“127 Hours” (2010)

Dwight Dekeyser rating: BBB

Dear Friend:

Why did I see this movie?!  “Because it was there!” to quote the mountain climber or in this case the canyon creeper.  I suppose “canyon climber” would be more respectful, but after you have seen this picture, you will know what I mean.  Based on a true story this canyon commando Aron Roylston (James Franco) did more creeping than climbing in this terrible tale of horrendous human suffering.  The story was an updated version of Jack London’s To Build a Fire (1902), set in desert Utah instead of snowbound Alaska.  This was the classic “man versus nature” theme. (Remember high school English?)  Or in this case, man versus rock.  The plot can be summarized in two sentences.  A solitary young man falls into a canyon crevice and is pinned by a small boulder.  After all reasonable attempts have failed to free himself, our hapless hero is compelled to cut off his arm. There!  Now there is no reason for you to see this movie – even if, James Franco gave an extraordinary performance.  Unless, of course, you think you might enjoy seeing someone suffer for 127 Hours. 

This was pretty much a one man show, give or take a view flash backs, hallucinations, and some trained ants. However, this was not exactly “Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm” fun-for-the-whole-family kind of entertainment.  Our protagonist was pretty much a desperate bug in a jar trying to climb out for most of the picture.  It reminded me of existentialist plays written by Beckett or Sartre with No Exit (1944), out of this hole in the ground.  A lot of waiting, wondering, and worrying over the meaning of existence by a helpless hopeless individual caught in circumstances he cannot control or comprehend.  (His CapitalOne card was of no help to him under the circumstances.)  In other words, this was a production that was not intended to be necessarily sensually pleasurable but intellectually meaningful.  It was entertainment that is supposed to be good for you, like a Wagnerian opera you cannot stand or a Shakespearean play you cannot understand.

In addition to the American realism and the French existentialism, I found there was a striking surreal theme to the movie.  The desert landscape was a stunning dream-like setting that turned into a nightmare of despair and deprivation in an instant.   Roylston was a lonely loner who rode for miles on his mountain bike on solitary sojourns to get to Blue John Canyon.  From the flashbacks he experiences, we learn he is unable to accept love and finds his missions through the monastic mountains and canyon crevices an exhilarating escape from the entanglements of human relationships.  If I might be allowed to make a Freudian observation, all the squeezing, sliding, and slinking through narrow rock walls was a recreation of the birth canal.  (This movie is not for the claustrophobic.)  It is only when our hero realizes that “No man is an island,” John Donne (1624), that he realizes the futility of his attempts to return to the womb.  He needs other people to survive.  When he severed the arm he cut the umbilical cord. 

Perhaps the greater challenge of this movie was not how our foolish friend (he told no one where he was going) would escape from the bolder bowels of bedrock, but how the filmmaker, director and writer Danny Boyle was able to maintain an audience’s attention for the entire length of the picture with a single immobile actor stuck in a deep crack?  Roylston may have been up Shit’s Creek without a paddle but he did bring his video camera.  (He brought his cell phone too but like this credit card it was of no use – alas, no bars.)   I told this was an updated tale!  When our forlorn fellow was not recording the ecstasy of his agony, he entertained himself by replaying events he had captured prior to his piteous precipitous pitfall.  In the end our prodigal Prometheus pried himself from the rock as the deus ex machina or state police helicopter swooped him away to Hollywood immortality.  Some people have all the luck!

Here's the trailer:  http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi768149785/

From the vault:  Harold and Maud (1971), directed by Hal Ashby; starring Ruth Gordon, Bud Cord, and Vivian Pickles.  After this crucible of 127 Hours, you could use another kind of inspirational movie.  Like an improbable love story?  Maud to Harold, “A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They're just backing away from life. Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can. Go team, go! Give me an L. Give me an I. Give me a V. Give me an E. L-I-V-E. LIVE! Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room.”

 

Best of luck in your movie selections.  Your faithful friend,

Dwight Dekeyser

© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved.

 

"Cedar Rapids" (2011)

Dwight Dekeyser rating:  BBB

Dear Friend,

I really liked this movie.  It was a fresh and fun parody of a slice of the American way of life – the annual national sales convention.  The hero of the story is a thirty-something innocent named Tim Leppe (Ed Helms) an insurance salesman from the mythical town on Brown Valley, Wisconsin.  The local agency’s star salesman died suddenly under tawdry circumstances just before the national sales convention in big-city Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  It fell upon Leppe’s shoulders to take his first business trip to the convention and give the agency’s pitch for the coveted “Two Diamond Award” that they have won consistently for the past several years at this conservative Christian conference.   The pressure is on to restore the company’s chaste reputation as Leppe’s job at the agency is at stake – the only place he’s ever worked. 

“Innocent” may not be quite the right word to describe Leppe.  Perhaps “inexperienced” would be more appropriate.   He was “practically pre-engaged” to his former seventh grade teacher Macy Vanderhei (Sigourney Weaver) whom he ran into one day at the True Value store.   Their Mrs. Robinson relationship was consummated once a week at his dreary split level.  While Benjamin Braddock may have been The Graduate (1967), Leppe was emotionally the undergraduate – at best.  Until this trip, he had never flown in an airplane, rented a car or stayed in a hotel before.  A teetotaler, he had his work cut out for him fitting-in at this reunion of hard-drinking sales hacks.  While his new friends ordered shots, he was persuaded to change his order from root beer to something hard.  His concession was to order a cream sherry.  This was the first of may compromises he would make in this latter-day coming of age story that would lead to his corruption and redemption.          

There was something terribly familiar about this film.  It had a television show immediacy to it, perhaps because two of the main characters have appeared on major shows in similar roles.  Ed Helms plays nice guy Andy Bernard in The Office (2005—present), and Kurtwood Smith (Orin Helgesson) played the prickly father Reginald “Red” Forman in That 70’s Show (1998—2006).  Helgesson was the intimidating owner of the insurance company who presided over the compulsory prayer breakfast as well as the madcap scavenger hunt and the aforesaid “Two Diamond Award” competition.  The company’s traditional “talent show” of usual suspects was left to others to run.  It was this peculiar combination of business rituals and rites of spring (drunken debauchery) that made this a uniquely American comedy of corporate culture.  

The story was very clever and took some unexpected turns that injected elements of sex and violence into this otherwise insouciant tale, but I will not spoil the story.  Let’s just say the bikers and the prostitutes were not in town for the convention.   It was a crazy and touching story.   Leppe and his roommates (John C. Reilly and Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) were three men who could not have been more different.  Together with a frisky redhead from Omaha (Anne Hecke) they bonded to form a confederacy of dunces to become the “wild and crazy guys!” at the convention.  (Hope you can withstand a little potty humor.)  The foursome made a solid cast of outcasts that compared notes, combined experiences, and triumphed over the hypocritical and corrupt business establishment.  It was the classic victory for the little guy that provided such a gratifying and unexpected ending to this manic movie. 

Here’s the trailer (spoiler alert):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJqFUWbITug&playnext=1&list=PLDC20F60DF68904EE

From the vault:  Breaking Away (1979), Directed by Peter Yates; starring Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, and Paul Dooley.  This movie has nothing to do with insurance salesmen or business conventions, but it is an inspiring coming of age story set in the Midwest.  Now, who couldn’t use a little inspiration every once in a while?   Speaking of prickly fathers: “No, I don't feel lucky to be alive! I feel lucky I'm not dead. There's a difference.”   Thanks, Dad!

Best of luck in your movie selections.  Your faithful friend,

Dwight Dekeyser

© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved.

"The Fighter" (2010)

Dwight Dekeyser rating:  AAA

Dear Friend,

I like boxing.  It’s pure unmitigated violence – nothing pretentious.  Oh, there’s plenty of hype.  But let’s face it, this sport is as basic as it gets: two guys enter the ring and pummel each other until one of them drops.  There is no score for artistry or originality; it’s who can inflict the greatest injury on the opposing party.  The last man standing wins.  This is as close to the Roman coliseum as we ever get in modern times.   Thumbs down meant a lot more than a bad movie review in those days.   Nowadays, we are enlightened.  We allow the vanquished to survive.  The entertainment value may suffer, but our conscious is clear.  What’s a little brain damage amongst washed-out warriors?   “Old boxers never die, they just fade away,” to paraphrase General MacArthur.  This movie is about an aging athlete who would not fade away – not until his self-confidence was restored and his triumph complete.

There have been many wonderful boxing movies throughout the years including Rocky (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Diggstown (1992), Million Dollar Baby (2004), and Cinderella Man (2005).  It’s a theme that appeals to a lot of people.  The effort is superhuman and the result is either triumph or tragedy and sometimes both.  The Fighter is right up there with the best of them.  What is appealing about this picture is that it is the story of a young man, a young couple, brothers, an extended family, a community, and a sport that mixes them together in a combustible cauldron of emotion and action.  The fighting outside the ring was every bit as intense as inside the ring as the family grappled with how best to promote their favorite son in a rough world of brawn, braggadocio, and broken dreams.  As any Roman could tell you, the fight for survival is the most compelling competition of all.

The movie is based on a true story.  Boxing was a family business for this Irish-American clan in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1993: one mother, two fathers, two brothers (both fighters), and seven sisters.  The chain-smoking mother (Melissa Leo) was the fight manager and the crack-addict older brother (Christian Bale) trained the younger brother (Mark Wahlberg).  Sound intense?  It was.  Add a beautiful ambitious girlfriend (Amy Adams) and a chorus of seven jealous sisters and you have one giant dysfunctional family.  Although, most of them lived in one house, no one would mistake their cramped headquarters for the Kennedy compound.  (Touch football?  Ya-gotta-be-kiddin’ me!)  These people were rough and tough.  While their vocabulary was in no way impressive, they had no problem making their opinions known.  Mother to adult daughter: “You talk that way to me in my own kitchen when you owe me $200.00?”  (Mom’s rhetoric was not much better than her promotional abilities.)

What was so refreshing about The Fighter was its down-to-earth quality.  These were blue collar people living in a run down town doing dirty jobs.  No glamor here.  (Bette Davis was born in Lowell, but that was some time ago.)  When the brothers were not training they were working on a road crew or doing a roofing job, sometimes with their sisters.  Boxing was their excitement and their means of social mobility.  Winning in the ring made them important and admired in the community.  It also meant money and a way out of Lowell, a major textile center before it lost its industry to the non-unionized Southern states.  (Remember Norma Rae, 1979?  She’s unemployed now that the textile industry moved to the no-minimum wage Third World.)  The history of Lowell is a parable for our fading country.  In fact, it is the nation’s current economic condition that makes the timeliness of this movie so appropriate.  While it would be tempting to compare this movie to Rocky for its urban ethnic character, it makes one wonder whether The Grapes of Wrath (1940) would not be a more suitable predecessor for a desperate family struggling to survive forces beyond its control.

Not all was struggle and grief.  Much of the movie was funny.  The sisters were a hoot!  (Where did find these actresses – West Virginia?)  The acting was a pure joy to watch.  Melissa Leo and Christian Bale were awesome.  In fact, the casting of the whole movie was flawless.  Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams were a perfect match.  Local casting added to the authenticity of the picture.  Wahlberg himself is the youngest of nine children from a working-class family in Dorchester, Boston, Massachusetts.  Making appearances as walk-ons were members of the actual Eklund-Ward clan.  Burgess Meredith was unavailable, so they hired Lowell police sergeant and boxing trainer Mikey O’Keefe to portray himself – very convincingly.   The producers couldn’t find anyone locally as debonair as Sugar Ray Leonard or in Hollywood, so they had to hire the real deal for his appearance, “What’s that movie about, again?”

Here’s the trailer: http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2330986777/

From the Vault:  The Grapes of Wrath (1940).  Directed by John Ford; starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, and John Carradine.  Dust bowl Okies are forced off their land (along with 300,000-400,000 others during the 1930s) and move to “Californie” in a Beverly Hillbillies-style limousine. Jane Darwell gave a heartbreaking performance as Ma Joad and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.  From the book by John Steinbeck, “The bank is something more than men, I tell you.  It’s the monster.  Men made it, but they can’t control it.”   (Just a little nostalgia for pre-bank regulated America.)

Best of luck in your movie selections.  Your faithful friend,

Dwight Dekeyser

© Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.   All rights reserved.