New Release! Vice (2018)

Director: Adam McKay

A reasonably entertaining look at certain key aspects of Dick Cheney - arguably the most powerful and influential vice-president the United States has ever had in office. However, it is a look very often colored by writer and director Adam McKay's strong political biases.

Not unlike his smash hit 2016 film The Big Short, Vice adopts a coy, humorous style and tone to dig into some very real historical events. In this case, the nature of Dick Cheney, a man who seemed never to have been "the smartest guy in the room" or much of a politician, but was perhaps one of the most low-key and successful opportunists the White House will ever see. By tracing his roots from a hard-drinking, Yale dropout hanging power lines in Wyoming to and through his time as a congressional intern, Chief of Staff, and ultimately Vice President, we get a portrait of a man guided by little more than a rough set of conservative ideas, a hyper-keen nose for opportunity and power, and propelled by an ability to seem far less threatening than he actually was.

While Cheney is clearly a rather interesting modern historical figure, whose fingerprints are still all over the U.S. political landscape, the more obvious set of fingerprints on this movie are Adam McKay's. My wife even compared it to a Michael Moore film, in that Vice has a style that overwhelms and most likely obliterates much of its substance. The narrative is non-linear. There are several self-indulgent (though funny) flights of humorous fancy, and more than a few wink-wink, nudge-nudge moments directed right at those of us in the audience. Honestly, it felt far too flippant, given the gravity of much of the subject matter. This only grows more obvious as the story arrives at the wars in Afghanistan and especially Iraq. When a filmmaker is essentially laying hundreds of thousands of civilians' dead bodies at a man's doorstep, it seems atonal to be taking little comic jabs at his speaking style and endless series of heart attacks.

The seemingly non-threatening Dick Cheney. Christian Bale
turns in another transformation and excellent performance,
even if cinematic forces beyond his control weaken the film.

Savvy viewers will probably be able to suss out the fact from the fiction, but it's not always easy. In addition, the implications that McKay makes about Cheney are, to be honest, unfair at times. Sometimes painfully unfair. Yes, Cheney had a big enough hand in pushing the Iraq War in 2003 that he deserves a big portion of the blame. One could even argue that he should probably have gone to jail for war crimes. But to suggest that every dead body from that war was solely Cheney's fault is a gross oversimplification. There were no end of hawks and enablers surrounding that debacle, from the president right on down to the tens of millions of Americans who fully supported to war, even as it became more and more obvious that it had been predicated on a massive lie. While I understand that such issues are too complex and uninteresting for an "entertainment" like McKay's movie, I can only think that he should honor the subject's complexity or leave it the hell alone.

Ultimately, I probably agree with McKay's general feelings about Cheney and many of his cohort through the 1980s and 2000s. But I also think that historical events, especially recent ones, need to be handled with respect. What Vice gave us elicits more than a few laughs, but they are laughs that fade once the credits roll and one realizes just what the consequences were of the subject's actions. It is all a subject which deserves a more thorough, sober look through the form of a quality documentary, rather than a streamlined, comic version that leaves out far too many of the other relevant facts and people involved. 

Retro Trio: The Wrestler (2008); The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996); Finding Dory (2016)

The Wrestler (2008)

Director: Darren Aronofsky

I fell in love with this movie back before I even started this blog, so I never did a review of it. I recently rewatched it with my wife, who hadn't seen it. She was impressed, and I was reminded of why I saw it twice in the theaters ten years ago.

The movie is a documentary-style following of fictional professional wrestler Robin Ramzinski, whose wrestling moniker is Randy "The Ram" Robinson, played by Mickey Rourke. Set roughly around the late '00s, Randy is a wrestler well past his prime. In the late 1980's, he was on top of the wrestling world, watched and adored by hundreds of thousands of pro wrestling fans. Now, however, he is struggling mightily. Working as a mover in a grocery store and barely able to afford rent for his broken down mobile home, Randy still puts his meager disposable income into staying in shape and wrestling in small, local events. Though still respected by the younger generation of wrestlers and old-school fans of the medium, Randy is only hanging on thanks to his legacy and a steady dose of steroids and other risky supplements. After he suffers heart attack, he begins to rethink the wrestling life. He decides to hang up his bright green tights and try to rebuild his broken life. He begins to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), starts working a steadier job at the deli counter in the grocery store, and seeks to deepen his relationship with a stripper (Marisa Tomei) who is, herself, questioning her line of work. But just as Randy seems to be getting his emotional life back in order, old, self-involved habits rear their heads and send him spiraling back to isolation. He ultimately retreats back to the one place he felt comfortable - the ring, even though it will likely cost him his life.

When one hasn't watched a movie in a decade, it is easy to wonder if it will be as entertaining or engaging as the original viewing. Despite being a devoted fan of Darren Aronofsky, this same question ran through my mind before this recent viewing. But it was just as good as I remembered. Even more surprisingly, my wife really liked it, and she has very little interest in pro wrestling. This is due to the movie's dual focuses: the fascinating and often hidden culture and world around pro wrestling, and the brilliant character study of Randy "The Ram."

Shot in documentary style, the feel of the movie wonderfully authentic, and thanks to an Academy Award-winning performance by the battered Mickey Rourke, it is easy to see what exactly makes the Randy character tick. He is not an overly complex man - his love of wrestling and the glory that being in the ring provides supersedes everything else - but within about 100 minutes of movie time, you get to understand this through his various relationships, moments of triumph, and his mistakes.

This has thus far been easily the most accessible film by Aronofsky, whose other films have taken on grand, cerebral, spiritual themes (sometimes all three). From his first movie Pi to his most recent mother!, the Brooklyn-born filmmaker loves going big, thematically, and sometimes even visually, such as with films like The Fountain or Noah. With The Wrestler, he showed that he is equally skilled with small-scale, personal stories grounded very much in the real world. Even if that "real world" involves grown men wearing fluorescent spandex and pretending to fight in a boxing ring.

The ever-outspoken Larry Flynt, being gagged and bound
in court after repeated outbursts and (often successful)
attempts to show up the judge.

The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)

Director: Milos Foreman

This movie still holds up phenomenally well, these twenty-plus years after its release.

The People vs. Larry Flint is a fictionalized biopic that chronicles key moments in the life of Larry Flint (Woody Harrelson), the founder and CEO of Hustler magazine - a periodical that started in the 1970s and depicted women in various states of undress and in compromising positions of variously scandalous natures. Flint was a self-made multi-millionaire who started in the strip club business but saw his wealth expand exponentially when his Hustler magazine very quickly became a publishing hit. He also became a target of the newly-emerging "Moral Majority" group founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell and like-minded preachers and their followers. These groups often sued Flint and tried everything they could to shut down his publishing operation, which they saw as corrupting the country. Flint became a rather unlikely and thoroughly uncouth champion of free speech, often taking the government and various powerful groups to court over his right to publish his magazine. He was also paralyzed from the waist down after a failed assassination attempt, and his wife Althea (Courtney Love) suffered a slow and fatal spiral into drug overdose.

I hadn't watched this movie for probably over twenty years, and I was pleasantly surprised at how the quality still shines through on every level. No, I don't find Larry Flint a particularly admirable person for his systematic profiteering off of the blatant sexualization of women in his magazines. But this is the very type of contradiction that the movie addresses - simply because you don't admire a person should not be a reason to silence their right to say and publish what they wish, provided that all involved are consenting adults. It's easy for most people to generally agree on the right to free speech when it comes to political views (though that's taken a hit lately) or general opinions about fairly innocuous topics. But what about when it comes to something that more than a few people find highly objectionable, like pornography? The U.S., as progressive as it is in many ways, has long had a strong Puritanical streak running through it, and sexual prudishness is one of the ways that it has manifested itself. The story of Larry Flint, his legal disputes, and the uproar that they caused is a fascinating case study in what, exactly, free speech represents and protects. These themes are where the real meat and depth of this movie come from.

Even beyond the more meaningful tale of Flint's battles, which actually went all the way to the Supreme Court, the movie is highly entertaining. Larry Flint always cut a very colorful, if crass, character, and he is written and played with great verve by the oft-underrated Woody Harrelson. When you add in the excellent supporting performances by Courtney Love and Ed Norton, you get top notch acting to go along with the other strengths of the film.

I probably won't need to watch this movie again any time soon, but I still highly recommend it to any who have never seen it, or haven't seen it in many years.

And now, from a biopic about a smut-monger to a family-friendly movie about an amnesiac fish...

The folks at Pixar have "cute" down to a science, as
evidenced by the young, large-eyed Dory and her doting
parents.

Finding Dory (2016)

Directors: Andrew Stanton and Angus McLane

The wife and I finally got around to checking this one out, and we enjoyed it.

The story follows Dory, the blue tang fish from Finding Nemo, as she sets off on a quest for her long-lost parents. Along the way, we viewers learn that Dory's famous forgetfulness is a condition that she was born with, and is the reason that she first wandered off from her parents years before she met Nemo and his father Marlon.

Dory's quest takes her back to a massive public aquarium, where she rediscovers several old friends from her time there - a near-sighted whale shark, a beluga whale with damaged echo location, and a few others - who try to help Dory find the trail back to her parents. One of the greatest helpers is a new friend, Hank, a clever, camouflaging octopus with a missing limb.

If you sense a pattern here, you're right. Finding Dory is very much about how those with disabilities can overcome them and succeed at something. It's a welcome message, and one that is handled well, if not always in the subtlest of ways. What impressed me most about this movie is how it truly does stand on its own, without relying on the tremendous success and impact of its predecessor, the early Pixar hit, Finding Nemo. Although several characters from that instant classic animated film appear in the picture, this movie has its own themes, primary characters, and unique plot. And it does bear plenty of the trademark Pixar visual creativity, with some great gags and use of the brilliant color palates at their disposal.

Finding Dory is a very satisfying sequel, even if there is a touch of the saccharine to its ending. It continues the tradition of Pixar movies that have displayed wonderful humor with themes relevant to everyone from age five through a hundred. 

Idiot Boxing: Arrested Development Rewatch + Season 5 Review

A poster for the original - and still the best - season.

This didn't go the way I was hoping.

Like a fair number of people back in 2004, I was oh-so-slightly late to the Arrested Development party. I distinctly remember seeing the preview commercials on Fox, before the show aired in fall of 2003, but ignored it as probably another Fox misfire. Several months into the show's first season, though, more than a few TV-loving friends were passionately recommending the show to me. Before I knew it, the first season had wrapped up, but I was able to snap up the DVD collection immediately upon its release and catch up. No sooner had I fallen in love with the show than there were whispers about its potential cancellation. As it has done with more than one great show (Firefly, for example), Fox completely fumbled a true TV gem, let it sputter, and then die after a mere two-and-a-half seasons.

The show was given a second life in 2013 when, seven years after its cancellation, a long-hoped for fourth season was released by Netflix. The show then went dormant yet again. When I noticed that a fifth season was just released earlier this year, my wife and I decided to go back and give the series a full rewatch.

The First Four Seasons, 2003 to 2013

My feelings about this show's progression seem to reflect the general opinion about them: absolute brilliance that lost a fair amount of its luster in the third and fourth seasons.

The first two seasons of the show were, and still are, some of the greatest TV comedy of all time. The sharpness of the writing and the truly unique structure and feel of the entire show have not lost a bit of their magic since the initial run between 2003 and 2005. As during my original viewing, I found the writing and the cast so outstanding that I found myself changing my mind about which character was the best several times. The entire cast was so locked into what the writers were going for that it's still astounding to this day.

The cancellation-shortened third season was obviously where a few cracks started to show. As with nearly every "zany" TV show, there seems to be an imperceptible, razor-thin line that separates "hilariously zany" from "silly and unfunny." Most of the third season stays on the right side of that line, but most of the entire Little Britain storyline was simply too goofy, despite Charlize Theron's solid comedic performance at Rita. Thankfully, that particular arc ran its course by the middle of the season. Unfortunately, the masterminds at Fox decided to completely cancel the show shortly after that - a fact which the brilliant writers on the show hilariously worked into the show's plot.

The show's resurrection on Netflix seven years later in 2013 was a mixed bag. My wife and I watched it almost immediately upon its full release at that time, and apparently felt similar to much of the viewing public: while still bearing a decent amount of the original run's humor, and managing to bring back every single member of the original main cast, the structure of the season was bafflingly convoluted, spinning multiple overlapping stories that often doubled back over on another and never hitting a real stride in terms of clear narrative. Netflix recently did a "Remix" version of this season, which I had hoped would re-edit the season into a more coherent form, but I was disappointed to find that it was at least as frustrating, leaning far too heavily on an insane amount of Ron Howard's narrative exposition to try and keep the various story threads together. The real shame is that, when the tale settles down from its dizzying structure, it's still pretty damn funny. The characters and actors are usually still great, and the dialogue is often as sharp as it ever was. But this season is often an exercise in frustration, with the muddled organization just getting in the way of what have always been the show's real strengths.

I can respect the writers' swinging for the fences and trying something new with this season, but it seems that their reach exceeded their grasp here. It's a bit baffling, given that they could have used the 7-year gap to do so much more than just try to clumsily fill in all of the characters' backstories in the intervening years. It seems like it was a perfect opportunity to re-introduce the family into a completely new scenario. In the first two-and-a-half seasons, the greater arc revolved around George Senior's treason/embezzlement scam. Why not whip up a completely new scandal or dilemma around which to have the narcissistic and greedy Bluth family orbit and stumble? This is the type of thing that I was hoping for when hearing about a fifth season:

Tobias Funke - always the butt of a million jokes - continues
to roam far beyond the "funny" line and into the realm of
idiotically ridiculous. Other elements of the show follow suit.

Season 5 (2018)

Not wanting to let a classic-but-short-lived-show go out on a flat note, Netflix returned five years after the letdown 4th season to bring back the Bluth family, with every single primary cast member from the original seasons joining in. The tale basically picks up very shortly after the 4th season ended, with the various Bluth family members scrambling to claim or plunder any assets they can in the wake of Lucille Austero's supposed death. We see a continuation of the weird friction between Michael and George-Michael, and the typically selfish and idiotic schemes by their family members. Many of these seem to revolve around and come back to a new setting - a beach-side home once owned by Michael and his long-dead wife.

Full disclosure now - my wife and I didn't even make it through the modest 8-episode season. Five episodes in, we simply abandoned it in order to watch other, more reliably entertaining shows. That should probably tell you all you need to know. But if you're curious as to why...

It all boils down to the show shockingly continuing the weakest elements of the 3rd and 4th seasons. The writers and show runners seemed unable to ratchet back the dizzying pace and zaniness to that oh-so-difficult-to-master balance found in the first two seasons. Yes, there are funny moments in season 5, but they are surprisingly few and far between, given the immensely talented cast. The contrivances were just too far-fetched most times, with too many oddities stacking on top of each other, thus dampening any comedic effect. But I guess this is the fate of virtually every "silly" TV comedy. When the initial premise and general tone of the humor is so very zany from the jump, the only direction it can go is "zanier." And that wears itself out each and every time, with the over-the-top oddities being the "too much salt" that spoils the dish. Such seems to be the case with Arrested Development.

At least we'll always have those first two magical seasons.