Disconnect (My Favorite Movie You Haven’t Heard Of From 2013)

Synopsis: “A drama centered on a group of people searching for human connections in today’s wired world.” (Rated R; 1 hour, 55 minutes)

Was the title of this latest blog entry a dead-giveaway? Yes I enjoyed the movie. A lot. Well, enjoyed may not quite be the right word for it… “affected” perhaps.

Do you remember how good everyone said Crash was, but how there was something inherently heavy-handed and manipulative about the movie that just kept it from actually BEING great? Well those were certainly my feelings from the 2004 Academy Award winner. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a very easy movie-audience to please, and I loved watching Crash, with its intense multi-layered story-lines, and great actors playing against type all over the place. In fact it was thanks to Crash that the world started to see that Sandra Bullock really COULD act after all. But it was just a bit too schmaltzy to actually be great (in my humble opinion).

Disconnect is basically Crash without the schmaltz. It has a handful of different story-lines that come together in some bizarre way at the end, but more importantly it is deep, with compelling plots, great acting, and almost a year later I still think it was fantastic. It probably contains the best Jason Bateman performance to date, as well as a “Catfish” type subplot that absolutely broke my heart. I recall the lights going down and being so overwhelmed by what I had just seen that I couldn’t even get up right away. I will not give away more of the story, because I hope you’ll be renting/streaming it soon, and letting me know what you think.

The movie was better than Crash – as I’ve made crystal clear – and it’s not as good as…my bachelor party in Las Vegas. What, I HAVE to pick a movie that I liked more that’s also multilinear? Sorry, it was better than Crash, Babel, Short Cuts and Syriana. I’ve never seen Nashville, so perhaps that was a greater movie of its genre.

Quality Rating: A+ (This isn’t a guilty pleasure type movie where I enjoyed it more than its worth, it actually was great.)

Boaz Rating: A+

The Place Beyond The Pines

Synopsis: “A motorcycle stunt rider turns to robbing banks as a way to provide for his lover and their newborn child, a decision that puts him on a collision course with an ambitious rookie cop navigating a department ruled by a corrupt detective.” (Rated R; 2 hours, 20 minutes)

I knew this was supposed to be a good movie, but I still prepared myself to see something that I’d find slow and boring. Why? Because it’s an indie, it’s a drama, and it’s 2 hours and 20 minutes. I added that up in my mind and assumed it would be a major drag, but knew I had to see it anyway. This took place last week, as a part of my celebratory three-movie day for passing the nursing boards. (Some people have fancy dinner celebrations, my fiancée knows me well enough to award me a triple-movie feature!) The Place Beyond The Pines had the unfortunate timing of following Jurassic Park; anything would feel slow after that exciting one.

I’m happy to report that in spite of the many reasons it could have been a solid, but boring experience, I thought it was fantastic, and anything BUT boring. It’s honestly such a well made movie, that it’s hard for me to find any flaws. Let me analyze it piece by piece:

The Acting

Everyone was great in it. Ryan Gosling may truly be one of the best working actors today. He was so believable as a suave lady’s man in Crazy, Stupid, Love. He was utterly convincing as a sweet person with mental illness in Lars And The Real Girl. And in The Place Beyond The Pines he fits the part of a white trash guy desperate to win back his baby mama like a glove. Is there any role he can’t do well? The movie was broken up into three sequential stories. The first starred Gosling, the second was led by a fantastic Bradley Cooper, and the third followed an intriguing Dane DeHaan. Cooper previously surprised people when he was great in Limitless and especially Silver Linings Playbook. The difference here was that he got to play the part of a normal person, without relying on the eccentricities of an offbeat character. Not that it’s easy to act eccentrically, but it can be even tougher to give a powerful performance when you’re acting somewhat…normal. Dane DeHaan was most notably in the sci-fi flick Chronicle, a movie I highly recommend for its inventiveness. He had a quiet intensity that made you feel for him, while at the same time you were nervous that he could explode at any moment. Last year Ben Mendelsohn played a scummy low-level criminal so well in Killing Them Softly, I was thrilled to see him here in a variation of that role that was kind and sweet, but still a lowlife. Eva Mendes played one of her least glamorous roles I’ve seen, and was totally believable in spite of her obvious beauty. Rose Byrne was good as Cooper’s wife, but didn’t have very long to make a mark. But anyone who’s seen her in the excellent show Damages knows she’s more than proven her acting worth. And Emory Cohen is quite new to the acting scene (he is on the show Smash which I’ve never seen) but he was so believable as a self-entitled rich punk that I wanted to wring his neck. All of the actors truly felt raw, realistic and gritty, without an ounce of schmaltz in their performances.

The Direction

Derek Cianfrance wrote and directed this epic drama, and seems to create characters on screen that feel so realistic, that it takes you a few minutes to walk out when the lights turn on. His previous movie was Blue Valentine, an extremely depressing look at the love-life of Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. That movie was such a downer to sit through, that when we later watched Amour, Adi compared her gut-wrenching feeling to how she felt with Blue Valentine. Once again in The Place Beyond The Pines, Cianfrance did such a fantastic job that it was hard to get up afterwards. The movie Cianfrance created hits you emotionally like a ton of bricks, and when you’re finished you want to just go home and decompress. It’s not even a downer like those other two movies I described, but it makes you feel like you’ve been watching the dramatic lives of real people, spanning many years, and it’s just a lot to take in when all’s said and done. What an amazing thing to accomplish two movies in a row. Clearly Cianfrance has a gift for creating reality on the screen, and so far he’s left me unsettled…twice. Well done.

I realize it may seem funny comparing his movies to Amour, but what they have in common is the feeling that you’re watching absolutely real characters, and then getting to know them a little bit too well. As a result, when horrible things gradually occur, it becomes tougher and tougher to watch. Again, this is no easy task for a film-maker to accomplish. And I’m GLAD most directors don’t know how to pull this off, because I prefer to let loose and relax most of the times I’m watching a movie. I want to enjoy my silly popcorn flicks! He creates a story on the screen that’s like a bucket of ice water on your face; it wakes you up and keeps you captivated, but I can only handle it once in a while.

In spite of this being a 2 hour and 20 minute indie, I was riveted from start to finish. Whether it was a fast-paced scene with Gosling robbing a bank, or a quiet moment with Bradley Cooper talking to his wife in bed, it was electrifying. The movie was done with such a sense of taut suspense that each and every word and moment created a sense of vital importance. I would love to see what the director would do with a comedy, because at this point there can be no doubts left as to his ability to make a hell of a drama. My wonderful fiancée had already sat through the marvelous Jurassic Park, and now the heavy movie that was The Place Beyond The Pines. She loved both films, but was ready to go home. Yet a third one was still in store…

The movie was better than Drive, the critically-acclaimed Ryan Gosling drama that was interesting, but never had the heart that affected me throughout The Place Beyond The Pines. It was however on par with Blue Valentine, Derek Cianfrance’s other major release with Ryan Gosling. The two movies may have been equally well-made, but this one was certainly more interesting and less depressing to sit through.

Quality Rating: A+

Boaz Rating: A+ (This was the rare movie I expected to think was good but also slow and boring, and thus give it a lower Boaz Rating…it wasn’t so, it may have been very slow-paced, but I wasn’t bored for a second)

Jurassic Park (3D) (“My Research & Adulation About The Masterpiece”)

Synopsis: “During a preview tour, a theme park suffers a major power breakdown that allows its cloned dinosaur exhibits to run amok.” (Rated PG-13; 2 hours, 7 minutes)

Steven Spielberg is a God. Is that too sacrilegious a statement for an observant Jew to make? Fine, I’ll clarify it and say he’s just a god among men. How else to describe the fantasy that he has helped bring to life SO many times over the years with movie spectacle after movie spectacle.

It’s not just his budgets that create wondrous blockbusters, because numerous directors get hundreds of millions of dollars to play with, and their movies may be cool and fun, but they sure aren’t magical (I’m talking to you, Michael Bay). And he certainly doesn’t exclusively choose Oscar-bait material, because many of his movies would have been second-rate in other peoples’ hands. Imagine Jaws directed by anyone else. What are the chances  that the LACK of seeing the shark would be what scares the bejesus out of us. (I was one of countless kids who for years still had lingering twinges of fear when I’d dip my toes into a swimming pool!) How about Saving Private Ryan; do you think anyone else would have given you the terrifying sense of “being there” that you had during its initial 20 minute D-Day scene? In my opinion that scene escalates the film so much, that I consider it to be the greatest war movie ever made. I could honestly go on and on about my all-time favorite director, but let’s focus my attention on the brilliant blockbuster at hand, Jurassic Park. Oh what an awesome movie it was. And I’m happy to report that it stands the test of time. Seeing it on the big screen once again was exhilarating;  it was as scary, thrilling and (yes) funny as ever.

I need to mention the fact that Adi went with me to see the movie in 3D. For anyone who is unaware, I am incredibly critical of the 3D experience in movies, and my feelings generally range from hatred to mild apathy. Whether it’s about the distractions of the glasses constantly slipping off my nose, or how they feel pressed against my own glasses underneath, or the dulled tones and colors that result from the 3D effect…I despise the format. But for the sake of this particular blog post, I will write about the movie and not mention the 3D aspect again; one of these days I will revisit the topic and address/attack it as its own article.

Unlike most of my posts, the vast majority of people reading this blog will have seen the movie in the past, so I don’t need to convince anyone that it’s worth checking out. What I would like to do is remind people about some of the more brilliant aspects of the movie, and possibly offer some new information I’ve compiled from my research.

The Music

As soon as you saw the poster above, didn’t you start playing the music inside your head (or out loud for that matter)? If not, I welcome you to get in the mood and listen to it right here (at the start of the YouTube clip as well as the 2:25 minute mark). John Williams composed the score for all of Spielbergs’ movies, and has thus created some of the most memorable melodies in film history. He managed to somehow make 2 notes absolutely terrifying with his Jaws theme. He gave a platform to world-renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman, who was forever immortalized in the beautifully haunting Schindler’s List theme. As Spielberg created another piece of cinematic history, so often John Williams followed. The melody for Jurassic Park was an instant-classic, and you would hear people singing it as soon as they’d leave the theater. To say it set the mood for the wonders on the screen would be a glaring example of understatement.

The Special Effects

It’s been 20 years since the movie came out. There have been so many advances in technology, computers and special effects, and nobody would even try to contest that statement. Then why on earth do these effects hold up as better and more “real” than the majority of big budget movies today? The amount of thought, care and dedication that went into the visual arts of this movie are astonishing. As fantastic as some of the CGI (computer-generated imagery) movies have gotten, so many film-makers have abused it to the point where it’s not uncommon to hear “CGI-heavy” as a descriptor for a movie – and it’s rarely meant as a compliment. (I’m looking at you Transformers!) Although Jurassic Park had plenty of CGI (and essentially revolutionized it), some of their key moments and characters were mechanical, touchable, animatronic dinosaurs – amazingly REAL ones I might add. When Sam Neill hugged the sick Triceretops? He wasn’t hugging a blue screen, the creature was created for the movie, and it was as if dinosaurs were alive and real…you can’t replace that realism! What about the giant Tyrannosaurus Rex that moved around snapping and snarling and darting rapidly? It was usually a robot. Holy cow-eating dinosaur! In fact it was SUCH a feat of brilliance creating the T. Rex that I invite you to watch these videos that were recently released here; they show the thought and genius that went into it, led by the world-famous special effects pioneer Stan Winston. There are 3 segments at 4 minutes apiece, and you may not understand all of the technical terms they’re using, but you will be amazed by their inventiveness! Are you curious to read a fun National Geographic piece about how the T. Rex from the movie compares to what we actually know about the monstrous creature? I am happy to provide you with a fun piece of reading material here!

Spielberg had originally hired Phil Tippett to use his go-motion animation technology to move the dinosaurs around. Tippett had previously created numerous famous go-motion effects, including the Imperial Walkers during The Empire Strikes Back. Spielberg wasn’t happy with the end-result’s lack of realism in Jurassic Park, and when they saw initial CGI footage of the T. Rex running around and hunting the stampede of other dinosaurs, he famously said to Tippett, “You’re out of a job”, to which the go-motion wizard responded, “Don’t you mean extinct?”. That witty exchange of course made it into the movie itself! As for the shots when the dinosaurs WERE computer generated? I have no explanation as to why they still seem more real than most modern day effects. They just do.

The Script

It sure doesn’t hurt when the author is also one of the screenwriters, and that’s what happened here. Michael Crichton was hired to adapt his own screenplay, and David Koepp came in later and made some very clever changes to its final product. For example, there had been a lot of exposition in the book (and Crichton’s screenplay) about the backstory of HOW it was scientifically possible to bring dinosaurs back to life. Koepp solved this by creating the cute cartoon that was shown to the characters that explains it all. This and other changes took the meat of the clever story, and made it flow so darn well in a 2 plus hour movie. He also took Richard Attenborough’s owner-of-the-island character and made him a sweet, misguided, well-meaning old man instead of a ruthless billionaire. Trust me, when you watch the movie again you’ll realize just how many lines are now classic, and the comic timing is hilarious, especially when Jeff Goldblum speaks. Although I must admit I was rolling my eyes at the ridiculousness of the script where Goldblum’s character Dr. Ian Malcolm asks Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) if she’s heard of chaos theory, and then later the butterfly effect. In both cases neither she nor anyone else is even familiar with the concepts. Seriously?! What the hell sort of schools did these other scientists go to? I was a lazy student in high school but even I had heard of both, c’mon! In spite of that slight lapse in judgment, the script was fun, memorable and well written by the author himself and Koepp. Other notable movies that Koepp has written include Mission: Impossible,  Spider-Man, and last year’s underrated popcorn flick Premium Rush.

The Actors

I would have never thought Sam Neill could be such a great hero, but he really pulled it off. It’s funny, because I don’t associate him with roles like this, as he’s usually a bit stodgy or serious, but here he fit the hat of an Indiana Jones-type perfectly. And it’s ironic, because Harrison Ford was actually Spielberg’s first choice. As the director once reported, “My first choice was Harrison. I went to the art department and I had them do a photo-realistic painting of the T-Rex chasing Harrison… and I put Harrison’s face on the character of the archaeologist, and sent the script, the book, and the picture to Harrison. The next day I got a call and he said, ‘This is not for me, pal.'” So as often seems to occur with famous roles, it could have gone to someone else and now we can’t really imagine it any other way. (William Hurt was also considered for the role before Sam Neill turned up.) Laura Dern was an interesting choice to make since she was mostly doing indie flicks at the time. According to a recent Entertainment Weekly article, she got the script while working on Wild At Heart, and only accepted the role when Nicolas Cage told her that it was his dream to work on a dinosaur movie and she’d be CRAZY to turn it down. And don’t get me started on Jeff Goldblum, his unique delivery is an acting class in itself.

Did You Know?

Pieces of information I wasn’t aware of until yesterday include:

-At the start of their automated tour of Jurassic Park, Richard Attenborough’s character tells everyone, “”The voice you’re now hearing is Richard Kiley. We’ve spared no expense.” I assumed Richard Kiley must have been a well-known actor from the days of yore, but there’s more to it. In the book, Chrichton wrote that Kiley was the narrator of the tour, so fittingly Spielberg was able to get him to actually do it for the movie.

-When they showed dinosaurs entire bodies moving around, or more distant shots, it was usually CGI. Most close-ups of them were animatronic though, including the majority of the climactic velociraptor-kitchen scene, which most people falsely believe was CGI. In fact during that scene Joseph Mazzello at one point ran into one of them and got injured. The seamless blend of computers with fleshy animatronics works so darn well, and that scene was terrifying!

-During filming a massive hurricane hit Kauai, causing the entire crew to flee. The pilot who took them off the island was Fred Sorenson. Who’s that? He was the same pilot who flew Indiana Jones away during the opening scene of Spielberg’s own Raiders Of The Lost Ark!

The Director

This brings us full circle back to the genius himself, Steven Spielberg. Seeing the movie on the big screen after all these years, I was able to see countless details and moments that demonstrate his mastery of the film-making craft. I will give some examples of this from just one famous scene in the movie, the T. Rex encounter: The cup of water rippling each time the T. Rex took a step…iconic. The rear-view mirror vibrating out-of-focus during that same thunderous sequence…brilliant. The close-up of the side-mirror showing the T. Rex chasing their vehicle, and almost caught up, with a funny focus on the words, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”!

There were truly endless moments of masterful film-making throughout the film, and as Adi said to me, it did two things that most movies never achieve: It scared her, and it made her care. The animatronics and CGI were able to make these dinosaurs more real than it had seemed imaginable, and the script was able to provide a hell of a fun story; but it’s only thanks to Steven Spielberg that each moment was actually suspenseful, touching and highly effective. The movie fires on all cylinders, and I can’t wait to see what he does in the next chapter of his illustrious career.

The movie was better than its sequels, including the Spielberg directed The Lost World. That one was certainly entertaining, but never as brilliantly innovative as the original. It wasn’t as good as…geez, do I really have to pick a better movie than a classic? Sure, okay, technically it wasn’t as fantastic as his own Schindler’s List. Are you happy now? I need to go wash my hands after that dirty, dirty comparison…

Quality Rating: A+(After everything I’ve written here, was there ever any doubt?)

Boaz Rating: A+

Trance

Synopsis: “An art auctioneer who has become mixed up with a group of criminals partners with a hypnotherapist in order to recover a lost painting.” (Rated R; 1 hour, 41 minutes)

Talk about being stuck between two realities. Trance was really disappointing for a Danny Boyle flick, but interesting enough for a no-name director. It was either a really bad A-lister movie, or a really decent B-movie. On the one hand it was something you’d see in the theater and think of as a “rental”, or alternatively you’d see it late at night on cable and think it was a surprisingly good movie. Basically, it was an intriguing flick that tried to be clever and tricky, but mostly was using recycled gimmicks.

Let’s start by examining the man behind-the-scenes, Danny Boyle. As an exciting English director, he has been worth following for about 20 years. His first feature film was the clever dark comedy Shallow Grave, and he really broke out with his next one, the inventively filmed Trainspotting. I can still picture the disgusting scene where Ewan McGregor fishes through a FILTHY toilet to find his drugs, before literally climbing into it. Years later he energized the zombie genre by giving a sense of urgency and speed to the typically-slow corpses in his great movie 28 Days Later... His last two movies were deserving Oscar-bait material, first the wonderful Slumdog Millionaire, and then 127 Hours, which managed to make two hours of James Franco drinking his own pee an interesting passage of time, a true feat! A dossier like that makes me expect so much more than a decent B or C movie.

The basic premise of Trance was that James McAvoy’s character got involved with a bad crowd, stole some art, got hit in the head, got amnesia, and couldn’t remember what he did with the art. Thus hypnotherapy plays the title role. There are twists and turns, and sometimes you aren’t sure if a character is awake or in a hypnotized state. But none of it was as clever as it wanted to be, and that’s just plain disappointing. It wanted to be the same caliber as other movies that screw with your brain, including Inception, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and Stranger Than Fiction,  but instead it came across as second-rate twisty entertainment that’s intriguing to watch but feels more like…late night cable. Even the music sounded like an 80’s electronica score, and not in a good Wendy Carlos kind-of-way. It just helped set the mood for a really good straight-to-video movie.

Another problem was with lead actor James McAvoy, whom I usually love. While I understand that it’s refreshing to have people play different ranges of roles, I didn’t enjoy following a character who was whiny, sniveling and ultimately an unlikable  guy, all while supposedly being the protagonist. There are plenty of movies in which the main character is an anti-hero, but if you get to the point where you don’t care if they live or die, that’s simply a badly written screenplay.

I will point out the Rated R elephant in the room. There was a depiction of nudity from Rosario Dawson in Trance that I have NEVER seen in any previous movie, and comes out of the blue when it does. In fact, when it suddenly happened, Josh and I both looked at each other in disbelief, and I’m actually shocked that the hyper-critical (and often hypocritical) MPAA didn’t stick the movie with an NC-17 as a result. It was also a bizarre bit of nudity, because it played such a key role in the plot, it ALMOST felt like Danny Boyle got an idea for a nudity-related plot device and then wrote an entire movie around it!

Truthfully the acting was all pretty good (Vincent Cassel was interesting to watch), and the  story was continuously intriguing. It’s just hard to take a movie seriously when it thinks it’s being more clever than it is, and you feel like you’ve seen it all before.

The movie was better than A Life Less Ordinary, an early Danny Boyle movie misfire that some people seemed to like; but it was a bizarre love story that never held my interest in spite of a promising cast. It was however not nearly as good as Trainspotting nor any of the examples of clever movies that mess with your brain I had mentioned earlier.

Quality Rating: C+

Boaz Rating: B-

Side Effects

Synopsis: “A young woman’s world unravels when a drug prescribed by her psychiatrist has unexpected side effects.” (Rated R; 1 hour 46 minutes)

I liked this movie. I really did. I’m just trying to understand why I didn’t love it.

As an example of how most members of society are medicated, it was intriguing. As a courtroom drama showing how the legal system works with a challenging situation at hand, it was interesting. As a twisty thriller, where you don’t know what’s going to happen next, it was about average. The direction by Soderbergh was fine but less captivating then many of his past films. What I’m getting at is that it is a movie with a high pedigree that did a good job overall, but just never wowed me. I watch a movie like this, feel like everything was written, directed, and acted well, but that spark is just missing that can ignite it all into a great movie. The plot doesn’t captivate the viewer as much as you’d like, and the twists are fine, but don’t surprise as much as they should. (Both Adi and Jared were sitting there guessing what was going to happen, and they were both correct!)

I will also note that this is one of the very rare movies I hadn’t already seen previews for; meaning that every minute and each plot twist was new and unexpected to me, something I’m not used to in movies. (Isn’t it a frustrating experience watching a movie, waiting and waiting for something to develop that you already know about thanks to those damn previews; so that when it actually happens instead of saying “Wow!”, you instead think to yourself, “Finally, now I’m caught up with what I already knew was going to happen!”)

Rooney Mara did impress me in her followup to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and is clearly an impressive actress with little to no vanity to get in the way of her dark performances. I’m actually hoping that one of her upcoming performances will be more of the normal variety, so I can see how she acts when her character isn’t quite so dark and depressing. Jude Law provided his best performance in ages, and was someone who was fun to watch twisting and turning as the plot unraveled, seeing him attempt to put the pieces back together. He showed some star quality that I haven’t seen in ages from him, and it was wonderfully refreshing.

I wish I had more to say about the movie, but without giving away spoilers, it really was just a good, solid film that moves and intrigues slowly, and then sprints with it for the exciting final 30 minutes. But it simply could have been better, which just about sums it up.

The movie was better than Soderbergh’s female-driven action movie Haywire, which bored me to disappointment. It was less cool, and less exciting than his last movie, Contagion.

Quality Rating: B+

Boaz Rating: B+ (That may seem high given my complaints, but with a movie of this genre and director, I was just expecting to enjoy it a whole lot more than I did)