Quick review: Men in Black 3

 (this is another quick review as I wanted to get a review out quick yet don't have time to do a full review)

Grade: C+

It's pretty obvious this movie didn't have a script finished before they began production. You can almost see the director (Barry Sonnenfeld) going "okay now Will ad lib" throughout like half of the scenes. Luckily for the people making this movie Will Smith is really charming when on camera. Him, a surly and really looking old Tommy Lee Jones, and Josh Brolin doing a spot on Tommy Lee Jones impersonation have to carry this movie, and for the most part they do. The story follows the same formula as the other two: A big bad alien threatens to destroy Earth and it's up to the men in black to stop it. This alien is called Boris the Animal and is played by Jemaine Clement in a lot of make up. Jemaine Clement is a funny guy so this was an odd casting choice playing the completely serious Boris. It still works enough though.

That's kind of the theme of this movie. Everything just works enough to make it enjoyable. Smith is charming enough to ab lib a lot of his lines. Josh Brolin is talented enough to play a character as relatively blank as young Agent k and still make his scenes enjoyable. Michael Stuhlbarg is good enough at playing whimsical to make his character (an alien the agents have to save from Boris) likeable instead of annoying. There aren't any big laughs but the movie is funny enough to make you smile. There isn't much of a story but there is enough to make the surprisingly heartfelt ending still hit and almost enough to bring up a tear. Overall this movie didn't need to be made, but at least they did enough to make it worth while.

Quick reviews: The Ides of March

 (I haven't fully had time to write out full review of this movie and I want to say something before I forget too much so here is an abridged review)

The Ides of March (Dir. George Clooney 2011)- Grade: B+
Ides is a very capable movie. I mean that in the sense that it is just good at everything. The story is interesting and takes realistic yet surprising twists. It's just a real good political espionage film. It features a very strong cast. Clooney plays a role very polarizing to the one he plays in The Descendants which shows how impressive he was in The Descendants more than anything. Ryan Gosling continues to show why he owned 2011 with another strong showing. They then round out the cast with a menacing Paul Giamatti (probably the best kind of Giamatti), a no nonsense Phillip Seymour Hoffman (the subplot of Hoffman and Giamatti essentially playing the angle and devil on Gosling's character's shoulder is maybe the best part of the movie), and Marisa Tomei as a reporter willing to get the story no matter what.

It's weaknesses are small but mainly revolved around Clooney's behind the camera work. It clearly had a strong story that it was based off of so it's too bad the writing wasn't handled by a more accomplished writer that would know how to really turn the story into something more memorable (think what Sorkin did with The Social Network) instead of just kind of fall short or greatness like Clooney and Grant Heslov's writing does. The directing falls into the same category. It was fine but Clooney too often went for the epic and it ended up just looking like he was forcing it. At times it was like he was trying to make a modern day Citizen Kane by just doing the exact same things as Citizen Kane (the argument Gosling and Hoffman have behind the American flag backdrop for instance). Still though you have a good movie with a good cast. It won't be remembered five years from now like the rest of the good movies to come out this last year, but it's still a lot better than most generic looking political films that come out.

Movies I love, that don't get enough love

I’m all about love right now. Maybe it’s the spring weather finally kicking in and seasonal affective disorder kicking out. Maybe it’s that I just finished a midterm that I feel good about. Maybe it’s a lot of things. But either way I’m feel like spreading the love and what better way to do it then with my first list. I love lists! I love them because lists categorize things and as a future accountant I love categorizing things. I thought my first list was going to be my favorite movies of 2011, but that is taking far too long and will have to wait. Instead I’ve decided to make a list all about love. Specifically, I want to give love to movies that I feel deserve more love than they normally receive. For various reasons these movies more or less fell between the cracks of popular culture, and while they are fantastic, I don’t feel like they get enough love overall. Without further a due here is my list of movies I love that don’t get enough love:

Brick (Rian Johnson 2005, On Netflix instant): This movie is what started this list. It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I unabashedly love Brick. It’s a complicated crime mystery involving a guy (loner Brendan Fry played awesomely by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) whose ex-girlfriend goes missing and he is on the trail to try and figure out what happened. Its neo-noir at it’s absolutely best as the story twists and turns. The dialogue is so razor sharp that I still am picking things up on my fourth and fifth viewing. Every character talks like they are some sort of closeted literary major who also happens to sell drugs and has read The Art of War. It’s easily one of the most quotable movies ever made. The last half hour is so complex and full of twists that I am utterly useless to society when it’s on still to this day. Oh and it’s all mind blowingly set in high school.

Marwencol (Jeff Malmberg 2010, On Netflix instant): Mark Hogancamp was beaten within an inch of his life outside of a bar. He recovered but is left with serious brain damage. Because of this he was no longer able to have interactions like a normal human being leaving him alone and sad. As the tagline for this movie says “his world was stolen.” As a way to combat this he created his own world in his backyard, with a town he calls Marwencol. Marwencol is a 1/6^th scale town that is inhabited by characters Mark creates using WW2 era dolls. He chronicles these stories with his camera and what comes out of it is unquestionably art. Not only are the dolls and town painstakingly accurate to the real world, but the stories Mark tells with them are better than 90% of the movies being created in Hollywood. Everything about Mark’s world is fascinating and this documentary does a great job of exploring everything. From Mark’s accident, to Marwencol, to Mark’s oddities, and it all culminates triumphantly in Mark’s first showcase.

Kicking and Screaming (Noah Baumbach 1995, On Netflix instant): First off this isn’t the Will Ferrell movie of the same title. Instead, this is defining movie that any recent or about to be college graduate should watch. It’s about a group of recently graduated friends who struggle to figure out their place post-college. It’s not a particularly original premise and nothing really happens, but for what it lacks in originality climax it more than makes up for with “leaving you questioning your entire life”-ity. It’s the kind of movie you watch and then spend an hour or so just sitting there afterwards pondering everything. “I’m having one of those times where my name sounds very weird to me” is one of my all time favorite movie quotes. It also has some extremely 90’s fashion in it, you know if you are nostalgic.

Barking Dogs Never Bite (Joon-Ho Bong 2000, On Netflix instant): This is the first foreign film on this list. I contemplated not putting foreign films on here because it’s hard to tell if they were sufficiently loved in their home country, but I put this in because I have a hunch it never did. This is because the director Joon-Ho Bong is a very successful director over in South Korea. He’s best known over in the states for The Host (ironically probably his least favorite of my films, but still enjoyable) and I have to imagine his other more high profile films (Memories of Murder and Mother) got more attention over there, but my favorite film of his is his first feature length film Barking Dogs Never Bite. Like most of his movies it’s a simple premise, a young college professor is at his wits end with a local dog that keeps yapping so he decides to try and shut it up. What ends up happening is both strangely dark and really quirky as he finds it more difficult than he thought to take this dog out. Throughout though it’s all really fun and manic, staples of Joon-Ho’s films.

The Visitor (Thomas McCarthy 2007, Not on instant): I could have just as easily written about another great film from Thomas McCarthy called The Station Agent as both came out to little attention, but I feel like The Visitor is overlooked even more. The Station Agent sometimes gets some attention as people remember it when talking about how much they love Peter Dinklage, but The Visitor is almost never brought up. It’s too bad too because Richard Jenkins (who was nominated for an Oscar for this film) gives just as great of a performance. The movie revolves around a college professor (Jenkins) who goes to his apartment in New York (that he rarely goes to because of his work in another city) for a conference only to find that an immigrant couple has moved in. Rather than kick them out he decides to let them stay. Just as they are forming a great connection the male immigrant is sent to a detention center where Jenkins and his wife try to help get him free. It’s also kind of a hard movie to fully describe but the best way is to just say that it is beautiful and sad.

Four Lions (Christopher Morris 2010, On Netflix instant): It’s early in this movie’s life so there is still time for it to hit cult status but Four Lions is easily one of the funniest movies of the last ten years and nobody knows about it. It’s also not the easiest movie to sell someone on as it’s very dark humor about a group of idiot British Jihadists who are planning a terrorist act, but seriously it’s ridiculously funny. Imagine if the manic rants of Always Sunny in Philadelphia were mixed with the dumb logic and lack of self awareness from Anchorman all set up around overzealous religious absurdity. If that makes any sense, it’s sort of like that. Almost every line and scene is spot on parody, and more importantly it avoids the easy jokes. It could be real easy for someone to make a parody about terrorists that makes racially generalized and religiously ignorant jokes over and over again, but this movie never falls for that crutch. It’s simply hilarious.

So there you go six movies I love that I hope someday you will too. Or maybe you already love some of these movies and you are reading this while nodding along and thinking “Gosh I heart that movie so much!  I should go watch it again.” Either way, you should probably watch them.

Crazy, Stupid, Love

Grade: B

 (I waited way too long before writing about this movie after watching it so this will be a brief review that I figured I should still write because this movie is good and worth watching)

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s Crazy, Stupid, Love is a funny movie. It’s also a very accessible movie as its essentially fun for the whole family humor. Well as long as you are fine with your kids understanding that Ryan Gosling uses the move from Dirty Dancing to get girls to sleep with him. What I mean by accessible is that just about anyone can appreciate this movie. It’s very much like Easy A in that while it still has that studio gloss all over it (cliché storylines, sappy trying too much to be more than just a comedy moments, and visually just looking like a studio movie) it is self aware enough to give even the super serious film buffs something to enjoy. There is this moment when Ryan Gosling is telling Emma Stone about how he usually gets chicks to sleep with him, and the whole time I’m thinking “ugh this is going to be either sappy or dumb” and then he says “I tell them I can do the move from Dirty Dancing.”The movie knew people like me would be skeptical of that moment, so they drew us in in cliché fashion only to surprise us with a twist. Also like Easy A it would make a great first date movie as it has things both parties could enjoy. Honestly if it wasn’t for the kind of serious divorce and cheating thing going on between Julianne Moore and Steve Carell’s characters I might say this is the perfect date movie because of the following things:

A.      It has Ryan Gosling: A year or so ago I would say this is a bad thing, because women love Ryan Gosling and he makes men look inferior by comparison (as Emma Stone says in this “Oh come on, it’s like your photoshopped!”) without making up for it by being awesome by males standards. But then he was in Drive, and kicked boat loads of ass so now men can respect him too. It’s a win-win and speaking of win-wins…

B.      This movie has Emma Stone: Men have loved Emma and her “funny yet still sexy” dry wit ever since Superbad. She’s like the kind of girl you could crack jokes and hang out with, and she would come back with her own jokes that are probably better than yours. Women also seem to really like Emma Stone. Just go look at The Helps box office numbers for proof of that. Really a lot of women just want to be Emma Stone because she seems like the bee’s knees.

C.      It has light humor: Humor is a good way to a girl’s heart. Dark humor usually is not. You may find Fargo hilarious but she may not and that risk is definitely not worth taking on a first date.

D.      It has Steve Carell in it: Steve Carell is right up there with Paul Rudd as far as most universally likable guys in Hollywood. Also Steve Carell could lead to conversations about how much both of you like The Office which could be a really good thing because: A. it could lead to conversations of other great shows you both like and B. if you are charming enough she might start to associate you with Jim Halpert and if she loves The Office she is also madly in love with Jim Halpert. High potential there.

E.       It looks kind of like a chick flick from the previews: This will earn you guys points because it will make you look like the kind of guy who appreciates a chick flick. Then you will get even more points for liking it because you will. It’s not a chick flick though. Just a movie that got marketed like one

.

So there you go. I don’t know really why I said that last part because I am not an expert on dates or women in any way, but in my mind this all makes perfect sense.

If there is one thing about this movie I didn’t enjoy it’s that it has a bad case of the precocious child syndrome. It seems like every movie now has some kid in it that is wise beyond his years and through his logic ends up knowing more about life than the adults. The idea of a child knowing more about life than an adult is completely absurd yet for some reason in the movies they seem to think it makes perfect sense. I think they do it because a lot of people find it funny or cute. So it’s going to continue happening but it bugs me a lot. This movie also gets a bit too sappy at times, but it’s acceptable because there is plenty of funny stuff in it.

So in summation: it’s a funny movie, that’s really universal, has a really appealing cast, and I think would make a good date movie. You should probably watch it.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Grade: B

Story telling is an interesting process. There are so many different ways that you can tell the same story. So many little changes can make big differences in how we perceive the story. You can love or hate the same story based off how it was told, and whether or not we know it we are all aware of this. That’s because we all like to exploit it. You tell the story one way to make you look better. The other person tells it a different way to benefit them. Even if you get two people who are honestly trying to be completely unbiased you will still get two different stories just because we all perceive things differently. And this kind of sucks too because knowing this means that when you hear the story you have to work to sift through what is bias and what is fact.

I say this because after watching Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene I can’t help but notice how similar yet how other worldly different it is from the Greek film Dogtooth. Both are similar in subject. Martha is about a girl who joins cult (lead by a charismatic psychopath) and two years later decides to leave, only to then be haunted by the residual effects from her lifestyle while in the cult. Dogtooth instead focuses on a family that has been isolated from society by their patriarchal father, only to have their world fall to pieces when an outsider is brought into the equation. So not exactly the same but very much the same principal storylines apply. Stockholm syndrome, odd behavior encouraged by the leader, and brain washing are a plenty in both films. They are also filmed similarly in a very minimalist fashion. No fancy tricks with lenses and such (although both have good cinematography). Also little music is heard to give both an uncomfortable tone. The difference though (and a rather big one at that) is that one is a very dark comedy (Dogtooth) and the other is a very serious drama (Martha). See it’s all about how you tell a story.

Now for the review. As I noted earlier Martha is about a girl named Martha. Martha joins a cult, but finds that the deeper she is accepted into the cult’s inner circle the more out of hand things get. It becomes too much for her and she eventually decides to run away. She ends up living with her much older sister at their vacation house in Connecticut with her and her husband. But of course as all this happens you don’t really know any of this. The movie instead decides to tell the story more or less backwards. It starts with her running away, and then through a series of flashbacks we learn about why she chose to run away. It’s an interesting storytelling choice because while (somewhat intentionally) confusing at times, it works to give you more of an understanding of why Martha acts the way she does now.

This is especially helpful because she acts very odd. She tries to swim naked, casually walks in on her sister and husband having sex and rather than leaving the room she curls up in bed with them, and thinks having jobs and earning money is a flawed way of life. In probably the oddest scene of this film, she pees herself while sleeping (which we actually see, it’s not overly graphic I mean she is wearing a dress but it’s definitely one of those “did that just happen” moments) and rather than wash the dress she is borrowing she uses it to clean herself then just stuffs it under the mattress (actually I don’t really understand that scene. I don’t really see what it was supposed to tell us and while it helped it definitely wasn’t necessary for establishing character. It’s just oddity for oddities sake, something this movie does a few times to set the tone of the film). She also has complete breakdowns at what seem like mundane moments. This is all thanks to the residual effects of her life in a cult, and it makes it easier to understand this thanks to telling most of the story through flashbacks.

Martha’s actions also work as interesting commentary on how easily we can get conditioned to things, even if they are terrible. Before she seems like she was a relatively normal girl, but now she does many different odd things that she no longer finds odd thanks to being fully immersed in her cult lifestyle. It makes life for her on the outside all that much more difficult. It’s bad enough she is constantly haunted by the fear of them tracking her down, but she also doesn’t fit into this new world either. She simultaneously fears her old lifestyle and is nostalgic for its logic. It’s like a child with an abusive parent who grows up to treat their kids the same way. They hate the way their parent treated them, yet when it comes to parenting that style is all they know. Its equal parts interesting and scary. The movie does a great job of adding to this feeling by doing a lot of master shots and long takes in large empty rooms. By pulling out on the camera and showing everything, we see just how empty and solitary her life is now.

As we learn more about Martha’s cult life we learn that most of it revolves around the group leader named Patrick (played by the brilliant and ridiculously underrated John Hawkes). Patrick is like most cult leaders. He’s very sure of his beliefs and he is charismatic enough to convince weak minded people that his way of life is the right one. He runs a farm and has the men that join go out and recruit new members. Once at the farm they will work all over doing various chores. He treats the women like second class citizens as he makes them make the meal and then wait to eat until the men have finished. He also rapes all the women once. I say once because after he rapes them the first time they are then convinced by the other women (who were at some point originally convinced by him) that this act was not rape but rather a privilege and part of their duty here at the farm. Then going forward they are more of a willing party to these actions. He does other very bad things, but I don’t want to ruin too much of the film for you so I will leave it at that.

Simply put, he is haunting. He has that type of sociopathic logic that is insanely flawed yet seems to make enough sense to impressionable people that they follow. At one point he gets one of the girls to kill a cat because it is sick and needs to be put out of its misery. He then instantly ups the ante and tries to get Martha (who he calls Marcy May because he calls the girls by whatever he wants, probably as a way of establishing dominance) to shoot one of the boys from the farm to prove a point to the boy and to see if he could get her to do it. He’s always in control and will hurt you if you question this fact.

This is pretty much the set up for the rest of the film. We delve deeper and deeper into Martha’s cult life until we fully understand why she left. We also simultaneously see her constantly at odds with her new life at her sister’s place. Then the movie just sort of ends. It’s really odd too. Everything seems so well thought out, but then there is absolutely no ending. Well there sort of is, but it’s ambiguous and very abrupt. It’s this movie’s one big glaring flaw and it’s too bad as everything else was almost pitch perfect. If you are wondering about the grade, this ending is what held this movie back from creeping up to the B+ to A- range.

To contrast, the acting was top notch. This movie is carried by two characters: Martha and Patrick. If they didn’t get the right people for these parts this whole movie could have easily fallen apart. There was a lot of buzz about Elizabeth Olsen’s performance in this movie and it is all just. She is on the screen probably around 90% of the time in this movie and this was very much a role she had to go all in with and she did. I wouldn’t say she is a surefire star in the making, because I wasn’t naturally drawn to her like a superstar and she was overshadowed at times, but she definitely has the chops to be a big name in Hollywood. The person who would sometimes overshadow her was John Hawkes. To anyone who has seen Winter’s Bone this is no surprise as he was fantastic as the scary meth addict Teardrop. He is also quite terrifying in this film too but in a completely different way. His unwavering confidence and sociopathic behavior were chilling. I found myself excited every time he showed up on the screen. It absolutely blows my mind that a man so small and wiry could be so terrifying.

I think I’ve used haunting to describe parts of this movie 4 times now, and that’s because it’s extremely apt. I could look for another word to use but it just won’t be as fitting. Even the ending, while abrupt and ambiguous, almost worked because of how haunting this film is. This movie was made to eat away at you, in the same way the residual effects of living at Patrick’s farm eats away at Martha, until you too become sufficiently (for lack of a better word) haunted.

It should also be noted that this movie has a lot of nudity in it. I couldn’t find a way to properly fit that into the review but I felt like it should be noted so you know what you are getting into as far as a viewing audience for this movie.

The Descendants

Grade: A-

There are two ways I thought about starting this review. One is about trying to make a poignant point; the other is about things that bother me about reviewing movies. The latter of whom nobody will care about, but I want to mention it because it bothers me. The point is that overall Alexander Payne’s The Descendants is a better movie than Attack the Block, yet I enjoyed Attack the Block more. This isn’t really a problem unless you write about movies and give them an accompanying grade. See I wanted badly to give The Descendants an A- but ultimately I felt like I couldn’t because that would be a better grade then Attack the Block and I didn’t like it more than Attack the Block. So I’m just going to say it’s a better movie, but not nearly as much fun. (ed. – After further consideration I decided to man up and give it an A-)

Okay now on to stuff other people might find interesting. My other point is that The Descendants opens an interesting discussion about how we can’t help but become our parents. We all try, in some way or another, to not become them but in the end we can’t help but end up like them in some way. Often it sucks. It sucks hard. This is mostly because we are too quick to notice how we are like them in the bad ways. We get plenty of great qualities from our parents but they often aren’t the ones that get the most discussion.

In The Descendants, two of the main characters George Clooney’s Matt King and Shailene Woodley’s Alexandra King are plagued by this. Matt is his father, who we are told was an honest and hard working man that while he was born wealthy believed in only using the money he directly earned and raising his children on “enough to do something, but not enough to do nothing.” This lifestyle has worked out for him pretty well. He has a good job that he admits he may work at a bit too much. A wife who while things haven’t been great he still very much loves. He has two daughters. He lives in Hawaii. He also has a giant chunk of land in his family’s name that has been entrusted in him that he plans to sell for a lot of money and split among his many relatives. Things aren’t perfect for Matt but they could be a whole lot worse.

Then all of a sudden they get a lot worse. It all starts when his wife, Elizabeth, gets in a bad boating accident. She hits her head pretty hard, putting her in a comma, and eventually leading to her death. After being told by the doctor that his wife will be passing away in a few days Matt decides to go and tell all of her friends and family to say their last words before she passes away. He starts by getting his teenage daughter Alexandra out of the boarding school she is attending. After showing up and finding her drunk he takes her home to tell her the bad news about her mother. She of course reacts like any teen who hates their parent because they are so much alike. She’s mad and sad and in the course of this she tells father that she caught mom cheating on him.

This, we find out, is why she was really sent away. Matt never knew this because he is as he calls it “the backup parent.” Alexandra and her mother fought constantly as is often the case when two people with as strong of personalities as they both have (because they are the same person) are stuck in confinement with each other long enough. Then Alex saw her mom with another man and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The great thing about Alex, and supposedly her mom, is that this is an extremely realistic character and her actions are spot on. She hates her mom for making her like her and for doing something wrong to her dad who she views as being completely innocent. People like Alex love to grandstand when someone else like them does something bad. Never mind the fact that she herself does wrong things all the time and expects no repercussions. Someone else did wrong and they must be punished. You’re lying to yourself if you don’t know someone like that; well either that or that person is you.

Matt, who is naturally a passive man, takes this news hard and instantly goes on a middle aged tirade looking for the man. Matt is mad and he wants to do something to this man, who he finds out is named Brain Speer (played by Matthew lillard). Matt in an effort to track down Brian is lead to another island in Hawaii where he finally gets a chance to confront Brian. The interesting thing though is that through his travels Matt remembers who he is. Matt is a good man who does the right thing, like his father. So rather than confront Brian to try and fight him, he decides that he owes it to his dying wife to give Brian a chance to say goodbye. Matt wants to be the hard ass who makes Brian hurt as much as he has been hurt, but ultimately that’s not who he is.

The rest I will let you see for yourself, but as I said things basically all go to hell for Matt and the rest of the movie is him figuring out how to put things back into place. There is another side plot about him trying to sell the land. It’s interesting and is the main thing about the movie that is special to a story told in Hawaii as everyone is pushing for Matt to sell the property to a local buyer even if he won’t make as much money in the deal. Hawaii also plays a large role in the movie not just as the backdrop of the story but for interesting moments that make the movie memorable. Like when Matt is in an important meeting with a bunch of his family members about the land and everyone is dressed basically like it’s casual Friday so he says in voice over “don't be fooled by appearances. In Hawaii, some of the most powerful people look like bums and stuntmen.” Or his opening scene narration where he exclaims his distaste for living in Hawaii by saying “Paradise? Paradise can go fuck itself.”

Through this the director, Alexander Payne, does a really nice job of accustoming himself to his movies. I mean this in the sense that the views and overall approach to shooting a movie in Hawaii seem realistic to Hawaii. Part of this was probably thanks in large part to the writer of the book Kaui Hart Hemmings being around the set (she plays a cameo role in the movie too), but still you get a sense that Hawaii isn’t just a location but a character in this movie and an accurate one at that. Much like how in The Town you get such a feel for living in that part of Boston that Boston becomes more or less a real character in the movie. I’ve only ever seen one other Payne movie (Sideways) and while I didn’t care for it he definitely gave you the feeling of what it is like to go across the California visiting vineyards.

This movie is also well acted. Clooney does a great job of not being Mr. Handsome and instead playing a regular Joe who it’s believable that he would be cheated on. I’d imagine it’s hard for someone as suave as Clooney to play a man so angry and unassuming, so he did a great job. The anguish when Matt is being told by his step father about how he should have done more for his wife because he doesn’t know she was unfaithful is palpable, and Clooney helps to bring that. Shailene Woodley was also quite impressive. If you have ever seen The Secret Life of the American Teenager I feel sorry for you, and I’m also assuming you didn’t think she had a performance like this in her. Sure she is still playing pouty but this character was much more nuanced and fully formed and a lot of that could have been lost with a lesser actor. In the similar vein, Matthew Lillard doesn’t have a huge part but he is good in what he is in. Going toe to toe with Clooney in the scene he does is no easy feat but he was up to the task. It seems like maybe he has done some growing up since his Scooby Doo days.

I feel like I also have to mention the character Sid at some point in this review as he is the films comic relief. He’s a lovable idiot who Matt can’t stand but Alex keeps around because she needs someone her own age to help her mourn. At first he seems unnecessary and cliché, but as the movie progresses he grows on you and you see his value. Not just as a character but as a person. As a whole The Descendants is sort of like that. At first you think something is just there to happen as part of the story and then it becomes the story. In this way you can definitely tell it was a book first. It doesn’t have a bunch of ups and down and doesn’t really have much of an ending, but by the end of it you have been told a story worth telling. And well told at that.

Win Win

Grade: C+

Thomas McCarthy’s Win Win is a frustrating movie for me. This is because I love Thomas McCarthy movies. While he has only directed two movies prior to this both have been great, and both have very distinctly had his own personal style stamped on them. The Visitor is subtly beautiful and The Station Agent is one of the most likeable movies I’ve ever seen. I don’t have an exact word to describe McCarthy’s previous efforts but I know that they just make me happy in a way that is distinct to both those films. Certainly there are common themes amongst McCarthy films. They are often set in New Jersey, Bobby Cannavale is in most of them, they feature respected actors, they are rather minimalistic, and perhaps best of all they have a heavy foot in reality the likes of which you rarely see in movies. Mix that all up, add some charm and you have a McCarthy film that will leave you grinning from ear to ear.

Win Win had all this, but it just wasn’t the same. I enjoyed it just fine. It’s a fine movie and pretty much all the things I listed above are in it, but it just didn’t have the heart of McCarthy’s previous movies. I wanted it so bad to be just as pitch perfect as his other films, but it just wasn’t, and that bummed me out. So take this review at face value because while I wasn’t too high on it, my opinion is clearly skewed.

The story goes as follows. Paul Giamatti plays a small town lawyer named Mike. Mike has a wife (played by the delightful Amy Ryan), two daughters, and is a high school wrestling coach for a team that is terrible. Mike has two friends. One Stephen (played by Jeffrey Tambor) works with Mike and also helps to coach the wrestling team. His other friend Terry (Bobby Cannavale) is a successful businessman who is having troubles coping with his wife leaving him for the construction worker he hired to fix his house. Mike’s problem is that his small town practice is struggling. He’s not making enough money to fix basic things both at his home and at his work. Soon Mike sees an opportunity to help with these problems when ones of his wealthiest clients Mr. Poplar (Burt Young) is in a need of a new guardian. Mr. Poplar is in the early stages of dementia and while he still could live in his home by himself, he would need a guardian that could provide a lot of assistance. Seeing an opportunity to take on the money allotted to the guardian of Mr. Poplar, Mike offers to take on the role, but instead of helping to take care of him Mike just sends him to an old folk’s home while telling Mr. Poplar the judge made him do it.

A wrench gets thrown in this plan though when Mike is going to shut off Mr. Poplar’s pipes at his now empty house. On the doorstep of his place they find a high school aged boy. It turns out the kid is Mr. Poplar’s grandson who traveled all the way from Ohio(the movie is of course set in New Jersey) to escape his in and out of rehab mother. With no other choice Mike and his family are forced to take the kid (his name is Kyle) in. Kyle is an understandably quiet kid who, Mike soon learns, just happens to be a former state runner up for wrestling in the state of Ohio.

The story unfolds like how a lot of sports movies (not to say this is really a sports movie but it sort of is) do from here. Kyle brings new life to the down and out, ragtag bunch. They go from dead last to well… they win like one match, but still it’s progress. Everyone is affected by the new life Kyle brings to the team and for the most part all is well. The problem then starts when Kyle’s mom shows up. I won’t go much farther into the story because you really should go watch this movie if for nothing more than to support people who make good films, but you may be able to guess what kinds of trouble arises from there.

 The person who is most interestingly affected by Kyle’s presence (and leads to my favorite part of this movie) is Terry. After seeing Kyle wrestle (by Googling him) Terry decides to become an assistant coach. Due to his current boredom with his life Terry, instantly becomes way too into the team as well as a little too fond of Kyle. Not in a creepy way, but in an over excited way. See as I said earlier, Terry’s life sucks right now. Sure he has all this cool stuff (as we see from him casually playing Wii in his fancy condo) and money but that’s not what he is interested in. Terry just wants to be like a normal person, and even more importantly Terry just wants his wife back. Everyone else has lives and families, while all Terry has is things. He is the king alone in his castle with nobody to talk to (or for you film buffs: he is Charles Foster Kane alone in Xanadu). He needs the team and even more he needs Kyle to keep winning because those are the only good, human things in his life right now. It’s fun watching the very charismatic Cannavale get way too excited about a high school wrestling match or wear a suit to his first match as an assistant coach because he’s taking things way more seriously than everyone else, but at its heart this character is very real and sad.

In fact that character was just like the kind of characters I have come to expect from McCarthy movies. The problem was the rest of the characters just didn’t meet the same depth. Mike is sort of your typical Joe everyman, and while he is clearly flawed, he just feels too much like your average indie movie lead. Mike’s wife is spunky, fun, and has some fight in her (although a lot of this is because Amy Ryan is very much these things) but she too feels too much like a typical indie movie wife. And Kyle is interesting, but hardly a character you would want to carry a movie. Again, there is nothing wrong with any of these characters. They are better than probably 80% of characters you see in movies, but it just wasn’t on par with the rich characters I’m used to seeing in McCarthy’s other films.

I really hate to be so negative about a film that A. I did like B. is by a director I very much respect and C. has a relatively good and positive message (I mean this is the sense that there should be more strong women characters like Jackie (Mike’s wife) and it is a somewhat uplifting movie with characters you want to route for). It’s just not as good as McCarthy’s other movies, and if you know me you know that I have trouble getting past things like that. So while I gave it a C+, I still think you should definitely watch it and if you like it I can’t suggest McCarthy’s other movies (The Visitor and The Station Agent) enough.