Movie Reviews - 2015 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s just a suggestion at first. Just a few musical notes here and there, reminding you of Bill Conti’s iconic “Rocky” soundtrack. And not just “Gonna Fly Now,” which, besides being a staple for high school bands everywhere, went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts back in 1977. No, I’m talking about glimmers of, say, “Philadelphia Morning” (the somber one, from Rocky’s first out-of-shape run), and “Alone in the Ring” (also somber, when he can’t sleep the night before the big fight), as well as “Going the Distance” (plodding for the fight montage, then rising and triumphant as Rocky is knocked down and gets back up in the 14th round—my favorite, to be honest). Throughout Ryan Coogler’s “Creed,” as Adonis Johnson, or Donnie Johnson (Michael B. Jordan), Apollo Creed’s illegitimate son, tries to make a name for himself—tries to prove, as he says in the end, that he’s not a mistake—we keep getting suggestions of this music.

It’s not until the final round of the climactic boxing match (because the arc of the Rocky universe is long but it bends toward the final round), that we get more than just a suggestion: We get the full, triumphant monty. A.O. Scott reports that in his screening room, at that moment, critics erupted in spontaneous applause. As a veteran of screening rooms, I can let you know: That’s rather unusual. But then all of us have grown up on Rocky.

Together we fill gaps
I keep reading that “Creed” is the best Rocky movie since the original in 1976, but that’s not saying much. The first was great, and, at the time, massively original in being a feel-good Capraesque throwback in an era of cinematic anti-heroes and anti-Christs. “Rocky Balboa,” a lion in winter tale from 2006, is pretty good, too. But the others? The less said, the better.

“Creed,” in fact, almost redeems one of the worst of them, “Rocky IV,” the cartoonish, jingoistic movie in which Apollo Creed is killed during a boxing exhibition with the Russian heavyweight Ivan Drago, setting up Rocky’s “World War III” battle in Russia. It gives Apollo’s final moments a seriousness, and a kind of dignity, they never had in the original. In a way, Coogler does to it what Coppola did to Mario Puzo’s trashy novel.

“Creed” begins with a fight in a juvenile detention facility in L.A. in 1998. A woman (Phylicia Rashad, the third actress to play Mary Anne Creed) comes to visit the troublesome boy, and lets him know she’s the wife of the father he never knew. “What was his name?” the boy eventually asks, and that’s when we cut to the title in big block letters, a la “Rocky.” But not scrolling across the screen. Just there. It’s a nice open. Then we get the equivalent of the Spider Rico fight: a now-adult Adonis in Tijuana, Mexico, clobbering a guy in one or two rounds. Twelve hours later, he’s back at work at a financial consulting firm; but when he gets promoted, he quits. He’s got fighting in his blood.

At this point I’m thinking, “Wait, why does Adonis need to travel to Philly to have Rocky train him? He’s Apollo Creed’s son—anyone would jump at the chance.” But his mom, in cahoots with the son of Apollo’s trainer, makes sure no one in LA will touch him. That’s why Philly.

As for why Rocky? It’s probably more than the fact that he’s the two-time heavyweight champ. Early on, we see Adonis watching the Bicentennial superfight, and mimicking the movements. But he’s mimicking Rocky; he’s beating on his father. The man who never married his mother and never knew him. His feelings about his father, as we say today, are complicated; and in Philly, Rocky becomes a father figure for him. He calls him “Unc.”

The key to a good Rocky movie is in the relationships, and “Creed” goes the distance here. Rocky, still running his restaurant, and now bereft of all of his supporting cast—Paulie, Adrian, Apollo and Mickey—is reluctant to take on Apollo’s son. He tried training in the past (“Rocky V”); didn’t work (both ways). But Adonis keeps at him, “like a woodpecker” Rocky says with a smile; and one day after visiting Paulie and Adrian’s graves, reading to them from the newspaper, he gets a look on his face, and returns to Mighty Mick’s Gym, where Adonis is training under the name Don Johnson. At first nobody gets it: Why does the champ care about this black kid, who calls him “Unc”? After his first professional fight, word gets out about who he really is.

Adonis’ other key relationship in the movie is with, Bianca (Tessa Thompson of “Dear White People”), the woman in the apartment downstairs, and it feels more than just the sidebar romance. Coogler handles these quiet moments so well. He makes them smart and tender. The way he shows you how people can get under each other’s skin gets under your skin. These scenes are also fun in a Lois and Clark kind of way: We’re waiting for Bianca to find out Don is not just another kid from the neighborhood. When she meets Adonis’ uncle, her first comment is “You’re white.” (“For a while now,” Rocky nods.) But she knows. To Adonis, she says, kind of starry-eyed, “When were you going to tell me your uncle was Rocky Balboa?”

Was you on a cruise or something?
Should we get into the race issue here? Coogler, who’s African-American, has stated over and over that he wanted to do this movie as an homage to his father, who loved the “Rocky” movies, particularly “Rocky II.” Then there’s Eddie Murphy’s take. You do wonder how much the success of the “Rocky” series owes to white audiences thrilling at a white man reclaiming territory long yielded to black men in real life. Coogler has to be aware of this, even as he sets about reclaiming that territory in fiction again. Because we are our fictions.

Yet there’s a great respect for the original movies. The references are everywhere: Mighty Mick’s, turtles, the chicken-catching thing, the one-armed push-ups, “Women weaken legs.” Seriously, has any movie series been as carefully catalogued and self-referenced as the “Rocky” series? Before this, though, it was a self-contained world. It felt too much in Stallone’s head and heart. Coogler opens the windows on this universe without knocking anything over; he just lets the fresh air in.

He lets the air into Stallone, too. Good god, maybe Sly just needed a better director all of these years. Rocky has a line in the locker room, where he’s talking about all that he’s lost (“Everything I got has moved on”), and his voice breaks, and it’s  just heartfelt and beautiful. Stallone is now the same age that Burgess Meredith was when he first played Mickey, for which he was then nominated best supporting actor. There’s talk, not unjustified, that Stallone might get the same treatment. He might even win. He’s certainly got sympathy on his side, and it would be a shocking turnaround after decades of Razi awards. The whole end of his career was a million-to-one shot.

There are mistakes. I would’ve abandoned the “12 O’Clock Boys” motorbike racers zipping alongside Adonis during his final run—as if they were the kids in “Rocky II.” Doesn’t work. Apparently Stallone also foisted the stars-and-stripes boxing trunks upon Coogler, and thus Adonis, for the final bout with “Pretty” Ricky Conlan (well-acted, by the way, by three-time ABA heavyweight champ Tony Bellew); but it muddies the thematic waters. Adonis is worried about embarrassing the name, and wearing the trunks would exacerbate that. Hell, his father died in those trunks—and his widow sends a facsimile version to her adopted son before his title match? Makes no sense. Plus Rocky urges Adonis to fight for the very reason Ivan Drago is vilified in “IV”: for himself.

Is there too much drama before the fight? Rocky is diagnosed with cancer, Adonis doesn’t like being called “Baby Creed” and decks Bianca’s headliner (she’s  a singer, of course). But I’ll take drama that creates the fight rather than drama that prevents the fight, as in “Rocky II” (he’ll go blind), “III” (he’s lost the eye of the tiger) and “V” (he’ll die).

Philadelphia morning
We don’t get the iconic steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum until the very end—after the title bout—when Adonis walks alongside a cancer-ridden Rocky Balboa up those steps again. Adonis urges them up those steps. It’s touching. What those steps mean and how often we’ve returned to them. Has any character, played by the same actor, and allowed to age, been with us as long as Rocky Balboa? 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Everything is good about “Bridge of Spies” but the pace. There’s drama but no real drive. Since director Steven Spielberg reinvented pulse-pounding with “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” et al., one wonders if this isn’t a conscious choice (reminding us of the pace of life in the 1950s) or an unconscious one (he’s 69 now).

OK, I didn’t much think of the color scheme, either. Not a fan of those muted grays and blah blues that Spielberg and longtime DP Janusz Kaminski seem to prefer now. The past didn’t always look like a winter day in Seattle, guys.

But I recommend the film. Start with two words: Mark Rylance.

Nothing remarkable
What makes an actor compelling? At one point, Rylance’s character, Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, is talking with his lawyer James Donovan (Tom Hanks) in federal prison, and says the following:

Standing there like that, you reminded me of the man that used to come to our house when I was young. My father used to say, “Watch this man.” So I did. Every time he came. And never once did he do anything remarkable.

It leads to a good, self-effacing line from Donovan (“And I remind you of him?”), and then a story, typical of Hollywood films, about The Man Who Keeps Getting Back Up. I quote it here because it reminds me of Rylance’s Abel. Never once does he do anything remarkable, yet he’s always remarkable. We’re drawn to him. As an actor, Rylance is able to convey a humanity and a depth of understanding at odds with the flurry around him. He seems quietly, sadly amused by it all.

Here’s another quote—a good, repeated line in the movie:

Donovan: You don’t look worried.
Rylance: Would it help?

Think of all the ways to say this line. It could be delivered with a slight sneer, or an eyeroll, or a as an insidery joke. And Rylance says it, yes, as a kind of joke, but not insidery; there’s almost a small bubble of hope at the end. His lawyer is a smart lawyer, after all, so maybe he knows something about American jurisprudence that he does not? It’s a voice that knows the ways of the world yet remains open to possibility. How lovely is that?

A few words about Hanks’ performance. Over the past 10 years, as senior editor of a legal publication, I’ve interviewed upwards of 250 lawyers. And Hanks’ Donovan feels like one of the most lawyerly lawyers I’ve seen on a movie screen. He exudes the profession: the quiet, plodding advocacy; the toughness in negotiation without seeming tough. He makes his arguments with a friendly face even as he’s working levers behind the scenes.

The trailer plays up his ordinariness—“I’m just an insurance lawyer”—but, c’mon, he’s a top lawyer who also participated in the Nuremberg trials. That’s why he gets the gig. Also because everyone else turns it down. No one wants to represent a commie spy in the middle of the Cold War. Look at what happens to Donovan for repping Abel:

1. Ostracism: Exemplified by a woman on the train who gives him a dirty look.
2. Professional setback: His law firm partners grow weary of his advocacy and shut him out.
3. Violence: Shots are fired through his living room window, where his teenage daughter is watching TV.

For most people, even the judge (particularly the judge), the trial isn’t a real trial. We’re giving the world a show trial. But Donovan isn’t part of that game; he goes all out. Was there a search warrant? How much of the evidence against Abel is admissible? What’s the difference between a criminal case and a national security case? He winds up taking Abel’s case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and makes a strong argument there. Of course, he loses. That’s the first part of the movie.

The second part is the titular part. Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), a U2 pilot, is shot down over the Soviet Union and doesn’t have the decency to kill himself. So a trade: Powers for Abel, and Donovan is called in to negotiate things. Except it’s almost like “Mission: Impossible.” He’s not really representing the U.S. government, so if caught we’ll disavow any knowledge of his actions. Worse, Donovan is negotiating with both the Soviets and the East Germans, and each has their own agenda. He makes his situation more difficult by including in the negotiations an American economics student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), who was caught on the wrong side during the building of the Berlin Wall.

I wonder about that impulse. Donovan is told repeatedly, by everyone, to forget about Pryor. He doesn’t. Why risk everything? That would be a good question to ask Hanks, or Spielberg, or screenwriters Joel and Ethan Coen and Matt Charman. Is it that he senses an opening? A weakness? Is it ego? Or is it just something in his nature?

As a man who can negotiate nothing, I’m fascinated by this impulse.

Take a bite and end it
Endings are not a bright spot for Spielberg. He’s the anti-Hitchcock in this regard. Hitchcock cut the cord quickly, and often beautifully, but Spielberg usually can’t let go. He drags things on.

I should add that I liked each of his possible endings of “Bridge of Spies.” But they do contradict each other in subtle ways.

The first ending is on the bridge. Before the exchange is made, Donovan, solicitous about Abel, asks if he’ll be OK in the Soviet Union. Abel says that if he’s embraced on the other side by the Soviets he will be; if not, not. And he’s not embraced. And the camera pans up and out.

That’s how Hitchcock would’ve ended it. But Spielberg continues.

We wind up on the transport plane back home, in which Powers gets the first taste of the ostracism he would feel for the rest of his life. Everyone ignores his attempts to explain himself. Everyone but Donovan, who tells him: “It’s not what people think; it’s what you know.” Then they settle back, these two very different men, and head back home, where, to different degrees and for different reasons, both are ostracized.

That could’ve been a good ending. But it’s not a Spielberg ending.

Instead, he shows us Donovan returning to his family, who thought he was on a business trip in England. But as soon as he enters his home, it’s all over the TV news about Powers’ release, and who negotiated that release; and his wife and little girl look up at him with eyes full of wonder and admiration. Then he goes upstairs and collapses on the bed.

The end? Nope.

Cut to the next day as Donovan takes the train to work. His story, and photo, are all over the front page of The New York Times, and that same woman who sneered at him before, who regarded him as a traitor when he was defending Abel, now looks over at him with understanding ... and pride. Donovan acknowledges her with a little head nod, then looks out the window of the elevated train and sees boys climbing fences in backyards; and it reminds him of a horrific moment in Germany when, from a similar elevated train, he witnessed two people being gunned down trying to get to the West. It’s a reminder that it continues.

Then we get an afterword about what happened to each of our principles. In 1962, Donovan negotiated the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners from Cuba (sequel, Steven?), while Abel led a long and seemingly satisfying life in the Soviet Union. The End.

Me in the audience: Wait, Abel lived? What about the non-embrace? Wasn’t that supposed to imply danger? Possible death? Why give us that scene and this afterword?

Then there’s the lady on the train. Doesn’t that entire scene, the need of it, contradict Donovan’s advice to Powers? It’s not what people think; it’s what you know. This is the Spielbergian corollary: “It’s not what people think; but, c’mon, isn’t it nicer when people think highly of you?” 

I still recommend “Bridge of Spies.” It’s a movie about grown-ups and for grown-ups. There’s a certain propriety to everything, a set of expected manners. On some level, those expected manners are as vanished as the Cold War. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

An odd thing happens when Hugh Grant makes an appearance about four-fifths of the way through “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”: I smiled and laughed a bit. There was lightness and fun to what he was doing and saying. He gave off ... what’s the word again? ... charm. The very thing missing from the rest of the movie.

Guy Ritchie’s “U.N.C.L.E.” wants to be light but it’s oddly heavy and tone deaf. Bits that should float through the air clunk to the ground. The repartee is sluggish, the charm absent. One moment Gaby (Alicia Vikander) is exuding a kind of rage; the next she’s drunk and doing a bad Tom-Cruise-in-“Risky Business” dance in a hotel room. Then we get the sadistic Nazi, with quick flashes of his concentration camp background, torturing the lead. Nothing funnier than concentration camps.

I don’t have any skin in this game since I never watched the 1960s TV show—not five minutes of it. In a way I was rooting for the movie since I want Henry Cavill (Superman, after all) to succeed. And he’s not bad. But his Napoleon Solo is too blasé without the necessary twinkle, while Armie Hammer’s Ilya Kurakin is too intense without any other redeeming quality. It feels like it should work—the Lone Ranger and Superman!—but it doesn’t come close.

Is it because Cavill, the Brit, is playing the blasé American, while Hammer, the blasé American, is playing the uptight Ruskie? On the chick side, you have the Swede playing the East German and the French woman (Elizabeth Debicki) playing the Nazi. It’s like Twister with nationalities. Everyone falls down.

So it’s 1963 and Napoleon and Ilya are the two top agents for the CIA and KGB, respectively, and they need to team up to find Gaby’s father, a former German scientist, who is helping remnant Nazis build the most powerful bomb of all. One bomb to rule the world, as it were.

They start out hating each other, of course—or Ilya hating, Napoleon shrugging—but it builds into mutual respect. We get exotic locales, hotel suites, cars that go vroom, but it’s never particularly fun, smart or sexy. None of it. Rarely have such good-looking people in such fine-looking clothes given off so little.

Is director Guy Ritchie done? Should someone turn him off?

I knew something was wrong when this was the first thing I saw in the film. It's background detail for the morons in the crowd, but surely a contender for worst fake headline in any movie ever:

As opposed to, you know, “PEACE!” or “WAR ENDS.” As if people in 1945 needed to be told which war. 

But my favorite part is the last word in the subhed: “Foe.” Not Germany or Japan. Foe. 

Guy? Uncle. 

In Bob Byington’s 2012 indie comedy “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” his main character, Max (Keith Poulson), fails up: he becomes rich, successful and loved without much effort. In this slice-of-life follow-up, Larry (Jason Schwartzman) fails the more normal way: down down down.

Larry shares a small apartment in Austin, Texas with his soporific French bulldog (Schwartzman’s own dog, Arrow), and occasionally visits his grandmother (Olympia Dukakis, a standout) at an assisted care facility. He drinks too much. Like Max, he’s disaffected and stuck in a dead-end job even as he eyes a potential inheritance. Unlike Max, he’s a tiny bit engagé. At the least, he’s trying to amuse himself.

After filling out a job application, for example, he declares, “A couple of spelling errors but I’m going to give it a B+.” He’s forever doing a bit called “fat guy getting out of pool” that requires slowly rolling over a countertop. Asked to help at the QuickLube garage where he works, he stares deeply into a computer while tapping furiously at the keyboard. “One second,” he declares, “my stocks are crashing.”

Much of the movie seems improvised, and Schwartzman is great at making Larry both sharply intelligent and not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. You also sense, in some lost look in his eye, a faint realization that life is passing him by.

The movie has interesting twists and quality secondary characters, but it doesn’t quite gel. It shows us a character with an obvious defect, then makes it apparent, to us and to him, that the defect is holding him back.

Still, there’s a gentleness here, and a greater maturity than Byington displayed in “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” He gives us more to like. 

-- This review appeared in slightly different form in The Seattle Times. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Well, at least it gets a lot of the details right. In its 90-minute runtime, we see/hear:

• Vince Guaraldi music
• Crack the whip on a frozen pond
• The kite-eating tree
• The little red-haired girl, and the teeth marks on her pencil
• Miss Othmar
• Adult voices going wah wah, wah wawa wah
• “No Dogs Allowed”
• “It was a dark and stormy night”
• Joe Cool
• Psychiatric Help: 5 cents

Charlie Brown is called a blockhead, Frieda calls out her naturally curly hair, and Sally calls Linus, who carries around his security blanket, her “Sweet Baboo.” They‘re not even concerned about updating anything for the 21st century. Kids still talk on land lines, Snoopy still writes on a typewriter, and he still fights “the Great War” versus “The Red Baron” in his “Sopwith Camel.”

No surprise that the details are right. The movie was written by Charles M. Schulz’s son and grandson, Craig and Bryan Schulz, along with family friend Cornelius Uliano. It’s directed by Steve Martino (“Horton Hears a Who!”).

But they still missed it.

Beagel
Question: What is the essence of Charlie Brown?

It’s more than just losing. In the best of the movies and TV specials, the essence of Charlie Brown is to lose and to get over the sting of that loss through the wisdom of Linus, his right-hand man and personal priest. In a sense, Charlie Brown represents the fall of man while Linus articulates the redemptive impulse of God.

The most obvious example of this is in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” After Charlie Brown is made director of the school paegant, he tries to counteract its overt commercialism with a tiny tree. That tree is really a version of himself, isn’t it: overlooked and unloved. And, true to form, everyone hates it. But then Linus tells Charlie Brown the true meaning of Christmas, and Charlie Brown, momentarily happy, puts a bulb on the tree. It falls over, apparently dead. So Linus to the rescue again. He declares that the tree just needs a little love. The tree is resurrected, Charlie Brown is redeemed, the spirit of Christmas is saved.

Here’s an even more interesting example. In Schulz's first feature-length movie, “A Boy Named Charlie Brown,” Charlie Brown winds up in a national spelling bee and seems on the verge of winning, but then misspells, of all words, “beagle,” and is crushed. He actually sinks into depression: in bed all day, shades drawn. It’s Linus who gets him out of it. He comes over, raises the shades, tells him all the kids at school miss him. But Charlie Brown is adamant: He’ll never go to school again, never play baseball again, never do anything again. So Linus offers this:

I suppose you feel you let everyone down, and you made a fool out of yourself and everything. But did you notice something, Charlie Brown? The world didn’t come to an end.

The world didn’t come to an end. That’s some cold comfort right there. But it gets Charlie Brown out of bed. And he sees girls skipping rope and boys playing marbles. Linus was right. Then he sees Lucy with the football. He thinks she doesn’t see him but she does; so when he tries to sneak a kick, she pulls the ball away (again) and he winds up flat on his back (again). “Welcome home, Charlie Brown,” she says with a smile, while he remains on his back, face turned with chagrin toward the camera.

That’s the ending. It’s amazing to me that that’s the ending. Here’s the lesson of that first “Peanuts” movie: in a world of gut-wrenching defeats like the spelling bee, you should be grateful for your everyday defeats, like Lucy pulling away the football. That’s how you know the world didn’t end: When you’re defeated in warm, familiar ways. That's how you know you‘re home. 

100%
Now let’s compare this to the new movie, in which Charlie Brown tries to impress the new girl in town, the little red-haired girl, whom he’s too tongue-tied to talk to. Among his schemes:

1. Win the talent show
2. Dance exceptionally at the dance
3. Write a great book report

What happens?

1. He has to choose between peforming his magic act and helping Sally, and he chooses the latter.
2. He begins to dance well, which means he’ll get to dance with the little red-haired girl; but then he slips on some punch and the sprinkler system is activated. Party over
3. He’s partnered with the little red-haired girl for the book report, but she’s away for the weekend and the report is due on Monday; so he reads the entirety of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” (which he initially thinks is a book called “Leo’s Toy Store” by Warren Peace), and writes a 1,000-word report, which is subsequently, literally, cut to shreds by a toy “Red Baron” fighter plane that keeps buzzing through town—a running gag.

The kids also take a standardized test, and Charlie Brown, initially flummoxed, scores an unprecedented 100%. For this, he’s celebrated, since we all know how popular brainy kids are at school. Other kids even start wearing Charlie Brown’s trademark yellow shirt with the black stripe. (Sally, the merchandiser, has a line that reverberates less with irony than the corporate chutzpah of Fox Studios: “You have to cash in while you can,” she says.) And the school holds an assembly in his honor. But there, on stage, he realizes the test isn’t his; it’s Peppermint Patty’s. Once again, he’s faced with a moral dilemma. Once again, he does the right thing.

Which sets up our ending.

In the final school assignment, kids are asked to choose a summer pen pal, and the little red-haired girl chooses Charlie Brown. Why? He needs to ask her! But circumstances intervene, and soon she’s about to board a bus for summer camp; so he rushes to see her before she can leave. At one point, it all seems hopeless. There are too many kids between him and her. But now the world, in the form of the kite-eating tree, intervenes on his behalf, and he’s lifted above the crowd and set back down to earth. (Kite ex machina.) And there, with everyone gathered around, he talks to the little red-haired girl for the first time. For the first time, we get to see her. And she talks about the various things he’s done in this movie; and she tells him why she chose him as a pen pal. 

“You have all the qualities I admire,” she says.

Which is sweet. But it’s not exactly “The world didn’t come to an end, Charlie Brown.”

Mittens
“The Peanuts Movie” is OK. They do a good job with the voices, and with some of the characters—Lucy in particular. We also get some funny lines. At the library when Charlie Brown searches for Tolstoy, for example: “He’s going into the grown-up section? Is that legal?”

But they screw up Charlie Brown. They make him someone who would succeed if he weren’t so moral and/or didn't have some temporary setbacks. He does write a good book report, he is a good dancer, he does have a good magic act. Why, with his pluck, he‘ll go far in life. And that’s just not Charlie Brown.

This is Charlie Brown. It’s from 1988. At the age of 25, I cut it out and saved it because I had my own unrequited love at the time. Seeing the strip made me happy. It told me that someone, somewhere, understood:

The one character given short shrift in the new movie is Linus, and you can guess why. When the ending is happy, when the girl you like tells you that you have all the qualities she admires, you don’t need a redemption song. But a quick note to Hollywood about happy endings: They don’t always make us happy.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Last year it was Godzilla. This year it’s an earthquake. What shitty thing will Hollywood do to San Francisco next year?

Maybe show us “San Andreas” again.

This is a movie to watch only when you’re surrounded by a lot of friends, and a lot of booze, and you take turns lobbing insults at the screen since the screen spends so much time lobbing insults at you. We watched it because Patricia loves the Rock, and I like the Rock—he was the best part of the WWF in the late ’90s by a long shot—but Rock, dude, get a better agent. I don’t know how someone with so much charisma keeps making such godawful movies.

It’s a shame about Ray
The Rock is Ray, a helicopter rescue guy in L.A., and in the cold open we see him rescue a pretty blonde with cleavage whose car goes off an embankment because she’s not paying attention. A local news crew, headed by super pretty Serena (Archie Panjabi), films it all. But then Ray comes home to divorce papers from wife Emma (Carla Gugino), a pretty brunette with cleavage who is now engaged to an architect named Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffudd, poor bastard, taking a paycheck to be a cowardly asshole.). Ray and Emma also have a daughter named Blake (Alexandra Daddario), a pretty brunette with fantastic cleavage, as anyone who’s seen the first season of “True Detective” can attest. That HBO show was Ms. Daddrio’s “Uma Thurman in 'Dangerous Liaisons'” moment; the moment every exec in Hollywood stood up and took notice. As it were.

Elsewhere, there’s a brainiac named Lawrence (Paul Giamatti), who, with his Asian colleague Dr. Kim Park (Will Yun Lee), figures out how to predict when big earthquakes hit. They do this right before a big earthquake hits, but not with enough lead time for Dr. Park to actually survive it. OK, he would have survived if that shitty little girl hadn’t been too frightened to get off the bridge. He had to rescue her and then die, leaving us Asianless. Unless you count Serena, who returns to film Lawrence warning everyone that an even bigger earthquake is about to hit. How big? The biggest ever. The Rock’s biceps big.

So what happens besides the shaking? What's the plot?

• The Rock rescues Emma from the top of some swanky LA building where she’s having lunch with an inexplicably bitchy woman played for two seconds by Kylie Minogue.
• Blake takes herself and her breasts to San Francisco and waits in the lobby of Daniel’s building, where she meets an endearingly nervous job applicant named Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt), who’s also endearingly Bri’ish. Which is even beh-ah. Plus he’s brought along his kid brother named ... wait for it ... Oliver! (Art Parkinson). Apparently they’re saving Artful Dodger for the sequel.
• When the quake hits in SF, Daniel totally abandons Blake like the douche we knew he was, but like 10 times worse. But he gets his later. Splat!

For some reason, director Brad Peyton (“Journey 2: The Mysterious Island”), screenwriter Carlton Cuse (“Nash Bridges,” “Lost,” “Bates Motel”), and the fine folks at New Line Cinema decided to make almost everyone in California assholes. I get Daniel; he’s a longtime movie cliché. But Kylie? The chick in the car? Hey, what’s the first thing you do during an earthquake? How about loot? Even better: with a hot-wired truck. And if someone like the Rock tries to take the truck to save his daughter in San Francisco? All five-foot-nothing of you should totally pull a gun on him. Because that’ll work.

Everyone’s shitty but the Rock, who, in the midst of rescuing half of California by helicopter, plane and boat, admits to wifey that he didn’t let her in after their other daughter died in a river-rafting expedition. That’s the backstory we get as people die below. And it sets up our ending in which Blake and her boobs are trapped underwater and the Rock and his mighty biceps finally get to her. But too late? In the safety of the speed boat, with wifey and Brits watching, he tries CPR. He pumps her chest again and again and again and again and again and again and again and...

She’ll live, but she’ll be flat-chested.

It’s a shame about us
And in the end, as an American flag unfurls in magic-hour light over what’s left of the Golden Gate bridge, we get the following conversation:

Wifey: What now?
Rock: Now ... we rebuild.*
Wifey: But Daniel’s dead. Who’s going to design the buildings? You? Don't make me laugh.
Rock: Just ... look at the flag. We need a happy ending.
Wifey: With millions of people dead?
Rock: Right, but millions of shitty people. The best survived. My biceps, our daughter’s boobs, and Oliver and Pip over there. And the camera will pan up as the music wells up and everyone in the audience with any lick of sense will throw up a little in their mouths. But they’ll be back next summer. Because they’re the people. The shitty people.

*We do get the first two lines. Which are bad enough to qualify for worst ending of the year. 

See you next summer, San Francisco!

WARNING: SPOILERS

“You haven’t got it.”

That’s what Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) tells Woodward and Bernstein (Redford and Hoffman) about an early Watergate story in “All the President’s Men.” So he slashes huge chunks out of it, sticks in the back pages, tells his reporters to get better stuff next time.

It’s probably what should have been said to Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett), the “60 Minutes II” producer, who, like a lot of the press, had been digging into a story about the activities of Pres. George W. Bush when he was with the Texas Air National Guard from 1968 to 1973. How did he get in? Was he AWOL in 1972? How did he get out almost a year early? It’s the middle question that’s the humdinger, of course, and in September 2004 she finally gets a source and a document, the so-called Killian memo, that indicates Bush had been working on political campaigns rather than doing his duty in the early ’70s. POTUS had been AWOL. In the middle of a presidential campaign, this was a potential bomb. But it blew up in her face. Ours, too, you could say.

Bradlee’s line is also what should have been said to the national media in 2004, which focused myopically on the forged Killian memo and ignored the rest of the story, which is a story about good ol’ boy Texas privilege. The memo was forged, in other words, but its contents were true. This means that during the 2004 presidential campaign, the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, who served in Vietnam and earned a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts, was questioned relentlessly over his service (see: swiftboating), while the Republican president, who labeled himself a “wartime president,” and who fought the Vietnam War from the safety of Texas with time off for bad behavior, sailed through unaffected. The coward was seen as a hero and the hero smeared as a coward. And all of this from a media that Republicans continue to label “liberal.”

Finally, sadly, Bradlee’s line needs to be repeated to James Vanderbilt, the writer-director of “Truth.” He made a pretty good movie from Mapes’ book. But he didn’t get it.  

Corporate has some questions
The first half isn’t bad. Mapes and her team, including Mike Smith (Topher Grace), Lucy Scott (Elisabeth Moss) and Lt. Col. Roger Charles (Dennis Quaid), go over the evidence, gather new evidence, including the Killian memo from Lt. Col. Bill Burkett (Stacy Keach), and finally air the story behind Dan Rather (Robert Redford, perfectly suggesting rather than imitating the news anchor). That’s fun. We get a good shorthand on the issues and a nice dynamic among the players. True, Lucy gets short shrift, and the Lt. Col. calls the short-haired-but-bearded Smith “hippy” several times; but there’s snap and crackle.

Then pop. The story airs and Vanderbilt shows us people around the country, in various public spaces (airport, etc.), watching the episode with faces uplifted and serious, while transcendent music wells in the background. It’s not only wrong—since part of the story will be recanted—it’s a ripoff of Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” when Lowell Bergman’s “60 Minutes” piece on tobacco insider Jeffrey Wigand finally aired. That moment was truly transcendent, since it justified all the shit Wigand (and Bergman) went through to air it. And this isn’t that. So that put me off straightaway.

Then it got worse.

Once questions arise about whether the Killian memo was a forgery—see: fonts, spacing, superscript—our team does the following:

• Searches for evidence to refute those charges (and finds some)
• Re-interviews Lt. Col. Burkett and finds out he’s kind of nuts
• Follows CBS Corporate’s directives
• Wallows
• Speechifies

The bigger problem: The way Mapes struggles on the way down isn’t interesting to me. She breaks too easily, and lashes out when she shouldn’t. She keeps fighting the wrong fight—mostly with her father, a conservative who beat her as a child. At one point, she reads blog comments where she’s called “a witch,” and crumples. I’m like: Really? Rule No. 1 of the Internet age: Never read the comments section. It’s our “Never get off the boat.”

Fuck it
Here are two more quotes from the aforementioned better movies about journalism:

• “Corporate has some questions.” – The Insider
• “Fuck it, let’s stand by our boys.” – All the President’s Men

The first quote is the opening salvo in CBS’s move to squelch the Wigand story in “The Insider.” This was in the mid-1990s. Bergman had a story that was completely solid and he still had to fight to get it on the air because of concerns over litigation and corporate profits and possible mergers. Mapes should’ve known the entity she was dealing with.

The second quote is again from Jason Robards’ Ben Bradlee, and it’s after Woodstein screws up. They write an article stating that, in an FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in, Hugh Sloan named White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman as the third man to control the slush fund of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). It was and wasn’t true. Haldeman was the third man to control the fund but Sloan hadn’t named him because he’d never been asked. The quote is Bradlee’s solution: he issues his own non-denial denial. He and publisher Katherine Graham stand by their reporters, who, over time, uncover the rest of it. And it brings down a corrupt president.

That’s the key difference between Mapes/Rather and Woodward/Bernstein: CBS didn’t stand by their boys. They made a corporate decision to avoid risk and ensure profit because they are a corporation, while Bradlee/Graham made a human decision to stand by their boys because they’re, well, human beings. You could say this is the key difference between the world I grew up in and the world as it’s run now.

It’s a downward cycle:

• 1970s: the company stands by its reporters and the story gets out.
• 1990s: the company betrays its reporters but the story gets out.
• 2000s: the company betrays its reporters and the story doesn’t get out.

You get an inkling of all this in Rather’s speech about when networks realized news divisions could make profit—ironically, because of “60 Minutes”—but it’s not enough. You need to dramatize it, not speechify it. I don’t know how you do that, but that’s what needs to be done. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Shit is big in “The Martian.”

We first see the crew of Ares III, a manned mission to Mars, giving each other shit as they do their various tasks just before a massive storm hits, forcing them to abandon the planet.

But, oops, botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is clubbed by a kind of satellite dish, assumed dead, and left behind. Except he’s not dead. He’s the last man on Mars, our titular Martian, and with the remaining equipment and diminishing resources he has to figure out a way to grow food on a planet that doesn’t grow anything. As he says, “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.”

Which he does. By using his own shit.

So three shits: two figurative, one literal.

Let me add another: I enjoyed the shit out of it.

The needs of the many
I got echoes of other movies watching this one. Let’s start with the obvious:

• For much of the movie, there’s just one man on the stage, and by the end he’s a thin, ragged, bearded figure—like Tom Hanks in “Castaway.”

Then the Matt Damon-specific echoes:

• Damon is left alone on a planet, as in “Interstellar.”
• A team risks everything to bring Damon back alive, as in “Saving Private Ryan.”

Director Ridley Scott added this echo as an homage to a great film and filmmaker:

• Ares III crewmember Beth Johanssen (Kate Mara) runs on a treadmill as a portion of the ship revolves in space, reminding anyone who’s seen Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” of Gary Lockwood seemingly running sideways (and uspide down) around his ship.

Here’s an intellectual echo:

• The second and third “Star Trek” movies raise the question of when you risk many to save one. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” is not only Mr. Spock’s line but his philosophy, his logic, but it gets turned on its head when the U.S.S. Enterprise risks everything to save, or resurrect, him. “The Martian,” which never really raises the question, actually has a better answer for it: In risking a few to save the one they unite the all; they unite the world.

But the movie that echoes most strongly here is Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13.” Once more, a NASA mission goes awry and once more  a team of scientists and technicians back on Earth work around the clock to figure out how to fix it and bring the men, or man, back. In doing this, they unite the world.

As a result, “The Martian” is both futuristic and nostalgic. It’s about a mission to Mars in the 2030s but it reminds us of when we all had a common purpose in the 1960s; when we all gathered in big squares (Times, Trafalgar) to watch how space missions turned out, if we ever even did that. To be honest, when we got the huge crowds in Times Square, the cynic in me thought, “Really? We’re not all watching it on our smartphones? We’re not just watching it in the air as in ‘Minority Report’? We’re physically united?” But the sentimentalist in me still teared up.

Hey there
I’ve tried to figure out why I liked “The Martian.” I think it’s the “Apollo 13” thing—which is an underrated movie, by the way. It’s that combination of smarts and teamwork and humanity. Most movies are about a hero, who’s strong, and who goes it alone even if he has to save something that’s not him: a town or a building; a family or a woman. Intelligence? Eh. Science? The science he needs is what makes a gun go boom. Questions? The only question he wants answered is this one: Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya? Punk?

This is not that. The landscapes are beautiful and desolate, the first green shoot poking through Watley’s makeshift greenhouse is beautiful and delicate, the movie’s pace is my pace. It’s well-acted. Damon rocks. Watley is often ahead of us rather than behind us. He's smarter than we are.

Yes, certain characters are given short shrift. Didn’t we need more of the rest of the Ares III crew? Didn’t you want to see more of Chiwetel Ejiofor? And what exactly is Kristen Wiig doing here? With so many interesting characters, it almost feels like it should be a miniseries rather than a movie.

Which is a compliment. Its 140-minute runtime zips. When was the last time I wanted more after a two-and-a-half hour film? 

WARNING: SPOILERS

In Philippe Petit’s 2002 book, “To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers,” the epigraph is from Werner Herzog, who directed a documentary on Petit 10 years earlier. It reads:

Philippe, you are not a coward—so what I want to hear from you is the ecstatic truth about the twin towers.

Truth and ecstasy is exactly what we don’t get from Robert Zemeckis’ “The Walk."

Did the filmmakers go wrong from the start? They have Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) telling us the story from the torch of the Statue of Liberty, with the twin towers and lower Manhattan in the background, which Patricia thought “dorky.” Or was it earlier—when they cast Gordon-Levitt in the role? Is he too American? Not imperious enough? They make him seem like us when Petit can’t be us. We look into the void and our legs turn to jelly and we feel the void’s pull. He looks into the void and gathers strength and rises.

The worst part? They make Philippe Petit seem like an amateur.

Surprising the sky
Here’s how they do it. In 1972, during a Paris street performance, Petit hurts a tooth and goes to a dentist, where, in the waiting room, he sees an article about the twin towers being built in New York City. This is where he gets the idea for “le coup”: walking between the twin towers. And that’s when he begins to take wirewalking seriously. He learns from Papa Rudy (Ben Kinglsey, wasted), practices a bit with his girlfriend Annie (Charlotte Le Bon, who is almost too pretty to be in movies) and his friend Jean-Louis (Clément Sibony); then he makes his debut, walking over a brook at an outdoor fair. He falls in. Oops. Then he pulls off the Notre Dame coup—walking between the spires of the ancient cathedral. And then it’s off to New York.

That’s right. In the movie, the twin towers walk is his third public performance.

The dental scene is correct but it took place in 1968, by which time Petit had been wirewalking for two years. From a 1999 New Yorker profile:

[By 1967], I taught myself to do all the things you could do on a wire. I learned the backward somersault, the front somersault, the unicycle, the bicycle, the chair on the wire, jumping through hoops. But I thought, “What is the big deal here? It looks almost ugly.” So I started to discard those tricks and to reinvent my art.

Falling into the brook? Never happened. Notre Dame did. So did the Sydney Harbor Bridge walk in Australia, which the film ignores. Anyone who’s seen “Man on Wire,” the Oscar-winning documentary from 2008, remembers the footage of Petit in that field in France with the wire strung between the trees: the insane shit he could do on it. He practically lived on that wire. So why do Zemeckis and first-time screenwriter Christopher Browne pretend otherwise? To increase tension? It’s so reductive it’s dull. Tension droops.

OK, but to the question everyone wants to ask: How is the walk itself? What’s it like to see that?

It’s not bad. But early reports about getting vertigo and throwing up? Nah. I was actually more wobbly-legged when Petit was on the edge of the building than I was when he was on the wire. Maybe because I can relate to being on the edge of a tall building. Maybe because once he lets go and steps out onto the wire we’re into the realm of superheroes. I know he won’t fall the way I know Superman won’t fall.

But they kinda fuck up the walk, too. Zemeckis sends a police helicopter to circle around Petit when 1) there wasn’t time, and 2) he’s a funambulist not King Kong. In the movie, the cops are abrasive when he’s on the wire and respectful when he’s back on the South Tower, when it was actually the other way around. In his book, he calls the cops “the octopus” for the way they grabbed him. He writes that the most perilous part of his six-year adventure was when he was being pushed down the tower’s narrow staircase by New York’s finest.

Why didn’t we get the press conference? The stupid questions and his imperious answers:

I do not appreciate the phrasing of most of the questions and make a point of correcting it as I answer: “No, I am not a daredevil, I am a writer in the sky!” “No, do not connect this with looking for a job—I do not need anything!” All I wish to describe is the beauty of seeing from such heights the city waking up, and my elation at reaching the clouds and surprising the sky.

In the movie, afterwards, he and his friends enjoy a meal in Chinatown, but in reality, elated, a folk hero now with all the perks that entails, he had sex with a beautiful woman he’d just met. It’s hours before he meets his friends. “Jean-Louis and Annie are angry,” he writes. “I’m hungry. I win.”

Throughout, the moviemakers tamp down Petit’s eccentricities, what makes him him. In the eighth chapter of Rick Burns’ documentary on New York, “Center of the World,” for example, there’s a great section on the walk. Petit provides voiceover:

So at some point the Gods—the god of the wind, the god of the tower, the god of the wire, all of those invisible forces that we persist in thinking don’t exist but actually rule our lives—might become impatient, might be annoyed by my persistence. ... So my intuition told me it was time to close the curtain of this very intimate performance.

All of those invisible forces that we persist in thinking don’t exist but actually rule our lives ... It's like something I'd hear from some sad woman at a party who's oversensitive about vegetables. But from Petit, I'll take it. Because he did what he did. 

Something somebody would never see again
In case you can't tell, I get great joy from Petit's story—it's so brave and beautiful and pointless. He once said, “I would’ve felt myself dying if I’d had this dream taken away by reason,” and that’s key. Reason is the problem and unreason is the answer, and Zemeckis is all too reasonable in his storytelling. We needed a more unreasonable director. Someone like Herzog, or Scorsese, or Audiard.

I was hoping we’d get a clip of Sgt. Charles Daniels, too. Daniels was one of the octopi on the South Tower, a classic-looking 1970s Port Authority cop. And the way he described Petit to reporters afterwards was just this beautiful mix of Jack Webb-like police protocol and open admiration:

Well, after arriving on the rooftop, Office Myers and I observed the tightrope dancer—because you couldn’t call him a walker—approximately halfway between the two towers; and upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh, and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire. He then went down to one knee. We stepped into the background and I said for everyone to be quiet.

And at this time he laid down on the high wire, and just lackadaisically rolled around on the wire like. He got up. He started walking and laughing and dancing. And he turned around and ran back out into the middle. He was bouncing up and down—his feet were actually leaving the wire—and then he would resettle back on the wire again. Unbelievably, really, to the point that everybody was spellbound in the watching of it. And I personally figured I was watching something that somebody else would never see again in the world.

Philippe Petit didn’t just do something that terrifies most of us, he made art out of it. Someday a filmmaker will do the same. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

You can just imagine the studio pitch: “Bourne Identity” meets “Pineapple Express.” Small-town stoner is in reality, and unbeknownst even to himself, a top CIA assassin. 

The surprise is how sweet “American Ultra” can be. The tenderness in some of the early scenes took me by surprise. But then gore and general cartoonishness took over.

Mike Lowell (Jesse Eisenberg) lives in the dying town of Liman, West Virginia (an homage to “Bourne” director Doug Liman), where he gets high, eats Fruity Pebbles, and sits on the hood of his car with his girl, Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), and tells her the further adventures of his creation “Apollo Ape,” which he can’t bother to write down. He works at the local Cash & Carry, a dying all-night grocery store, and looks for the perfect moment to propose to Phoebe. He also can’t leave Liman. Physically. He gets anxiety attacks and throws up.

Turns out this is part of his programming. Mike is the last remnant of a CIA program that turned three-time offenders into assassins, but which is now part of an internecine struggle between its creator, Victoria (Connie Britton), and middle-management douchebag Adrian Yates (Topher Grace), who has his own program, codenamed “Tough Guy,” that turns psychopaths into assassins.

After Yates seeks to eliminate Mike, Victoria activates him, but some of Mike’s mental wiring is frayed. When threatened, his pupils dilate and his inner assassin takes over; then he reverts back to the vulnerable slacker. He kills two people with a spoon, for example, then needs a hug from Phoebe. “I have a lot of anxiety about this,” he says, surveying the damage.

Eisenberg makes the most of this dichotomy, and his rapport with Stewart, his co-star from 2009’s “Adventureland,” is touching.

But there are missed opportunities and unanswered questions. How much of the stoner Mike is the real, pre-CIA Mike? A mid-movie reveal dampened rather than deepened my interest, while the CIA here is over-the-top, calling in drone strikes on American shopping markets.

It’s Eisenberg who anchors things. The stoner who is really an assassin is the movie’s least cartoonish element.

-- Originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The Seattle Times

WARNING: SPOILERS

I think I’m getting hard-hearted.

In “99 Homes,” written and directed by Ramin Bahrani (“Goodbye Solo”), we’re supposed to root for Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), a young carpenter/construction worker who can’t find work in Florida during the global financial meltdown, and he winds up losing his family home.

Admittedly, that’s a powerful scene. In court, the judge tells him he has to vacate the property but he has 30 days to file an appeal. But the very next day the cops (or off-duty cops dressed up for private contracting?) show up, along with Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), the real estate broker who foreclosed on the home, and they order the family, including Nash’s mom, Lynn (Laura Dern), and his son, Connor (Noah Lomax), out. In two minutes. “This isn’t your home, son,” Carver tells him. Later, amid chaos, crying and shouting, Carver adds, “The two minutes is a courtesy. You’re trespassing right now.” Imagine that. You are given two minutes to gather all the possessions you have, to leave all you know, and this sliver of time is called “a courtesy.” The free hand of the market is often a fist.

And after the two minutes? I wondered if they would lose everything. Instead, sketchy-looking laborers simply dump the rest onto what was once your front lawn. You take what you can and leave with your tail between your legs, while the broker who foreclosed, who is actually making a killing on the deal, stands on what was once your porch smoking a cigarillo.

(I thought the cigarillo a bit much.)

Nash and his family wind up in a motel-like way station with the rest of the wretched refuse (pst: blacks/Hispanics), but he returns. His life turned to shit because he’d chosen the wrong moment to take a loan out on his mortgage to buy tools for his construction/carpentry business, and one of Carver’s scumbag laborers swiped some of those tools. It’s the final insult. So he goes to Carver’s business, finds the guy, starts a fight. Just then, Carver emerges with the news that another of his homes has been abandoned with the toilet overflowing and a shit stream is spilling out into the yard. Nash tags along and reveals himself to be resourceful and willing to get dirty. And Carver offers him a job.

That’s the set-up.

Bailing out winners
It’s a good one. In order to survive and get back his home, Nash has to work for the man who turned him out of his home; and his job is turning other people out of their homes. Carver puts it this way:

You go to church, Nash? One in a 100 is going to get on that ark, son. Every other poor soul is going to drown.

He also puts it in Donald Trump fashion:

America doesn't bail out the losers. America was built by bailing out winners—by rigging a nation of the winners, for the winners, by the winners.

Carver says he began his career wanting to put people in homes, not take them out of them, but the world changed. The government deregulated, banks gave out subprime loans, and everyone tried to capitalize on the easy money to be made in the housing market. Then pop went the bubble. Now Carver is getting rich off of everyone else’s slide into poverty. He shows Nash how to get rich, too. But unlike Carver, Nash is conflicted. He feels bad about it. He still wants the people he’s throwing out of their homes to like him.

He's so conflicted he lies to his mom and his son about where the new money is coming from. He claims it’s construction work. He doesn’t let them know he’s become the enemy. He keeps pretending you don’t have to do what you have to do in order to survive in the world.

That’s why I liked Carver, the movie’s ostensible villain, more than Nash, the movie’s ostensible hero. Carver is clear-eyed about who he is and the way the world works. It’s not heroic, it’s just interesting. Nash's conflict just isn't interesting to me. 

I was even more annoyed with Nash's mother, sitting back and moralizing while she contributed ... anything? She objected to the way Nash brought them money? Helped them survive? I would’ve liked a scene where Nash told her, gently maybe, but with an undercurrent, that her kind of morality was for the comfortable. And they were no longer comfortable.

Stacking the decks
“99 Homes” is worthwhile because it shows us that modern America isn’t about hard work; it's about working the system. That's how you get ahead.

But Bahrani screws it up. He doesn’t let the movie live in the gray area between Nash’s morality and Carver’s lack of it. He stacks the decks against Carver. He turns the moral issue, with its undefined lines, into a legal one, with its clear demarcations. He gives us a clarity we don't need.

In clean, conference rooms, Carver makes a deal to turn 100 people out of their homes by a certain date in order for him and Nash to capitalize. Unfortunately, the 100th turns out to be a problem. He’s this guy, Frank (Tim Guinee), that Nash vaguely knows, and with whom he sympathizes, and Frank has actually done the paperwork to keep his home. So Carver sends Nash to falsify the record so they get the home anyway. But then Frank flips out, holes up with his family in his home, brings out a rifle. He’s making a stand in the grand, stupid American tradition. It’s actually a little nutty. This is the guy that Nash hopes will like him? That we’re supposed to sympathize with? The guy shooting at the cops?

Of course this is the moment Nash finally opts for morality. He enters the fray, arms raised, and owns up to falsifying the record. Frank stands down, Nash is arrested. And in the back of the patrol car, waiting to be taken to jail, Nash looks over and sees Frank’s tousle-haired boy staring at him. And the boy smiles.

Nash is liked!

The end.

Really? Is that supposed to be a glimmer of hope? The smile from the kid? Some glimmer. The kid's father will be arrested and imprisoned, so they'll lose the home anyway. If Carver is arrested someone else will simply take his place. Nash, he gone. The real estate market continues. The free hand continues. It's the saddest of endings and the movie doesn't know it. It thinks it's giving us a gift.

WARNING: SPOILERS

For a movie that combines two of the things I dislike most in the world—backstage drama and product launches—it’s not bad. But it ain't good. 

Was there a better way to tell this story other than the three-act play? Or the symphony?

Ah yes, the symphony.

Here’s what we get. As Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) gets ready to launch three iconic products—1) the Macintosh in 1984, 2) the NeXT Cube in 1988, and 3) the iMac in 1998—he interacts and argues with, among others, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), Apple computer scientist Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), and Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels). Flitting around the edges is Apple marketing executive Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), who does a poor job of protecting her boss just before he gets on the big stage. The opposite. To her, the half hour before a product launch is the exact right time to lambast Jobs about his “child problem.” In that he has one but won’t acknowledge her.

These are the main points of backstage contention:

• Pay for your child and her mother, ya deadbeat
• Acknowledge the Apple II dudes, ya ingrate
• Is a closed system really such a good idea?
• Was that 1984 Super Bowl commercial really such a good idea?
• Who fired whom?

Themes are revisited. The clue to the Time magazine cover, railed over in the first act, is revealed in the third. The clue to Jobs’ adoption, which may or may not be the source of his fierce drive, is revealed in the third. In the first act, Wozniak asks/demands that Jobs acknowledge the people who worked on the Apple II at the launch of the Macintosh, which seems like a bad idea even to me. In the third act, he demands the same damned thing at the launch of the iMac. Really? I thought. Again with the Apple II? Man, that wore on me.

Most of the arguments wore on me. It was screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s usual script—hyper-articulate people walking hallways while others trying to keep up physically and mentally. There was so much bickering and carping, and in such public view, it felt like a Silicon Valley version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

I liked moments. Lisa, the unwanted child, becomes wanted when she plays well with Jobs’ other child, the Macintosh. I like Jobs’ admission about the Cube: “I guess you could say, in layman’s terms, we don’t have an OS.” That made me laugh. Could you argue that Jobs is like a closed system himself? He doesn’t communicate well with others. “I’m poorly made,” he says in the end. Good line. For all of us.

But Sorkin and director Danny Boyle go too much with the conductor metaphor. In the second act, Jobs tells Wozniak something conductor Seiji Ozawa supposedly told him: “Musicians play their instruments; I play the orchestra.” That’s who Jobs is. We know that immediately, but Sorkin drives the metaphor home. Relentlessly.

Is “Steve Jobs” too much of a closed system? Does it strive for a kind of artistic perfection at the expense of something more expansive and interesting? I wanted to know more about Jobs’ early days: How he met Wozniak and why computers and what they learned in the garage. I wanted a story and got this.

Here’s a story. It relates to the iconic Super Bowl commercial from 1984 (not to mention “1984”), which creates buzz but not demand. Jobs thinks the Mac will fly off the shelves but it doesn’t. It’s good, and friendly, but too expensive, not to mention a closed system, so it’s Microsoft, a year later, that takes off, since its software communicates with the hardware of other companies. Consumers mix and match. They buy low. Yet when I was in a position to buy my first PC, eight years after that iconic commercial aired, I bought a Mac. Why? Because I thought that’s what everyone used. And this is in 1992. In Seattle. Which reveals either how effective that ad was or how dumb I am. Both. For the record, I haven’t stopped using Macs. I’m writing this on an iMac: OS 10.9.5 and counting.

There’s great acting here—particularly from Fassbender—and I could watch Michael Stuhlbarg in almost anything. He has a gentleness to him; he has kind eyes.

But overall “Steve Jobs” is too many unpleasant people having too many arguments that never end. Sorkin and Boyle keep taking us backstage when I wanted to get back to the garage.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Why the Hollywood fascination with con artists? Is it an easy metaphor for what they do to us? Show us a pretty face or a handsome bod and while our attention is diverted pick our pocket? We leave the theater feeling rooked.

And what the fuck happened to Will Smith? For 15 years he couldn’t appear onscreen without exuding charm, but since coming back from a four-year hiatus he’s played the most charmless dolts. He plays soft-spoken superior men who don’t have time for the rest of us. We’re an avenue to his power. We get stepped on.

Woo woo
“Focus” is a kind of love story, just not a very good one. Nicky (Smith) takes Jess (Margot Robbie), a pretty blonde amateur scam artist, under his wing, and shows her the basics of grifting. Then during a Super Bowl weekend in New Orleans, he lets her in on the super-efficient rarefied air of his grifting operation, where members of his team pick pockets and scam football fans as easily as football fans high five one another. Before the game even starts, they’ve netted more than $1 million of, well, our money. Thanks, bro.

But there are intimations that Nicky has a gambling problem, and, at the game, which isn’t really the Super Bowl since the NFL didn’t want to be associated with this thing, he gets into a series of bets with Liyuan (B.D. Wong), a happy-go-lucky Chinese gambler, and keeps losing: $1,000, $50K, then $1 million—all the money he’d earned, or stolen, all gone on what are in essence 50/50 bets: The next play will be a run; the next pass will be caught, etc. Finally, ruined, he decides to make an absurd bet where the odds are astronomically against him. He bets that Liyuan can pick the number of any player on the field and Jess can guess it. Liyuan tries to warn him off; Jess is horrified and wants no part of it. But the bet goes forward. And using binoculars, Jess spies, on the sidelines, Farhad (Adrian Martinez), an overweight grifter who is part of Nicky’s team, wearing No. 55. So she chooses that one. Which is the number Liyuan chose. Nicky wins it all back! But how? That’s what Jess wants to know.

Turns out they’d set up Liyuan from the beginning. They made sure the number “55” kept appearing in his field of vision during the previous few days. They were also playing the Rolling Stones’ song, “Sympathy for the Devil” in the luxury suite, with its background vocals going “Woo woo, woo woo,” and Nicky helpfully explains to Jess that the Chinese word for five is “Woo.” Woo woo. Five five.

And?

And that’s it. That’s how they won that absurd, impossible bet. In that absurd, impossible fashion.

It turns out Nicky doesn’t have a gambling problem. But then why does he go to the racetrack and lose? Who’s being set up there? Just us? And how did he know he would lose all of those 50/50 bets earlier? Or did he plan to just keep betting until they got to the point where the absurd bet was necessary? Except it never was. 

After all this excitement, Nicky unceremoniously cuts Jess loose. He gives her the money she earned and boots her from his car. I guess he was becoming attached and he doesn’t want attachments. That would be vaguely human and Will Smith isn’t that anymore.

Oh, and FYI, but the Chinese word for “five” sounds more like “oo” than “woo.” It’s third tone, falling and rising. It's very specific. What the Stones sing sounds as much like five in Chinese as it sounds like five in English.

Daddyo
Anyway, that’s the first half of the movie. The second half is set in Buenos Aires, where a rich, unscrupulous racecar owner, Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro), against the wishes of his personal bodyguard Owens (Gerald McRaney), hires a seemingly bereft Nicky to scam his competition. Garriga owns a McGuffin that will allow him to race faster, and he wants Nicky to pretend to be a disgruntled engineer who will sell that technology to the Aussie competition, McEwen (Robert Taylor). Ah, except he’ll really be selling something that’s not quite as good, allowing Garriga to keep winning! Hahahahahaha.

So that idea is stupid. But then Nicky double-crosses him by selling the real McGuffin to nine of Garriga’s competitors, netting $27 million in all, even as Owens closes in on both Nicky and Jess, who is Garriga’s girlfriend, and over whom Nicky seems to be getting all moony-eyed. Seems he’s missed her these past years.

Except! She’s not really Garriga’s girlfriend. She’s just trying to steal his watch or something, while Garriga and Owens think of her as a garden-variety racetrack skank. (The movie is not kind to Robbie's character.) Plus! Nicky is faking being moony-eyed. That’s part of the scam, too. Because! Owens is really working with Nicky. He’s really Nicky’s father. Which leave us! Nowhere.

Woo woo.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Everyone leaving the 4:30 show of “Everest” at the Cinerama in downtown Seattle last Saturday looked wrecked. They kept exhaling, a few gripped and ungripped their hands, many asked aloud, “Why the fuck would you...?”

That’s asked of the mountain climbers in “Everest,” too, apologetically by Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly), the famed journalist for “Outside” magazine who is writing an article on the paid expeditions of Mount Everest begun by New Zealander Rob Hall (Jason Clarke). At first, Krakauer’s question elicits hems and haws. Then, joking, they all point and yell in unison, “Because it’s there!” Finally, Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), the postman, gives an answer in his usual quiet, forthright manner:

I have kids. If they see a regular guy can follow impossible dreams, maybe they’ll do the same.

Everyone smiles and nods, and you get the sense that Krakauer has his lede—or at least a good anecdote for the story.

The unasked follow-up becomes more important as the movie progresses. And if you fail? And if you bring others down with you? What lesson have you imparted?

This is not the usual bullshit; it’s not a Hollywood story. Here are some lines from the trailer:

• “You’ve got to get moving! You’ve got to come on down!”
• “We’re all getting down together!”
• “If anyone can come back, you can.”

In most Hollywood movies, the guy would get moving, they would all get down together, the dude would come back. In “Everest,” the answers are: Nope, nope, nope.

Gripping
“Everest” is a felt movie; it’s a movie you feel in your bones. Its director, Baltasar Kormakur, directed “The Deep,” a 2012 Icelandic film about a fisherman who survives in impossibly cold waters, and my review ended thus: “You’ll be chilled to the bone. Bring warm clothes.” Same here. It’s an ordeal. It’s gripping. I know I kept gripping Patricia sitting next to me. It’s also stunning and beautiful, and worth seeing on the big screen. You’re amazed at all that beauty, and more amazed that anyone would risk everything to experience that beauty. You also sense that the beauty doesn’t care. The mountain doesn’t care.

We do. We have a short window to care about these characters, and Kormakur makes it work. I think it has something to do with the way they were written and the quality of the actors: Kelly’s dark-eyed stare, Hawke’s good-natured humbleness, Clarke’s professional calm. You sense quiet competence from them. From Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), you get an outsized Texas personality, but that’s fun, too. He’s not my guy, but I enjoy him. He wears a Dole-Kemp T-shirt but I could hang with him.

Why this disaster—one of the worst in Everest's history—on this day? Four things:

1. The ropes near the summit need to be repaired
2. The oxygen tanks are empty
3. Doug has to summit
4. The storm

Basically, if the storm hadn’t hit the delays wouldn’t have mattered to the extent that they did. If the delays hadn’t happened, most of the climbers would’ve made it back to camp in time. Eight people wouldn’t have died.

Were 1) and 2) a consequence of all of the other adventure companies climbing and profiting from Everest in Rob’s wake? That with this competition came cutting corners? That not everyone was professional in a place where you had to be professional or die? The famed Russian climber Anatoli Boukreev (Ingvar Sigurosson) gets off a good line early when the different adventure companies are fighting for space and time. “We don’t need competition between people,” he says. “The competition is between the people and the mountain; and the last word always belongs to the mountain.”

In the end, “Everest” is as cold as the mountain. It offers little in the way of solace. That's the harsh beauty of it. 

Krakauer’s question
I keep going back to Krakauer’s question. Why summit? Why climb? Why be impelled upwards?

It’s not on nearly the same scale, but I love hiking the mountains of the Pacific Northwest; and I think I love hiking because it’s arduous, it’s beautiful, and I feel better having done it. But I also hike because I’m good at it. Going up, not many people on the trail pass me; I pass them. It makes me feel good.

I think that’s why most of us do what we do. We feel good about being good at this thing, so we keep doing it. And I think that’s why these climbers did what they did. They were among the best in the world at it. But for some that wasn’t enough.

Bring warm clothes and someone to grip.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Sometimes a summer movie that looks OK in trailers but bombs at the box office still turns out to be not horrible.

This isn’t that. “Hot Pursuit” is a candidate for worst movie of the year.

Reese Witherspoon is Cooper, a by-the-book, daughter-of-a-cop who, having infamously tasered the Mayor’s teenaged son after he calls “shotgun!” while walking with his bros to their car, is relegated to the evidence room. Ah, but then the plot. Or the assignment: help bring back Daniella Riva (Sofia Vergara) and her husband, who is turning state’s evidence against Mexican drug lord Vicente Cortez (Joaquín Cosio), whose enemies tend to disappear. The husband doesn’t even make it out of his house. Anglos in masks attack first, then Mexicans. Both Riva’s husband and Cooper’s partner are killed and the two women go on the lam in a red Cadillac convertible with 42 kilos of coke in the back.

It’s a buddy film. Cooper’s white and uptight, Riva’s loco and Latina. It’s “The Heat” but more outré and far less funny. Witherspoon and Vergara are rushed through set pieces that become increasingly cartoonish. They cross the Mexican border, for example, by pretending to be a deer and making “deer noises,” even as they bicker loudly. Later in the movie, handcuffed together, they commandeer a bus full of old people, whose eyes light up happily as they find themselves in the middle of a crazy car chase/shooting gallery. Because you know old people. 

Witherspoon mostly works doing a working-class Tracy Flick but Vergara is way too outsized. She stomps on scenes.

Of course, during their adventures, Cooper learns to loosen up while Riva learns ... responsibility? Doesn’t matter. In these types of movies, it’s always the uptight one that has to learn something. Being less uptight, chiefly. Getting a man. 

Early movie reveal: The masked Anglos are cops from Cooper’s precinct, so she can’t trust that outfit.

Mid-movie reveal: It was Riva herself who hired the Mexicans to kidnap her (and her husband?) because she wants revenge against Cortez, who killed her brother years earlier. So why not let hubby turn state’s evidence against him? Wouldn’t rotting in a U.S. prison be pretty good revenge? 

Eleventh-hour reveal: Cooper’s captain is dirty, too. Which raises the question: Shouldn’t Cooper come out of this totally effed up? Disillusioned? No one is who they say they are. Instead, she comes out whole, and pals with Riva, who, in movie terms, is her biggest betrayal.

“Hot Pursuit” comes from two writers with lousy sitcom backgrounds (“According to Jim,” “Two Broke Girls,” “Whitney”) and a director, Anne Fletcher, who has directed mostly lousy chick flicks (“Step Up,” “27 Dresses,” “The Proposal” and “The Guilt Trip”). It shows.