Drinking Buddies is one of the best films of 2013.
It’s important to state that from the beginning because it can be difficult to explain the appeal of Drinking Buddies. In fact, it can be argued that nothing really happens in the film. For 90 minutes, we follow four likable and familiar characters as they drink, talk, flirt, and occasionally fight. In many ways, this is a very funny film but it’s definitely not a comedy. It’s a serious movie that’s notable for lacking any real drama. Instead, it’s a warm and sympathetic portrait of life as it’s lived.
Luke (Jake Johnson) and Kate (Olivia Wilde) both work at a Chicago brewery. Luke is an almost stereotypical nice guy while Kate is good at her job but totally neurotic with almost every other aspect of her life. When we first see them on-screen together, it’s easy to assume that Kate and Luke are in a relationship. However, despite being perfect for each other, Luke and Kate are both involved with others. Kate is involved with Chris (Ron Livingston) while Luke is trying to get over his nervousness over the prospect of getting married to Jill (Anna Kendrick). After the four of them go on a camping trip with each other, Kate and Chris break up and Luke is forced to deal with his feelings for both Kate and Jill.
Now, I knew that sounds like the set-up for a romantic comedy, the type where Chris would turn out to be a complete cad and Jill would be so obviously wrong for Luke that the audience would be openly rooting for Luke to dump her so he could get together with Kate. However, and this is what makes this film brilliant, Joe Swanberg isn’t interested in making a film full of romcom stereotypes. If anything, Chris and Jill are both portrayed as being far more sympathetic than either Luke or Kate. (Livingston and Kendrick have an extended picnic scene that should be remembered as one of the best cinematic moments of 2013.)
In the end, Drinking Buddies doesn’t do anything that you expect it to do. Swanberg is less interested in romance and more interested in observing and celebrating the friendship of these four characters. This is one of those unexpected films where every single detail rings true and you end up feeling as if you could hop a plane to Chicago and find any of these four characters living their own lives beyond what the audience has been lucky enough to observe.
I have to admit that when I first heard the plot of All Is Lost, I was skeptical.
Essentially, the film is 100 minutes of Robert Redford (playing a nameless sailor) floating out in the middle of the ocean and trying not to die. Beyond delivering some deliberately ambiguous narration at the beginning of the film and then shouting at some profanity about halfway through the film, Redford’s performance is almost entirely silent. We’re never really sure why Redford was out in the ocean in the first place, though there are hints to be found by those who are willing to take the time to track down the small details. Myself, I know nothing about sailing and, considering how utterly terrified I am of drowning, I doubt that I ever will. As such, I spent most of the film not having the slightest idea what Redford was doing or why he was doing it.
(To just give one example of my lack of nautical knowledge, I was stunned to discover, while watching All Is Lost, that a boat can be flooded with water without automatically sinking to the bottom of the ocean.)
So, I really should have hated All Is Lost.
But I didn’t.
I have to admit that it took me a while to get into the film. There were a few times when I thought the movie was going to lose me. But every time that I thought I was going to zone out on the film, Robert Redford snapped me back. Redford brings such a sense of immediacy to his role that you can’t help but watch him even if, like me, you’re not always sure what he’s doing.
If not for the all of the Oscar talk being generated by Redford’s performance, I probably would not have seen All Is Lost.
When I saw Lee Daniels’ The Butler, I was not impressed.
Yes, the audience applauded as the end credits rolled. And yes, I know that almost all of the mainstream critics have given it a good review. I know that Sasha Stone has been hyping it as a surefire Oscar contender. I know that, up until 12 Years A Slave introduced us all to an actress named Lupita Nyong’o, Oprah Winfrey was considered to be the front-runner for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
But it doesn’t matter. The Butler did little for me.
I also realize that the film ended with a title card that announced that what I had just watched was dedicated to the American civil rights movement. In many ways, that title card felt like emotional blackmail, implying that if you criticized The Butler than that meant you were also criticizing the brave, real life men and women who risked their lives to fight for equal rights.
However, when you put emotions and good intentions to the side, the fact of the matter is that Lee Daniels’ The Butler is not that good of a movie. One need only compare The Butler to some of the other films that were released this year that dealt with the African-American experience — films like 12 Years A Slave and Fruitvale Station — to see just how safe and uninspiring The Butler truly is.
The Butler tells the story of Cecil Gaines (Forrest Whitaker), the son sharecroppers (played by David Banner and Mariah Carey) in the deep south. After Cecil’s father is murdered by plantation owner Thomas Westfall (Alex Pettyfer), Cecil is raised and educated by the wealthy Annabeth Westdall (Vanessa Redgrave). Eventually, the teenaged Cecil leaves the plantation and ends up working in a hotel where he’s educated in how to be a master servant by the elderly Maynard (Clarence Williams III, who brings a quiet dignity to his role). Cecil eventually gets promoted to a hotel in Washington, D.C. It’s there that he meets and marries Gloria (Oprah Winfrey).
In 1957, Cecil is hired to work at the White House. Along with befriending two others butlers (played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Lenny Kravitz), Cecil also gets the chance to observe history play out first hand. Starting with Dwight Eisenhower (played by Robin Williams) and ending with Ronald Reagan (Alan Rickman, giving a performance that is incredibly bad), Cecil watches as President after President deals with the civil rights movement. Some presidents, like John F. Kennedy (James Marsden) are portrayed as being heroes while others, like Richard Nixon (John Cusack), are portrayed as being villains but all of them have the watchful eye of Cecil Gaines in common.
Meanwhile, at home, Gloria has a brief affair with Howard (played by Terrence Howard and really, you have to wonder what Cecil was thinking leaving his wife alone with anyone played by Terrence Howard) and Cecil’s oldest son, Louis (David Oyelowo), gets involved with the civil rights movement and grow increasingly estranged from his father.
The Butler actually starts out pretty well. There’s a lengthy sequence where Louis and a group of students are trained on how to conduct a sit-in that’s extremely compelling to watch. However, then John Cusack shows up wearing a big fake nose and the entire film starts to fall apart.
From a cinematic point of view, the film fails because it ultimately seems to be more dedicated to trotting out a parade of celebrity cameos to actually telling a compelling story. As is his usual style, Lee Daniels directs with a heavy hand and, as a result, the film is full of emotionally-charged scenes that fail to resonate for longer than a handful of minutes.
My main issue with The Butler is that the film literally contains no surprises. Nothing out of the ordinary happens and, at no point, is the audience actually challenged to consider the way they view history or race relations. Whereas films like Fruitvale Station and 12 Years A Slave truly challenge our assumptions, The Butler encourages us to pat ourselves on the back for being so enlightened. Every single frame of The Butler is specifically designed to fool us into thinking that we’re watching an important and challenging movie.
Because of a silly copyright lawsuit, the official title of The Butler is Lee Daniels’ The Butler. However, that title is very appropriate because The Butler is definitely a Lee Daniels film. Even if you didn’t know it beforehand, it would be easy to guess that the same man who directed Precious and The Paperboy also directed The Butler. As a director, Daniels specializes in making simplistic points in the most bombastic way possible. The results are films, like The Butler, that are more concerned with manipulating an audience than challenging an audience. When audiences applaud at the end of The Butler, they aren’t so much applauding the film as much as they are applauding themselves for having seen it.
Do you remember that YouTube video of Chris Crocker screaming, “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!” while tears and eye liner ran down his face?
That’s often the way that I feel about Lindsay Lohan, a talented actress and a fellow redhead whose career has been destroyed not so much by her own mistakes but by the fact that the tabloids refuse to allow her to move on from those mistakes. It seems that, regardless of what Lindsay Lohan does, not a single story will be written about her that doesn’t mention that she’s spent time in rehab and jail or that doesn’t offer up some sort of tawdry speculation about her private life.
And that’s unfortunate because, regardless of what the tabloids may say, Lindsay Lohan remains an excellent actress who is capable of doing a lot more than parodying her own image in Scary Movie 5.
Consider, for instance, her performance in The Canyons.
In The Canyons, Lohan plays Tara, the world-weary girlfriend of a wealthy sociopath named Christian (James Deen, who may not be a great actor but still projects a proper mix of charm and menace). Christian is a film producer whose need to control and dominate is demonstrated in both the way he manipulates actor Ryan (Nolan Funk) and the way he arranges for Tara to have sex with strangers while he films the action.
Tara and Christian live a life that epitomizes empty luxury, an existence defined of ennui where casual cruelty is the norm. However, when he discovers that Tara is secretly having an affair with Ryan, Christian’s carefully constructed facade of control starts to fade away. Perhaps not surprisingly, Christian’s obsessiveness and manipulative mind games eventually lead to a brutal act of violence…
When it was released earlier this year, The Canyons got terrible reviews and the film is definitely uneven. Bret Easton Ellis’s script is predictable and, while director Paul Schrader captures some haunting images of Los Angeles at its most languid, the film also is a bit too slow for its own good. Schrader takes Ellis’s pulpy script and attempts to use it to craft an existential portrait of American culture and he doesn’t quite succeed.
However, to a large extent, The Canyons is redeemed by Lohan’s excellent performance. In Lohan’s hands, Tara becomes a survivor who has sacrificed her innocence but still has yet to develop the hardness that one needs to survive in Ellis and Schrader’s Los Angeles. As cynical and decadent a character as Tara may be, Lohan plays her with just enough hints of optimism that it’s impossible not to regret the loss of who she was before she met Christian.
It’s a performance that manages to redeem a film that, without Lohan, would have been one of the worst films of 2013.
For that reason alone, perhaps it’s time to leave Lindsay alone and she what she’s capable of doing when she’s simply allowed to act.
Just in case you somehow missed your chance to see one of the greatest films ever made, here’s Frank Capra’s classic It’s A Wonderful Life. I’ve seen this movie a countless number of times. I can recite every line by memory. And yet, every time I watch it, I still get tears in my eyes. If you missed it on TV this year, please feel free to watch it below.
For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take a look at Oliver Stone’s 1995 presidential biopic, Nixon.
Nixon tells the life story of our 37th President, Richard Nixon. The only President to ever resign in order to avoid being impeached, Nixon remains a controversial figure to this day. As portrayed in this film, Nixon (played by Anthony Hopkins) was an insecure, friendless child who was dominated by his ultra religious mother (Mary Steenburgen) and who lived in the shadow of his charismatic older brother (Tony Goldwyn). After he graduated college, Nixon married Pat (Joan Allen), entered politics, made a name for himself as an anti-communist, and eventually ended up winning the U.S. presidency. The film tells us that, regardless of his success, Nixon remained a paranoid and desperately lonely man who eventually allowed the sycophants on his staff (including James Woods) to break the law in an attempt to destroy enemies both real and imagined. Along the way, Nixon deals with a shady businessman (Larry Hagman), who expects to be rewarded for supporting Nixon’s political career, and has an odd confrontation with a young anti-war protester who has figured out that Nixon doesn’t have half the power that everyone assumes he does.
Considering that his last few films have been W., Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and Savages, I think it’s understandable that I’m often stunned to discover that, at one point in the distant past, Oliver Stone actually was a worthwhile director. JFK, for instance, is effective propaganda. Nixon, which feels a lot like an unofficial sequel to JFK, is a much messier film than JFK but — as opposed to something like Savages — it’s still watchable and occasionally even thought-provoking. Thanks to Hopkins’ performance and, it must be admitted, Stone’s surprisingly even-handed approach to the character, Nixon challenges our assumptions about one of the most infamous and villified figures in American history. It forces us to decide for ourselves whether Nixon was a monster or a victim of circumstances that spiraled out of his control. If you need proof of the effectiveness of the film’s approach, just compare Stone’s work on Nixon with his work on his next Presidential biography, the far less effective W.
(I should admit, however, that I’m a political history nerd and therefore, this film was specifically designed to appeal to me. For me, half the fun of Nixon was being able to go, “Oh, that’s supposed to be Nelson Rockefeller!”)
If I had to compare the experience of watching Nixon to anything, I would compare it to taking 10 capsules of Dexedrine and then staying up for five days straight without eating. The film zooms from scene-to-scene, switching film stocks almost at random while jumping in and out of time, and not worrying too much about establishing any sort of narrative consistency. Surprisingly nuanced domestic scenes between Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen are followed by over-the-top scenes where Bob Hoskins lustily stares at a White House guard or Sam Waterston’s eyes briefly turn completely black as he discusses the existence of evil. When Nixon gives his acceptance speech to the Republican Convention, the Republican delegates are briefly replaced by images of a world on fire. Familiar actors wander through the film, most of them only popping up for a scene or two and then vanishing. The end result is a film that both engages and exhausts the viewer, a hallucinatory journey through Stone’s version of American history.
Tonight’s ghost of Christmas Past was recommended to me by the TSL’s own editor-in-chief, Arleigh Sandoc. This episode of the Twilight Zone originally aired on December 20th, 1985. Based on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, The Star features two men — one a scientist and one a priest — exploring the remains of a long dead alien civilization and discovering a connection to our own society.
Today’s ghost of Christmas past originally aired on December 24th, 1953. In this episode of Dragnet, two stoic cops investigate the theft of a statue of the Infant Jesus.
Today’s ghost of Christmas past comes to us from my favorite country in the whole entire world, Canada!
Admit it, longtime readers — you knew that I was eventually going to have to find an excuse to include an episode of Degrassi in my holiday series, didn’t you?
Ghosts of Degrassi Past is a mini-episode from 2009. Holly J is, as usual, stressing out so the ghost of J.T. appears and teachers her a lesson about Christmas spirit.
For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take a look at Elia Kazan’s 1957 political satire, A Face In The Crowd.
The film opens with radio producer Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) visiting a local jail in Arkansas. She’s looking for human interest stories that she can feature on her show and she discovers one when she meets an imprisoned drifter named Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith). When Marcia interviews him, Rhodes proves himself to be a natural performer, telling folksy jokes and launching into a song about being a “free man in the morning.” Rhodes proves to be so popular that, after he’s released from jail, he pursues a career in show business with Marcia as both his manager and, eventually, his lover.
Moving to Memphis, a renamed Lonesome Rhodes eventually lands his own television variety show and he soon starts doing irreverent commercials for local companies. Along the way, Rhodes also finds a new manager, the glib and manic Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa). With the help of Joey, Rhodes becomes the spokesman for a fake energy supplement, Vitajex.
As Rhodes’ fame grows, so does his ego. After dumping Jeffries, Rhodes impulsively marries a 17 year-old majorette (Lee Remick). His show also goes national and Rhodes soon starts to use his influence to try to both promote an incompetent, business-backed Presidential candidate and to destroy anyone who he considers to be an enemy. As his show’s disillusioned head writer (Walter Matthau) puts it, Rhodes has become a “demagogue in denim.”
A Face In The Crowd is a personal favorite of mine. Director Kazan deftly mixes satire with melodrama and, with the exception of the weak ending, the film’s vision of media manipulation and demagogic celebrities probably feels more plausible today than when it was first released. The film is full of great performances, from the avuncular Walter Matthau to vulnerable Patricia Neal to the innocent-and-then-not-so-innocent Lee Remick. Anthony Franciosa is wonderfully glib and sleazy and it’s a lot of fun to watch his joy at discovering how easy it is to manipulate the world.
Ultimately, however, the film’s success is mostly due to Andy Griffith’s amazing performance as Lonesome Rhodes. Griffith, displaying all of the folksiness but none of the empathy that would be displayed in his later television show, turns Rhodes into a force of nature, a smiling charlatan and a charismatic sociopath who manipulates for the pure enjoyment of manipulation.
To make the obvious comparison, it’s very easy to imagine Lonesome Rhodes getting his own show on MSNBC, where on a nightly basis he could bark orders at his followers and ridicule anyone who dares to question him. But even beyond that, the character of Lonesome Rhodes resonates. I’m from the South. I grew up down here and I live down here. I can tell you, from my own personal observations and experiences, that we still have our share of demagogues. Some of them run in elections and some of them preach on Sunday but all of them have got a bit of Lonesome Rhodes inside of them.
For that reason, A Face In The Crowd is probably more relevent today than it’s ever been.
