NOCTURNAL ANIMALS: The Film Babble Blog Review

Now playing at an art house or multiplex (or an art house multiplex if there are such things) near you:

NOCTURNAL ANIMALS

(Dir. Tom Ford, 2016)

The opening credits sequence for this film may be considered one of the most challenging bits of cinema this year. It contains a montage of a burlesque line of full frontal nude plus-size models, dancing amid firecrackers and American flags.

I don’t want to body shame anybody, but it was difficult to watch despite how uninhibited and happy these women appeared. I found myself focusing on the names in the credits as these unabashedly naked ladies were grinding behind them onscreen.

Turns out that this bold display of flesh is part of a modern art installation at a Los Angeles gallery owned and run by unhappy socialite Susan Morrow (Amy Adams), who later calls the exhibit “junk.”

Susan is living a posh existence with a handsome husband (Armie Hammer) in a lavish steel and glass house, but she’s unhappy because her life feels empty. Also her husband cheats on her so there’s that.

Susan receives in the mail a manuscript of a novel written by her first husband, Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal) that’s dedicated to her and named “Nocturnal Animals” – something he used to call her because she rarely sleeps.

When Susan starts reading the manuscript she imagines Gyllenhaal’s Edward as the protagonist, Tony Hastings, but Isla Fisher stands in for Adams, and Ellie Bamber plays their teenage daughter. This is the film inside the film of sorts as we are taken to a West Texas desert in the middle of the night where Tony and his family get run off the road by three rowdy, scary rednecks (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Karl Glusman, and Robert Aramayo).

Led by Taylor-Johnson, the trio of troublemakers terrorize Tony and kidnap his screaming wife and daughter leaving Tony stranded in the desert. By morning, Tony makes his way to the nearest town and goes to the police, but they are too late to save his loved ones as they find them raped, and murdered lying together, arranged like an art exhibit, on a red velvet sofa in the broken down remains of a building out in the middle of nowhere.

This is shown in sections as the film cuts back to Susan in the real world when she stops reading after a particularly harrowing passage. The dark content of her ex-husband’s book makes her have flashbacks to when they first met and fell in live, with Susan re-living how they fell apart because she found him too sensitive and weak. Susan breaks Edward’s heart for good when she aborts their baby, and runs off with successful heart surgeon Arnold (Hammer) resulting in her current unsatisfied existence.

Obviously, the guy’s book is making a symbolic statement about their relationship, but it may be hard to decipher beyond its themes about murder and revenge. 

Susan reads on and we see Tony, with the help of deputy/detective Bobby Andes (the always excellent Michael Shannon in his tenth movie this year – no joke), try to avenge his wife and daughter’s deaths by tracking down the psychopath perpetrators (two of them at least, as one was killed) and taking them to the shack where they committed the crime. Taylor-Johnson is so effectively sleazy in this part that I was hoping that they'd just hurry up and off him.

Despite some of its perplexing motivations, Ford’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut, A SINGLE MAN, is stylish and thoroughly compelling exercise, or triplet of exercises. It’s based on Austin Wright’s 1993 novel “Tony and Susan,” and from descriptions I’ve read it seems to be very faithful adaptation. Not sure if the overweight nude dancing ladies were in the book though.

I may be to prudish to appreciate that aforementioned opening, but the film's well crafted and exquisitely shot (by ace cinematographer Seamus McGarvey) textures took me into the worlds of Adams’ lush life, her imagined scenes from the novel, and her remembrances of her younger self’s choices. Adams does a great job subtly fleshing out the role of Susan, but it’s Gyllenhaal’s performance that really got under my skin.

Gyllenhaal’s exasperated everyman Tony whose weakness goes on trial is one of his finest portrayals to date. His character is a surrogate for anyone who’s ever wished that they could go back to a crucial time where they faltered and man up.

What Edward is trying to get across to his ex-wife Susan in the book “Nocturnal Animals” is something to be debated, but damn if it isn’t provocative enough to keep moviegoers processing it for weeks. I speak from experience as I saw it a month ago and I’m still working on what it means.

The ambiguous ending left me hanging a bit too. So I’m betting that the beginning and the end of NOCTURNAL ANIMALS will turn off a lot of folks. But with hope, maybe they’ll get something seemingly profound from the middle. I know I did. I think.

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Denis Villeneuve’s ARRIVAL Shoots For The Stars And Almost Hits Them

Arriving tonight at a multiplex near everybody:

ARRIVAL (Dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up to last year’s excellent cartel counterinsurgency thriller SICARIO, my #3 film of 2015, posits itself as a cerebral sci-fi epic in the vein of 2001: A SPACE ODDYSEY, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, and CONTACT.

Sadly it comes off more like an artsier take on INTERSTELLAR, Christopher Nolan’s failed foray into the genre from 2014.

It starts off compellingly with the news that a dozen ginormous oval spaceships have landed and are hovering over 12 different locations on Earth. Amy Adams as linguist Louise Banks is called in by US Army Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) to work in a team with mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to make contact with the aliens at their Montana visitation site. Michael Stuhlbarg, also currently seen in DOCTOR STRANGE, is also on hand as CIA Agent Halpern, the chief government liaison who’s monitoring the proceedings.

Every eighteen hours a portal opens in the aliens’ craft so a group can be lifted up into the ship and see and hear what they refer to as “heptapods” through a glass-like barrier in hope that they can get an answer to the key question which is the film’s tagline: “Why are they here?”

On one visit, Adams’ Banks removes her orange hazmat suit, risking contamination with the air, to try and make physical contact with the species. By this point, Banks has deduced that the language used by the two dominant creatures, who Renner’s Donnelly nicknames Abbott and Costello, formed by gaseous clouds of ink that illustrate Rorschach-esque circular sentences, is a non linear type of communication and that when they say “weapon,” they may mean “tool.”

Sure, this sounds and feels very much like CONTACT, but there’s a different vibe at work particularly in the beautifully fleeting flashbacks that Banks keeps having revolving around her daughter (played at different ages by Abigail Pniowsky and Julia Scarlett Dan) who we learn in the film’s heart-tugging prologue died from cancer at 12-years old.

While Banks and crew are making headway with our extraterrestrial visitors, their Chinese and Russian counterparts aren’t fairing as well so there’s the looming possibility that mankind is on the verge of global war.

The movie’s message and meaning gets really muddled in its last third. Imagery collides with itself as Adams’ Banks gets further and further into artsy, dream-like fuzziness. To sort out what happens would mean major Spoilers but I’m not so sure that I processed the films’ themes and plot points properly. The layered reveal of the film’s big twist isn’t handled effectively enough to make it really land. It feels like an afterthought that screenwriter Eric Heisserer adapted without any added imagination from the Ted Chiang 1998 short story that the film is based on (not that I’ve read that).

Yet while there are narrative strands that are left hanging, and no other character other than Adams’ is very fleshed out, the film is admirable on an aesthetic level largely due to cinematographer Bradford Young’s vivid, fluid imagery, and within the muddled execution there is still a semblance of emotional heft. Adams, whose touching performance is among her finest, has a lot to do with that.

It’s just that the whole thing just comes off as a spiritually strained and self important exercise in the end. I don’t think Villeneuve set out to make a mash-up of CONTACT, INTERSTELLAR and THE TREE OF LIFE but I’m afraid that’s what we’ve got here. Were I a star rating critic, I’d give it three out of five stars because it did its job competently in a number of departments, and because it’s a decent piece of well made entertainment. But if it had hit the stars over the moon that it was shooting for, it really could’ve been a masterpiece.

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BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE: Yeah, No.

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

(Dir. Zach Snyder, 2016)

DC pitting their two biggest, most iconic superheroes – Batman and Superman - against each other in order to jumpstart their cinematic universe looked like a questionable premise right off the bat – pun intended.

Especially since I, and many others, hated the first installment of the DCEU (DC Extended Universe), Zach Snyder’s SUPERMAN series reboot MAN OF STEEL.

So I went in to Snyder’s follow-up/BATMAN reboot with exceedingly low expectations, but was still majorly disappointed.

For BATMAN V SUPERMAN is another round of boring bombast surrounding a couple of dark dullards without a lick of compelling storytelling to be found. There’s also a severe lack of humor, and anything resembling a fresh style.

Henry Cavill, returning as the red caped crusader as well as giving us our first real taste of his Clark Kent persona (we only got a glimpse of him getting the job at The Daily Planet in MAN OF STEEL at the end), and Ben Affleck, making his debut as the Dark Knight/Bruce Wayne, both brood up a storm but there’s nothing really that intriguing about their characters. They’re just overly self serious, bland dudes is all.

The film tries to simultaneously function as a sequel and a origin story for Affleck’s incarnation of Batman, but it strongly appears that his/Snyder’s version of the character is a continuation of the Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale model as there are references to The Joker, an identical bat cave, and restagings of his parents’ murder and his being attacked by bats in a well as a child that attempt but fail to recreate the gravitas of Nolan’s work.

We learn that while Superman was battling General Zod and reaping mass destruction on Metropolis in MAN OF STEEL, Wayne was one of the many folks in the rubble building up a hated for Superman. Just like many in the audience.

Clark Kent, for his part, dislikes Batman, labeling him a “bat vigilante” and “a one man reign of terror” so the stage is set for what Lex Luther (Jesse Eisenberg) bills as “the greatest gladiator match in the history of the world.”

Eisenberg’s Luther is an unhinged, mad scientist who, of course, wants the two leads to fight and destroy each other so that he can…uh, I forget exactly what his plans were for after that but we’ll just go with world domination. Eisenberg locks in to the villain role with a lot of crazy conviction, but I never bought him as Luther. He reminded me of the Jon Cryer role in SUPERMAN IV – Luther’s (then played by the great Gene Hackman – now, there’s a Lex Luther!) newphew/flunky. He seems like the guy who’d be fetching stuff for Luther, not actually be Luther.

Whatever the case, this movie plays out exactly how you’d expect with no surprises. Batman and Superman fight, then bond together to fight a ginormous, grotesque creature that Luther created from Zod’s DNA, with the help of Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), whose addition here feels like an afterthought.

David S. Goyer (MAN OF STEEL) and Chris Terrio’s (Oscar winner for the screenplay for Affleck’s ARGO) screenplay is full of pretentious dialogue about good, evil, “god versus man,” etc. but none of it comes together to form any meaningful theme. There are also a few incredibly weak plotpoints that would be a Spoiler to complain about, but I'll just say that in the worst one they make a connection between the feuding leads based on a coincidental name in their families. Man, that made me cringe.

So did the dream sequences - one a dream inside a dream deal - which were ultra unnecessary. 
Amy Adams, reprising Lois Lane, puts some genuine passion into her part, and her fellow returning cast members (Lawrence Fishburne as Editor Perry White, and Diane Lane and Kevin Costner (a dream-set cameo) as Superman’s earth parents) are all fine, but in the messy machinery of this movie they are little more than cardboard cogs.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Irons takes over from Michael Caine as Batman’s butler Alfred and has a few of the film’s only mildly amusing lines, and there’s a welcome turn by Holly Hunter as a senator who wants to hold Superman accountable for his actions in the previous film’s climax, but sadly a hearing scene in which Superman stands before congress is cut short before he gets to testify. Silly me for thinking that Superman could offer any plausible justification for the sins of MAN OF STEEL. Also Hunter’s role here may remind some folks that she was in a movie that dealt much better with the accountability of superheroes: THE INCREDIBLES.

Folks complained plenty when Affleck was cast, but he does an admirable job with the underwritten role. He mostly just has to grimace behind a mask while the special effects people rig things to explode around him and he can certainly pull that off. Affleck’s Bruce Wayne persona is basically just a collection of suave poses with flashes of his bedroom eyes and he hits the mark with that too. If only there was something more to flesh out there. I mean, Will Arnett’s Batman in THE LEGO MOVIE was more complex than this guy!

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (stiff, clunky title) is the first big, bad movie of the year – an awful, mess of a wannabe epic that casts a dark shadow on the future of both superhero franchises as well as the entire DCEU. The two JUSTICE LEAGUE movies that are set for 2017 and 2019, the next we’ll see these characters, really have to be something special to redeem the whole enterprise, but Snyder is set to direct those too so I’m not counting on that to happen.

Oh, and don’t worry about staying to the end of the credits because there is no stinger – that’s something they surprisingly haven’t stolen from Marvel. 

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Joaquin Phoenix Is Smitten With His Operating System In Spike Jonze’s HER

HER (Dir. Spike Jonze, 2013) 

This is way too lovely and poetic a film to find mixed in with the formulaic fodder at your local multiplex. Yet that’s where it’s playing in my area having bypassed the independent theater circuit because of awards season buzz.

Set in a shiny clean Los Angeles in the near future, where everyone wears beltless high-waisted pants, the film concerns a love story between a meek mustached Joaquin Phoenix and his phone’s sentient operating system voiced by the sultry Scarlett Johansson.

Having weathered a painful breakup (we catch fleeting glimpses in flashbacks of Phoenix in an extremely emotional relationship with Rooney Mara, best known for the American version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO), our soft spoken protagonist purchases said OS1, which is billed as the first artificially intelligent operating system, and is immediately taken with the disembodied voice of Johansson.

Johansson, names herself Samantha after reading the book “How To Name Your Baby” in two one hundredths of a second, and goes about sorting through all of Phoenix’s files on his hard drive.

Phoenix writes for a company that produces custom made greeting cards (Beautiful Handwritten Letters Dot Com), so his sentimental “sad and mopey” (as Amy Adams, his documentary film maker friend, puts it) nature comes in handy.

After Adams sets him up on a blind date (played by Olivia Wilde in a small but crucial cameo) that at first goes well but ends badly when commitment comes up, Phoenix finds himself falling hard for Samantha. What’s freaky is that Samantha feels the same and even hires a surrogate (Portia Doubleday) to act as her body so they can have sex.

Phoenix’s predicament isn’t an anomaly as many others are having relationships with their OS’s including Adams since her marriage (to a jaded Matt Letscher) went south. The film’s take on a future world in which isolationism is a lifestyle choice, isn’t so farfetched as anybody who’s been in a public place filled with folks with their faces buried in the screens of their devices can attest.

Jonze first solo screenplay, which won Best Screenplay at Sunday’s Golden Globes Awards), shows that he learned much from Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the director’s first few films (BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and ADAPTATION).

There’s a lot of emotional material that’s hard to pull off on display here, but Jonze handles it with endearing delicacy and a pure sense of purpose. He’s greatly aided by Phoenix putting in one of his most fully realized performances as the supremely sympathetic lead – a man who looks like he’s aching inside even when he’s smiling. 

Factor in Johansson conveying the OS’s evolving vulnerability with poise, and Adams making a stunning transition from being a ‘70s glamour puss con woman in AMERICAN HUSTLE to embodying the mousy insecure frizzy-haired could-be love interest and you’ve got a cast as charming as the film itself.

HER’s soundtrack doesn’t expand much on the musical palette of Jonze’s previous film, his and David Egger’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, as both Arcade Fire and Karen O. both return to provide songs, but this is so not a complaint as their music, especially when matched with Hoyte van Hoytema’s incredible cinematography effectively fits the highs and lows of the lightly surreal scenario.

The concept of having cyber sex with Siri aside, I can’t think of another recent film dealing with romance that better captures the way it feels to first fall in love; how wonderfully intense and scary it can be. It also nails how painfully fleeting the losing of love can be as well. HER is an immersive and beautiful cinematic conversation about what our real wants and needs are.
 
But it may not be for everybody – just those with two eyes, two ears, and a heart.

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SUPERMAN: The New Nolan-ized Reboot

Now playing at mulitplexes from here to the Phantom Zone:

MAN OF STEEL (Dir. Zack Snyder, 2013)

The time is as good as any for a new take on the most powerful comic book superhero ever, but Zack Snyder’s (300, WATCHMEN, SUCKER PUNCH) reconstruction of the Superman movie mythos is a big bombastic bore.

A great cast has been assembled, including Henry Cavill as the caped crusader, Russell Crowe as Superman’s Kryptonian father, Kevin Costner as his Earth dad, Amy Adams as Daily Planet reporter/love-interest Lois Lane, Lawrence Fishburne as her editor/boss Perry White, Richarh Schiff (The West Wing) as some sort of all-knowing scientist, and, best of all, Michael Shannon as the evil bent-on-revenge General Zod, but Snyder working from a screenplay by DARK KNIGHT co-writer David S. Goyer, overcrowds the storyline with spectacle, repetitive dialogue, and needless convolutions making it difficult to connect with anything on screen.

You know the drill – before Krypton explodes, Papa Crowe (probably the actor who brings the most gravitas to the film) puts his new born baby (touted this time as the planet’s first natural birth in centuries) in a spaceship to Earth, where he’s found by a kindly middle-aged couple (Costner and Diane Lane) living on a farm in Kansas, who name him Clark Kent.

As the boy grows up he recognizes that he has great powers, learns of his origin, and heeding the advice of his step-dad Costner to conceal what he can do, he goes on the road anonymously going from town to town working different jobs until his powers get in the way and he has to move on just like David Banner (Bill Bixby) did on the old Incredible Hulk show.

Huh? Wait a second, that’s not really part of the classic Superman story is it? Sure doesn’t feel like it should be here, but whatever. In this version, Lois Lane figures out that Clark Kent has powers before he even puts on the suit; she never knows Clark and Superman as 2 different people. I’m fine with that – it would be too much to ask for an ace investigative reporter (one that’s won the Pulitzer Prize, mind you) to be fooled by a pair of glasses, so they don’t introduce the element of our hero working at the newspaper until the end. Makes me miss the comically over-sized glasses that Christopher Reeve wore as Clark back in the original ‘70s-‘80s SUPERMAN movies, but, oh well.

Also unlike that run of movies, that got progressively worse (the first two were great, the third and fourth ones, not so much), there’s no Fortress of Solitude made out of new age crystals, no Lex Luthor, and barely any humor.

Shannon is perfectly cast as General Zod (stepping into the mighty shoes worn by Terrence Stamp in SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE and SUPERMAN II), but it’s an exposition-heavy role, with the actor looking like he’s in a permanent bad mood (resembling grumpy cat at times), but it’s still one of the more successful elements on display in MAN OF STEEL, because of how invested Shannon is in it.

Zod and his minions attack Metropolis, with tons of buildings getting destroyed (we don’t seeing many people dying but from what we see it’s impossible that there wasn’t a large death toll) and start taking over Earth so that they can make it New Krypton or something. The cityscape alien attack sequence was much better done in THE AVENGERS (not to mention SUPERMAN II), and the climatic one-on-one battle between Superman and Zod just has them pummeling each other from one set-piece to another with no excitement (they punch each other through buildings over and over).

Meanwhile Fishburne and a few other Daily Planet folks are running through the rubble, for some reason they’re some of the only survivors of the attack, but the film never took anytime to establish them as characters to care about.

The British-born Cavill makes for a fine Superman aesthetically, and he’s got the American accent down, but his is also a blank slate of a character that I had trouble forming any connection to. The charisma that Reeve had in the iconic role, and that Bryan Singer tried to capture with Reeve clone Brandon Routh in 2006’s SUPERMAN RETURNS is sorely missing, but that fault lies more with the writers/filmmakers than with the man in the cape.

One thread that really didn’t work for me had to do with the scrambled narrative that jumps around, and way too often to flashbacks of Earth dad Costner saying that the world isn’t ready for a man of incredible powers yet. They draw this out too long, when you know that the world is as ready as it’s ever going to be, and Costner’s death in a tornado, which his son could’ve saved him from, doesn’t make any sense.

In SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE, Glenn Ford as our hero’s adoptive father died much more poignantly from a heart attack – something Superman could never have saved him from (well, unless he spun the world back in time), and it had a richer meaning to his maturation; here the man’s death doesn’t teach any lesson except that he’s wrong and his son should’ve revealed himself much earlier. I really don’t get what they’re waiting for. The movie doesn’t give any discernible reason except to stretch out Superman’s angsty development and Costner’s part.

The dark gritty approach to the material, which undoubtedly came from Executive Producer Christopher Nolan, who shares a “story by” credit with Goyer, isn’t right for this area of the D.C. Comics universe. I’m not saying Superman should be nothing but sunny warmth, but there’s no triumphant thrill to seeing our hero save the day here – he doesn’t even show concern for the many who undoubtedly died in the huge devastation on Metropolis.

MAN OF STEEL is a by-the-numbers summer blockbuster wannabe that forgot to have any fun with its source material. Ultimately, it's a ginormously fussy film pulled in so many directions that it's un-engaging and dull. 

Technically, with its well chosen cast and vast array of nonstop visual effects, Snyder and crew have made a serviceable popcorn picture, but next time out (and with all the money that it has already made, there certainly will be a next time) I’m hoping they’ll remember to add more heart, humor, and actual heroism to this not quite re-booted franchise.

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The Film Babble Blog Top 10 Movies Of 2012

Yeah, I know it’s the end of January, but I had a bunch of movies to catch up with so back off! 2012 wasn’t really a bad year for film, but it was far from fantastic. Looking at the top ten highest grossing films of the year, I see that all of them were franchise entries.

Maybe 2012 was the most formulaic year for film ever, I dunno, but I do know that there were some worthwhile films that stood out from the usual glut of super hero sequels and here they are - Film Babble Blog’s Top 10:

1. THE MASTER (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

The immaculate imagery provided by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., the layered construction of Anderson’s screenplay, and the powerful performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, and Amy Adams (who ought to win the Oscar just for having to sit nude except for a pregnant-belly prosthetic in a central surreal scene), all make up the most memorably stirring movie of the year. Shame on the Academy for not nominating it for Best Picture. Read my review. 

2. HOLY MOTORS (Dir. Leos Carax)

The freakiest film of the year is also one of the most invigorating. French film maker Carax gives us Denis Lavant as the eccentric Mr. Oscar, whom we watch being driven around Paris by his associate Céline (Édith Scob) in a white limousine that functions as his dressing room to various odd jobs. And I do mean odd. Read my full review here.

3. ARGO (Dir. Ben Affleck) 

Another shameful omission by the Academy was Affleck for Best Director for this superb thriller, but some are predicting that it will win Best Picture to make up for it. I would be cool with that because his terrific take on the joint CIA-Canadian secret operation that used the ruse of a sci-fi film production to rescue a group of American diplomats from Iran’s clutches in 1980 is well deserving. Read my full review. 

4. BERNIE (Dir. Richard Linklater) 

Linklater’s 15th film takes the true story of a Texas mortician (played to perfection by Jack Black) who kills a wealthy widow (a sharp harpie depiction by Shirley MacClaine), and makes a matter-of-fact comic docudrama out of it that really works. Read my full review here.

5. SKYFALL (Dir. Sam Mendes)

Who expected that the return of the iconic superspy after a four year hiatus would yield an Oscar caliber James Bond movie? I sure didn’t. I’m happy to have it as Daniel Craig’s third outing as 007 isn’t just one of the best of the series, it’s one of the best full throttle action films in years. Read my full review.

For my full reviews of the rest – please click on the highlighted titles:

6. LINCOLN (Dir. Steven Spielberg)

7. SAMSARA (Dir. Ron Fricke)

8. MOONRISE KINGDOM (Dir. Wes Anderson)

9. LOOPER (Dir. Rian Johnson)

10. ZERO DARK THIRTY (Dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

Now bring on 2013! Again, I know it’s a month into it, but go with me on this. 

More later…

The Cornball Charm Of TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE 

(Dir. Robert Lorenz, 2012)

Sure, every critic will mention it, but Clint Eastwood’s embarrassing crazy-old-man-yells-at-chair speech at the RNC a few weeks back doesn’t at all get in the way of his new film being a good old-fashioned cornball crowd-pleaser.

Eastwood, with his crotchetiness played to greater comic effect than say in GRAN TORINO, plays a baseball scout for the Altlanta Braves who is going blind, so he may be in his final season on the job. As his daughter, Amy Adams (also in THE MASTER opening today) joins him on the trip against his wishes, to help out.

Meanwhile, back at the home office, Matt Lillard, as obviously a jerk for the audience to hate, wants Eastwood out of the game, and his boss, a grimacing Robert Patrick, might agree. But luckily Eastwood has a friend in the Braves’ organization in the form of John Goodman pulling for him.

Another friend, Justin Timberlake as a retired pitcher now doing the scouting thing too, runs into Eastwood at a game, and immediately has eyes for Adams.

It’s a comfortable ole baseball glove of a commercial movie, where everything falls exactly in the place you’d expect. With only a few current topical references, its script, by first time screenwriter Randy Brown, feels like it was written in the ‘90s when old people were first becoming troubled by the idea of a computer run world. Clint’s line about the “interwebs” attests to that.

In that way it’s like a gruff counterpoint to last year’s MONEYBALL, in which old school on the spot skills are favored over statistical analysis. So much so that I expected Clint to take a baseball bat to a laptop OFFICE SPACE-style.

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE, throws no curves story-wise, is full of cheesy clichés, and was completely filmed in Georgia, despite being mostly set in my home-state North Carolina, yet I still found it highly likable.

Eastwood’s growling and grunting through his part is amusingly affecting, and Adams, along with Timberlake both put in warm and fuzzy performances. And if you want your film to be more likable, casting Goodman is always a good idea.

Robert Lorenz, whose first film as director this is after many assistant directing duties, provides Eastwood and co. with a sturdy vehicle that has plenty of cornball charm, and isn’t too sappy. It’s not a home run, but it’s a perfectly pleasant stroll around the bases.

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THE MASTER: A Complicated Yet Beautiful Dream I’m Still Processing

THE MASTER (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)

The impact of the amazing imagery in Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up to 2007’s THERE WILL BE BLOOD is immediate. Opening shots of the frothy ocean from above are vividly captured by the camera of cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., as is the following sequence of American soldiers on a tropical beach at the end of World War II. However, the impact of the narrative, as it shapes, isn’t as immediate, for this is a film that viewers will still be processing way after it ends.

Joaquin Phoenix, looking more haggard than usual, plays one of the soldiers, and his chief characteristics are that he’s a horny drunkard. So much so that he can’t keep the department store photographer job he gets shortly after returning to the states, because of the effects of his homemade moonshine. That also leads to the end of his next occupation, as a cabbage picker, when one of his fellow workers swigs too much of Phoenix’s toxic concoction, and may die of poisoning.

Phoenix bolts out of there, at first chased by other pickers, and stows away on a ritzy riverboat where he meets Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the charismatic leader of a new religious movement called “The Cause.” Oh, yeah, in case you haven’t heard – this is the movie that’s supposedly based on Scientology, and Hoffman is allegedly based on writer/Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

It’s impossible not to think about that when Phoenix undergoes intense questioning by Hoffman, i.e. auditing, and when vague yet lofty theological platitudes are tossed around. Hoffman sees through Phoenix, but still takes him on as a protégé. Hoffman’s family, including wife Amy Adams, daughter Ambyr Childers, and son-in-law Rami Malek are skeptical of Phoenix, although it’s obvious Childers has a thing for him, but Hoffman apparently sees something in him that reminds him of his younger self, or, maybe, he just wants him around to make more of that powerful moonshine.

Despite that Phoenix pines for a girl he left behind when he went to war, played by Madisen Beaty in a scene that I’m not sure if is imagined or not, he appears to want to screw every woman in sight. In a party scene hosted at the house of a benefactor played by Laura Dern, Phoenix envisions every woman in the nude as Hoffman sings a bawdy song. Except for the men who all remained clothed, his imagination doesn’t discriminate age-wise, and even a pregnant seated Amy Adams (who looks very uncomfortable) is naked.

Phoenix doesn’t seem to pay attention to the philosophies of the cult around him, and Anderson’s screenplay really doesn’t either. When Hoffman’s son, played by Jesse Plemmons (amusingly recently referred to as Meth Damon on a A.V. Club message board because of his role on Breakin’ Bad and resemblance to Matt Damon), asks Phoenix “Don’t you know he’s making it all up as he goes along?” it doesn’t really register.

Figuring out what’s supposed to register in THE MASTER will be quite a sport this season. Many will be turned off by the coldness of the production, but no doubt will endlessly discuss it.
The film’s wide scope, which was shot in 70 mm, can be overwhelming, even when it’s only focusing on a few faces in the frame. Or just one – mostly Phoenix’s gritty mug, but the red sweaty pores of Hoffman’s cheeks get exhaustingly explored as well.

Phoenix nails the adrift emptiness of a man who just wants to go with the flow, as long as booze and loose woman are part of that flow. Hoffman’s religion may be bullshit to him, but it’s still something to grasp onto, or at least the trappings around it.

I got lost in the engulfing experience that was “The Master,” and believe it’s one of the year’s best films. Each of Anderson’s films has an angle on the American right to the pursuit of happiness, whether it be gained through drilling oil (THERE WILL BE BLOOD), the business of pornography (BOOGIE NIGHTS), crime (HARD EIGHT), romance (PUNCH DRUNK LOVE), or pure chance (MAGNOLIA).

Here, Anderson’s angle is much more difficult to pinpoint, but because of the incredible luscious look of the film, the meticulous acting (both Hoffman and Phoenix’s sharp performances will surely garner award season attention), the precision of the writing, and the excellently fierce and sometimes frightening score by Jonny Greenwood, maybe that doesn’t matter.

The only thing I can really pinpoint is THE MASTER felt like a complicated yet beautiful dream. You just have to wait ‘til later to ask me what it means though, I’m still processing it.

More later...