TAKE SHELTER (Dir. Jeff Nichols, 2011)
Ever since Michael Shannon stole REVOLUTIONARY ROAD out from under Leo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet a few years back, I've been waiting for the man to carry a movie as the lead. Here, he gets to do just that as a man tortured by apocalyptic visions.
Shannon plays a blue collar father in a small town in Ohio - so small that everybody knows each other - who continually sees ominous clouds, strange formations of frightened birds, and rain that looks like orange soda when it pours into his palm.
Nobody else sees this scary stuff so his wife (Jessica Chastain), best friend/co-worker (Shannon's Boardwalk Empire co-star Shea Whigham), and everybody else think Shannon is going crazy.
Shannon thinks he may be going insane too, as there is a history of mental illness in his family - Kathy Baker has a brief bit as his mother suffers from dementia.
Still, his awareness of his possibly delusional state doesn't stop him from building a bomb shelter in his backyard.
There have been many stories about protagonists who may be crazy, or they may be on to something (that saying about paranoiacs being the people that know what's really going on comes to mind) - it's Twilight Zone 101.
I wish I could say that TAKE SHELTER brings something new to the table, but it doesn't. It's far from fully fleshed out, there's one too many fake-out nightmare scenes, and I don't think I took away what they wanted me to take away from the ending. I say I don't think so, because I really don't know what director Nichols (who also scripted the film) wanted folks to take away from the ending.
Chastain doesn't really have much to do as Shannon's wife except look worried - a part that resembles her role in THE TREE OF LIFE - but she brings a believable presence regardless.
It's Shannon's show though, and he owns the movie indeed. It's Oscar worthy work that's pretty much the sole reason to see this movie. His brow has never looked as furrowed before than in this excellent portrayal as a honest working man plagued by fear.
It's a performance that will stay with you for days.
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MARGIN CALL (Dir. J.C. Chandor, 2011)
Most movie-minded folks know what a “MacGuffin” is, but for those who don’t – it’s a term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, meaning an object or event that drives the plot. From the Maltese Falcon to the Ark of the Covenant to the Dude’s rug, MacGuffins are inescapable plot elements in many many movies.
In “Margin Call”, we are introduced to the MacGuffin in the form of a USB drive that Stanley Tucci, just downsized from risk management at the fictitious firm the film is set at, gives to one of his former underlings (Zachary Quinto) with the warning “be careful.”
Quinto appraises the flash drive’s content after his co-workers leave, and, after crunching some numbers, he urgently calls everybody back to the office. Senior trader Paul Bellany calls Kevin Spacey as a senior broker, stressed out about business as well for his dying dog, and the news spreads throughout the firm leading to a tension filled all-nighter.
I was less concerned with the timely play-out of how our current financial crises came into being here, than I was how Chandor’s intricately plotted scenario handled its MacGuffin. All the characters (including Simon Baker as head of securities and Demi Moore as head of risk) take a glimpse at Quinto’s computer screen and are shocked by what they see.
We never see the screen, which is understandable because it would just be a bunch of numbers we couldn’t make sense of, but we get from everybody’s reaction (“Are you sure these numbers are correct?” they all seem to ask) that the info indicates that their firm is in major trouble.
The news is so dire that CEO Jeremy Irons arrives to take control. In a heated meeting, Quinto (who is one of the film’s producers) lays it out to the steely Irons: “Sir, if those assets decrease by just 25 percent, and remain on our books, that loss would be greater than the current market capitalization of this entire company.”
It is way less complicated than it sounds. Simply stated, the MacGuffin in MARGIN CALL is like a hole in a sinking ship. All the shipmates try to fix the hole, but it’s too late.
As the Captain, Irons takes desperate measures to ensure survival, but at costs that may ruin the future of the ship, and poison the waters around them.
Cold and humorless, yet still incredibly involving, MARGIN CALL takes us into the scary isolated heart of Wall Street before the rest of us had any clue as to what was going down. Its flawless cast (particularly Quinto and Spacey, who does his best work in ages), and intense tone kept me compelled from start to finish, even when I could see right through its MacGuffin.
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TOWER HEIST (Dir. Brett Ratner, 2011)
This began life as a notion Eddie Murphy had for a “black OCEAN’S 11’” but they threw some money at it and made it into a concept, and then later turned it into an idea.
That idea is a Ben Stiller movie with Murphy as a supporting player, ganging up with Matthew Broderick, Gabourey Sidibe (PRECIOUS), Michael Peña, and Casey Affleck to rob a billionaire (Alan Alda) who stole their pensions.
Unfortunately, even with that incredibly capable cast and that promising premise, TOWER HEIST is a half baked comic crime caper that comes close to bringing big laughs, but never quite delivers.
There are a fair amount of small laughs throughout the film, and I caught myself smiling at the shenanigans onscreen a few times, but the all-too-familiar construction of the material kept holding back the funny.
The first half is all set-up with Stiller as the by-the-book building manager of a luxurious Manhattan high rise (obviously modeled on the Trump Tower) realizing how evil Alda is after the Ponzi scheming penthouse owner is charged with financial fraud.
With the help of small-time crook Murphy, Stiller enlists his co-worker co-horts (Sidibe, Peña, and Affleck) and Broderick, as a down on his luck Wall Street broker just evicted from his tower apartment, to pull off a big-time job – stealing 20 million from Alda’s penthouse safe.
The film has been touted as a comeback for Murphy, and while there’s an undeniable charge to seeing him again assume the foul mouthed quick tempered persona that he had abandoned for family fare over a decade ago, too many scenes have no payoffs.
In one scene in which Murphy is training the crew to be thieves he gives them bobby pins and locks them on a building’s roof in the extreme cold. Once Murphy says his lines (like “here’s your punk ass bobby pin”) and leaves, the scene is over – we don’t get seeing the guys attempting to pick the lock because I think screenwriters Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson couldn’t come up with anything funny there and thought Murphy’s shtick would be enough.
This is a method they seem to employ throughout: let’s just get these guys bickering in set piece after set piece and people will be laughing so hard they won’t notice the predictable plot mechanics.
Director Ratner doesn’t provide a strong enough balance between laughs and thrills to make TOWER HEIST anything special - at its best it’s likably perfunctory. I also could’ve done without the Téa Leoni as an FBI agent who is on to both good guy Stiller and bad guy Alda subplot, but usually I can do without Téa Leoni so there’s that.
Like I said, I did lightly laugh here and there (not just at Murphy as Broderick, Sidibe and Peña also have their moments), and I felt a little excitement during a scene involving Alda’s Ferrarri (allegedly once owned by Steve McQueen) being dangled from a cable from the top of the tower, but with its many plot-holes and lack of payoffs this is nowhere close to how good it could’ve been.
Here’s hoping Murphy’s newly proposed project that remolds his original black ensemble comedy notion into something titled JAMAL AND TYRELL AND OMAR AND BRICK AND MICHAEL'S WACK-ASS WEEKEND gets a lot further past the idea stage.
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