that path of what’s legal just one time and then get right back on. If you have any confusion about what happens next, check your ancient Greek dramas with the hashtag #hubris. Or, just listen to the loving description of a method of killing people from Reiner (Javier Bardem) that involves a wire noose that tightens inexorably around the neck. METAPHOR ALERT. Don’t even get me started on the diamond seller the counselor visits to buy an engagement ring, the one who explains that in the world of diamonds, what we look at are the imperfections, sells him a cautionary stone, and tells the counselor, “We will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives.”

Renier also has a girlfriend named Malkina (Cameron Diaz) who not only MORE METAPHORS COMING loves to watch her pet cheetahs chase and devour jackrabbits but has cheetah-themed tattoos and eye make-up, a gold tooth, and an amber ring the size of a cheese sandwich. She also brings new meaning to the term “auto-erotica” in a crazynutsy scene narrated by Bardem that is literally over-the-top. Note: Diaz is very limber and has lovely long legs. “I asked her whether she had ever done anything like that before and she said she had done everything before,” Renier says, a little dazed. Also, the drug smuggling involves trucks carrying human waste and occasionally a dead human body. On the side, it says, “We pump it all!” Is it just me, or is that a METAPHOR, too? Did I mention Renier lives in a glass house?

Ridley Scott’s direction, the cinematography by Dariusz Wolski, and outstanding performances keep the movie watchable, even when it isn’t working, until the literary pretentiousness overcomes it with a series of speeches near the end that tip the scales from poetic, and ironic to purplish and self-parodying. In small roles, Rosie Perez, Rubén Blades, and Natalie Dormer create vivid characters who evoke the work the counselor thought he could keep himself apart from and does not realize he has already been changed by. “If you think that, Counselor, that you can live in this world and not be a part of it, you are wrong,” Renier tells him.

McCarthy knows this is a world where the problem that brings you down is one that in normal world would be quickly explained and quickly forgiven. These people do not believe in explanations. “They’re a pragmatic lot. They don’t believe in coincidences. They’ve heard of them. They’ve just never seen one.” There are no second chances. And then, as Renier explains, “it’s not that you’re going down. It’s about what you’re taking down with you.”

I enjoyed the elliptical epigrams tossed around by the characters, especially Brad Pitt’s cowboy, a loner who has a bit more perspective than the others. “How bad a problem?” the counselor asks the cowboy. “I’d say pretty bad. Then multiply it by ten,” he answers. These are people who expect they are being listened to by law enforcement, so it makes sense that they would corkscrew their communications. And it was fun to see the actors having fun with their roles, especially Diaz, with her asymmetric hair, cut to a point that looks like it could etch metal, swanning into a church to try out this confession idea she had heard about. With all the flamboyance, though, the movie’s best moments are the quiet ones. Everything ends up turning on a decision that was not really a mistake. And the most terrifying moments are not the ones with spurting blood or automatic weapons. They are a quiet phone call and a simple, “Hola!”

Parents should know that this film is an extremely violent crime drama with very disturbing and graphic images including decapitation. Many characters injured and brutally killed. It includes guns, crashes, drug dealing, drinking, smoking, very explicit sexual references and situations, and very strong and crude language.

Family discussion: Who suffered the most? Why do we never learn the counselor’s name?

If you like this, try: “No Country for Old Men” and “The Lincoln Lawyer” and the books of Cormac McCarthy and James M. Cain

Related Tags:

The Fifth Estate

Posted on October 17, 2013 at 6:05 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and some violence
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some violence including murder of two people and footage of military killings
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	October 18, 2013
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00BEIYRYM

In late medieval times, when people first began to divide each other into groups defined by status and power, they began to speak of a “first estate” (the clergy), a “second estate” (the nobility, which also at the time meant the government), and a “third estate” (the common people. Later, the “fourth estate” was added to describe journalists and what today we call news media. Julian Assange, the Australian teenage hacker turned founder of Wikileaks is singular, unprecedented, gui generis. He collects masses of “secret” data and publishes it without editing, digesting, analysing, or redacting any of it. And so, this movie, with Benedict Cumberbatch as the white-haired Assange, is called “The Fifth Estate.”

This movie, from director Bill Condon (“Kinsey,” “Dreamgirls”), and based on a book by Assange’s now-estranged former partner Daniel Berg (played in the film by “Rush’s” Daniel Brühl) at times feels as though it is un-digested and un-analyzed. As a government official forced to resign due to some of the disclosures says near the end of the film, “I don’t know which of us history’s going to judge more harshly.” I would advise anyone interested in Wikileaks to begin with the documentary, “We Steal Secrets: The Wikileaks Story,” directed by Alex Gibney.

Assange says that he has two goals for what he calls “a whole new form of social justice.” He says he wants transparency for institutions and privacy for individuals. The problem, or, at least, one problem is that institutions are made up of individuals. And so, when one of Wikileaks’ early scoops is a list of British members of the far right “National Party,” it does not bother him that the members’ contact information is disclosed. Assange is an absolutist. He refuses to edit or redact (remove identifying information from) any of the documents he publishes. “Editing reflects bias,” he says. He is also something of a monomaniac and a megalomaniac, at least in the view of his one-time colleague. According to this film, he grew up in an odd Australian cult called “The Family,” with severe beatings, and has been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. He is very protective of his own privacy as he exposes the secrets of others. And, as they say, just because you’re paranoid does not mean they’re not really out to get you. Once Assange starts exposing the secrets of the wealthy and powerful, they start coming after him, and the thing about being wealthy and powerful is that they have the resources to inflict a lot of harm. Two of his sources are murdered.

Condon does his best to minimize the scenes of people staring intently into monitors while they bang on the keyboards. He has some nice visualizations to evoke the experiences, some fantastic, some just the rocky topography of Iceland, one of many places Assange hid. And he takes a balanced approach. Everyone would agree with some of what Assange has uncovered. And everyone would object — even be horrified — by something he has done. Both sides quote Orwell. Big Brother is watching. Like “The Social Network,” the movie focuses on the rise and fall of the friendship and partnership more than the impact of the product they were working on. In this case, that is in part because we don’t know what that impact will be. But in this case, we do know that the impact is transformational. This is not some Facebook advertiser using an algorithm on your status posts to figure out what to sell you. This is a 22-year-old destroying the confidentiality that allows candid conversations between diplomats, including information about the foreign nationals who are giving them information.

Assange explains early in this film that the program he has developed to protect the identity of the providers of leaked documents is to drown them in false and phony data. He can say that editing reflects bias, but in the case of terabytes of information dumped in undigested and unredacted form, the data dump can be just as distorting. Like the journalists Assange worked with on the Bradley Manning material, this film tries to put some shape and perspective on a story that is still too big and too new to frame as a definitive narrative. But it is an absorbing story and as good an assessment as we can get for now.

Parents should know that this film has very strong language, violence including shooting and wartime scenes with some disturbing images.

Family discussion: What is the answer to the State Department official’s question about whose side history will be on? Who should decide what gets released? If Wikileaks makes other organizations accountable, who makes Wikileaks accountable? Do you agree with the two things Assange says you need to have to succeed?

If you like this, try: the documentary “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks,” read up on the most recent leaker, Edward Snowden, and take a look at the Wikileaks page

The Snow Queen

Posted on October 10, 2013 at 5:00 pm

C-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Kindergarten - 3rd Grade
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG
Profanity:	NOne
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Fairy tale and fantasy peril and violence, guns, fire, parents killed
Diversity Issues:	Strong female heroine and villains
Date Released to Theaters:	October 6, 2013

It may be a coincidence that a Russian animation studio decided to make a movie based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the Snow Queen at the same time as Disney’s big-budget feature, “Frozen,” inspired by the same source. But it is probably not a coincidence that the low-budget, low-quality Russian version got distribution in the United States as it would otherwise not have attracted any interest beyond the straight-to-DVD bin. Russia, which once produced animation of exquisite beauty and storytelling, shows with this film that it can churn out uninspired, dull animation just like everyone else. The visuals are poorly conceived, with characters that are hardly more expressive than Weebles apart from the cleavage that is the most notable feature of at least three of the female characters. The vocal performances are uninspired and uninvolving. And the one effect that words, a 360 degree swoop-around, is relentlessly overused. The script is muddled and dull. Plus, there are fart jokes.

This version of the story has a little girl named Gerda (Jessica Strauss) in search of her brother just as The Snow Queen (Cindy Robinson) has sent her troll (Douglas Erholtz, trying to sound like a Borscht belt comic) to find her. The Snow Queen has frozen the world. Gerda’s brother is her captive. And Gerda may have some sort of secret power to conquer the Snow Queen, having to do with a mirror that reveals the true self.

Gerda and the troll have various PG encounters along the way that all seem to be half-heartedly designed to teach lessons about cooperation, bullying, and family. There’s a king with squabbling children, a lady who grows fragrance-less flowers in a hothouse, and a pirate captain and her daughter. The flat affect of the vocal performances and bland expressionlessness of the characters has a soporific quality. Both seem…frozen.

Parents should know that this film has fairy tale/fantasy peril and violence, with guns, fire, and pirates. Parents are killed.

Family discussion: How did being bullied affect the girl with special powers? How were Gerda and the pirate girl alike? What made the flowers smell?

If you like this, try: “The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship”

A.C.O.D.

Posted on October 4, 2013 at 7:30 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and brief sexual content
Profanity:	Very strong language, some crude
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drug references
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense family confrontations, some shoving, fire
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	October 4, 2013

Are today’s 20-and 30-somethings the least-parented generation in history, as a character explains in this film? To quote Rosie O’Donnell in “Sleepless in Seattle” about another depressing statistic, “It’s not true, but it feels true.” While the generation that came of age in the 1970’s and early 80’s were self-actualizing and consciousness-raising and yuppifying, their children were being raised by adults who were too often acting like, well, children.

Adam Scott (“Parks and Recreation,” “Party Down”) produced and stars in “A.C.O.D.,” which stands for “Adult Children of Divorce.” It’s an apt oxymoron. Scott plays Carter, who is very much the adult in his relationship with his long-divorced but still-warring parents and with his younger brother, Trey (Clark Duke). He is also the adult in his professional life, as the owner of a trendy restaurant. But that has a considerable advantage, he points out. “It may be like a family, but I could fire the ones I don’t like.”

Trey’s engagement creates some immediate problems. He and his fiancée Kieko (Valerie Tian) have only known each other four months. Trey cannot support himself; he is living in Carter’s garage. But those are minor concerns compared to the “9 year marriage turned into a 100-years war” — their parents, Hugh (Richard Jenkins) and Melissa (Catherine O’Hara). Trey wants them to come to his wedding and be civil to one another. Even though both have re-married (Hugh twice), their toxic mutual hostility is still the most powerful and all-consuming force in their lives.

Carter, himself allergic to marriage due to the childhood trauma of his parents’ divorce (and their self-absorption, bitterness, manipulation, and use of him as a go-between and subject of endless custody disputes), knows that Trey’s plans are unrealistic. But he can’t help being captivated, even a little wistful and the optimism and certainty of the couple. And he knows it is in part because he has worked so hard to protect Trey from the worst of his parents’ battles.

The stress of negotiating with his parents is so unsettling, Carter seeks help from a woman he saw after his parents split up (Jane Lynch). She is glad to see him again, but informs him that she was not his therapist. She was interviewing him for a book about the impact of divorce on children. And it became an international best-seller. This puts him even deeper into a tailspin, as he reads the book for the first time and discovers what his middle-school turmoil looked like to an observer. “Am I living in a shell of insecurity and approval-seeking?” It is even more disconcerting that the book is a best-seller (“Fourteen printings and Margot Kidder did the audio book.”)

Meanwhile, his efforts to get his parents to be civil to one another has had some very disturbing repercussions. And Carter’s sympathetic and supportive girlfriend of four years (the magnificent Mary Elizabeth Winstead) may not put any pressure on him, but she does point out that it would be nice to have a key to his apartment.

The storyline may be weak in spots, but the spectacular cast (Scott’s “Parks and Recreations” co-star Amy Poehler plays Hugh’s third wife) makes the most of the sharp dialogue and depictions of world-class boundary issues. A credit-sequence coda with the movie’s real-life crew discussing their own A.C.O.D. issues is, like the film itself, sobering but still a reminder that ultimately, no matter how dysfunctional our origins, we get to decide who we want to be.

Parents should know that this film includes explicit sexual references and brief situations, rear nudity, very strong language, drinking, smoking, and drug references.

Family discussion: Why was Carter unhappy about the way he was portrayed in the book? How did he try to be different from his parents?

If you like this, try: “It’s Complicated” and “The Baxter”

Prisoners

Posted on September 19, 2013 at 8:08 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for disturbing violent content including torture and language throughout
Profanity:	Constant very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Substance abuse to deal with stress
Violence/ Scariness:	Extensive and disturbing violence, including torture
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 20, 2013

The subject matter of the movie “Prisoners”– parents desperately searching for their kidnapped little girls– is so potent that it requires a strong, sure director to maintain control. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (“Incendies”), in his first Hollywood feature film, is mostly successful but along the way he is sorely tested by emotionally charged social, religious and moral themes struggling to break free of the excruciating situation and gallop off in the direction of political metaphor, propaganda, violence, or sermonizing.

Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover, a strong, self-reliant, religious man whose six-year-old daughter disappears while walking in their neighborhood with a friend. Dover’s wife, played by Maria Bello, becomes so distraught that she soon sedates herself into helplessness. Their neighbors, Franklin and Nancy Birch (played by Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) whose daughter also disappears, look for a different path out of their nightmare.

As the hours tick by, the parents lose patience with police detective Loki (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) and begin to take matters into their own hands. The distraught father yells at the cop, “Two little girls have to be worth more than whatever little rule you have to break.” Loki does not agree, and the race is on, to see whose tactics will be most effective, and whose tactics are morally justifiable. Jackman makes clear he is willing to do anything to get his daughter back, including torturing a suspect: “He’s not a person anymore, he stopped being a person when he took on our daughter.”

Prisoners is a dark, tense crime drama with an excellent cast and some important topical themes. It is not for the faint of heart. Director Villeneuve says that he hopes his film will inspire audiences to debate these issues “long after the movie ends,” and in this he surely succeeds. There are issues to debate regarding the treatment of the mentally ill, civil liberties, law enforcement, self-reliance, and morals in modern society, and especially the ultimate question of whether the end justifies the means. The movie has some excellent, artful moments, cleverly filmed with flair and style. However, there are also moments when the movie gets carried away with itself, losing its sense of proportion, and taking already extreme situations a notch or two beyond credibility.

Parents should know that this story concerns kidnapping and child abuse, extensive violence (including torture and shooting, alcohol, substance abuse to deal with stress, and constant very strong language.

Family discussion: When is it appropriate for people to take the law into their own hands? Who is right? Who does the director think is right? How does this story relate to issues in geopolitical conflict?

If you like this, try: “Ransom”

Related Tags:

Crime Movies -- format Thriller