Category Archives: Jon Ronson

Listmania ‘09! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part One

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I had hoped this would be the last post, but as ever, I run off at the mouth. Fingers. Whatever.

Most Underrated Movie of the Year: The Invention of Lying

It’s not a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination. It’s poorly directed, sloppily structured, paced badly, and apparently the original script is much stronger (I have yet to read it, sadly). Nevertheless, it’s also terrific brainfood, features an incredibly ballsy middle-act satire on religion that drew gasps of surprise from the audience we saw it with, and happily skewers the idea of romantic love as depicted in the movies. As expectations of real-world romantic love are often distorted by expectations generated by the fake movie world, it was nice to see this subverted with such glee. Ricky Gervais also surprised us with an emotionally powerful scene in a hospital. Real tears flowed down my shocked face. Who knew he had it in him?

Honorable Mentions:

G-Force (A clever spoof of action movie cliches mistaken for an empty and noisy kids movie.)
A Christmas Carol (As I said before, a loyal and thoughtful adaptation with a lovely painterly look.)
Pandorum (A committed performance by Ben Foster and a consistently bleak atmosphere make this worth watching.)
Land of the Lost (Horrible final act but we laughed a lot on the way there. I also laughed a fair bit at Year One, especially at Oliver Platt. What?!??!)
Duplicity (A very entertaining con-trick movie with a ton of very entertaining performances, especially from Clive Owen, star of the also-very-entertaining The International.)

Most Overrated Movie of the Year: Up In The Air

By the end of the year it felt like only a handful of critics had seen through the glossy, heartwarming sheen of polish that coated Jason Reitman’s phony feel-good confection. A quick look at Rotten Tomatoes shows Armond White didn’t like it, and along with his rant against Precious is probably the only other time I’ve agreed with him this year. Dana Stevens, Stephanie Zacharek, J. Hoberman, Karina Longworth and Keith Uhlich also resisted its sickly charms, along with a few other choice reviewers. I’m honestly not sure what I can say to top Will Leitch’s elegant takedown of the film, except that this is the one movie this year that almost had me all the way through to the end and then just lost me completely in the final act. The ridiculous U-turn of one character — as clunky a “twist” as anything I’ve seen in poorly plotted action movies — was the final straw.

Some great work from the cast still deserves praise, and there were enjoyable moments throughout, but I cannot forgive it for all the clangingly obvious metaphorical messages, its sneering distrust of anyone’s desire for isolation (Ryan Bingham is portrayed as a kind of crazy person for not wanting to hang out with his awful family), its attempts to streamline Walter Kirn’s unorthodox (and horribly overwritten) novel, or its final message. Yes, I can attest to the fact that unemployment can indeed have the unintended consequence of allowing a person to reconnect with his family, and the support and love that they can give is a wonderful thing. I’m a better person for that experience. However, as wonderful and as welcome as that is, there is still the gnawing uncertainty and fear that remains underneath it. Unemployment is not a betterment opportunity. It’s an absolutely fucking terrible and distressing situation. The mawkish attempt to spin it as a kind of freedom — using non-actors who had in fact just been laid off — made me want to set fire to the screen. When this wins 20 Oscars later this year, I will be saying the swearwords I reserve for special occasions.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire (This year’s Slumdog Millionaire. I just want to forget it happened.)
Mesrine (I heard some people compare this rather average and overlong crime flick to The Godfather. Without irony! It’s a kind of madness.)
The Hangover (A comedy with a structure but no jokes. Its success has left me utterly baffled.)

“Trying Too Hard” Direction Of The Year: Tom Hooper (The Damned United)

Some great performances and a nifty script by Peter Morgan forced to contend with all kinds of tricksy and unnecessary compositional flash. A shame, as it’s a good enough movie that even someone who hates football/soccer as much as myself was riveted throughout. This “award” might not seem like it, but consider this a recommendation. Ignore the attention-seeking framing. Enjoy the performances instead.

Best Movie of 2008 That We Saw in 2009: Rachel Getting Married


Nothing I can add to this post, really. It knocked our socks off and the memory of it lingers on. Simply an instant classic.

Honourable Mention:

Synecdoche, New York (Wrenching to watch, but fascinating nevertheless. I’d rewatch it to get a better view of it, but I’m too scared to endure it again.)

Worst Movie of 2008 That We Saw in 2009: The Reader


Lest this comment turn into a profane rant, let’s just say that letting this profoundly awful and ethically dubious piece of crap go past greenlight — let alone onto screens and into awards ceremonies — is a black moment for culture in general. I watched the whole godforsaken thing in a state of apoplexy, horrified at its weak moral arguments and shitty veneer of classiness. It’s the worst kind of empty Oscar-bait. I may have hated Crash, but it’s worth ten Readers. Bury it under a mound of salt. ::spits on movie::

Dishonorable Mention:

Punisher War Zone (One of the dumbest and most tedious superhero movies of recent times. The Punisher accidentally kills a cop and mopes in his lair for 80% of the movie? Yay fun!)

Most Baffling Movie of the Year: All About Steve


Even weeks after seeing it I have just no idea what the hell this movie was supposed to be doing. Appreciation of humour might be a completely subjective thing, but even taking its “comedic” efforts off the table, I’m still just not sure what was going on from one scene to the next. Are we meant to dislike Mary? Admire her? Love her? Hate Steve? Root for them both? Root for her and DJ Qualls’ nerdy character? What the hell was the sub-plot about the three legged baby? The worst comedy metaphor for abortion ever? What the hell is funny or logical about people protesting the amputation of a baby’s vestigial third leg? What tone was it going for? Why did a tornado appear in the middle of the movie? Oh God, it made my head hurt trying to keep up with it. I doubt even a re-edit could save this pitiful mess.

Dishonorable Mention: Yatterman

Takashi Miike’s version of the old anime series was certainly garishly coloured, hyperactive, and featured several cartoonish elements. That much he got right. It also featured a giant robot dog being attacked by a giant robot woman with missiles for nipples. The robot dog then sends an army of robot ants to attack the robot woman, and they agitate the nipple missiles so much she begins to have an orgasm. This makes the robot dog horny, and he proceeds to start kissing the woman, who by this point is yelling, “I’m coming!” She then explodes. It also features a man being absorbed into the butt of a creature called the God of Thieves, much buttock-exposure from one character who is creepily obsessed with his female boss, and a completely baffling love triangle plot that bogs down the entire movie and doesn’t seem to get resolved at the end. And yet it still it makes more sense than All About Steve.

Most Obtrusive Product Placement of the Year: Up in the Air


(The photo shown above is sponsored by MacCutcheon whiskey.) When we saw Up In The Air at the London Film Festival, the screening was sponsored by American Airlines. I barely noticed this fact. Half an hour into the movie, I was convinced I was watching an extended and expensive advert for the company. And Hilton Hotels. And Travelpro luggage. I’m not railing against product placement in movies: that would be futile, and besides, though something like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is full of fetishised footage of hot cars and gadgets, it has a kind of pointless gloss and trivial air about it that the commercial nature of it can be ignored as business as usual. In Up in the Air the product placement sometimes feels like the reason the movie exists. Some might argue that this is product placement done well, but during scenes where Clooney and Farmiga compare hotel keys and executive passes in airports, it was easy to forget that the movie was an adaptation of a novel, not the outcome of some godawful synergistic meeting of minds between AA and Hilton and Paramount. The product placement is woven directly into the DNA of the movie like some kind of awful high-budget Mac and Me, with characters even eulogising those products in their dialogue. If that’s that way it’s going to be done, fine. Just don’t expect me to listen to your heartwarming tales of connectivity at the end.

Dishonourable Mention: Love Happens

Walter (John Carroll Lynch) is grieving because his son has died after falling off some scaffolding at his construction site, and he blames himself. It has stopped him working, and he is close to financial ruin. And here comes Burke Ryan (Aaron Eckhart) to get Walter out of his emotional slump by taking him and their therapy group to Home Depot, where he buys him a huge pile of tools for just under $3000, and this magically fixes his crippling emotional wound! Hey, you can kit yourself with everything a handyman needs for just under $3000 at Home Depot? Thanks, movie! That’s not at all horribly manipulative and staggeringly tasteless!

Most Disappointing Movie of the Year: The Men Who Stare At Goats

Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed this adaptation of Jon Ronson’s book. George Clooney is great value as the delusional Lyn Cassidy, and Jeff Bridges is even better as Bill Django. It is occasionally very loyal both to the book and the TV series Ronson also made (The Crazy Rulers of the World), and some of the setpiece moments are nicely done. However, when you go back and revisit the original materials, you realise how Grant Heslov and Peter Straughan waste a lot of energy on making the material seem wacky when it’s already mindbogglingly odd just on its own. Even worse, the final act is a complete disaster, full of childish slapstick that undercuts the two minutes of serious subtext. The hastily added battle-against-the-antagonist doesn’t help. By the end the tone wore on me. With the benefit of hindsight I’d find it hard to recommend it to anyone. Best to stick with the book and TV series. They’re funny and disturbing and rage-inducing, all in the right proportions.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Outlander (Really really long and kinda boring, though it gets some scenes really right.)
Les regrets (Well made and absorbing, but too similar to director Cédric Kahn’s earlier movie L’ennui.)
Two Lovers (Well observed and very well performed, but as with James Gray’s other movies, the emphasis on style and tone comes at the expense of dramatic oomph.)
The House of the Devil (OMG it’s the scariest movie of the year! Except it’s actually just really slow and the ending is silly rather than scary. A damn shame. I really wanted to like it.)
Franklyn (As with House of the Devil, the kind of low-budget labour of love I really wanted to support, but just couldn’t. I look forward to future films by both filmmakers, though.)

Not Disappointing, Not Great, But Still Worth Watching Movie Of The Year: Extract


As with Office Space, Mike Judge expends a lot of energy introducing a plot that gets abandoned two thirds of the way through and then just sort of gets resolved in a half-arsed manner. Also, lots of great character actors do terrific work, but often get given some rough material and unfinished arcs to work with. Nevertheless, this is the charm of Mike Judge’s work. It’s not polished or finessed, and even in this rough diamond state allows for more laughs — and satirical heft — than most comedies released. It’s just a shame that the energy peters out with such predictability (with the caveat that Ben Affleck is hilarious all the way through). Though it’s not fashionable to say it, I’m increasingly of the opinion that his strongest movie is coincidentally his angriest: Idiocracy. Every revisit to that movie makes me laugh more. Maybe in time it will be considered his best work.

Most Tediously Conservative Remake of the Year: Race To Witch Mountain


That’s right, it’s not The Taking of Pelham 123. That was indeed a terrible and pointless remake, but it at least had some awareness of what made the original memorable. Tony Scott and Brian Helgeland kept some moments that worked, threw out the rest, and added some very annoying modern accoutrements (post-Die Hard banter between villain and hero, swearing, the Internet). That sucked, but the latest remake of the Witch Mountain stories was a different kind of crappy remake. More mediocre than bad, but formed by a series of stupid and unadventurous choices. The original movie — directed by the quirky British director John Hough — was a peculiar beast, made during a period when Disney’s live-action movies felt like they were made by people who were thinking their story through instead of just glomming bits together from other films. Not all of those movies were great, but they were certainly lively. This remake dropped all of the atmosphere and ambiguous plotting in favour of a predictable Fifth Element carbon-copy complete with cab driver. It’s horribly boring, makes fun of SF fans, and completely wastes two of the hottest and most appealing lead actors ever (Dwayne Johnson and Carla Gugino, who should be running Hollywood by now). Avoid like the plague.

Okay, one more to go. It’s really trivial. That’s a warning.

What I Did At The London Film Festival (So Far)

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We walked on a red carpet on Monday. I felt like an interloper, especially clad in hobo jacket, Converse, and Green Lantern T-Shirt, but it was still a weirdly thrilling moment. Getting tickets to the first UK performance of Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! (oh, that infuriating exclamation point…) was an accident of timing, not an attempt to rubberneck at a glamour collision, but it’s fine. The London Film Festival seems to be pretty casual. Only Soderbergh, writer Scott Z. Burns and producer Gregory Jacobs were dressed to the nines, and even then they seemed relaxed. Seeing Soderbergh delighted daisyhellcakes, who has had terrible luck spotting celebrities in the past (so far she’s seen Johnny Vegas, Bill Bailey, Jeffrey Archer and Queen Nigella), but refused to take a picture of the great man, stating that it would be gauche. As I’d seen the Enter The Void audience eagerly snapping away at Gaspar Noé last week, I figured it would be okay, but after taking this blurry picture…

soderbergh

…I convinced myself that the final stutter in Soderbergh’s short speech was caused by him spotting me and thinking, “Dude, that’s totes gauche.” For the record, I’m sorry Mr. Soderbergh. I liked Solaris, if that’s any consolation.

The lack of a distribution deal for Enter The Void is making me unbelievably sad. Attending that screening was something I did on a whim after seeing Drew McWeeny become so enthusiastic, and now I realise that if I hadn’t gone I might never have had the chance to see it on the big screen. Just yesterday Edgar Wright was tweeting his frustration at having missed it, and it threw my good fortune into perspective. Is there any way to start a campaign to save it from oblivion on DVD, when the only distribution deal it has seems to be getting a release in Finland next April? As the version I saw was seemingly different from those at Cannes and Toronto, perhaps it’s still being fine-tuned, and then it will be put on the market again. Certainly there are longueurs at about the 100 minute mark, but I’m not sure what could be removed without ruining the flow.

princecharles

The one thought I had would be for the Prince Charles Cinema to stump up for their very own print. Despite its punishing length, this is the perfect midnight-screening cult movie in waiting, with massive appeal to counter-cultural audiences and cinephiles who can understand what Noé is trying to achieve (a group that excludes J. Hoberman and Variety’s Rob Nelson, who completely missed the point of the movie). It would take time for them to get their money back, as the buzz on this film has yet to grow properly, but it would be a wise investment. Unless it did suddenly get a distribution deal and the film turned up elsewhere, but still, right now, it’s not looking too good.

upintheair

Sadness over the fate of that one movie aside, the festival has been extremely enjoyable so far. Even the one movie I’ve not liked — Jason Reitman’s disappointing Up In The Air, which I hope to write about soon — has its pleasures, especially the terrific performances from George Clooney and Anna Kendrick. For the most part audiences have been great too, with enthusiastic responses to The Men Who Stare At Goats and The Informant! reminding me why seeing movies at the cinema can be a rewarding experience, though Mr. Honking McOverlaugh who sat behind us during The Informant! was a bit of a trial. Yes yes, it’s a very funny film, but Mr. Soderbergh is sitting at the back of the room and even your guffaws cannot reach that far, especially when my eardrums are absorbing 90% of the sound energy.

maxcady

It’s not all roses, though. If you’re a new reader visiting this site after searching for info about London Film Festival screenings, please can I beg you to do the right thing and arrive at the screenings with plenty of time to spare? If you’ve not already picked up your tickets, there can be terrible queues, and that’s after navigating the barriers, security guards, and photographers blocking the pedestrianised roads of Leicester Square. The movies have tended to start a few minutes late, but there are no trailers or adverts, so if a film is supposed to start at, say, 16:15, the film will be on the screen at around 16:20, and arriving at 16:30 is going to piss a lot of people off. Oh, and the tickets have allocated seat numbers on them FOR A REASON. This message is directed at the numerous people who seem to love sitting wherever they want, and then look put out when they are evicted from their seats by ushers not long after the film has already started. I’m looking at you, selfish idiots who figured sitting by me was the thing to do and then ruined the start of Enter The Void and White Material, with extra bonus fuck you’s to the couple who turned up late at White Material and then left their phones on. Assholes.

I’ve had fun with the odd connections between the movies I’ve seen so far. The Informant! and Claire Denis’ White Material are centred by main characters (played with great skill by Matt Damon and the incredible Isabelle Huppert respectively) whose inability to see the dire consequences of their behaviour dooms them. In Soderbergh’s movie Mark Whitacre’s insanity is played for laughs for the most part, though those laughs run out by the end as you realise the man is so deeply embedded in his fantasy life that he doesn’t even seem capable of keeping track of it. Maria Vial — the protagonist of White Material — is in just as much denial, but perhaps even to the extent of not recognising her own cultural and ethnic background. Her ambiguous actions in the final moments of the film could be the product of derangement or berserk revenge, but whatever their origin, they were enough to deeply upset the lady sitting next to me. She seemed traumatised, poor dear.

extract

Other connections abound. Jason Bateman teams up with Jason Reitman again for Up In The Air, and also features in Extract, which I’m hoping to see tomorrow. Melanie Lynskey appears in Up In The Air and The Informant!, and is similarly weak in each movie. Clooney appears in The Men Who Stare At Goats and Up In The Air, and co-produced The Informant! Up In The Air and Up (which I saw again on Sunday, though it was not part of the festival) is about men who find escape in flying, and learn to connect with others. The protagonists of White Material and Enter The Void are often filmed from behind: in White Material as a representation of how Maria is hiding her true face from herself and others, and in Enter The Void as a consequence of the PoV conceit. Enter The Void and The Men Who Stare At Goats features talk of esoteric beliefs, as well as the use of hallucinogens.

goats

That was one of the things that annoyed me most about Goats. While Enter The Void took the use of hallucinogenic compounds seriously, Goats used it as a stupid punchline, with characters acting as if they were drunk and high-lariously falling over a lot and talking about how hungry they are. Goats was a lot of fun, but the relentlessly silly tone made it hard for the film to shift gears in the final act when we see the negative consequences of letting a bunch of insecure New Age dipsticks into the army. What was, in Jon Ronson’s excellent book, a sobering portrait of US psy-ops torture techniques gone weird is here transformed into a slapstick romp with one minute of “Oh noes, war is bad” added to give the protagonists something to fight for. The book still manages to be funny, but Ronson’s a skillful enough writer to juxtapose the wacky with the awful. Here it’s shoehorned in, and seemingly only to give a dramatic edge to the Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey) character arc that suddenly appears midway through the movie. Writer Peter Straughan does some good work in translating the oddness of Ronson’s book into movie form, and keeps the funniest material mostly intact, but the artificial three-act structure and neatness of the final few minutes smack of laziness. Still, it remains very entertaining, and what it gets right it really gets right. Jeff Bridges — as New Earth Army leader Bill Django — perfectly channels the craziness of First Earth Battalion leader Jim Channon…

…and first-time director Grant Heslov is good enough to recreate the pictures shown in Channon’s manifesto: a lovely touch. It feels like the film will touch on all aspects of the insanity of war in a similar way to Clooney’s previous Gulf War film Three Kings, but even with the addition of warring Blackwater-esque security forces and asides showing Clooney and Ewan McGregor wandering through Iraq getting into scrapes, it never fully takes off. I’d still recommend it, though. As with Up In The Air, Clooney does miracle work holding everything together. It’s easy to forget what a great film star he is. He does comedy and drama equally well, and now he’s removed almost all of his tics, he can excel at both over-the-top dopey comedy or subtle and moving character work. We’re lucky he’s around.

theinformant

My recommendation for The Informant! is much stronger. Though we were exhausted while watching, and were sitting in the Odeon West End which — unlike the Vue West End which is showing the majority of films — is not air-conditioned, it turned out to be almost as good as we had hoped. Spoilery trailers and press releases have given away the delusional nature of Mark Whitacre, but Soderbergh and ace writer Burns hide the depth of his craziness until a wonderful final act where everyone involved in the Lysine price-fixing investigation is shocked by his slowly unravelling web of lies. The cast doesn’t have a single weak link, with an unexpectedly complex performance from Matt Damon at the heart of the movie, but I have to give special props to Scott Bakula, who is particularly affecting as the enthusiastic FBI agent whose career goes awry thanks to Whitacre’s deceptions. His increasingly heartbroken face adds a bittersweet note to the zany proceedings. Props also to Joel McHale in his first dramatic role: weird seeing the snarky Soup host playing straight man to Damon.

whitematerial

I also heartily recommend White Material, but I’m still processing that one, so I won’t go on about it too much, except to say that a) Claire Denis has a mastery of pace and atmosphere that would shame other directors, but then you probably already knew that, and b) Christopher Lambert was good enough to make me partially forgive him for his dire performance in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. I can lay the blame for that on Kelly, I guess. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, after all.