"The Big Short" takes a deftly comic look at the 2008 housing bubble.

At once documentary and narrative, comical and cynical, The Big Short is a refreshingly un-self-important end-of-the-year release from director Adam McKay. McKay, who’s best known for making such silly comedies as Anchorman and Talladega Nights, has plenty of experience with movies about terrible people in positions of power. Now he’s made a film which depicts real people who did real damage, even though some of the names have been changed. The Big Short examines the housing market crash of 2007-08 and the financial entrepreneurs who predicted it and profited by it. It’s a virtual who’s-who of the country’s greediest people. The film’s wry tone will likely overshadow the real weight of its subject matter. But thematically speaking, this movie is on the level of a massive-scaled Victorian novel: It’s both fascinated by and critical of capitalism, and even if it doesn’t punish its characters with the moral authority of a Trollope or a Dickens, it’s a film capable of lighting a fire in its audience.

The material covered by The Big Short (it’s adapted by McKay and Charles Randolph from Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book) is dense and at times confusing if you are, like me, woefully under-educated about sub-prime mortgages and swaps and all things mortgage-related. McKay knows his material is difficult, which may be one of the reasons he resorts to at times audacious moments of humor. The market’s crash was, of course, a very bad thing for a lot of people. And you can feel the film’s indignation as it depicts all of the financial entrepreneurs who profited by the crash. Playing hedge fund manager Michael Burry, Christian Bale is—according to the movie—the first to recognize a housing bubble. It’s 2005, and Burry, who wears a T-shirt and cargo shorts to the office and blitzes himself out to heavy metal while he stares into a computer screen all day, decides to short the market. His colleagues are horrified that Burry will bring their company to ruin, and the big lending companies are only too happy to take his money, never dreaming that Burry will ultimately be taking theirs.

The film tracks various other financial people who, like Burry, make the decidedly amoral choice to short the housing market, to profit off the impending financial ruin of others. Their attitude is: Anyone can figure this out, but nobody’s looking, so why not us? Moreover, the mortgage industry had been giving housing loans to anyone with a signature. Why shouldn’t they take advantage of the bad behavior of these lending companies who are offering the American Dream to those who cannot afford it?

McKay really emerges as a first-rate director here. Anchorman and Talladega Nights have their moments, but they are both too loosey-goosey in their structure. Working with different material and different actors, and fueled by healthy cynicism, McKay has found his niche as a director. At times, the actors speak directly to the camera, but their speech is always laced with humor, as though we were watching one of Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries. At other times, the movie is surprisingly humane in its treatment of its characters. Steve Carell, playing another investor, named Mark Baum, is a good example of this. Baum is a prickly rat of a man (he looks like Templeton from Charlotte’s Webb) who barges into his group therapy session and interrupts everyone with his loud complaining, only to leave again to take a phone call. He’s caught up in the noise of his own life because he’s doesn’t want to deal with a personal tragedy for which he feels guilty. Later, he’s the one who realizes that taking advantage of other people’s bad practices isn’t good: it’s just more bad behavior.

Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt co-star, although their performances don’t really register. Gosling is quite good at playing a self-aggrandizing asshole, and does that very well here. Pitt’s character is the most laid-back of the bunch: he’s into sustainable living, since he believes the crash will permanently wreck the global economy. (Sustainable living is so much easier when you’re rich.)

With Melissa Leo, Marisa Tomei, Hamish Linklater, John Magaro, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, Finn Wittrock, Max Greenfield, Stanley Wong, and in amusing cameos, Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain, and Selena Gomez.

American Psycho

Have you ever thought about the fact that Norman Bates was actually a pretty likable character? Aside from the grisly truth of what Bates was doing with his nights, Alfred Hitchcock managed to make him endearing for much of the film. (Well, Anthony Perkins, the actor who played him, deserves a lot of the credit, thanks to his boyish face and the way he makes Bates charmingly awkward.) We feel bad that he has to live with that crotchety mother of his, running that depressing motel, wasting away like a hermit. And then, when we find out the truth, we feel bad that Norman Bates was raised under decidedly horrible circumstances. This doesn't mitigate his crimes or his guilt, but it certainly humanizes him.

Now prepare yourself for a movie that is extravagant in its desire to dehumanize its main character (it seems unfitting to call him a protagonist) and alienate its audience in the process. American Psycho (2000) is about a sociopathic yuppie who gets his jollies killing people. It's from a novel by Brad Easton Ellis, and his heavy ideas weigh the movie down with nothing to relieve them from their own stifling self-importance. The script was written by the director, Mary Harron, and Guinevere Turner. So one of these three is to blame for the line, "They don't have a good bathroom to do coke in." It happens early in the film: four Wall Street businessmen are sitting at some fancy schmancy restaurant that serves unappetizing yet pretentious-sounding food that only the rich could afford to eat and pretend to enjoy. Then another member of their pack returns to the table and says it: "They don't have a good bathroom to do coke in."

My problem with the line was this: He reports his findings as though he were doing a commercial, perhaps telling a friend--and the viewer--that "this new cream really rejuvenates your saggy skin." He should have said something more vague, if we're trying to be realistic. You may think I'm splitting hairs, but actually this little bit of detail underscores a much bigger problem in American Psycho. The line is meant for shock value, realism or good writing be damned. It's part of an overarching--and failed-- attempt to satirize the 1980s and all those alpha-male, coke-snorting frat boys-turned executives, who whip out business cards and compare them to see whose is the nicest. I wonder: are the business cards a euphemism for anything? This is one line of dialogue in a script that feels incredibly contrived, as though the writers were saying, "are you getting how cleverly we're satirizing yuppie culture? We're trying to make it as obvious as possible."

Aside from some beautiful shots of New York City, American Psycho lacks any sense of elegance. And yet it's made with skillful good taste: the lavish yet sterile apartment of Christian Bale is lavish and sterile in a calculated way: it's all designed in order to bring out the blood stains that frequently cover his floors and his bed sheets. The overly familiar 80s music that layers the film (Phil Collins, Robert Palmer, Huey Lewis and the News) reminds us--as if we needed it--that this movie very specifically wants to capture the insanity of that decade. But I see no evidence that the movie has anything deeper or more authentic or interesting going on in it than the most banal, expensive yuppie films that actually came out of the 80s. Like The Wolf of Wall Street, American Psycho may be secretly in love with the things it wants to critique. (Although I'm not sure how secretive this love affair really is.)

The film drifts along with humorless precision, as bad as many a David Cronenberg movie, and the whole time I yearned for some Brian De Palma. The difference between American Psycho and any number of De Palma's ridiculous thrillers is manifold: With De Palma we get some kind of freakish, manic, titillating, tricky joke. All of his movies between Sisters and Blow Out captured this feeling to one degree or another (even if not all of them were entirely good or successful). You see a Brian De Palma thriller and you're blissfully aware that you're at a movie directed by someone who wants to show you a good time. You see American Psycho and you feel the deadening pulse of a bad sermon.

Christian Bale obviously got himself in impeccable shape to play the character of Patrick Bateman. Bale is of course famous for "becoming" his characters. There's no denying that the man has talent. But I'm convinced more than ever that he is an overrated actor. He seems hellbent on playing characters that require basically the same kind of performance: one comprised entirely of alternations between very serious scowls and a sunken-faced deadpan expression. (It's what made the Batman movies such enormous box office hits.) I guess we've stopped expecting anything more from our "serious" leading men. They're certainly not going to be accused of having fun or letting us have fun. Bale aficionados can look forward to seeing his chiseled body, but are you okay with it being covered in blood? Are you okay with Christian Bale running through the halls of his high-rise apartment building naked with a chainsaw? (I know...It's the universal good time.) His performances often feel overly perfected and somehow never alive.

Some will likely argue that the point of American Psycho is to show the heart of not-aliveness. The problem is that a corporate thriller without any life in it starts to feel like a corporate snuff movie, and even if there weren't scenes of Christian Bale's house of horrors (bodies in closets propped up like trophies, and various other horrors) and his bizarre sexual trysts and his deviant inner-thoughts and psychotic dream journal, we'd still have the film's snuff-like devotion to 80s corporate greed. If the makers of American Psycho wanted to make a movie that is believably about a sociopath, they have done it. (Is there anything weirder than the way Patrick Bateman talks about music? As if he were reading the reviews of albums?) But they haven't given us any reason to care one bit.

With Willem Defoe, Josh Lewis, Reese Witherspoon, Chloe Sevigny, Justin Theroux, Jared Leto, Samantha Mathis, and Matt Ross. ★

American Hustle

Watching American Hustle is like watching three different train wrecks happen at once, and yet there is an element of control involved that would distinguish it from an actual train wreck. First and foremost, it's a comic film that yearns to have been made in the late 70s, which is when it's set. The period detail is as conspicuous as the hair of the women in the movie, from the carefully chosen music to the glossy retro Columbia Pictures logo that plays at the beginning of the movie. That's part of the trouble: American Hustle feels too manufactured, and as such the story falters a lot. The script by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell (he also directed) is self-consciously a crime-comedy. Movies of this kind from the actual 70s weren't self-conscious. They just were. You begin to miss this element in American Hustle, because it always feels like a put-on.

But there are redeeming qualities, such as the magnificent cast: Christian Bale as a con artist with a deluxe comb-over and a striking little gut that compliments his even more striking fashion sense; Amy Adams as his mistress/cohort, a gal who affects an English accent in order to dupe clients; Bradley Cooper as a cop who's looking to get a promotion; Jennifer Lawrence as Bale's hard-drinking, hilariously out-of-control wife, who has a big nest of hair atop her head; and Jeremy Renner, a naive, well-intentioned mayor from New Jersey, who unwittingly becomes part of the cop's plan to entrap a bunch of politicians and mobsters.

David O. Russell's brand of comedy is hard to take sometimes. He's big on letting his characters ramble their way to a point, and you really miss clever, quick, flashy dialogue when that happens. On the other hand, there are some pretty funny lines in American Hustle, and many of them fall out of Lawrence's mouth like little flecks of verbal dynamite. Half the time you aren't aware of how funny they are, and just how loopy her character is. She really colors the film.

Bale is appropriately pathetic-looking as a lifelong scammer, he of the hyper-real performance. (I'm quite prepared to believe that he put on weight so he could have a real belly.) The movie doesn't take him too seriously, but it also doesn't completely dismiss him, which feels like loyalty on its own terms. Bradley Cooper, on the other hand, is always some degree of Bradley Cooper. (His character wears curlers at night, which is a good example of how the film can be uproariously funny when it wants to be.) They do play off each other well.

The overall results for me, were mixed. There were moments I laughed loud and long, and moments where I felt bored by what seemed like deliberate chaos. It's a whirlwind of a movie, and admittedly a well-made one. Linus Sandgren was the director of photography. His work is solid: American Hustle has panache and charm and sexy camera angles to spare. But there is something hollow inside of it, like director David Russell was grasping at becoming the next Coppola or Scorcese, and not quite hard enough. With Elisabeth Röhm, Robert De Niro, Jack Huston, Louis C.K., Alessandro Nivola, and Colleen Camp. ★★½

3:10 to Yuma

Russell Crowe and Christian Bale head the cast in the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma. Crowe plays an infamous cutthroat train robber who's supposed to be evil incarnate, and Bale is the stubborn rancher, struggling to feed his family, who agrees to help transport him to a train station bound for the Yuma, Arizona prison. I haven't seen the 1957 original, which starred the always forthright Glenn Ford, and Van Heflin, but this re-imagining is a first-rate Western. It's trashy good fun, sustained by Crowe's inability to be unlikable. He's the kind of dream villain who's tough enough to be intimidating but not dastardly enough to kill a kid or anything like that.

The director, James Mangold, maintains a sort of controlled brutality that works because there's an ironic side to all this: the archly drawn characters poke fun at the old model of good guys vs. bad guys. Granted, there's nothing new in this, but the movie doesn't make a point of being too clever or self-impressed about it. We're allowed to enjoy the play-acting. This is probably the best sham Western I've seen.

This movie offers itself up as some kind of hero-worshiping wish fulfillment. Bale's character wants to be a hero to his sons again. After losing a foot in the Civil War, he feels reduced to something less than a man, and he sees this moment as an opportunity to improve his image. You find yourself laughing at this delusional reasoning. It fuels all the drama of the movie. Westerns have always contained an element of wish fulfillment. They have so often encapsulated an obsession with masculine power and domination. The outlaws, the Indians, and the elements become the Western hero's three obvious antagonists.

The actors are mostly well-cast. Ben Foster, as Crowe's right hand man, achieves a kind of creepy comic book style performance. He's disturbingly devoted to Crowe, and the moment he comes on screen he's commanding your attention. As a performer he restrains himself for the most part, and lets the creepiness really sink in and populate all of his scenes in the film. Peter Fonda does good work as a determined old codger working for the Pinkerton guards Crowe and his gang attacks in the beginning. He's go the vibe of a John Carradine: he's done this before. Vinessa Shaw seems anachronistic as a saloon keeper Crowe beds early in the film. She just looks too modern, even with authentic-looking costumery. She doesn't look, for instance, as convincing as Katharine Ross did in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

With Logan Lerman, Peter Fonda, Dallas Roberts, Alan Tudyk, Gretchen Mol, and Luke Wilson.

The Prestige

100th Review
 

The Prestige (2006) is about two magicians in London at the end of the 19th century, both vying for the public's attention and acclaim. It's an interesting idea that was bungled, possibly before Christopher Nolan, the director and co-writer (along with his brother, Jonathan), ever began working on it. As a director, Nolan tends to inflate his movies. He enjoys hatching labyrinthine plots, and tinkering with time and manipulating the viewer's emotions. That's all fine and dandy, but the problem with most of his work has been a certain hollowness that may naturally proliferate as a result of his best intentions to be clever and grandly mysterious.

This is a movie about magic that's absolutely lacking in any sense of wonder or excitement. I didn't care about any of the characters, despite the interesting cast that was assembled (including Michael Caine, Rebecca Hall, Scarlet Johansson, David Bowie, and Andy Serkis). It was all lifeless, uninvolving. Christian Bale does his usual thing as one of the magicians, the darker, more obsessive one. Bale acts with his facial expressions, or should I say, expression. He rarely shows more than the one. He frequently plays dark, deeply disturbed characters, to the point that everything he does blends into something indistinguishable. There's not much difference between this and Batman Begins or even American Psycho, except that he laughed more in American Psycho. He was a certifiable sociopath there. Here he's just a mad genius.

Hugh Jackman plays his American rival and nemesis, and he's the more commercial of the two. Jackman has an engaging quality about him, but he's played as the heavy. He's in it for the money, and even admits, readily, that Bale is the better magician. Their careers and their lives mirror those of certain Hollywood directors: say, Orson Welles in the place of Bale's character, and Steven Spielberg in the place of Jackman's. One a masterfully intuitive filmmaker and the other a master, epic-scale showman. Welles's entire career was troubled because of studio tampering, financial turmoil, and inner-conflict. Spielberg has always been the darling of the studios because he's always been able to make a lot of money with his films, some of which are genuinely marvelous, and some of which are shamefully commercial and uninteresting.

The two magicians develop a deep and mutual rivalry, and the movie is full of the tricks they play on each other. The idea of The Prestige reminded me of Sleuth (1972), which was directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starred an aging Laurence Olivier and a youngish Michael Caine. Olivier played a respected English mystery writer living in a beautiful, ornate mansion in the English countryside, and Caine was the young Italian immigrant (there's a great line where Olivier assures Caine's character that he could never become English) sleeping with Olivier's wife. The movie was mainly a series of elaborate tricks designed to titillate and terrorize the audience, and it worked. Sleuth was a fascinating entertainment. It wasn't inflated into some large scale dramatic epic, complete with courtroom scenes and a wife hanging herself in the attic. The Prestige wants to be all things to all people, and I suspect this is Christopher Nolan's temperament as a director seeping into the movie. He's certainly got it all, except for the kind of kinetic excitement this move requires. This is a soap opera between two magicians, and it's too stilted to generate any real movie magic.

Nolan continues to get hung up on big ideas to satisfy his baser cinematic instincts and passions. He clearly likes pulp, but doesn't approach it in the right way. He dresses it up with superficial sophistication. The thing that people enjoy about a Quentin Tarantino movie is its unashamed dedication to that low pulp entertainment. When I watch Nolan's movies, I sense the desire to deliver that kind of true enjoyment, but it's tainted by a need to be the smartest director in Hollywood, the one who "really makes you think," as more than one person has said to me about him.

The Fighter

For me, boxing is about as uninteresting as good taste is to Kathy Griffin. I liked Cinderella Man but it's such a bland subject to me that much more is needed than the back and forth of the two prizefighters and the ever popular theme of an underdog triumphing over insurmountable odds. Apparently entire cities of people can rally behind a boxer as though he's a symbol of all their hard work, blood, sweat, values, etc., but how many times do we have to sit through a movie that's made of such subject matter before we're asleep with boredom? Director David O. Russell makes The Fighter less about boxing and more about the family of sleazy, opportunistic worms and their selfish investment in the career of son/brother Micky Ward, whose brother Dick had his time in the limelight in the 1970s against a fighter named Sugar Ray. Dick is now a crack addict, and the addiction keeps pulling him apart from his brother as both a friend and a trainer and mentor. Nevertheless, Dick's mom Alice, who manages Micky's boxing career, is blinded by Dick's past glory and is convinced that he's necessary to Micky's success. She's waiting for Dick to make his big comeback, and biding her time with Micky's boxing campaign. They're thrilled that HBO is doing a documentary on Dick until they discover it's a documentary about the horrors of cocaine addiction.

As Micky, Mark Wahlberg does a formidable job playing the emotional center of the movie. Wahlberg will probably not get the recognition he deserves for initiating The Fighter and for his performance, but he's quite good. The problem is he's not really playing anything new for himself as an actor. He's basically a nice guy. We feel confident that he can do what is needed to win, and we trust Wahlberg as an actor to carry the film. Christian Bale, as Dick, has the more extreme character. His glassy-eyed stares and wobbling swagger make him seem a bit nightmarish--he's trying to show us the ravages of addiction and in the process becomes something increasingly hideous. I wasn't even particularly sympathetic towards him. He seemed like a leech sucking away his younger brother's potential, urged on by the Mama Leach, Alice (Melissa Leo), whose part is probably the most delicious one in the movie (along with the parts of her seven dried-up, spaced-out daughters, who do pretty much whatever Mama tells them).

 This is probably one of the funniest movies of the year. Russell gives us such a bleakly comic look at this royally f***ed up family that it has the effect of watching an episode of Jersey Shore. They revel in the gutter as though it were lined with satin and roses, and their opportunism is so unveiled that you can't help but laugh at their efforts to protect their turgid family unit from outside invasion. Amy Adams, as Micky's girlfriend, represents the first real threat to the family's shell. She sees how much they're ruining Micky's chances to really succeed as a prizefighter, and she has the audacity to stand up to their "us verses the world" act.

The relationship between Dick and Micky is truly what drives the film's story. Without Micky's fear of letting go of his brother--of essentially betraying him by realizing how destructive Dick is to Micky's career and his life--he could easily move on to brighter pastures and recognize his potential. However, it's not as simple as Dick being a useless leach. He's got instincts that can't be ignored when it comes to boxing, and Micky realizes that he does still need his brother's help. Perhaps the dramatic tension is a bit predictable, but the movie's comic realism helps to lighten the load of the drama. We're already enjoying the juicy scenes of the family in-fighting more than the boxing anyway.

Overall I'd say The Fighter exceeded my expectations because it went so much against the grind of the typical boxing movie, and I was very thankful that David Russell and everyone else involved in making the movie took the care to be funny and realistic in their approach. With Jack McGee and Frank Renzulli. Written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson.