MOLLY'S GAME Is Well Played By Jessica Chastain and Aaron Sorkin

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MOLLY’S GAME (Dir. Aaron Sorkin, 2017)

Jessica Chastain is a shoo-in to get an Oscar nomination for her role as Olympic-class skier-turned-Poker-Princess, Molly Bloom, in the crackling, flashy directorial debut of Aaron Sorkin, who is likely to score a nomination (or two) as well.

The real-life Bloom, whose book, “Molly’s Game: The True Story of the 26-Year-Old Woman Behind the Most Exclusive, High-Stakes Underground Poker Game in the World,” this film is based on, was a target of an FBI investigation for running an illegal underground poker ring, which Sorkin lays out here in a movie that at times feels like a busy cluster of montages all crammed together.

That is to say that Sorkin has learned (or cribbed) a lot from David Fincher and Danny Boyle, the filmmakers he collaborated with on THE SOCIAL NETWORK and STEVE JOBS, as well as Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, or pretty much any modern director known for their fast-paced, kinetic style in telling close-to-true stories that are packed to the brim with sizzling, often sordid information.

Through sharply spoken narration, Chastain’s Bloom gives us and her lawyer Charlie Jaffey (a wonderfully understated Idris Elba, who convincingly works his American accent as well as he did on The Wire) her side to how she built her secret poker empire that involved movie stars, sports stars, business titans, and, most dangerously, members of the Russian mafia.

We see how Bloom was goaded into being a hard driven perfectionist by her strict, demanding psychologist father (Kevin Costner, much more effective as a father figure here than in MAN OF STEEL), and how a skiing accident forced her to reevaluate her career goals. After a brief stint as a cocktail waitress in LA, she works an office assistant to a vulgar producer (played with just the right amount of jaded sleaziness by Jeremy Strong) who introduces her to the world of exclusive back room poker matches with extremely expensive buy-ins.

At her first game at the Cobra Lounge (read: Viper Room), Bloom meets Michael Cera as an A-list actor who’s only identified as Player X (a composite of celebrities such as Ben Affleck and Leonardo DiCaprio, among others), and becomes one of her principal players when she leaves her boss, and takes his clients to hold her own games in luxurious hotel suites staffed with former Playboy playmates.

In a dizzying array of flashbacks and flash-forwards, we watch as Bloom gets deeper and deeper into a lifestyle of debts and drugs (to help her stay awake for days), bottoming out when she’s brutally beaten up by a mob goon because she refuses the offer of protection by a couple of Italian mafiosos.

One of Sorkin’s most familiar motifs, over confident people sparing with other over confident people, is on full display here in the exchanges between Chastain and Elba, with his trademark snappy dialogue dominating every scene. Sorkin’s screenplay and direction is just as confident as his characters, and it’s a buzz seeing him put all these slick puzzle pieces together into this often exhilarating portrait. It’s also great to see Sorkin refrain from using his patented “walks and talks,” which were a mainstay of one of his most well known works - the presidential television drama, The West Wing.

The sculpting of Sorkin’s material is excellently handled by a trio of editors - Alan Baumgarten, Elliot Graham, and Josh Schaeffer, who also deserve Academy action. It may feel like “cut, cut, cut” at times but, dammit, they make the majority of cuts flow into one another with exciting energy while enhancing Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s crisp cinematography from shot to shot. 

The film is sprinkled with amusing supporting turns by Brian d’Arcy James as a poker player so lousy that he’s dubbed “Bad Brad” by Bloom, Chris O’Dowd as a Irish drunkard who, like many of the players, falls in love with Bloom; a sweaty Bill Camp as a seasoned card shark, who gets in way over his head; and Graham Greene as the judge overseeing Bloom’s case.

But MOLLY’S GAME is first and foremost a showcase for the radiant Chastain and the rapidly clever Sorkin, who both well play their hands at every jazzy juncture.

Despite being two hours, and twenty minutes long the movie mostly maintains its intensity and momentum. It does get close to being bogged down with too many details, but it largely transcends its well worn rise and fall arc with its wit and stylish gusto. Some folks may walk out of it wondering what the point of all of it is, but I bet they will have been hugely entertained in the process.

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STEVE JOBS: An Intensely Talky Character Study In 3 Acts

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STEVE JOBS (Dir. Danny Boyle, 2015)

As screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, and director Danny Boyle have stressed repeatedly, this highly anticipated portrait of the late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs isn’t a biopic - it’s an intensely talky character study told in three acts, each set backstage at crucial product launches in Jobs’ career.

The first third is set in 1984, at the launch for the original Macintosh at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts in Cupertino, California. We meet Jobs (Michael Fassbender in his sharpest performance yet and with a flawless American accent to boot) fretting over making the computer say “hello” to introduce itself when turned on for the presentation.

In snappy, witty dialogue largely delivered within walks and talks – a very familiar Sorkin device – Jobs argues with key Mac engineer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), and his trusted marketing chief Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) over the issue.

Hertzfeld protests: ““We're not a pit-crew at Daytona, this can’t be fixed in seconds.”

“You don’t have seconds – you had three weeks. The universe was created in a third of that time,” Jobs responds.

“Well, someday, you’ll have to tell us how you did it,” Hertzfeld replies through a smirk.

Yep, there’s that Sorkin snap!

Floating in and out of Jobs’ orbit are Jeff Daniels as Apple CEO John Sculley, who needles Jobs about how they used real skin-heads in the famous “1984” Apple television commercial; Seth Rogen as Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who wants Jobs to give credit to the Apple II computer team in his speech; and most importantly Katherine Waterson as Jobs’ ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan, and her five-year-old daughter Lisa (Makenzie Moss), whose paternity Jobs denies.

These interactions take us up until Jobs is introduced onstage, then the film transitions to the man and his team preparing for the launch of the NeXT computer system at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco. This time our genius is worried that the dimensions are off on what’s supposed to be a perfect cube of a computer.

As he makes the rounds through the facility, Jobs argues with the same folks - Sculley, Woz, Brennan - but he’s beginning to bond with his daughter, played at age 9 by Ripley Sobo, so there’s some significant development there.

The concluding third of the film concerns the launch event for the iMac in 1998 at the same venue as the ’84 Macintosh, and yet again we see Jobs go through the tangled motions with his minions (no, not those Minions!). Perla Haney-Jardine fills the shoes of his daughter at 19, who, of course, gets to finally connect with her father.

There’s some patented Sorkin character cutesiness present in such moments as Jobs telling his Walkman carrying daughter that he’s going to put “a thousand songs in your pocket” (the iPod, duh!), and when Wozniak and Jobs bicker over a Beatles analogy (“I’m tired of being Ringo when I know I was John,” Woz complains), but overall it’s a meticulously sculpted screenplay that’s a shoo-in for a Oscar nomination. I prefer Sorkin's script for THE SOCIAL NETWORK, but this is in the same lofty class.

As some scenes are strained and some beats are repetitive, STEVE JOBS falls just short of greatness, much like the man himself as these three spotlighted products were financial failures, but its strengths which lie in the delightfully punchy performances by Fassbender and everyone in the cast (seriously, there is no weak link in this ensemble), the volumes of perfectly on point one-liners, and Boyle’s inspired stylistic choices like using different film formats for each era (’84 in 16mm, ’88 in 35mm, and ’98 in digital) elevate it into a series of speculated conversations well worth cinematically eavesdropping on.

Jobs was a visionary, but, yeah, he could also be bit of a dick. Boyle, Sorkin, and Fassbender’s take on the man is that he was well aware of that, but it couldn’t be helped because “there is no off position on the genius switch,” as David Letterman would say.

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New Releases On Blu Ray & DVD: 6/11/13

The two biggest titles releasing today, Sam Raimi’s OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL (no colon) and Tommy Wirkola’s HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS, are both the stuff of modernized fairy tale fodder, which makes it hard to believe that Tim Burton had nothing to do with either of them.

Anyway, OZ, starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, and a bunch of green screen/CGI effects, which I wrote was “Not a bomb, but no magical masterpiece either” (3/8/13) is available now in the standard Blu-ray / DVD / Digital Copy package. Special Features include six featurettes: “Walt Disney and the Road to Oz” (10 minutes), “My Journey in Oz” (a 22 minute sampler of a video journal by Franco). “China Girl and the Suspension of Disbelief” (5 min), “Before Your Very Eyes: From Kansas To Oz” (11 min), “Metamorphosis” (8 min), “Mr. Elfman’s Musical Concoctions” (7 min), and 5 minutes of bloopers. My review from its theatrical release last March is here.

HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS, starring Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton, which I liked a lot less, is out in a likewise Blu-ray / DVD / Digital Copy edition, but adds a UltraViolet copy. Its Special Features are only 3 featurettes: “Reinventing Hansel & Gretel” (15 min), “The Witching Hours” (9 min), and “Meet Edward the Troll” (5 min). None of these extras are likely to sway me from re-thinking my description of the film last January that went like this: “From the same lack of inspiration that brought you ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’” comes this muddled mixture of the action genre with fairy tale mythology.” Read the rest of my review here.

Having only seen the film on a crappy truncated VHS release back in the ‘80s, it’s cool to see that Paul McCartney and Wings’ ‘70s concert film ROCKSHOW is out now on both Blu ray and DVD, marking the first time in over 30 years that the full over 2 hour program is available to the public. There’s only one bonus extra, a 10 minute backstage featurette entitled “A Very Lovely Party,” but the 30 songs of vintage Beatles, solo, and Wings classics from McCartney and crew’s 1976 tour of North America contained in this package should be satisfying enough on their own.

I skipped Ric Roman Waugh’s SNITCH starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson when it was released theatrically early this year, but folks who are into such action genre exercises should know that its new release (Blu-ray + UltraViolet + Digital Copy) is outfitted with Special Features like a 50 minute ‘Making of’ doc entitled “Privileged Information,” commentary with Director Waugh and Editor Jonathan Chibnall, and deleted scenes.

A more appealing looking title from earlier this year out today on both formats is Im Sang-Soo’s South Korean erotic thriller THE TASTE OF MONEY, available with sparse extras (“Behind the Scenes” featurette, trailer) on both 1-disc Blu ray and DVD editions. Other new movies hitting home video today include: Quentin Dupieux’s WRONG (Blu Ray + Digital Copy), and Jared Moshe’s 2012 Western DEAD MAN’S BURDEN (only on DVD).

Last week, this New Releases feature reported about the release of the Lifetime TV movie RING OF FIRE, a biopic about June Carter Cash as played by Jewel. This week, another RING OF FIRE comes out, but this one is a TV miniseries produced by REELZ about an oil rig causing a volcanic eruption in a small town starring Michael Vartan, Terry O'Quinn, and Ian Tracey. Since end-of-the-world scenarios are hot right now, maybe more folks than who saw it when it aired last March will check out this release (available in both 1-disc Blu ray and DVD editions), but probably not. Its lone Special Feature is a Sneak Peek of Reelz’s follow-up miniseries Eve of Destruction, which aired in April and is releasing next month on Blu ray and DVD.

Despite getting mixed reviews and a lot of internet ridicule for its unrealistic and pretentious agenda, Aaron Sorkin’s preachy HBO series The Newsroom was renewed for a second season that premieres next month (July 14, 2013). Folks who want to catch up with the trials and tribulations of self righteous news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), his neurotic executive producer (Emily Mortimer) and his mostly inexperienced staff at the fictional Atlantis Cable News (ACN) channel can pick up The Newsroom: The Complete First Season now out on 4-disc Blu ray (+ DVD Combo + Digital Copy) and DVD sets. 

Special Features include “The Rundown,” (an 25 minute long discussion about the show with Sorkin, Daniels, Mortimer, Waterson, executive producer Alan Poul and co-executive producer Greg Mottola), five commentaries with Sorkin, Poul, Daniels, Waterston, Mortimer and others, “Mission Control” (a behind-the –scenes featurette), “Inside the Episodes” (individual featurettes about each episodes), and deleted scenes. Now folks who loved hating the show will have a lot more material to “hate watch.”

The complete first season of Netflix’s much hyped series House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey as ruthless U.S. Representative Frank Underwood, hits Blu ray and DVD today in 4-disc sets. The very entertaining and addictive show, episodes of which were directed by David Fincher (SE7EN, FIGHT CLUB, ZODIAC, THE SOCIAL NETWORK) and Joel Schumacher (a much less impressive filmography including THE LOST BOYS, BATMAN FOREVER, and THE NUMBER 23 - see what I mean?), also stars Robin Wright, Kate Mara, and Carey Stoll. Like many people did when all 13 episodes dropped on the streaming service last February, you can still watch the whole season in a little over half a day, because this release has no bonus material (no commentaries, featurettes, nothing) to add to the running time. No word yet about when the second season, now in production, will air.

Despite its similar title to the Will Smith sci-fi summer bomb AFTER EARTH, the History Channel’s 3-Disc Collection, AFTER PEOPLE, out today on DVD only, is a fascinating breakdown of what life on this planet would be like if the entire human population went extinct. Made up of 4 extended programs from the History Channel series Life After People, the set has no Special Features, but at its 288 minute running time, they’re really not needed. It may be too intensely scientific for some folks, but the insights and speculations, as well as all the CDI-ed global destruction, should strongly draw most interested viewers in.

On the older film front, titles new to Blu ray out today include a couple of early ‘70s Clint Eastwood Westerns (John Sturges’ JOE KIDD and Don Siegel’s TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA), Phil Alden Robinson’s 1992 Robert Redford thriller/comedy SNEAKERS, and the Criterion Collection edition of Igmar Bergman’s 1957 classic WILD STRAWBERRIES.

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LINCOLN: The Film Babble Blog Review

LINCOLN (Dir. Steven Spielberg, 2012)

At the beginning of Steven Spielberg’s LINCOLN, based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 bestseller “Team of Rivals,” we meet the friendly, soft spoken Abraham Lincoln, played by Daniel Day Lewis in another Oscar caliber performance, as he’s conversing with soldiers, both black and white, in the Army of the Potomac’s camp.

When more than one of the infantryman starts reciting the Gettysburg Address with gusto to our 16th President,  I was thinking ‘what, is this written by Aaron Sorkin?’

I knew that it wasn’t - LINCOLN’s screenplay was penned by playwright Tom Kushner, best known for ANGELS IN AMERICA and Spielberg’s MUNICH - but the scene’s simultaneous attempt at gravitas and heartstring-tugging so reminded me of Sorkin’s style that the comparison was hard to shake. However, in this case, that’s not a bad thing.

Spielberg’s modest epic isn’t a life-spanning biopic; it concerns the pivotal last leg of Lincoln’s life, from January 1865 to his death several months later, in which he tirelessly fought to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, and end the Civil War.

Although it begins on the battlefield, only briefly do we see combat (there’s nothing that compares to the SAVING PRIVATE RYAN’s lengthy opening Normandy invasion sequence), because the film is more interested in the back room deals, with the suspense coming from how close the vote over the 13th Amendment was in the House of Representatives.

Of course, we all know how it’s going to turn out, but that doesn’t harm the feeling of being a fly on the wall for some of the most crucial conversations in America’s storied past.

A cast of recognizable faces help bring history alive, including Tommy Lee Jones (once a scene stealer always a scene stealer, especially as he has the most humorous moments here) as Republican Congressional leader Thaddeus Stevens, Sally Field as First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (Field’s one-on-ones with Day-Lewis are wonderful - two Academy Award winners reminding us what won them those awards in the first place), the always welcome Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a brief part as Honest Abe’s son Robert Todd Lincoln, and - thank the Heavens he’s still with us - Hal Holbrook, who once played Lincoln himself in a 1976 television project, as the wise, and very old political figure Francis Preston Blair.

Every other face seems to be somebody you may know too - James Spader, David Strathairn, Bruce McGill, Gulliver McGrath (last seen in DARK SHADOWS and HUGO), Jared Harris, Jackie Earle Haley, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Hawkes are all on hand.

Day-Lewis’s and Spielberg don’t offer us a larger than life Lincoln, they give us a humble man passionately driven to change the fate of human dignity (as he puts it), and it’s a portrayal to believe in. It’s made the more powerful because Spielberg refrains from CGI (an era-appropriate Washington D.C. could’ve been created with lavish special effects), and keeps his cameras (or more accurately cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s cameras) tight on these grand men (or in the case of Lee Pace’s character Democratic Congressman Fernando Wood, not-so-grand).

Spielberg’s long-time composer John Williams (this is their 26th film together) provides a suitably grandiose score, that gets cheesy at times, but overall effectively enhances the narrative turns, even if I’m having trouble remembering it right now.

For most of its almost 3 hour running time (of course, it’s long!) LINCOLN has the thrust of the best entertainment about political matters from the 1939 classic MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON to the acclaimed NBC drama The West Wing (Sorkin again!), but a few sections drag, and there were times that I thought it might’ve been better as HBO mini-series.

But that probably would’ve denied us the excellent work of Day-Lewis and other A-list cast members though.

There will be many folks that will be turned off by the notion of a long talky history lesson, but with the sheer strength of Day-Lewis’ incredible acting, and Spielberg’s subtle construction (and minimum of his trademark corny sentiment), LINCOLN ought to win over many more folks with the patience to take in what’s being said, how things were changed, and why, to this day, its title subject is considered to be the greatest American President of all time.

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THE SOCIAL NETWORK: The Film Babble Blog Review

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

(Dir. David Fincher, 2010)

This is the film that asks - is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg a computer nerd visionary or just an arrogant a--hole that ripped off his friends?

A bit of both appears to be the answer - but THE SOCIAL NETWORK, courtesy of Aaron Sorkn’s screenplay as realized by David Fincher, is far from a smear job on the world’s youngest billionaire.

Jesse Eisenberg, at his most coldly focused, plays Zuckerberg who we meet in a darkly lit Harvard college tavern in 2003 having an intense and intimidating conversation with his girlfriend (Rooney Mara).

It’s a back and forth that runs rings around your head, so much so that Mara takes the opportunity to break up with Eisenberg. He sulks back to his dorm room and blogs that she’s a bitch and that he needs a new project to get his mind off of her.

Drinking beer after beer, Eisenberg throws out errant ideas to his best friend (Andrew Garfield) before he settles on creating a site called “Facemash” – a Hot Or Not-like site featuring pictures he hacked from campus computer databases.

Eisenberg finds that in addition to making his fellow female students very angry, it gets him noticed.

He’s approached by a couple of preppy crew rowing twin brothers (Josh Pence and Arnie Hammer) and their business partner (Max Minghella ) who want him to help them build a new social networking site called HarvardConnection.

“I’m in.” says Eisenberg and the film cuts to his deposition 3 years later where under oath he states that he doesn’t recall saying that.

You see, he’s being sued by the brothers for intellectual property theft in Federal court at the same time he’s being sued by Garfield over ownership of Facebook.

We bounce between flashbacks and testimony exchanges that detail Eisenberg devising the famous Facebook format while dodging email requests from the brothers.

When the site goes public Eisenberg and Garfield attract many followers, groupies and the attention of Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake).

Timberlake seduces Eisenberg with his schmoozy charm, but not Garfield. Ties get even more tangled when Eisenberg rents a house in Silicon Valley which appears to be a nonstop party central despite the “wired in” employees working 24/7.

It’s easy to get caught up in the flow of this film. Sorkin’s dialogue is sharp, Fincher’s craft is on the scale of his best work (that includes FIGHT CLUB, SE7EN, and ZODIAC), and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth’s swift camerawork frames it all with a minimum of flashy tricks.

The cast is pitch perfect. It’s Eisenberg’s best work to date, Garfield’s worrywart tone clashes correctly, and Timberlake predictably steals every scene he’s in.

Also Rashida Jones (Parks And Recreation), Bryan Barter, and the convincing brother duo of Pence/Hammer all chime in with sublime supporting roles.

There’s plenty on the internet about what’s accurate and what isn’t in this film, but the movie on its own is a storytelling gem.

You can see the point of view of the allegedly wronged parties and feel sympathy for the character of Zuckerberg even as he works overtime to hide his emotions.

Fincher, Sorkin and Co. obviously want us to see the irony in an anti-social guy who screws over the few friends he has in order to build one of the biggest and most profitable social internet websites in history.

A piece of supreme entertainment, THE SOCIAL NETWORK does indeed accomplish that task with relish. The only thing it’s missing is a big “Like” button for me to click at the end.

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