Argo - 2012 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston
Director:  Ben Affleck

Argo is a film that accomplishes most all of what it sets out to do.  It has a compelling story, a solid script, and capable direction.  So why don't I like it more?  I suppose it's because it takes very few chances with its story or direction.  It's easy to call what happens in Argo cliche, but much of it is likely true-to-life; movies have contorted our grasp of common humanity - we're all trite when put into life-threatening circumstances.

Argo does have problems with tone - it doesn't trust its peripheral characters to be interesting, so it loads them up with pithy one-liners.  Every character, in addition to being good at their job, is apparently auditioning to be a guest on Pardon My Zinger.  The constant pith becomes distracting, but thankfully it subsides as the film reaches its final act.

Three Days Of The Condor - 1975 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway
Director:  Sydney Pollack

Note:  Minor Spoilers Ahead

Three Days Of The Condor is an Unwilling Participant film - by which I mean someone is taken hostage, yet somehow within the space of a day or so, is willing to risk her life and freedom for the person who's taken her hostage.  I'm blanking on the best examples of this genre - Commando comes to mind right away, but that film is a mountain of cheese whereas this one is a mere hillock.  Still, it's an exemplar of the genre - MacGuffins abound, people in clandestine organizations gnash their teeth about this lone, rogue, wolf, unaccounted for operative, and the film has a 70s bent that simply couldn't be replicated today.

The Master - 2012 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Director:  Paul Thomas Anderson

Note:  Spoilers below

For as much respect as I give Paul Thomas Anderson, I realize as I sit down to write this that the only one of his films that I both really liked and understood upon first watch was There Will Be Blood.  Hard Eight was entertaining but (as I recall) a trifle. Boogie Nights I saw well after the hype had died down, and while I now recognize that as an amazing accomplishment, I didn't quite get it then.  I hated Magnolia, and mistrusted Punch Drunk Love.  I'm not a P.T. Anderson fanboy, even though he is on my very short list of directors whose films I will see in the theaters without qualification.

The Master has the problem, at least upon first watch, of both of its main characters being inscrutable.  Having one's motivations or goals be unclear is fine, but neither seems to quite know what they want.  The Master is a charlatan, attempting parlor tricks to woo potential donors to his newfound religion, the Cause.  His favorite subject, Freddie Quill, is exactly what The Master rails against - pure animal instinct.  If Freddie isn't fighting or fucking, he's drinking so that he will end up doing one or the other.  He's anger and sex mashed together, with a tinge of regret.  What I at least never quite ended up understanding is what The Master wanted out of Freddie.  The easy answer is that in seeing Freddie as a man like himself, maybe he can get Freddie to move away from his impulses.  But where in the film have we seen that some sort of nobility is the goal of this religion?  Indeed, The Master's religion is not even do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do.  We don't hear a lot about moral codes.  Perhaps that's the goal of the new religion - self-actualization rather than moral refinement.  We need to become a better person through a greater understanding of ourselves, not through the perception of a God or of his teachings.

I suppose the conclusion of the film is that Freddie realizes that the Master cannot cure him of his regrets.  The Master himself can't be cured of the things he finds necessary - popular music and American cigarettes.  Freddie remembers lying down next to the false woman he's constructed, an avatar of womanhood, inscrutable and implacable.  Does he ultimately choose that?  I don't know.  I guess I need to see it again.

Chasing Ghosts: Beyond The Arcade - 2007 - 3 Stars

Subject:  Early arcade video games and the people who mastered them
Director:  Lincoln Ruchti

It's hard what to make of this documentary - on the one hand, it seems awfully trifling.  Lacking the drama of its bigger brother The King of Kong, Chasing Ghosts instead settles for an overview of what happened to the video gamers who converged on Ottumwa, Iowa in 1982 for the first video game championship.  It spends far too much time on a recollection of this event, but on the other hand, it feels like a life-altering meeting for all who attended.  The documentary captures the feeling of being young and being great at *something* and being recognized for it, in spite of what other flaws you (probably) have.  It's also a fascinating look at a dead world - not only is the arcade almost gone, but so too are the days when a person could be recognized for having been in a big-time magazine.  Both fame and video games have undergone radical alteration in the last 30 years.

Slacker - 1991 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Who Cares
Director:  Richard Linklater

Slacker is like a strange time-and-place capsule film - the content of the movie is not all that important, and indeed I've already forgotten most of the dialogue even though it's a talk-heavy film.  Concerning an interconnected group of underemployed twentysomethings in Austin, the film doesn't have an overarching plot - in fact, usually once a character's journey gets interesting, it gets shunted off screen.  I mentioned 'dialogue', but the film seems more like a series of monologues - no one seems to listen to anyone else here, they're too busy trying to be themselves.  I suppose the film makes the point that watching 90 minutes of different people trying their damnedest to be interesting can at times be quite exhausting.  Regardless, we get philosophy, conspiracy theories, pop culture commentary, and the sense that these people actually existed.

M - 1931 - 4½ Stars

Actors:  Peter Lorre, Ellen Widmann
Director:  Fritz Lang

'We have it down to a science' is something that gets said a lot of times, and that's a desirable thing.  It  means that if we follow certain steps, we'll end up at our desired result every time.  Filmmaking is to a large degree a science now, especially with larger budget movies.  Scripts are split into acts, conflicts arise at certain points, they get resolved, and it's all very clean - audiences are rarely upset with this sort of film if it's well-made, well-acted, and plausible within its own logic.

M is not a film like this.  It wasn't made when filmmaking was a science - it's an art picture.  There are long stretches of silence.  There are scenes that go on too long.  There are loose threads.  Regardless, it's a stunning achievement in film, one that manages to engage the viewer philosophically while still managing to tell a story visually.

Thief - 1981 - 3 Stars

Actors:  James Caan, Tuesday Weld
Director:  Michael Mann

I really wanted to like this more.  Opening with one of the best action setpieces I've seen - not in terms of exhilaration but in terms of sheer cool, both on the confidence of Caan and the director - Thief rumbles through a bunch of character beats over the course of its bloated 120 minutes to arrive at a perfunctory conclusion.  Mann does not seem entirely sure whether his main character lives in the real world or MovieWorld, but by the time he decides, I've decided that I don't really care about the character.  There's some great shots in this, it's just a shame that it doesn't add up to something better.