BOYHOOD: The Film Babble Blog Review

BOYHOOD (Dir. Richard Linklater, 2014)

Richard Linklater’s much buzzed about BOYHOOD is the best, and most real feeling film of the year so far. It takes us on an engrossing journey through the life of a boy from age 5 to age 18, covering the significant events in that timespan with powerful poignancy.

It’s able to tell its simple coming-of-age tale so well for one simple, astounding reason: writer/director Linklater shot the film intermittently over 12 years, capturing actor Ellar Coltrane stretch by stretch as he grew into early adulthood.

Along for the real-time ride is Patricia Arquette as Coltrane’s beleaguered mother, Linklater regular Ethan Hawke as his flighty father, and Lorelei Linklater (the director’s daughter) as his sister.

When the film begins in 2002, to the tune of Coldplay’s “Yello,” parents Arquette and Hawke have been separated for some time.

Despite his estranged wife taking the kids and moving away to Houston, Hawke hopes for reconciliation, but it doesn’t seem likely as he’s an unemployed musician, and Arquette has eyes for her new psychology professor (Marco Perella).

Like everything else in the film, this is seen through Coltrane’s eyes so at times we only get glimpses of such and such event – something that effectively conveys how kids’ memories can be.

Arquette marries Perrella, but he turns out to be an abusive alcoholic so after some appropriately unspecified period of time she uproots the family again. Meanwhile Hawke sheds his deadbeat dad skin, and marries a nice Christian lady (Jenni Tooley) whose mother (Karen Jones) gives Coltrane his first Bible (personalized!), while her father (Richard Andrew Jones) gives him a rifle for his fifteenth birthday.

Hawke’s birthday present to Coltrane is much more important: a three CD compilation he put together entitled “The Beatles: Black Album,” a collection of the best tracks from the solo work of the fab four (See the track listing here). This especially touched me because as a Beatles fan, I’ve made a likewise mix and have known so many others that did the same thing – i.e. try to make a new album by the band from the highlights of their post Beatles' careers. 

Since DAZED AND CONFUSED, Linklater has expertly blended music into his movies – here, with a soundtrack of 40 songs by such seminal artists as Bob Dylan, Arcade Fire, Yo La Tengo, Gnarls Barkley, The Black Keys, and Wilco – he’s made the a stirring soundtrack to a life; an awesome mix that gives that gives Chris Pratt’s coveted “Awesome Mix Vol. 1” cassette in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY a run for its money.

Within the naturalistic flow of BOYHOOD, Coltrane develops skills as a photographer, gains and losses a high school girlfriend (Zoe Graham), and has to deal with another of his mother’s drunk spouses, lastly a Afghanistan war veteran played by Brad Hawkins (“I’ve made some bad life choices,” Arquette says).

Through all these events, large or small, Linklater’s exceedingly well constructed film says a lot about the passing of time. It’s never preachy or pretentious about it, it just observes how people and times change yet still stay the same in a way that many movies have tried but never pulled off as touchingly.

Linklater's gamble that this would be movie-making time well spent really paid off in Coltrane's understated performance, matched with some of Arquette and Hawke's best acting.

Longtime Linklater cinematographers Lee Daniel and Shane F. Kelly really outdo themselves here too – the film is full of striking shots of Texan locales, and crisp close-ups of Coltrane and the cast.

Its 2 hour and 45 minute length may put some people off, but remember Ebert: “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” 

Linklater has done something really special here, something he’s come close to in his excellent BEFORE films, which also well utilize Hawke and the passage of time, he’s shown how much genuine, overpowering emotion can be triggered by a such a cleverly sincere cinematic experiment.

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Luc Besson’s LUCY: Over-The-Top Yet Still Underwhelming

Opening today at a multiplex near you...

LUCY (Dir.Luc Besson, 2014)

It’s too bad that Scarlett Johansson’s Marvel Universe co-star Samuel L. Jackson isn’t here to exclaim “check out the big brain on Lucy!” PULP FICTION-style, because Luc Besson’s new sci-fi thriller keeps asking us to do just that.

Johansson’s Lucy is an American student in Taipei, Taiwan, who gets forced into being a drug mule for an evil Korean crime lord (Choi Min-sik). But the colossal catch is that the drug the bad guys implant in our protagonist is a powerful synthetic called CPH4 (which looks a lot like the bright blue crystal meth from Breaking Bad), which increases one’s control over their mind rapidly bit by bit until it reaches 100% brain capacity.

This gives Johansson hyper-intelligence, superhuman strength, and the ability to change her metabolism, but this alteration in her body’s chemistry means she’ll need more of the drug within 24 hours or she’ll start decomposing. So Johannson travels to Paris to track down the other drug mules and confiscate their CPH4 with the help of Amr Waked as a grizzled French cop.

Morgan Freeman is on hand as a neuroscientist who first appears in cutaways from the main action lecturing a college classroom his theories about the brain’s untapped potential. These bits capture Freeman in narrator mode (when is he not in narrator mode?), and, mashed with cuts to nature footage, and time lapse cinematography, serve to visually sucker punch us with heady imagery and lofty conceptual themes.

This makes for some watchable eye candy especially when it comes to the fun of seeing Johansson kick lots of ass with her mind, but all the pseudo intellectual posturing that all the collective conscience of all humanity contains the entire history of the universe and ‘wow, what if we could tap into that?’ seems purposely aimed to shoot way over the heads of most movie-goers so they’ll think the movie is way smarter than it is.

Johansson beautifully builds upon the emotionless alien persona she exhibited in Jonathan Glaser’s UNDER THE SKIN earlier this year largely because we get to witness her invested transformation from college party girl to atomic super-heroine. Unfortunately as the climax approaches, Johansson literally gets absorbed into the surreal set pieces – i.e. she morphs into a black tentacle mass of squid’s limbs taking over a computer lab – as her presence becomes less and less interesting.

LUCY takes the “Flowers for Algernon”/CHARLY – i.e. everyman takes drug and gets super smarts - scenario, also recently utilized in the Bradley Cooper vehicle LIMITLESS and filters it through the ‘to understand how we live now, let’s begin at the very beginning’ thesis of Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE, which means, yep, there are dinosaurs. There's also a bit of Danny Boyle's time lapsing intros/outros from 127 HOURS happening too. I guess it’s all part of life’s rich pageant as Inspector Clouseau would say.

But for all these influences and/or pretensions, there’s little that’s actually thought provoking about the over-the-top yet still underwhelming LUCY. It tries so hard to be mind blowing, but it keeps coming up short. 

That said, Besson’s film is a vast improvement over THE FAMILY, his misguided mob family comedy last year, and it appealingly harkens back to his late ‘90s cult classic THE FIFTH ELEMENT. I also appreciate that it’s a summer blockbuster wannabe that isn’t a franchise entry, and isn’t in 3D.

However, no matter how much its stylish energy tries to obscure it, LUCY is a silly popcorn picture matinee masquerading as egghead cinema.

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A MOST WANTED MAN: The Film Babble Blog Review

Now playing at an indie art house near you:

A MOST WANTED MAN

(Dir. Anton Corbijn, 2014)

In what’s sadly one of his final performances, Philip Seymour Hoffman looks horrible.

This certainly fits the part, as Hoffman’s character, Günter Bachmann, in this adaptation of John le Carré’s 2008 espionage novel is a pale, sweaty, boozy German mess of man wrapped in a schlumpy, rumpled suit who’s the head of, as he puts it, “an anti-terror unit that not many people know about, and even less like.”

The scenario of the film, the third feature length production from former music video director Anton Corbijn, is set in present day Hamburg, which was, as the opening titles tell us, where Mohammed Atta and his fellow conspirators planned the 9/11 attacks.

The German port has been on red alert ever since so when a mysterious hooded half-Chechen, half-Russian immigrant (Grigoriy Dobrygin) suspected of being a Jihadist enters the country illegally, Hoffman’s agency tracks him as a potential terrorist threat.

Dobrygin, having escaped a Turkish prison, has come to Hamburg to claim a huge inheritance from his corrupt Russian colonel of a father, with the help of Rachel McAdams as a human rights lawyer.

Caught up in these shady complications are Willem Dafoe as a private banker in charge of Dobrygin’s father’s funds, Robin Wright in a brunette wig as a CIA agent who’s not to be trusted, and Homayoun Ershadi as a prominent Muslim professor, who Hoffman suspects will channel the money from Dobrygin’s inheritance to Islamic radicals.

Being that it’s a sparely paced, gray-toned thriller, A MOST WANTED MAN may put off some movie-goers as being cold and as hard to follow as the last adaptation of a le Carré bestseller, Tomas Alfredson’s TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, but Corbijn’s take on the material, working from a screenplay by Andrew Bovell, is actually very straight forward, that is, if you pay close attention. I will concede, however, that it is an extremely icy study of the least glamorous aspects of spy work.

At first, Hoffman’s untimely death hovers over the film’s proceedings, but, as a testament to how amazing an actor he was, that fades away. We then only see and hear him as the jaded chain-smoking, hard drinking intelligence operative whose subtle methods are thought of as being redundant in today’s world of counter terrorism.

Hoffman’s scenes with Dafoe, in which the two distinguished actors’ hushed toned German accents duel it out in the shadows of salvage yard meetings, smolder with intensity. Likewise the jarring climax, a superbly shot sequence that’s as haunting as hell.

This fine follow up to Corbijn’s excellently artsy 2010 George Clooney vehicle THE AMERICAN is obviously elevated because its Hoffman’s last completed film as the lead, but it's still well worth seeing regardless.

Hoffman himself is always worth seeing because he would completely become his characters. And here his character is the character of the film – weary, depressed, deeply cynical, yet still ideally determined to try to “make the world a safer place.”

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