"Limitless" (2011)

Dwight Dekeyser rating: BBA

Dear Friend,

This was a good movie that ended great!  What I liked about this movie was that it got better as it went along.  It was not like some pictures with a provocative theme or idea that floundered in search of a cogent meaningful story.   I was leery at first.  The film was narrated by the main character in the first person.  This can become very tiresome – the reflective actor commenting on his past behavior and motives when it is plain for all to see events as they transpire.  Yes, you’re an untidy, unproductive, alcoholic writer who lives in and dank, dirty, and depressing studio in New York.  (I hope this is not sounding as familiar to you as it is to me.)  In this sense, the movie started on a cliché note and developed into what I thought would be a parable about drug abuse.  (Don’t tell me this is a Nancy Reagan “just say no” campaign!)  But this movie become much more than its seemingly obvious pretext.  It was an actual original screen play.

This was a movie written by a real writer, in that, it was a story that came full circle. (N.B.: a writer writing about a writer writing about a writer.)  Its structure was not just beginning, middle, and end, but it was ultimately circular.  The story started on a cliff hanger, literally, and ended on the same ledge – bravo!  It was not the usual succession of existentialist events we have come to expect as a movie, but it was a carefully crafted fable that asked profound questions about what it takes to be a creative successful individual in a complex and confusing world of recrimination, results, and retribution. “Show me the money!”  He showed them, alright with the help of a little opaque pill, “NZT-48,” to be exact.  (Sound like AZT to you, too?)  This magical drug made this loser of a self-pitying scribe into a superman of confidence, productivity, and supernatural intelligence.  This elixir of life allowed our hero to use the alleged 80% of his brain he was not utilizing into a force majeure.  There was no circumstance or situation that he could not overcome by his sheer mental might.  Or was this “medication” just a metaphor for Dutch courage or a shot of self-confidence?

The picture is centered around a grubby young writer Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), who is more adept at drinking beer and playing pool during the day than actually producing his purported novel.  He has a pretty plucky girlfriend Lindy (Abbie Cornish), an up-and-coming editor who dumps her ne’er-do-well writer in frustration with his dependant disposition.   Life could not get any lower for our hapless Hemingway as he is abused by his (female) book editor for no manuscript and by his (female) landlord for non-payment of rent – a trifecta of terrifying termagants, one might say.  But fate has a funny way of finding those on their last leg (so I am told) and he runs into his ex-brother-in-law, the ex-drug dealer – now pharmaceutical rep., who gives him a gift of magical medicine.  You can keep your Cialis -- I want NZT!  This drug is a combination of everything you have ever heard of: speed, ecstasy, cocaine, crystal meth, with a just a touch of LSD.   Eddie becomes productive, prodigious, precognizant, and prophetic, until the buzz wears off, and he needs to pop another pill.  His hopeless addiction leads him on an adventure that is as exhilarating as it is terrifying.  (Did I say, “just say no” to drugs?)

The movie was beautifully cast.  Bradley Cooper really carried this movie of metamorphosis and mayhem.  Limitless was about his character’s evolution from sub- to superhuman.  It was a great part well-played.  For a movie that centered on a single actor, one never tired of focusing on him throughout the picture, much in the way of Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), there was such cunning character development.  Unlike the restrained Kind Hearts, there was a lot of sex and violence in this movie.  (It is an American picture, after all.)  However, it was incidental to the story and suited the purpose of the film; it was none-the-less an entertaining aspect to the film, not its purpose.  There was a genuine chemistry between Cooper and Cornish, which kept the audience routing for their relationship.  Cooper was up to the task of facing his nemesis, the formidable Robert DeNiro, with equal aplomb.  I think you’re really going to like this movie.

Here is the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3U9RsXeJ3w

From the vault:  Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), directed by Robert Hammer, starring Dennis Price, Joan Greenwood, Alec Guinness, and Valerie Hobson.   In my opinion, this is one of the best written screenplays (by Hammer) ever.  The BBC English is pure heaven to hear.  It is chock full of British understatement and sly humor.  Sibella, “I’ve married the dullest man in London.” Louis, “In England!”  Sibella, “In Europe!”

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

Dwight Dekeyser

© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved. 

"The Adjustment Bureau" (2011)

Dwight Dekeyser rating: BBB

Dear Friend:

Pizzicato:  DOO DOO, doo doo. DOO DOO, doo, doo.  Rod Serling: “You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead — your next stop, The Adjustment Bureau?!”  Well, they tried.  And for the most part they succeeded in trying to revive the unique genre of what I will call the “supernatural film noir” of The Twilight Zone (1959-64).   Film noir was an edgy but stylish dramatic genre filled with marginal, often desperate, characters struggling to stay alive in an unforgiving, usually criminal, world during the 1940s and 50s.  The films were generally low budget and always filmed in black and white, which I might add was not a problem for the seasoned experts of the studio system before their destruction by the antitrust division of the United States Department of Justice.  But, that’s another story.    

I (and everyone else) loved The Twilight Zone.   (The opening with music by Bernard Hermann was enough to give you the creeps for the next half hour.)  The series spanned the “utopian” Eisenhower years to the disillusioned never-to-be had last year of the Kennedy administration.  Faith in America’s unlimited future popped like a soap bubble with the Kennedy assassination.  They tried to warn us that all was not well in Levittown – those leftist Jewish intellectuals we thought we excoriated from Hollywood during the McCarthy era.  Despite all the appearance of success and security of middle America, people were unhappy in their assigned roles.  It was the rigidity of thought and behavioral codes that exploded into the counter culture of the 1960s.  But I digress.

 

The Adjustment Bureau is in many ways a comment on post 9/11/2001-America.  (I add the year because people forget.)  It is the Patriot Act gone gaa gaa.   Men in black hats (government/god agents) assume control over the fate of a young couple in an attempt to separate the two lovers for their own good, much like controlling parents might.  But these parental figures have magic powers.  The hatted-ones (and we know dangerous they can be) have plans for these two, which does not include marriage.   The failed senatorial candidate (Matt Damon) is to become president and his dancer girlfriend (Emily Blunt) is to become a great choreographer – but only if they stay apart.  Is love stronger than professional ambition and the predestination of government/god?   I found the issue posed by the movie to be a curious one: that marriage for a presidential candidate would be injurious, in fact fatal, to his candidacy.  Perhaps, the filmmakers have no knowledge of the public’s presumption of any unmarried man over the age of thirty.  But this is the supernatural, and one must suspend one’s sense of reality for the movie to succeed.

In fact, the ability of the director and screenwriter, George Norfi, to cast a spell of plausible deniability upon the audience for 106 minutes had to have been a real challenge.  The screen play was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick.  As one supernatural event followed the next, the film at times resembled a malignant Bewitched (1964-72) episode.   This is where the television format has an advantage.  The Twilight Zone was for the most part a one-act play.  It opened with a mundane premise, introduced the supernatural element which created a dilemma, and resolved the story with an ironic surprise ending – all within a thirty-minute timeslot.  There wasn’t time for the audience to appreciate the absurdity of the plot because they were so engrossed in the intensity of the drama.  To lengthen the plot for this movie, chase scenes (i.e., car/bus/bike/boat/people) were added.  To this extent it would appear, The Adjustment Bureau just might carved out a new triple genre for itself, the supernatural-film noir-action picture.   Holy Triple Threat, Batman!

I mentioned the Hollywood studio system, where the great film companies made their movies in-house by using a full-time staff of professional specialists.  The lighting directors, the costumers, the set designers, the sound and film editors all worked together for years.  They knew what the director wanted and they would pull it off.  Consequently, the movies had a unity to them and a predicable studio stamp of style and elegance.  Modern movies often lack this quality as this one did.  The production value was rough around the edges.  For a film that placed such significance on hats, I was astonished to see the cheap rumpled ones the costumer selected for the government/god agents.  For me, it was genuine distraction.  It is beyond me that a movie with a budget of $51,000,000.00 would dress main characters in cheap rumpled hats purchased from Target.  It did not help that they were ill-fitting.  This is something that would not have occurred in studio system.  When it came to hats, this movie was no Casablanca (1942).

Here’s the trailer:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H78XCiJamXc

From the vault:  Casablanca (1942), directed by Michael Curtiz; written by Julius J. Epstein, Philip Epstein, and others; starring, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Raines.  Bogart and Bergman were convinced this was going to be a monumental flop.  Studio chief Jack Warner reported co-writers and twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein to the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Although they were never called to testify, when asked if they ever were members of a "subversive organization," they responded, "Yes. Warner Brothers.”

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

Dwight Dekeyser

© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved.

“Nénette” (2010)

Dwight Dekeyser rating:  ZZZ

Dear Friend:

It was Oscar night and there was nothing showing I wanted to see.  I had never reviewed a documentary before, so I thought I would live dangerously and take a walk on the wild side and review this coquettish-sounding documentary about an “octogenarian” orangutan called Nénette.  (Actually, she was only 40, about five years past her life expectancy.)  It was not as if I were expecting Nana (1880) by Emile Zola, but I was expecting something more than this excruciating excursion to this abysmal French apiary.  No, I am not talking about Paris!  I am talking about the Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes.  The zoo which, according to some accounts, was once a dreadful place with small cages, rusty wire over the terrarium, and smelled like an open sewer.  Quel charme!

As you can imagine, the history of French zoo keeping has not always been pretty.  According to The Divine Sarah, food was so scarce during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), Parisians resorted to eating their exotic exhibits.  Things have improved since the fall of the Second Empire.   In the 1980s, the Jardin des Plantes was rehabilitated into a respectable zoo worthy of the City of Lights and La Belle France.  However, that was some time after Nénette’s arrival, circa 1968.  But this is ancient history, except for the poor girl’s petit appartement, which is not anyone’s idea of the Ritz.  (Perhaps, Mr. Fayed might have some suggestions for a changer de décor.)  In fact, one observer remarked her lack of space was most probably a result of the high rents in Paris – competition even Darwin could not have contemplated.

Watching this documentary had all the excitement of watching (Jacques Cousteau would agree) a home aquarium.  Yes, it’s very pleasant for a few moments, but not for 70 minutes.  Orangutans are not mischievous monkeys or majestic mountain gorillas.  No, they are the sloths of the ape world.  The sheer inertia of these magnificent orange oafs was oppressive.  They are a species that would try the patience of Jane Goodall.  They hardly move at all and almost never utter a noise – sort of like tropical fish.  Except these fish look like us, and there’s the fascination.  We look like them, they look like us.  We stare at them, they stare at us – except they don’t talk.  In many ways this movie was like visiting a nursing home for the aged or mentally retarded.  You know they’re human – "there's just no there there,"  to quote Gertrude Stein.  At some point it became clear to me that this wildlife documentary was actually a captivity documentary, a sort of inaction film and that that I was just another captive ape with nothing to do but stare back at the screen until I was released by my theater handlers.  At least, they got complementary yogurt and a jug of tea, which I discovered is just as easily unscrewed with one's lips as one's hands in Orangutan-land.

The cinematography, if you could call it that, was unimpressive.  It was deliberately minimalistic.  It was one camera focusing on an animal, usually straight-on and in extreme close-up.  It felt as if one were in a relentless starring contest with a bored depressed catatonic creature that would not make eye contact.  There was no Desi Arnaz three-camera simultaneous shooting here.  It was more like The Honeymooners (1951—55) single camera “keep the camera on Jackie” approach, except this Jackie never moved, but for her eyes from side to side.  It was almost like watching Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), eight hours and five minutes of continuous slow motion footage of the Empire State Building.  It was absolutely the most unimaginative and frankly lazy approach to film making I have ever seen.   It was shooting fish in a barrel.
 

Visitors to the exhibit were heard but not seen.  The subtitles came fast and furious.  (At least the movie was good French practice.)  Some of the children were very funny.  One insisted that Nénette and his father were not the same age, his father was 40 and a half.  A  zoo keeper said if the glass ever broke between the orangutans and the humans, it would be “run for your life.” Now, that would have been a movie!  I can just see a band of orange apes terrorizing Paris, climbing the Eiffel Tower, invading the Louvre, and commanding the cat-walk on Fashion Week.  But, as we now know, that would be out of character for our furry fellows.  They would be much more likely to be smugly ensconced in the front row between Anna Wintour and André Leon Talley at the Chanel show.  No faux fur for these guys.

Here is the trailer:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INjYL3M_WF4

From the vault:  Any Which Way but Loose (1978), directed by James Fargo; starring Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, and Geoffrey Lewis.  I have never seen this movie.  I have no idea what it’s about.   I do know that it has an orangutan in it.  Maybe this one knows some tricks.

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

Dwight Dekeyser

© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq.  All rights reserved.