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.

A Woman Under The Influence - 1974 - 5 Stars

Actors: Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands

Director: John Cassavetes

A Woman Under the Influence is what I like to call a one-monther. It's the sort of film that one receives from their Netflix account and groans upon seeing that it is a 2 hour and 30 minute John Cassavetes film. It takes a month to mount the resolve to watch the film.

I don't know if A Woman Under the Influence deserves 5 stars, as it is rough around the edges and probably has at least ten minutes that could be trimmed. It is, after all, a Cassavetes film. However, the film tricked me - I thought it was going to be about one thing, when it turns out that it's about something else entirely. I think it might need that time to perform this trick, to have this alteration come about organically.

When writing, it's very tempting to put something in a character's mouth, to have him or her say the thing he or she is thinking. However, Cassavetes understands that that's not generally how people act - they react emotionally, but they keep their thoughts guarded; they say other things. A Woman Under The Influence avoids being on the nose - it lets the characters' emotions speak for them.

The performance of Gena Rowlands as the titular woman is staggering - she avoids caricature in a part where that's almost impossible.

Comedian - 2002 - 2½ Stars

Subjects: Jerry Seinfeld, Orny Adams

Director: Christian Charles

I first saw Comedian as part of a focus group in 2002. Jerry Seinfeld was in attendance - this was, in effect, the premiere of his documentary film. About 20 minutes into the film, several people walked out. Perhaps they were misled into thinking this was a stand-up film, perhaps not - watching the film again, it's not hard to see why they left. It seems they were merely interested in the sausage, not the process that went into making it.

The premise of the film is that Jerry Seinfeld has thrown away all of his old material and is trying to go back on tour as a comedian, even after making millions with his television show. The parts with Seinfeld are engaging, even as annoying as it can be to listen to an incredibly successful person worry about his future success. The film goes off the rails with its 'B' story, which involves an aspiring comic star named Orny Adams. Adams is endlessly self-involved, but the real problem is that he's not funny. On stage he is funny, but off-stage he is painfully neurotic, and painfully unlikable. We see Seinfeld joking around with other comics, even working on bits with them - Adams is merely jabbering to the camera, always about himself, either about minor slights he has suffered, or triumphs he has performed. Finding out that stand-up comics are actually insufferable isn't a surprise, but they also make for a surprisingly poor documentary.

Standard Operating Procedure - 2008 - 3 Stars

Director: Errol Morris

Errol Morris documentaries tend to be about people on the fringes of society, far away from public attention. This has changed in recent years, first with The Fog of War's subject (Robert McNamara) and now Standard Operating Procedure, about the torture in the Abu Gharib prison.

Morris's documentary suffers in part because we've already seen the shocking photographs and have likely come to our own conclusions about the moral character of the torturers. We do get a different and perhaps more sympathetic look at the people involved, and an investigation into how photographs both reveal and conceal information. The film is well-crafted in the way that Morris documentaries always are, but it fails to be truly gripping.

Notorious - 1946 - 4 Stars

Actors: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Notorious's strength is that its suspense makes us shout at the screen. A film with more kiss kiss than bang bang, Hitchcock once again demonstrates that often it is what we do not see, but rather anticipate, that makes us terrified. This is a lesson that modern action directors should have learned from Hitchcock and films like Jaws, but they seem to have cast this aside for an excess of bang bang. Christopher Nolan's Inception is a good candidate for a film that suffers from constant gunplay.

This is a film that suffers from not being shot on location. I think of it as an American The Third Man - but of course, The Third Man was filmed in Vienna, and uses that to wonderful effect.