The Ice Storm - 1997 - 3 Stars

Actors: Kevin Kline, Joan Allen

Director: Ang Lee

It's a mystery how a metaphor actually works. When it does, it evokes something real - it feels true to our life, we empathize with it, and it may even unearth feelings or thoughts we may not have known that we had. When it doesn't, it feels contrived and unreal. A false metaphor is a virus that threatens others; they might somehow believe this false thing to evoke real feelings and thoughts in themselves. People need to be warned.

The Ice Storm has all of the pieces to be an excellent drama, but it's in the details that the drama unravels. I don't know if the film should have concentrated on only one story, or condensed some of the stories and lengthened others. I don't know if it's because this is ground that films like American Beauty and Donnie Darko have trod over in my mind. Something about it misfires - it feels untrue.

Overnight - 2003 - 3½ Stars

Subject: Writer/Director Troy Duffy and the making of the film Boondock Saints

Director: Tony Montana

Note: Spoilers below

There's a kind of irony to the ascent of the absurdly successful entertainers and athletes of our day - many of them very sincerely believed that their success was not only possible, but inevitable. Given that this kind of success not only takes hard work but extraordinary luck - the hard work/luck balance naturally being different in entertainment than sports, but still a balance - these people have to possess an extreme amount of self-delusion. Nowhere is this extreme self-delusion better depicted than in the documentary film Overnight, which chronicles Troy Duffy's ascent from Hollywood bartender to self-appointed future rock god and film mogul to embittered failure.

Duffy's career arc and general attitude is a reverse Entourage - not only does Duffy not succeed, but he screws everyone he promised fame and wealth to in the process. There's also a further irony that Harvey Weinstein, Duffy's promoter turned nemesis, has also been kicked quite a bit by the Hollywood system. Success is fleeting - a lesson that Troy Duffy never understands.

Sleeper - 1973 - 3 Stars

Actors: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton

Director: Woody Allen

I'd seen Sleeper before, long ago, when my dad inexplicably began showing me Woody Allen movies at around age 11. I think I'd already seen the comedies I wanted to see at the local video store, so he tried to get me into Allen films. I didn't get it then, but now that I do get it, I'm not sure I wanted to.

Cool stories aside, there's all the hallmarks of a Woody Allen film here - absurd quips, Marx Brothers' homages, feelings of inadequacy, mistrust of anything outside of New York City, and yet it's all set in the year 2173. It makes for one bizarre film, a weirdo pastiche of slapstick humor, quips about 1973 current events, and commentary on dystopias (I guess?).

Sleeper, like Annie Hall and Love and Death after it, relies heavily on the chemistry between Allen and Keaton; Keaton is outstanding at participating in all the absurdity that's put on screen. Many of the gags may fall flat, but it's a movie I still wanted to like.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...And Spring - 2004 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Yeong-su, Ki-duk Kim

Director: Ki-duk Kim

The best stories are often the simplest, for they are the most memorable. Part of the brilliance of a Shakespeare is that the main action of his plays can often be summed up in a sentence. Meanwhile, try summarizing a po-mo novel six months after you've read it. Too often our culture's art, commenting on the disposability and transience of modern culture, emulates its target too well.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...And Spring is one of these extraordinarily simple stories, with an almost fable quality. A Master and an Acolyte live in a small Buddhist temple that sits in the middle of a lake, and this film tells the story of their life together.

Naturally the film can be described with words like meditative or contemplative; the cinematography (and setting) are beautiful. While I'm not sure I agree with the moral teachings of the film, if there are any, I can say that it led me to thinking a great deal about the way the West has taught us to think.

The King of Marvin Gardens - 1972 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern

Director: Bob Rafelson

Note: Vague spoilers below

The King of Marvin Gardens is a classically 70s slow-moving character study. Chronicling a disaffected loser and his hustler brother working together on get-rich-quick schemes in faded 1970s Atlantic City, the film's plot could be said to be wandering, if it even exists at all. There's a very Cassavetes feel to the film - like Cassavetes films, it also has the slight problem of both trying to depict 'real' life, while also having its characters going through a whirlwind of emotions making grand theatrical gestures - i.e. acting in the way that we think 'actors' stereotypically conduct themselves when off-stage.

Bruce Dern is magnificent as an ingratiating confidence man - his winning smile often fading from his face as his fidgeting hands betray his actual inner state.

Down By Law - 1986 - 2 Stars

Actors: Tom Waits, John Lurie

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Note: Spoilers for this film, and very minor spoilers for Broken Flowers, Dead Man, Coffee and Cigarettes, and Stranger than Paradise below.

I didn't like this film, and I've come to realize that besides Stranger than Paradise, I don't really like Jim Jarmusch films in general. There's several problems that I have with his filmmaking techniques.

1. His use of protagonists with no discernible qualities

Bill Murray's character in Broken Flowers, Johnny Depp's in Dead Man, and John Lurie's in this film and Stranger than Paradise, don't really have much about them. They're sketches of people - malleable throughout the film to whichever shape Jarmusch needs them to take.

2. The unbelievability of these characters

Likewise, it was difficult to believe that Bill Murray's character was a successful businessman who had many torrid love affairs, that John Lurie was a pimp in Down by Law. Bill Murray's character is especially unbelievable - he's this despondent man-child, incapable of joy, it's hard to imagine his wooing of these women. Lurie's pimp is even less believable, in the few minutes that we see him as such, he is comically inept.

3. The union of these characters with goofy, elfin characters from the planet Indie Film

The goofy, elfin character is Eva from Stranger than Paradise, Xebeche from Dead Man, and Roberto in Down by Law; these characters imbue the uninteresting protagonist's life and show them how colorful and joyous life can be. All three are total fictions, their presence in the film mere indie quirk.

4. Jarmusch's insistence on using bad actors/improvisation or both

Jarmusch gets a lot of wooden performances out of people. This may be intentional; I'm not sure. It feels like he loves improvisation, but improvisation requires skilled actors, and Jarmusch so often casts non-actors in and around his films.

5. Stuff just happens for no reason

Each Jarmusch film feels like a shaggy-dog story, where characters decide to do something because the film needs them to. In Down By Law, the characters escape from prison because it's eventually really boring that they're in prison. Likewise with the trip to Cleveland in Stranger Than Paradise - the film is trapped in New York, so it leaves. I suppose this emulates life, but in no-budget filmmaking with lots of improvisation, it all feels very contrived.

Down By Law's main limitation may be its budget, which appears to be almost nothing. This may have forced the director's hand with regard to takes, shooting locations, and even plot.

This diatribe is not to say that Jim Jarmusch should not direct films, or that I didn't really enjoy Stranger than Paradise, but I don't really understand them, in the same way that I don't get a lot of Wes Anderson films. They're character-driven films without anyone who's believable or particularly interesting. I guess I'll have to take a break from them.

The Wild Bunch - 1969 - 4 Stars

Actors: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine

Director: Sam Peckinpah

The Wild Bunch should be required viewing for all of these Tony Scott wannabes filming action sequences with shaky cameras and a trillion cuts all over the place. Peckinpah and editor Louis Lombardo's cutting of this film is amazing - we ARE confused during shootouts in this film, in large part because shootouts are very confusing. Yet we as viewers are rarely unclear about where we are or what, exactly, is going on.

The Wild Bunch lost points from me for an extended action-less stretch of the film that felt self-indulgent. We get some character development, but not enough to justify the lengthy break in plot. Upon second watch, these scenes may make more sense within the framework of the film, perhaps enough to bump this up to a 4 and a half. Still, this film gets an A+ for sheer badassery.

The Informant! - 2009 - 2½ Stars

Actors: Matt Damon, Melanie Lynskey

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Note: Spoilers ahead

The Informant! is an ambitious failure, a film that attempts to throw us down a rabbit-hole where truth and deception battle for supremacy. The film doesn't work because of how twisted around the audience ends up becoming - we're not really that interested in who's lying and why. Ultimately, I suspect the absurdity of the film worked much better on paper - the idea that a person embezzling money would run to the government to expose other crimes sounds quite funny. The idea that the main character would have a lot of voiceover about banal things for the whole film sounds funny, but in execution it's merely amusing at times, unnecessary at others. The film may have been better served by leaving reality altogether, or even by revealing the end at the beginning (a move which I've criticized many times).

As a side note, it was fun to see lots of comedy pros pop up in this film, like Patton Oswalt and Paul F. Tompkins, as well as the guy who played Biff in Back to the Future.

The Dungeon Masters - 2008 - 3 Stars

Director: Keven McAlester

Subject: Dungeons and Dragons players

I love documentaries about obsessive sub-cultures like Spellbound, Word Wars, or episodes of Errol Morris's First Person. There's hundreds of niches around the U.S. for people to crawl into and become a different person. These sorts of documentaries usually highlight how proficient people are within their sub-culture, and how lost and confused they are outside of it.

It's easy to understand the allure of things like Dungeons and Dragons even if one has no interest in playing - it's a world that you can create and live in, a world where challenges are confronted and overcome by reason and chance. God may not play dice with the universe, but in D&D, he most certainly does.

Unfortunately, I think the documentary is a little unfair, and I don't think it does a very good job of getting past the freakish nature of who these people are and how they occupy their time. Their sad-sackness is more played for cheap jokes than pathos.

Re-Review - Greenberg - 2010 - 4 Stars

Actors: Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig

Director: Noah Baumbach

A film like Greenberg should not even show in theaters. A theater is a terrible place to watch a film that is awkwardly funny, where there's no real punchlines, and where at most half the crowd will be laughing.

I've compared Baumbach to Woody Allen, and I think that's a perfectly cromulent comparison. However, one place Greenberg differs from the Allen films I've seen is that at no point does Greenberg purport to be a meta-film - our protagonist is not self-consciously telling us this story. Allen's neurotic hero, in spite of his neuroses, we root for - Ben Stiller's Greenberg leaves us much more ambivalent. As a result, I don't think a film like this can ever really be a great film, but Greenberg does just about as well as it can. It's not moving, but it's always interesting.

I didn't realize the first time just how good Ben Stiller's performance is. While I think it's not that hard to nail a role like this - there's only about three or four moods Stiller has to convey - he nails the movements and the gestures of the character.