Truth (2015)

I've been meaning to write reviews of The Martian, Sicario, and Goodnight Mommy for weeks now. All of those are much better and more interesting films than Truth, and each deserves attention in its own right. I'll get to them. But I just saw Truth, written and directed by Zodiac screenwriter James Vanderbilt, and as I'm sitting here it's making my blood boil.

On a purely cinematic level, there's really nothing wrong with Truth, and indeed as I was watching it I was basically caught up in its mix of political thriller and melodrama. The ostensibly-behind-the-scenes story of the infamous CBS Killian documents scandal at "60 Minutes" that brought down producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) and legendary anchor Dan Rather (Robert Redford) is more than watchable. It's often gripping, and is even quite moving in parts. It starts off kind of stiff and fakey (the scene where Mapes is being "interviewed" by her seven-year-old son really should have been left on the cutting room floor), but it quickly picks up steam once the central narrative kicks into gear. It's thrilling to see Mapes and her team (including Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid, and Elizabeth Moss) put the story together, and more so to watch the story then fall apart.

It wasn't until after I left the theater and really thought about it that the movie started to get under my skin. It's like a competently made gourmet dish that tastes good while you're eating it but gives you the rankest gas on the car ride home.

I don't talk about it much (or even really think about it anymore, frankly), but I was a journalism major in college and very much wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I graduated right at the end of the 90s, when the Internet started taking its toll and newspapers started conspicuously slashing budgets and selling out their credibility for more advertising bucks and deeper political connections. I saw this happen even at the small-town paper where I worked, and it quickly left a sour taste in my mouth.

But for four or five years there, I was quite serious about it. I was one of the many, many teenagers who heard the story of Woodward and Bernstein and thought "I want to do that." I studied the history and internalized the code of ethics that makes objective news reporting one of the most important pillars of a functioning democracy. And that respect — even reverence — for the profession has stuck with me. It's what made the whole "Rathergate" scandal (as this controversy came to be known) so hard to take when it went down.

Let's face some hard facts here. CBS, Mapes, and Rather fucked up. They fucked up big. They had a pre-existing narrative they wanted to tell (that President George W. Bush had not only used his family connections to get out of Vietnam, but that he hadn't even lived up to the bare minimum of his duties in the Texas Air National Guard) and — under pressure to deliver the report before 2004 elections — made a series of grievous, frankly unforgivable errors in bringing the story to air. The documents that served as the linchpin of their story were not properly vetted and, while never definitively proven to be forgeries, should never have been used. They then spent weeks digging their heels in as the story imploded, going to absurd lengths to defend it before finally throwing in the towel.

The most maddening thing about the scandal to me (as a liberal) is that the substance of the story is very likely true. But CBS's epically shitty reporting became the story, and Bush sailed right on into a second disastrous term.

Now, more than 10 years later, Vanderbilt has adapted Mapes's memoir and brought forth a piece of cinematic apologia as stunning in its disingenuousness as any major motion picture I've ever seen. Both Redford and Blanchett are very, very good in this film, and I have no reason to question the earnestness of their portrayals. But their considerable talents have been put to use in a way I find truly nefarious, in a film that simply doesn't deserve them.

Truth would have us believe that Mapes is the victim here. It glosses over the many, many mistakes she made as a journalist and then, when she is challenged on those mistakes, presents the challengers as a bunch of mean, chauvinistic bullies looking for any excuse to bring this principled woman down. It presents the mistakes as almost unavoidable, but spends so little time on the bad decisions that lead to those mistakes as to have us believe they didn't happen at all. It presents Rathergate as something that happened to Mapes and Rather, not something they brought upon themselves. Blanchett is given an Oscar-baity speech at the end where she gets to rail against the system that has put her career on the line, and the way the scene is staged and the music swells triumphantly, we're very clearly meant not to question her. When someone finally does, he's literally shot as if he's a Bond villain. They should have just given him a white cat to malevolently stroke and been done with it.

It's true that Mapes was a celebrated news producer whose work brought to light some very important pieces of news, the most important of which was the Abu Ghraib scandal (a story for which she won a Peabody after being fired from CBS). I did not want or expect this movie to be a hit job. But by trying to tell her side of the story, it overcorrects so wildly that it only reinforces the negative image she has been saddled with for the last decade. There was a way to tell this story — dramatically, honestly — as the human tragedy it was without vilifying her any further. That's the movie I wanted to see.

I love movies about reporters and wish there were more of them. But this is not one I'd recommend.

Everest (2015)

I'm going to try not to have too many spoilers in this review. But I will be referring to the true story here and there, so I'll probably end up giving a few things away.

After watching the trailer for the new film Everest and seeing the tagline "NEVER LET GO," you'd be forgiven for thinking that this is just another one of those rousing man-conquers-nature, triumphs-over-adversity movies like Alive or Apollo 13. 

But if you have even a passing recollection of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster upon which this story is based, you'll know enough to suspect that's not going to be the case. Man didn't conquer shit in 1996, and there wasn't a lot of triumph to go around — unless you count losing only your nose and both of your hands to frostbite as a triumph.

I've read Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer's first-person account of the disaster, a couple times, and it's one of the most harrowing non-fiction books I've ever encountered. Everest isn't based on his book (in fact, Krakauer is pretty pissed about how he was portrayed), but from what I remember of the story it seems to be a pretty accurate retelling, even if a lot of the edges have been smoothed over and spackled under a layer of Hollywood gloss. 

But even with its faults, it's a pretty riveting film.

Jason Clarke plays Rob Hall, an Everest guide from New Zealand whose company Adventure Consultants was one of several expeditions stranded on the south face of the mountain during a blistering storm on the night of May 10, 1996. Hall's friendly rival was Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal, oddly underused here), whose Mountain Madness team was also caught in the "Death Zone" (a third expedition, comprised of a group of Tibetan police officers, was trapped on the north face and isn't mentioned in the film). A few of the people in Hall's group were Texan doctor Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), Seattle mail man Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), and Japanese businesswoman Yasuko Namba  (Naoko Mori). 

And, of course, there was journalist Krakauer (Michael Kelly), whose employer, Outside magazine, had been paid by Hall to document the excursion and (hopefully) bring some good press to his company. It didn't really work out that way.

Everest, for its first half, is a pretty able if not terribly impressive adventure film. There are some good performances. Clarke is the standout, but Hawkes and Emily Watson (as Adventure Consultants base camp manager Helen Wilton) are also quite good. Gyllenhaal is fine, but he doesn't have a lot to do. I expected there to be more focus on Kelly, but maybe that's because I'm mostly familiar with Krakauer's account. He's also underused, but has a few nice moments here and there. 

Director Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavik, 2 Guns) doesn't overload us too early with the sort of majestic/terrifying vista shots we saw jammed into the trailer. The focus is (rightly) on the characters, which would be great except none of them are terribly interesting. Hall — a professional mountaineer profiting (perhaps against his better judgment) off a bunch of rich wannabes — is the most developed. Clarke paints a portrait of a decent, well-meaning guy who's so able at what he does that maybe it doesn't occur to him he might screw up.

For about an hour, we do get some nice (if a bit clichéd) triumph-over-adversity stuff, and we get a few little glimpses into the family lives of Hall and Weathers (Brolin is ostensibly the second lead, but frankly I can't say he brought a whole lot to the table here). The trek up the mountain certainly feels triumphant, but we get a few little shadings of what's to come: logjams on the way up, an uneasy partnership between Hall and Fischer (whose Sherpas inexplicably seem to hate each other), rumblings about bad weather on the way.

Things go sideways as the groups reach the top, and Hall — wanting to see his buddy Hansen, who tried and failed to summit the year before, succeed — makes an understandable but tragic mistake.

It's in the second half that the film really comes alive (sorry about the unintended mordent irony there). When disaster strikes, Kormákur throws us right into it. It's stunning (and likely pretty true to life) how quickly things fall apart when there's literally no margin of error for survival. A few minor mistakes and miscommunications early on lead to an alarming descent into chaos. The film necessarily skips over some details (if you want more, read Krakauer's book), but it captures the sudden and inexorable sense of doom as the situation goes rapidly from problematic to absolutely dire.

Kormákur also heaps in a few heavy shovelfuls of rank emotional manipulation, but I don't fault him for it. He's got a highly developed, almost Spielbergian sense of how to play an audience's fear and empathy for maximum effect. And Clarke quietly delivers a performance of such crushing tragic weight that you don't notice the incredible feat of it until the movie is over. The final shot of the movie will haunt me for awhile.

Everest isn't a great movie. It doesn't quite reconcile the disparate tones of its first and second halves, and too many of the characters are underdeveloped (likely unavoidable with the size of this cast). But overall it's a damn effective one, and worth seeing while it's in theaters.

I didn't see it in 3D, and for that I'm glad. I'm not sure I could have hung with it when shit gets dark.

My Top 10 Best Pink Floyd Songs

This is one of those posts born solely out of boredom and an intense desire to procrastinate. There are so many other things I really should be doing right now, but whatever. Pink Floyd has been my favorite band basically since I developed a concept of what a band is. I'm probably one of the few dudes of my generation who can accurately say I've been a Floyd superfan for thirty years.

So, from least to most, here are my top 10 favorite Pink Floyd songs of all time. These are the desert island tracks I couldn't live without.

And before anyone yells at me: no, I'm not including anything from the Syd Barrett era. I appreciate Barrett, find that part of the band's story fascinating, and do enjoy some of the music (particularly "Astronomy Domine" and "Bike"). But for you Syd hipsters out there, let me ask you this: do you really think that music holds up the way, say,  Dark Side and Wish You Were Here do? Would you be at all interested in any of it if not for the drama of Barrett's collapse?

If you say "yes" to either of those questions, I name you LIAR.

10. "Dogs of War," A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987)

This choice will annoy a lot of people, because the general consensus is that A Momentary Lapse of Reason is the first Floyd "sellout" album, coming as it did after resident angry genius Roger Waters's acrimonious departure a few years earlier. I don't necessarily disagree (although I tend to be more forgiving of David Gilmour-era Floyd than most).

But this is one of those songs that caught me at just the right time (I was nine years old) and stuck with me in a big way. That ominous martial quality of the synthesizers (I was already into real dark shit, even at that age), Gilmour's strained rocker's rasp (deployed much more effectively on "Money"), the way it explodes into something approaching gospel and then swerves into one of those epiphanic saxophone solos that inspires little kids to pick up the sax and plunk their way through "Mary Had a Little Lamb" at their first school recital (as it did for this little kid, at least)... to nine-year-old me, this was rock music happening at a register I didn't know was possible.

In fact, now that I think about it, this is the Floyd song that had the most direct impact on the trajectory of my life. If I hadn't heard this song, I probably never would have wanted to learn the saxophone. Which, in turn, means I never would have ended up in the high school marching band and met my best friends (hey, Doug, Dan, and Karl). And I likely never would have gone to college in Alamosa, CO (went there for marching band, too), never would have become a college radio DJ, never would have moved to Pueblo for the summer (1998), which means I never would have met the girl who inspired me to write Dead Billy, and so on...

Badass.

Of course, adult me can listen to "Dogs of War" and recognize that it doesn't approach anywhere near the heights the band reached at its peak. But it was my "first" favorite Floyd song, so it needs to be on this list.

9. "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" Ummagumma (1969)

Floyd from an entirely different era, when they were just beginning to be identified with that popular if meaningless term "prog rock."

It's always amused me how Pink Floyd continually gets lumped in with prog noodlers like Rush and Yes. The only similarity, as far as I can see, is their tendency toward long, abstract instrumentals (like this one). But listen to "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" after, say, Rush's "The Trees" or Yes's "Close to the Edge" and try to tell me that they're working in anywhere near the same genre.

Pink Floyd were always murkier, more cynical, much less concerned with virtuosity and psychedelia and much more concerned with exploring concepts like insanity and death. To me, they've always felt more of a piece with musicians like the Velvet Underground, Philip Glass, John Cage, and even weirdo poets like Tom Waits. They were mining the dark side long before it was cool to do so.

8. "Fearless" Meddle (1971)

Meddle is one of my least favorite Floyd albums. It's an interesting artifact, documenting their transition out of the schizophrenic music of their early years into the smooth, dark, oblong cohesiveness of the Dark Side - The Wall era (1973-1980). But as an album, it's a little bit of a lot of things but not really much of anything.

"Fearless," though — this is just a masterful song, and it showcases a side of Floyd hardly seen up to that point. It's just a great 70s rock and roll song, straightforward and to the point, infused with a deep sense of melancholy wrapped around a delicious acoustic melody. It's something that could have been penned by The Eagles, if The Eagles had anywhere near the depth of Pink Floyd. It's one of those songs that always makes my heart skip a beat.

7. "Pigs: Three Different Ones" Animals (1977)

The record that came out the year I was born. I love that Floyd's answer to punk rock was to create an album where one of the shortest songs (this one) clocks in at over eleven minutes. But their gloomy riff on Orwell's Animal Farm is just as ferocious and blistering as anything The Sex Pistols or The Clash were doing at the time.

To my ears, Animals is Floyd's bitterest album (minus the shrill and nearly unlistenable The Final Cut), and one of their most underrated. "Pigs: Three Different Ones" was Roger Waters at his most sneering — but it was sneering with a purpose. Johnny Rotten could have learned a few things from this aging "dinosaur" if he'd ever bothered to listen.

Waters had one more great album in him (The Wall) before the anger that drove his creativity began to feed on itself.

6. "Brain Damage/Eclipse" The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

This two-song suite is, to me, the flip side of something like "Pigs: Three Different Ones." It's dark and it's got that Roger Waters snarl — but it's also oddly, nihilistically joyful. You listen to this song and you can just imagine Waters sailing off the edge of existence with a big, shit-eating grin on his face. And you can almost imagine sailing off right along with him.

5. "If" Atom Heart Mother (1970)

This is a pretty obscure track, sandwiched between the epic and orchestral (and nearly 25-minute)  "Atom Heart Mother Suite" and Rick Wright's much more bombastic "Summer '68" (both strong contenders for this list).

It's also deceptively gentle for a Roger Waters song. He doesn't sneer or shout, but rather sings in a delicate and tremulous whisper, accompanied mostly by nothing but an acoustic guitar, a few spacey Gilmour flourishes, and a bit of color from Wright's piano (drummer Nick Mason tosses in a few beats towards the end).

It's the type of song you put on a yoga mix. But this is still Roger Waters, and he can't entirely keep away from the macabre. That's what turns this song from something innocuously pleasant into a bonafide work of mad Waters genius. Lyrics like "if I go insane, please don't stick your wires in my brain" float by almost without you noticing them.

4. "Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 1-5)" Wish You Were Here (1975)

I almost wanted to leave this off the list because it's so fucking obvious. The only surprise, maybe, is that I didn't put it at number one.

But this is one of those rare 70s rock classics that is truly as great as everyone says it is. It sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, and it's the perfect symbiosis of all Floyd's disparate parts working perfectly together in absolute, clockwork harmony. Rick Wright's synthesizer has never been more haunting, and Gilmour manages to ring more emotion out of those four famous guitar notes than Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page do in an entire solo.

And it's probably Waters' crowning lyrical achievement, an ode to a fallen friend (Syd Barrett) that manages to both honor and skewer its subject in equal measure:

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught in the crossfire of childhood and stardom, blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter; come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr,
and shine!

You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision, rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions; come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, 
and shine!

This is just a beautiful song — maybe the most beautiful in rock-and-roll history. That's not opinion; it's verifiable fact.

3. "Nobody Home" The Wall (1979)

I know I just said that "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" is Roger Waters' standout lyrical achievement, but if that's true then The Wall's "Nobody Home" has to be a very close second. I think it's no coincidence that it's also about Syd Barrett; Waters was always at his best when he was reflecting back on his past and the fate of his former bandmate and friend.

"Dogs of War" was my first favorite Pink Floyd song. But A Momentary Lapse of Reason wasn't the first Floyd album that got its hooks into me. My brother had left a vinyl copy of The Wall in my parents' record cabinet. I don't remember how old I was the first time I listened to it, but I couldn't have been more than seven. I had been captivated by that stark black-and-white cover since as long as I can remember, and I can still recall the feelings of both utter hopelessness and transcendent joy that flooded into my young brain on that first spin.

I didn't get it at all, but something in this record spoke to me at an extremely impressionable age. And when I look at my own creative work, I see The Wall's dark influence all over it. To me this is and will always be the Pink Floyd record, the ultimate monument to all of Roger Waters' bleakest obsessions: madness, death, war, and rage. He has never been better, before or since.

2. "Hey You" The Wall (1979)

There's no Floyd song I find more haunting — and relatable — than this one. No piece of music has better captured that feeling of desperate, drowning loneliness. I don't even want to say how many hours I spent sitting alone in my bedroom in the dark, listening to this track over and over and over again. Even now, if I catch it in the right (or wrong) mood, it'll put me close to tears.

1. "The Trial" The Wall (1979)

The Wall's penultimate song and undisputed climax, "The Trial" is like the nuttiest Gilbert & Sullivan song you could imagine. It's a near perfect piece of theatre and a sublime work of black comedy, with Roger Waters playing the many roles with all the panache of a trained Broadway actor. No song in the English language gives me more joy than this.

I'm generally not a huge fan of The Wall movie (1982), but Gerald Scarfe's animation during this segment is an undisputed highlight. Watch the video above and marvel. Scarfe's depiction of the Judge as a giant, bleating asshole never fails to crack me up.

Honorable Mentions:
"One of These Days" Meddle
"Astronomy Domine" Piper at the Gates of Dawn
"Mother" The Wall
"The Great Gig in the Sky" The Dark Side of the Moon
"On the Turning Away" Momentary Lapse of Reason
"Waiting for the Worms" The Wall
"Welcome to the Machine" Wish You Were Here
"Sheep" Animals
"One of My Turns" The Wall
"Time" The Dark Side of the Moon
"Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" A Saucerful of Secrets
"Comfortably Numb" The Wall
"In the Flesh" The Wall
"Summer '68" Atom Heart Mother
"The Nile Song" The More Soundtrack
"Free Four" Obscured by Clouds
"Bike" Piper at the Gates of Dawn
"Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" Ummagumma
"Atom Heart Mother Suite" Atom Heart Mother
"Wish You Were Here" Wish You Were Here

Black Mass (2015)

There are some spoilers in here. Nothing major — and nothing you wouldn't know from reading the newspaper accounts of the story. But be warned.

Scott Cooper's Black Mass is not only the movie I've been anticipating the most this year, but one of the top five movies I've been most dying to see for the last decade or so. I became obsessed with the whole James "Whitey" Bulger story back around 2004 when I was living in Boston and I stumbled on Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill's Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob.

That book (the basis for Cooper's film) is still considered by many to be the definitive text on Bulger's Winter Hill Gang, which terrorized Boston from the mid 1970s through the early 1990s. Lehr and O'Neill, both Boston Globe reporters, followed it up in 2013 with Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss after Whitey was finally caught hiding out in Santa Monica, California.

Bulger — a fugitive for many years and second only to Osama Bin Laden on the FBI's most wanted list — wasn't really in the mass consciousness at the time (he would enter it again just a couple years later after Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello in The Departed was reported to have been based on him). The story was entirely new to me. As a small-town kid from the lower Rockies, Boston already seemed pretty exotic to me; add in a fugitive, murderous gangster and I was hooked. I read everything I could on the subject, even Howie Carr's terrible The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century. I even met one of Bulger's main associates, Kevin Weeks (played with brooding menace by Jesse Plemmons in the new movie), in an encounter at a book signing at the Boston University book store that I found a little terrifying and that he probably doesn't remember at all.

I closely tracked the development of this movie from the start, and when they announced Johnny Depp as Bulger, I was cautiously optimistic; sure, he's been having a little too much fun at the Pirates of the Caribbean/Willy Wonka/Dark Shadows costume party for quite a long time now... but he did brilliantly portray FBI agent Joe Pistone in one of my all time favorite gangster movies, Donnie Brasco (1997). If he could tap back into that, maybe it would work.

I started to allow myself to get just a little excited when I saw the pictures of him in full Bulger regalia. The resemblance is pretty impressive:

And of course, there was that great first trailer.

So after all that, what's my verdict?

Meh. Pretty good, I guess.

Black Mass is a decent Hollywood gangster movie, ably told but fairly anonymous, nowhere near as great as a Donnie Brasco or Goodfellas but better than garbage like 2012's The Iceman. It's probably about on the level of something like Ben Affleck's The Town (2010) or Gone Baby Gone (2007). Maybe a little less interesting.

I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a Bulger expert — and I certainly wasn't there for anything depicted in the movie — but I have read a lot about the case, from many different sources, so I know more about the true events than your average moviegoer. I can say that Black Mass gets many of the events pretty close to right in a very abbreviated, Cliff's Notes sort of way that I expected (I've always thought this story would have been best served as an HBO limit series like David Simon's Show Me A Hero). Right up until the end, that is, when they kind of just start making shit up. But okay, this is Hollywood. I'm not expecting exact fidelity to the truth — although I've never been able to understand why you'd invent stuff when the true story is far more interesting and cinematic.

I don't want to belabor this, but there are few details the movie got wrong that I want to mention for posterity. Minor spoilers ahead:

• Bulger's son actually died several years before the events of the movie. I'm not even sure why they included it, because the time wasted on that storyline took away from much needed development elsewhere.
• The film is oddly hands-off in the way it treats Bulger accomplice Stephen Flemmi (Rory Cochrane). Cooper and screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth portray him almost sympathetically as Bulger's reluctant subordinate. In fact Bulger and Flemmi were partners, and by many accounts Flemmi is a full-on psychopath who was as bad as Bulger, if not worse (he's currently serving a life sentence for 10 murders). Cochrane is a hell of an actor and he does everything he can with this underwritten role, but it's not enough.
• The movie suggests that it was Bulger who convinced Flemmi to join him as a top echelon informant with the FBI, when in fact Flemmi had been an informant since 1965 — about a decade before his partner.
• The film is also very careful in how it portrays Bulger's younger brother, Billy Bulger (Benedict Cumberbatch), who just happened to be the president of the Massachusetts State Senate while Bulger was dominating the streets of Southie. Billy is hardly a presence in the film, and Cumberbatch plays him pretty close to the vest. It's been an open question for a long time how much Billy Bulger knew about his brother's activities and whether or not he helped him or covered for him in any way. Billy is still alive and (mostly) respected in Massachusetts, and I would guess that the studio didn't want to risk a lawsuit by suggesting anything that it couldn't prove.

I haven't seen Cooper's earlier work (been meaning to catch up with Crazy Heart for forever), but I think he did a solid job here, and with a decent amount of style. Overall the movie is well paced. And many of the performances are quite good — in particular David Harbour, who plays corrupt FBI agent John Connolly's (Joel Edgerton) equally compromised boss John Morris. I wish he'd had a stronger presence in the film, because Morris had the most human (and subtly tragic) arc of anyone involved in the case. But the movie does offer a piece of information I had never heard before (or somehow missed), and I wonder if it's true; it suggests that it was Morris, on deep background, who approached Lehr and O'Neill in the first place as a whistleblower.

My favorite performance, Corey Stoll (House of Cards) as US attorney Fred Wyshak, comes pretty late in the game. But it's a breath of fresh air as, according to the movie, Wyshak was the one guy willing to step up and call everyone on the bullshit they'd allowed to drop over the years. It's a much-needed muscular and no-nonsense performance that shows up at just the right time.

The two central performances, however, are pretty problematic. Edgerton's take on Connolly — who, as a Bulger's FBI handler, abetted Bulger's murderous rise and is now serving time for murder — seems off to me. Connolly was certainly an arrogant, blustery dude, but in the film he might as well have been walking around with a sign around his neck reading "CORRUPT FBI ASSHOLE!! ARREST ME NOW!!" I just can't believe Connolly could have been as blatant — and, frankly, as stupid — about his corruption as is portrayed in the film. Edgerton's dialogue is mostly reduced to various bromides about his "loyalty" to Southie and the brothers Bulger, who were "very good to him" as a child. And, for some reason, that's good enough for his FBI superiors and for the US attorneys, even though boss Charles MaGuire (Kevin Bacon) knows almost from the start that the deal with Bulger stinks. We're given to understand that the FBI was so desperate to bring down the Italian Mafia of Boston's North End that they were willing to tolerate Connolly's obvious transgressions. There's a lot of truth to that, but the two-hour running time doesn't allow for the type of development needed to make it really make sense within the film.

And Depp... well, I guess he hasn't left the costume party just yet. In his hands, Bulger is an entirely exterior creature who seems to operate on exactly one level: a sort of demonic, murderous lechery that smacks of caricature. There's one scene in particular between Bulger and Connolly's wife, Marianne (Julianne Nicholson, in one of the film's other unheralded small performances), that's meant to be terrifying but instead comes off almost laughable. They didn't allow Depp a mustache with which to twirl, so instead he uses Bulger's leather jacket like a greasy black snake's skin to telegraph the depth of his evil (that jacket, by the way, comes from exactly one photo of Bulger, pictured above. Most other shots I've seen of him show that he pretty much dressed like a regular guy most of the time).

Literally every moment Depp has onscreen — even an early one where he's playing gin rummy with his elderly mother — positively oozes with slime. It works great in the scene everyone knows from the trailer, the one where Bulger presses Morris about his steak marinade. But over the course of an entire movie, it comes pretty close to eye rolling. It's like one of Depp's performances from a Tim Burton movie was just dropped whole into an entirely different film.

In the end I didn't hate the movie (which I feared), and as I was watching it I mostly enjoyed it. It's worth catching if you've got an evening free, but it's not one you need to rush out for.

But is this the definitive take and final word on James "Whitey" Bulger? I sure hope not.

The Visit (2015)

I guess I don't really need to go too deep into the conversation about how M. Night Shyamalan's movies have been terrible for the last decade or so. They have been, in sometimes stunning fashion, and we all know it.  So let's just move on, ok?

And I'm not going to go so far as all the critics claiming that his new film, The Visit, is a return to form. This isn't on the level of The Sixth Sense... or even Signs, probably. A few critics are going nuts for it because Shyamalan's last five or so movies have been so godawful that the bar has been lowered basically to ground level.

But, for what it is, The Visit is pretty damn good.

Might it be that Shyamalan has finally been humbled after all the vitriol that has been thrown at him since roughly The Village (2004)? I'm guessing that's part of it. But there's another player in the game here, and I think its influence on the film — a sort of retro found-footage movie about two kids sent off to visit a pair of maniacal grandparents they've never met before — needs to be acknowledged.

That other player, of course, is Blumhouse Productions. The company basically owes its existence to the Paranormal Activity franchise, and is best known for producing generally unimpressive but successful horror movies like Sinister (2012), The Purge (2013), and the moderately more artful Insidious series. They made their bid for an Oscar last year with Whiplash, which managed to be more intense and horrifying than anything else they've produced.

It's a bit odd to imagine Blumhouse teaming up with Shyamalan, and I'd love to know the inside story of how this came together. I'm guessing a significant part of it is the fact that there aren't a lot of other companies willing to work with the director anymore, and Blumhouse knew they could probably get him cheap.

But somehow this collaboration becomes more than the sum of its parts, bringing out the best of each other without indulging in the worst. For his part, Shyamalan's most turgid instincts seem to have been somewhat mitigated by the lean-and-mean, straight-to-the-point Blumhouse ethos. The Visit falls pretty squarely between the Paranormal Activity found-footage thing and the slightly more elevated sensibility of Insidious, and the constraints don't allow him to go up his own ass the way he's been prone to do.

The constraints suit him well. He's still got enough storytelling spark and visual flare to class up the joint a bit, and in The Visit he managed to conjure up a few of the most startling and genuinely upsetting horror images I've seen in a while.

I don't want to oversell it; there's nothing particularly mind blowing here, and the movie doesn't have anywhere near the energy or originality of recent movies like It Follows and The Babadook. But by and large it all works, and some of what he delivers is truly scary.

It's also legitimately funny, which I didn't expect. Shyamalan has shown a moderate ability with humor in the past (particularly in Signs), but he manages to really nail it here. The two young leads, Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould, are saddled with the sort of cutesy precocious kid roles that normally make me want to claw my eyes out. But these kids can act, and they have a genuine sibling chemistry between them. DeJonge takes Rebecca, the older of a two and an aspiring filmmaker, and makes her pretensions charming rather than grating. And Oxenbould's Tyler, an aspiring rapper (yep, that's right), is often laugh-out-loud hilarious. But when it's time for them to be scared and deliver the horror-movie goods, they do. Oxenbould's is the showier performance, but he manages to spin Tyler's manic energy into a genuine ferocity toward the end that is more than a little frightening and definitely unexpected.

But the real stars of the show here are Peter McRobbie and Deanna Dunagan as "Pop-Pop" and "Nana." They deliver the sort of tour-de-force genre performances that deserve Oscar consideration but never get it. At first you're charmed by them, then you're sort of laughing at them, then you're a little uncomfortable around them... and then you're absolutely terrified.

I kind of hope this Shyamalan/Blumhouse partnership continues. It's too early to call this a comeback, but I can say for the first time in years I'm actually excited to see his next movie.

Streaming Review — One False Move (1992)

"One False Move" is one of those odd little movies I've been hearing about for years but haven't ever  taken the time to sit down and watch.

I remember the moderate buzz surrounding it way back when. It came out in the year or so after "Reservoir Dogs," so the whole neo-noir indie thing of that time was just getting started. Directed by an actor and relative nobody named Carl Franklin (a nobody in the sense that he's worked mostly under the radar; in truth, he's done some pretty solid work both behind and in front of the camera) and written by and co-starring a complete nobody named Billy Bob Thornton, "One False Move" was basically a B-movie intended for the direct-to-video bin at your local video store. It wasn't until critics like Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel took up the cause that it finally got a small theatrical release (Siskel named it his movie of the year)

In the years since, it's grown into a minor cult artifact, largely because of the stratospheric rise not long after of its writer and star (Thornton would go on to make his breakout "Sling Blade" just a few years later).

It's one of those movies I think about watching every so often and then quickly forget. But it came up while prepping a new script I'm due to start soon, I decided to finally sit down and watch it.

Final verdict: pretty good. It's no masterpiece, but it's a more-than-solid slice of rural noir, and definitely worth a look.

The film mostly centers on a dual, criss-crossing narrative that follows a gang of murderous robbers and drug pushers comprised of the volatile and violent Ray Malcolm (Thornton), his slightly more sensible lover Fantasia (Cynda Williams, who was Thornton's real-life girlfriend at the time), and the coolly psychopathic Pluto (Michael Beach, who should be recognizable to modern audiences as T.O. Cross on "Sons of Anarchy"), and two L.A. cops (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings) who team up with a small-town sheriff (Bill Paxton) in hopes of intercepting the gang upon their arrival in Ray and Fantasia's home town of Star City, Arkansas.

In many ways this is all pretty standard fair. What makes the movie hum are the performances and Thornton's solid, if not wholly original, screenplay. Everyone is good here (Beach, in particular, plays Pluto with just the right mixture of brute menace and cool intelligence), but Paxton steals the show as Dale "Hurricane" Dixon, a small-town cop with big-time dreams. We know from the start that his inexperience, exuberance, and overall lack of intellectual rigor are likely to get him (and maybe a lot of other people) killed. Imagine if George W. Bush was a small-town sheriff about to go up against a gang of cold-blooded murderers.

But lest you think this is simply another Hollywood movie condescending to and fetishizing the rural south, remember that Thornton himself is not so different from Hurricane Dixon. He grew up in this world, and he knows it as more than a bag of clichés. When we meet Dale and first experience Star City, we're taking it all in through the eyes of the jaded and arrogant big-city cops, and Thornton's sly trick is to make the condescension theirs, not the movie's. He fakes us out by putting us into their subjectivity, then pulls the rug out from under us by dumping us right into Dale's. Dale is suddenly more complex, heartfelt, flawed — but inherently noble — than we previously imagined.

Thornton is also pretty great as Ray. It's the type of role we've become accustomed to seeing him in, but it's handy to remind ourselves that, at the time, nobody knew who the fuck he was. Yet he manages to dominate the screen like a seasoned veteran.

The ultimate confrontation between all these forces is powerfully presented, but overall pretty predictable. Nothing here really gives us anything we haven't seen before or since. "One False Move" may be one of the first of those 90s rural noirs, but it's far from the best (that honor goes to either John Dahl's 1993 film "Red Rock West" or Sam Raimi's 1998 film "A Simple Plan" — the latter of which not-so-coincidentally stars both Thornton and Paxton).

Still, this is a movie that's a lot better than in it should be, and that's due to the talent involved. Franklin, for his part, directs the film ably and with just enough style to elevate this beyond other direct-to-video fare from that era. He's not showy, but he shows a solid command over the form.

This is a good movie. If you haven't seen it, you should give it a shot.

Book Review — "Finders Keepers" by Stephen King

 

Mild spoilers below

Last year, when I wrote about Stephen King's "Revival," I expressed my cautiously optimistic hope that King was maybe finally pulling out of what felt to me like a decade-plus slump. The quality of his work has been trending sharply upward since 2010's "Full Dark No Stars," and I voiced the opinion that "Revival" was as close to classic King as anything he had produced in a long, long time. 

I'm going to be a douchebag and quote myself real quick:

"I'm not going to make any grand pronouncements about a 'comeback or (ahem) a revival here. We'll have to see if King can sustain this newfound focus with whatever he comes up with next. But, in the meantime, I'm just so grateful to have once again had the exhilarating experience with a new King book that I used to expect as a matter of course."

I've read "Revival" again in the months since this review, and for me it's skating ever closer to earning that classic label. I'm still not quite ready to go there, though.

But I have no such reservations with his latest book, "Finders Keepers." The exhilaration I felt when I read "Revival" is there, but positively squared this time. This is King's best novel — by a wide, wide margin — since his early/middle period ended with 1987's "Misery."

He's had a couple books that have come sort of close in the years since. 1996's "Desperation" comes to mind, as does his fourth Dark Tower novel, 1997's "Wizard and Glass." I personally have a deep fondness for 2003's "From a Buick 8," even if nobody else really does. But nothing (except for "Revival," "Full Dark..." and maybe "11/22/63") has felt like a truly towering achievement since "Misery."

Until now.

"Finders Keepers" is second in a trilogy of crime novels, directly influenced by writers like John D. McDonald (an oft-referenced King favorite). "Mr. Mercedes" was the first in the series but, like with "Star Wars" and "The Godfather: Part 2," it's really the second installment that's the defining masterpiece.

"Mr. Mercedes" was good, but it had its problems. The best things about it are the lead character, retired police detective Bill Hodges, and a truly frightening villain, Brady Hartsfield. The spine of the story is solid, but King wanders outside of its confines and stumbles into areas that challenge our suspension of disbelief. The biggest problems come when King has the elderly and corpulent Hodges enter with startling ease into a passionate love affair with a beautiful, much younger woman ("Revival" kind of has the same Woody Allen-esque old-man wish-fulfillment problem, but you sort of buy it more there since the main character, Jamie Morton, is a rode-hard bad-boy rocker and not a fat ex-cop who starts the book mostly sitting around eating Cheetohs and watching game shows).  These issues only compound when Hodges joins forces with two other would-be detectives — Holly, a middle-aged woman with Aspergers, and Jerome, Hodges's genius teenage neighbor — to stop Brady in his murderous tracks. Jerome and Holly are, like Hodges, pretty great characters on their own, but you just don't quite believe the meet-cute way they all come together.

The third major problem with "Mr. Mercedes" is its overall lackluster conclusion. King had dipped his toes into the hard-boiled world before (most masterfully with his 1985 short story "Dolan's Cadillac," which you can find anthologized in his 1993 short-story collection "Nightmares and Dreamscapes"), but never at novel-length. He's working undeveloped muscles with "Mr. Mercedes," and you can sort of feel him straining toward the end. None of these problems are fatal, but — Edgar award notwithstanding — they knock the book down a peg from "great" to merely "pretty good."

You feel none of that strain in "Finders Keepers" (well, maybe a little when Jerome conveniently shows up again to help out about halfway through). This story takes place four years later, and Hodges and Holly are a team now. Even if their original coming together strained credibility, here King has the advantage of picking up with them after their friendly if not always comfortable rapport has been firmly established.

But fundamentally "Finders Keepers" isn't even really about them. Hodges and Holly don't really join the main action until about halfway through, and they spend most of the rest of the book playing catch-up. The real main characters are a kid named Pete Saubers and a hardened old parolee named Morris Bellamy.

Bellamy is King's most compelling human monster since Annie Wilkes in "Misery." And that might be because, like Annie, Bellamy is an obsessed fan who turns against a famous author. I'm sure that's a subject that hits King right in all the feels.

The author in question is a reclusive genius named John Rothstein. After publishing a trilogy of novels about the life of a wayward youth named Jimmy Gold, Rothstein packs it in and retires to a New Hampshire farmhouse, never to be heard from again. But rumors abound; word on the street is that he never stopped writing.

Rothstein is an obvious riff on J.D. Salinger, but there's also some John Updike and Philip Roth in there. His "Runner" trilogy (comprised of "The Runner," "The Runner Sees Action" and "The Runner Slows Down") seems like a nod to Updike's "Rabbit" novels. And while Rothstein's Jimmy Gold character has a lot of Holden Caulfield in him — he's even got his own catch phrase, "shit don't mean shit" — he's also a clear analogue to Roth's Nathan Zuckerman alter-ego.

"Finders Keepers" opens with an 80-year-old Rothstein being rudely awakened by a trio of home invaders. The year is 1978, and Rothstein hasn't published anything in nearly two decades. Two of the masked men are clearly after Rothstein's money, but the third — Bellamy — wants something else. Bellamy is the criminal-minded estranged son of a respected English professor, and he sees himself as something of a literary sophisticate. In particular, he's imprinted himself deeply onto Jimmy Gold, in the way Mark David Chapman imprinted onto Caulfield and — indeed — Annie Wilkes imprinted onto Misery Chastain.

Bellamy is enraged by where Rothstein left Jimmy — a middle-aged man with a paunch, who has given up his anti-social and existential rebellion for a wife, a kid, a house in the suburbs, and a job in advertising. To Bellamy's distorted world view, not only did Jimmy sell out, but Rothstein made him sell out. To Bellamy, Jimmy is more real than any living breathing human, including the man who created him. Rothstein barely rates as a person and, to Bellamy, he must be punished.

So Bellamy kills him, much to the shock and dismay of his accomplices (this isn't a spoiler, by the way; it happens in the first chapter and the info is on the dust jacket). The gang runs off with $20,000 in cash and over a hundred hand-written notebooks taken from Rothstein's safe. Bellamy hopes and prays that Rothstein redeemed his beloved Jimmy somewhere in those notebooks, and a quick glance suggests to him that this might in fact be the case.

But before Bellamy can read the notebooks, he runs to his hometown in northern Ohio — the same unnamed city where "Mr. Mercedes" took place — and has an unpleasant encounter with an old friend, a wannabe book dealer named Andy Halliday. Halliday was the one who first proposed robbing Rothstein, but now that the deed is done he wants no part of the scheme and leaves Bellamy to fend for himself. In a rage, Bellamy hides the notebooks in a trunk and then finds himself locked up for more than three decades for a completely unrelated crime committed while he was blackout drunk.

Bellamy's narrative interweaves with that of Pete's, whose dad was one of the victims of Brady Hartsfield, the Mercedes Killer. Tom Saubers was a good husband and father, but now gravely injured and jobless during the Great Recession he's turning into a bitter, mean drunk. Reduced to a single income and choking on hospital bills, the Saubers family is coming apart.

It's in this moment of desperation that thirteen-year-old Pete stumbles on a strange trunk buried in the woods behind his house. Inside, he finds $20,000 in cash and stacks of lovingly preserved notebooks.

Pete uses the money to surreptitiously help his family. He also reads the notebooks and becomes as obsessed with John Rothstein and Jimmy Gold as Bellamy. But when the money runs out a couple years later, Pete decides to approach a shady book dealer with designs on selling the notebooks for a hefty profit. The book dealer just happens to be Andy Halliday.

You can probably sort of guess where the story is going from here, particularly after Bellamy is granted an unexpected parole. He's as obsessed with finding out what happened to Jimmy Gold as he was in 1978, and he wants his notebooks back.

To say much more would risk giving too much away. By the time Hodges, Holly and Jerome are brought into the story (Pete's little sister just happens to be BFFs with Jerome's sister Barbara), things are well on their way to a disastrous collision.

"Finders Keepers" is a remarkably assured crime/suspense novel from a guy who is admittedly more comfortable with the narrative conveniences of supernatural horror. But he's been working out since "Mr. Mercedes," and it shows. As I said in my earlier review, "Revival" was, for me, King's scariest book in broader, cosmic sense since "Pet Sematary." That's still the case. But "Finders Keepers" is his most sharply suspenseful in that grubbily human, tightening-of-the-screws way since at least "Misery"... possibly even "Cujo." It's the sort of book where you find yourself yelling at characters not to go into that room, answer that phone, or open this door. When one character makes a choice of almost jaw-dropping stupidity, I literally screamed in horror.

Beyond being a solid suspense yarn, "Finders Keepers" is also a pretty compelling rumination on the writer's relationship to his/her fans and the fans' relationship to the writer's characters. As fascinating a villain as Annie Wilkes is, "Misery" keeps us locked within writer Paul Sheldon's subjectivity and Annie herself remains pretty opaque. Here, King lets us go inside both Bellamy's diseased mind and Pete's marginally saner one. King shows that he understands the fan's perspective, and he asks some real questions about who has the ultimate right the characters, the writer or the reader. As another George R.R. Martin fan steadily working myself into a rage over the long-delayed release of "The Winds of Winter," it's a question I wrestle with every time some asshole posts a "Game of Thrones" spoiler on Facebook.

King's only real misstep here is in his characterization of Andy Halliday. Halliday is fat, pretentious, slimy, mincing, and gay, and he feels like an uncomfortable callback to the sort of "sissy" characters Hollywood used to feed us in movies like "The Maltese Falcon" and "Laura." If he'd been a character in an old movie, he would have undoubtedly been played by Peter Lorre. Andy's sexuality isn't a major part of the story and it's mostly used to show Bellamy's intense, prison-bred homophobia. But it's unnecessary and annoying and a reminder that, as progressive as he is, King is of a different (and slightly clueless) generation.

That dissonant note aside, "Finders Keepers" cracks right along and moves steadily toward a conclusion that, unlike the one he gave us in "Mr. Mercedes," feels like the perfect explosive culmination of what had come before. Interestingly, in setting up the third volume of the trilogy ("End of Watch," coming some time next year), he threads in hints of his familiar supernatural horror. I have mixed feelings about that — this trilogy so clearly takes place in a different universe from the rest of his work (a point made by a reference to the "Shawshank Redemption" soundtrack, which Holly professes to be among her favorites but more importantly firmly establishes King's other output as a work of fiction in this trilogy's world). I'd kind of like him to stick to the hard-boiled approach in the last book.

But what he's hinting at promises to be... well, pretty fucking awesome. I've got my fingers crossed.