2014 began with viewings of 2013 movies that saw wider release in 2014.
I really enjoyed Her, Spike Jonze’s poignant mix of fancy and romance with Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore, a lonely man who conducts a romantic relationship with his highly intelligent operating system, OS1 (voice by Scarlett Johansson) who calls herself Samantha. The film explores what constitutes love. Could you fall in love with someone who is just a voice? Well, considering that empathy, common interests, and listening are crucial elements in any relationship, I think it is totally possible. Without a doubt, I could fall in love with Scarlett Johansson’s voice. I also enjoyed the film’s very possible sci-fi technology: voice-control operating systems. Liked the scene in which Theodore downloads the snazzy-looking software. Love it when Theodore gets jealous about Samantha spending too much time hanging out with “other operating systems.” Yikes! Those other OS’s were studs!
Another 2013 release I caught was August: Osage County, the film based on the Tracy Letts play. It features a cast of many talented actors and actresses, though Julianne Nicholson as the sensitive middle daughter, Ivy, and Chris Cooper as Uncle Charles stand out over the histrionics of Meryl Streep as the pill-popping Violet Weston. Have to say that Julia Roberts did a good job – one of her best performances. While not as compelling or even as funny and wild as the play – a typical Lettsian romp into extremes – this film version of the Broadway hit offers some memorably touching and funny moments. “Eat the fucking fish, bitch.”
In Lone Survivor Mark Wahlberg plays a sole-surviving Navy Seal in a squad that gets into trouble in the mountains of Afghanistan. Taylor (John Carter, Battleship, Savages) Kitsch plays the squad leader; I really like him as an action hero. Three of the heroes are transformed by graphic, very bloody wounds and their crucifixion-like deaths into Christ-figures flagellated by their suffering in a war in which they have offered themselves up as sacrifices. The movie features gorgeous outdoor exteriors of rugged mountains and some gripping action, but it ultimately deflates due to excessive patriotic propaganda and a final firefight in which the film turns into a montonous shoot-‘em-up and Wahlberg’s bad acting gets in the way.
Dallas Buyers Club is a touching but disturbing portrait of a man dying of AIDS as he endeavors to avail himself and other sufferers of the unapproved drugs that might help them. Following in the bony fashion of Michael Fassbender in Hunger and Christian Bale in The Machinist, Matthew McConnaughey must have starved himself to play the emaciated Ron Woodroof whose desperate entrepreneurial drive extends his own life and alleviates some of the torture that other victims are enduring. McC. is superb as Woodroof, as is Jared Leto as Rayon, a transvestite dying of the virus. The scene in which Rayon dresses in a male suit to beg his bitterly disappointed banker father for cash is a subtle, superbly rendered scene.
In The Invisible Woman, directed by Ralph Fiennes, Dickens comes to life, as portrayed by Fiennes, and Felicity Jones is perfectly cast as the young actress, Nellie Ternan, with whom Charlie carries on a clandestine affair during the latter years of his brilliant career. Though the relationship between Dickens and Ternan is not adequately developed, Fiennes’s performance and the rich art direction stand out as strengths. Fiennes invests himself heartily in the role of Dickens, showing how the gregarious genius encouraged parties to go on until 5:00 AM by captivating his company with his jokes, tales, games, and acts of mesmerism. The meticulously rendered sets and the palpable atmosphere transport the viewer as though by time machine to mid-1800s Victorian England. The film leaves you hankering to dive into a big fat novel by Boz.
Jason Reitman makes Labor Day a tense, visually poetic (shades of Malick) drama about a benevolent escaped convict named Frank (Josh Brolin) who hides out in a house with willing hostages Adele (Kate Winslet), a manic-depressive, agoraphobic divorced woman and her insecure son, Henry (Gattlin Griffith). The fine acting and the memorable atmosphere are strengths here – and even though this may not be one of the best films of 2013, it certainly has one of the most memorable scenes, a sensuous and sensual episode involving Frank, Adele, and Hank making a peach pie. Wow! Makes you want to dash to the kitchen and make a pie! But writer/director Reitman should have allowed this central scene to stand in isolation, and should have settled on an ambiguous ending. Instead, he ventures into a cutesy happy ending that takes the peach pie element and turns it into the kind of device book publishers, looking for readers’ club darlings, love to froth over.
I guess I started off the actual 2014 movie year with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Top-heavy title, top-heavy acting by Kenneth Branagh, but very snappy direction by Branagh. Chris Pine as hot-shot CIA agent Jack Ryan and Keira Knightley as his gutsy fiancé drive the action throughout this been-there-done-that plot. But there are some genuinely suspenseful moments.
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