Tag Archives: Phoenix

Joker

3 Oct

‘Joker’: Phoenix tries to hold it all together, but eventually film lets loose, breaks down

By Tom Meek

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Throughout Batman’s long history, the Joker’s been played by some pretty mighty performers. Standouts include Jack Nicholson, who pretty much hijacked Tim Burton’s “Batman” (1989), and Heath Ledger, who won a bittersweet, posthumous Oscar for his deeply felt portrait of derangement in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” (2008) – and let’s not forget the comic genius of Cesar Romero during the 1960s TV series. Nolan and Burton felt like the right hands to shepherd a dark superhero/villain origins tale, but Todd Phillips, with such swinging steak comedies as “Old School” (2003) and the “Hangover” films to his credit? Odd as it may seem, it’s a somewhat logical evolution from drunken vomit awakenings to blood-splattered foyers with a panicked dwarf who can’t reach a chain bolt to escape.

The real reason Phillips’ “Joker” succeeds is simple: Joaquin Phoenix makes the anti-antihero psycho-saga all his own. There’s also the script by Phillips and Scott Silver that plays with the Batman mythology artfully without getting bogged down in the bigger picture – though we do briefly see Bruce Wayne at a young age, when dad and mom are with us – but without Phoenix, I don’t think “Joker” takes flight. It’s a bravura go, and Phoenix should be right up there at year’s end (like Ledger was) with Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio when Oscar nods are called out. With maybe the exception of Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” (2000) it’s hard to find a movie in which Phoenix doesn’t shine with brilliant quirk and dour doses of menace. He delivers all that here and more; it’s a total immersion. For the part of clown turned Gotham icon and sociopathic perp, Phoenix lost a ton of weight, something done with equal austerity by Christian Bale (who took up the bat cowl for Nolan) in Brad Anderson’s “The Machinist” (2004) or, inversely, when Robert De Niro added 50 pounds as Jack LaMotta in “Raging Bull” – and if as on cue (send in the clowns), the Martin Scorsese-forged actor shows up in “Joker” as beloved late night TV show host Murray Franklin, whom Arthur Fleck (the Joker’s birth name) and his not-quite-all-there mother (Frances Conroy, excellent in the small complicated part) watch religiously. Continue reading →

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Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot

28 Jul

‘Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot’: Alcoholic cartoonist was hell on wheels

By Tom Meek 

 

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The films of Gus Van Sant, be they the good (“To Die For” or “Drugstore Cowboy”), the total miscue (“Psycho” or “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”) or even a crowd-pleasingly mainliner (“Good Will Hunting” or “Milk”) have always been embossed by a gritty, streetwise authenticity. That’s Van Sant’s gift – plus, by skill, proximity or both, educing some of the great performances of the past 20 or 30 years from actors the likes of Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, Matt Dillon, Robin Williams, Matt Damon and River Phoenix, to name a few. Here he’s re-teamed with River’s brother Joaquin, who played one of Kidman’s teen lovers-turned-hubby snuffers in “To Die For” (1995).

“Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” isn’t a topical grabber; it’s a biopic about an esoteric satirist/sketch artist by the name of John Callahan who died in 2010 after spending most of his adult life in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident involving a drunken driver. The terrible catch there being that the car was Callahan’s, driven by another (Jack Black) because Callahan was too drunken to drive.

“Don’t Worry,” however, isn’t so much about overcoming physical difficulties and beating the odds, but about confronting one’s demons. As the film has it, Callahan has an angry closet full of ’em. A raging alcoholic from the minute we catch up with him to the alcohol rocket of an evening that ends with Callahan’s VW Bug wrapped around a cement post, the slacker handyman out for the next good time seemingly has little prospects beyond his shaggy good looks and winning smile – and then that too seemingly gets taken from him. Strapped to a hospital gurney in the cold, sterile aftermath, Callahan flirts with his physical therapist (Rooney Mara, impeccable and fetching in the small role) and when peppering his counselor (Rebecca Field) about the functionality of his equipment, she suggests with grave seriousness that he ask the night nurse to sit on his face. Callahan flashes his old smile and accepts the challenge gleefully. Out on his own. Callahan returns to the bottle with self-pitying vehemence. It seems a fast downward spiral, but he also starts drawing acerbic political doodles that get published (“the place that publishes Gary Larson just called”) and elicit strong public reaction. He also checks into an AA group led by Jonah Hill’s ultra-rich gay swami, Donnie, who presides over the flock with the smarmy, manipulative charm of a cocksure charlatan. Callahan takes to Donnie, but keeps boozing on the side with angry-man swagger. All of which makes for a gonzo 12-step ride.

It might be treasonous to say, but Phoenix and Hill don’t have great chemistry. They’re fantastic, mind you, but not in the way Bogie and Bacall or Newman and Redford were, or even Damon and Affleck’s bros in Van Sant’s “Good Will Hunting.” When the two are on screen together the film is undeniably intoxicating in its own quirky right; if you were at a bar with this duo, you’d find it hard to close out your tab before closing time. But they’re just not pouring the same stuff. And sans the bravura performances – self-righteous Hill and self-hating Phoenix – I’m not sure “Don’t Worry” would be that interesting of a film. Cultural icons Kim Gordon, Udo Kier and Carrie Brownstein have small bits and feel plugged in but not necessarily engaged in the presence of the immersed leads. Gordon, best known for her work as a member of edgy ’90s rock band Sonic Youth, also had a small role in Van Sant’s “Last Days” (2006) the last chapter in the filmmaker’s Death Trilogy that reimagined Kurt Cobain’s demise. The other films in that series, “Gerry” (2002) and “Elephant” (2003), a repainting of the Columbine massacre, are similarly fact-based and likewise riveting. “To Die For” (1995) and “Paranoid Park” (2007) too might make apt bookends, and if you added in “Don’t Worry,” an individual alone in a country cabin for a weekend with the ability to stream such a double-triple program might emerge on Sunday depressed, enlightened and oddly invigorated. The most telling and frightening aspect of “Don’t Worry,” however, is its raw and honest depiction of addiction and the grip it has on the ensnared – and the ends they will go to in spinning a false narrative even as the knees of reality betray them.

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Irrational Man

31 Jul

‘Irrational Man’: Woody rations delights through latest Hitchcockian hodgepodge

By Tom Meek
Thursday, July 30, 2015

“Irrational Man,” the new movie from Woody Allen, is a hodgepodge of parts held together by an enigmatic protagonist – a swaggering nihilist who teaches philosophy and, despite a flabby, alcoholic paunch, invites much favor from attached women, even though he can’t get it up – and a finely nuanced performance by Joaquin Phoenix taking on that role. Phoenix’s Abe arrives to a small New England liberal arts institution (filmed in Rhode Island), where there is as much dread over Abe’s debauchery as there is awe over his revered mind and that one big book he published that made him a philosophical rock star.

073015i Irrational ManAbe gets himself into a love triangle faster than he can down a shot of bourbon or spout a lazy line about “mental masturbation.” On the faculty side he’s got Rita (Parker Posey, digging into the role nicely), semi-unhappily married and dreaming of wine and roses and dirty sex with a kindred miserable spirit. Rita’s counterbalanced by the fawnish Jill (Allen’s muse du jour, Emma Stone, so good in “Birdman” and proving that inclination correct here), a student with a jockish beau. Things go from mentor-student banter to inappropriate friendship even with clothes on. Abe, in all his louche self-loathing, has become the black hole of the campus. But then, near the nadir of his pontificating wretchedness, he finds an up.

Allen has been making movies for almost 50 years. The sardonic joys of “Manhattan,” “Annie Hall” and “Hannah and her Sisters” radiates across the decades, the self-deprecating nebbish new and relevant again in every generation. There’s no doubt to his genius, but recent years have seen change-ups in his works, some too hauntingly self-reflective or suggestive of refutations of public opinion of his media circus life behind closed doors (“Husbands and Wives”) and forays into Hitchcock (“Match Point”). His last truly great film was “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (before the whole fallout with longtime partner Mia Farrow), and while there have been flourishes of the unique and the old Woody (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and “Blue Jasmine”) there’s almost always a two off that seem unformed, and that the old Woody wouldn’t have done or developed more to a point. No matter – his output of a film a year is nothing less than impressive.

“Irrational Man” fuses the old quirky Allen – with sharp characters ensnared in the mundane and struggling to get out – with his more current predilection for Hitchcockian dabbling. It almost works, but in the denouement, stumbles (irrationally) and falls down the shaft of the absurd. If you don’t see it coming, it’s not because you weren’t paying attention, but because you were.

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Inherent Vice

9 Jan

There’s drugs and free love a’plenty in Inherent Vice, but the characters steal the show 

Doc’s Orders

By

Joaquin Phoenix takes the audience on a trip in 'Inherent Vice'

Warner Brothers Pictures

Joaquin Phoenix takes the audience on a trip in ‘Inherent Vice’

Clearly Paul Thomas Anderson has a thing for the storied eras of America’s past. Boogie Nights welcomed in the rise of the porn industry during the flared-pant, disco-fueled ‘70s; the more nuanced The Master took up the arc of an L. Ron Hubbard-like charlatan in the wake WWII; while There Will be Bloodnegotiated the nasty, avaricious early roots of the American oil grab. Anderson’s latest, Inherent Vice, is no exception. In texture it’s an ode to the psychedelic ‘70s of free love and rampant recreational drug use.

Anderson’s always been a contemplative filmmaker with a keen sense of perverse quirk, and those qualities really come to the fore in Inherent Vice, a gumshoe noir on LSD if ever there was one. The stalwart indie director —who proved his ability to handle the opus works of literary lions by spinning Upton Sinclair’s Oil! into There Will be Blood — delves deep into Thomas Pychon’s far-roaming 2009 novel with baroque gusto. Continue reading →

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13 Sins

19 Apr

By Tom Meek
April 19, 2014

Published in Pate Magazine

<i>13 Sins</i>

“The devil made me do it,” might be an apt response for some of the mayhem and mischief that goes on in 13 Sins, but greed and desperation are more to the point. The film, directed by Daniel Stamm and based on the Thai film, 13 Games of Death, rides a one-trick-pony for all it’s worth. It might not be original, or superbly cut together, but it does pay dividends as it the scale of sociopathic doings becomes ever more satanic.

After a baroque opener that has an elder gentleman in a suit and tie launch into a four-letter-word fit at a podium only to perform impromptu digit surgery on a beloved one once he’s arguably calmed down, we meet Elliot (Mark Webber) who’s having the day from hell. His mentally impaired brother (Devon Graye) needs expensive meds, he’s expecting a child with his fiancée (Rutina Wesley), and with all the downward financial pressure, he gets tossed from his job by a patronizing ass of a boss, and we haven’t even gotten to his drunk, racist dad (Tom Bower) who needs to move in with them, and drops a few N-bombs on his African-American daughter-in-law-to-be just to let everyone know exactly what he’s thinking.

So it’s fortuitous, or ominous, when Elliot gets a call from a random avuncular soul who tells him, that if he kills the annoying fly buzzing about in his car, he’ll get a thousand dollars. At first, Elliot looks around to see if he’s been punked, but then complies. Boom, the money lights up in his account. (Smart phones are such great plot accelerator for rote horror films) and then he’s told, that if he then eats the squashed bug he’ll get three thousand more.

Continue reading →

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All is Lost

25 Oct

‘All is Lost’: Redford, alone at sea, silent, carries film soaked with beauty and fear

By Tom Meek
October 24, 2013

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Vastness can be an aesthetic wonderment, breathtaking to behold like the dark cold of outer space in “Gravity” or the endless desert in “Lawrence of Arabia,” but given a rip in a suit or a missed rendezvous at an oasis, that hypnotic intoxication with the serene forever can quickly become the edge of a hapless demise where outside intervention becomes a mathematic improbability and personal perseverance is the only shot at salvation.

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In his sophomore effort, “All is Lost,” young filmmaker J.C. Chandor – who got an Academy Award nomination for his bold debut “Margin Call” – employs the sea as his beauteous hell. The film’s title is a shard from a letter written by a hopeless yachtsman adrift at sea in a life raft.  Continue reading →

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Link

The Rhode Island International Film Fest

9 Aug

The Rhode Island International Film Fest

My 2 cents on it in the Providence Phoenix

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World War Z

24 Jun

‘World War Z’: Flesh-rippers come at you fast, and so does this globe-racing flick

By Tom Meek
June 22, 2013

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Zombie apocalypse and anything vampire seems to be the hot ticket out of Hollywood these days. The subtext that we prey on each other and that life is a precious and fragile thing is a piquant notion that gets magnified to its fullest when examining how man comports himself as civilization crumbles.

062213 World War ZSans rules and with limited resources, what would you do? Snatch and grab, help out or hole up doomsday-prepper style?

That’s the special sauce that makes any apocalypse-cum-horror flick grip the road. Real people, supernatural horror, deep shit. George Romero’s seminal “Night of the Living Dead” was more about the dynamics and dissent among a band of survivors barricaded in a farmhouse than it was about the throng of shambling flesh scratching at the walls. Decades later, guys such as Danny Boyle (“28 Days Later”) and Zack Snyder (the 2004 remake of Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”) got the nifty idea to make the dead move at warp speed.  Continue reading →

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Assholes Rule

18 May
Max is the Minimum

By TOM MEEK  |  September 16, 2009

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It seems that, these days, being a self-righteous boor is the new “in” thing. Kanye West and Serena Williams’s very public outbursts and subsequent apologies have made them Zeitgeist villains of the moment. Then there’s Tucker Max, the unapologetic frat boy who’s made a career out of blogging about his tales of debauchery and defilement (for a taste, if you must, go to tuckermax.com).

Max, who is in his mid thirties and attended Duke Law School, spun his bombastic tell-all antics — most every one of which features booze, vomit, and sex — into a New York Times bestseller, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. That title has now been turned into a feature film, which is giving Max more opportunities to accrue stories of booze, vomit, and sex.

To promote the movie — and himself (in the film, it should be noted, the role of Max is played by actor and New Hampshire native Matt Czuchry) — Max has launched a tour bus to hit college towns across the country. Stop number 14 was Harvard Square in Cambridge (which Max incorrectly lists and repeatedly refers to as Boston on his Web site). Outside the theater, the Max faithful lined one side of Church Street while the other was buzzing with protesters, accusing Max of employing date-rape tactics.

The anti-Max camp brandished such signs as GETTING HER DRUNK FIRST = RAPE and TUCKER DOESN’T REPRESENT MEN. (More curiously, one person held a sign that read LOVE WOMEN, RAPE CHRISTIANS.) Max and his camera crew, drinking beer, ju-jitsued the opposition, asking such insidious questions as, “Who has killed more people in America — nuclear power or Ted Kennedy?” (Kennedy had not passed away at the time of the screening.)

Inside, before the movie began, Max asked the friendly audience members — who had paid to see the premiere — to entertain him with their own tales of silliness. One young man recounted yelling “Shazam!” while getting a blowjob, while a video-game geek proclaimed that he earned oral honors when he got a high score.

Then came the big non-event of the evening: the movie (check the Phoenix next week for the review), followed by a post-screening Q&A (more like a love-in, with this group). In that session, Max, who routinely referred to women as “sluts,” admitted to being a narcissist and attention seeker, but rejected accusations of being sexist or a misogynist, pointing to the number of female audience members in attendance. One asked where Tucker would be later on. Max eyed the young lady and told her to hang around, she might make due — if he couldn’t “trade up.”

Max has created a perfect cycle: drink, screw, tell about carousing, garner audience, and repeat, cannibalizing those that wish to be anointed. We built this “asshole” (his word). Hopefully, Hell will be a lot less fun than he imagines.

 

 

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Before there was Darfur

29 Mar

Before there was Darfur

Around the world

By TOM MEEK  |  January 17, 2007

With the US bogged down in Iraq and anti-American sentiment sweeping the globe, it’s hard to find an affirmative story about our country’s place in the world. John Dau has one to tell. Ten years ago he was languishing in a refugee camp in Kenya; today he’s building a house, working on a college degree, and providing for the people he was formerly powerless to help. “This country has people who are kind, they like to help others,” says Dau of the US.

A graceful, 6’8” expatriate, Dau is the subject of God Grew Tired of Us, a documentary that chronicles the journey of several Sudanese “Lost Boys” brought to the US through relief agencies. The title of the film falls from Dau’s lips as he tries to rationalize the dire situations he and 27,000 other boys endured when civil war broke out in the Sudan during the ’80s. The Islamic north had made it a priority to target young males in the Christian south to cull off future fighters. As a result the boys banded together and fled, traveling more than 1000 miles to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. En route, disease, hunger, wild animals, and the enemy decimated their ranks. Dau, who had been forced to flee at the age of 13, was among 3000-plus Lost Boys chosen for resettlement in the US in 2000-’01.

Dau became the focus of the film by chance. “They list the names on a board, and when I was looking, I saw some journalist, people carrying cameras and I didn’t know anything to do with journalism before, so I thought that the government of United States might have sent these people.” The man with the camera was director Christopher Quinn. “He asked me if he could ask me a few questions, and I said, ‘Okay.’ I only thought it would be two or three, but I never got rid of him.”

The transition to a “better place” — he ended up in Syracuse, New York — was not without its pitfalls. At first, says Dau, “coming to America was like a honeymoon. Every day the helper came to our apartment to show us how to cook, to show us how to go to the grocery store.” But after three months, when he was required to start his first job, requests for aid back home started pouring in. “Many of the Lost Boys in Africa know that we are working, so they call us,” he says. “So here you are, you have money, and bills, and people in Africa. If you say no to them it is against our culture, so when you pay the bills it really pulls you down.”

Since then Dau, now 34 and married, has helped raise more than $180,000 for a health clinic in his homeland and in December was appointed director of the Sudan Project, which is raising funds to rebuild Southern Sudan. He also has a similarly titled book coming out and has applied for US citizenship. “When I was in Africa, I was there. Did I do anything?” says Dau passionately, “No. So it is better to be an American citizen and help people back there, and that is very important.”

Violence in Darfur is still severe, but for now there is peace between the north and south. Dau notes the situation’s tenuous nature and points to 2011, when the South Sudanese will vote to unify with the north or secede. “I will go back to campaign to secede. Be independent. That will cut off the problem,” he says. “Let’s live side by side as neighbors.”

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