Your Bowl of Cereal Is a Crime Scene: The Informant! Review

It is probably bad form to start a review with a cliche, but here goes nothing. The truth is stranger than fiction. Seriously. This is especially the case in Steven Soderbergh’s new film The Informant!, which dramatizes the story of Mark Whitacre, the highest-level executive to ever turn whistle-blower for the FBI. As the byzantine, darkly hilarious, and utterly astounding plot of the film plays out onscreen, The Informant! earns that exclamation point in the title.

While at the Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM), Whitacre tipped the government off to an international price fixing scheme between some the largest manufacturers of lysine. Lysine is an amino acid that humans need but cannot produce on their own. Thus it is added to lots of food. And when I mean lots of food, I mean lots of food. Detailing such a conspiracy may not sound so exciting given that this film does not play out like a thriller along the lines of The Insider or All the President’s Men. The ways in which Whitacre helps the FBI and subsequent revelations surrounding the price-fixing scheme surface, however, make this film one of the funniest and most infuriating whistle-blower films to date. It is funny because Soderbergh, working from Scott Z. Burns’ adaptation of Kurt Eichenwald’s book about the case, tells the story with an incredibly droll and wry tone. Some of the funniest humor does not come from overreactions, but from people trying to remain measured while events that merit wild reactions take place around them. It is infuriating because when ADM and their co-conspirators agreed to raise the price of lysine together, nearly every person around the world was hurt in their wallet when they bought food. The Insider told a terrible story of how tobacco companies lied about the effects their products had on consumers, but people by and large can avoid smoking if they choose. People cannot avoid eating.

I Am Jack’s Ten-Year Anniversary: Remembering Fight Club

In college, I introduced myself to a fellow student and when he heard my name was Tyler, he pulled me in close and said, “Are you serious? Do you want to join my fight club?”

On October 15, 1999, director David Fincher’s hilarious, subversive, violent, satiric film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Fight Club debuted. It is hard to imagine that film is now ten years old.

Fight Club is one of those movies that acts as a watershed for many of my friends and I. I do not doubt that the fact we were in college when we saw it had some affect on why we loved the movie so much. The film questions and offers many critiques about identity, the role of gender in society, consumerism, the work-a-day world, etc. These are precisely many of the questions undergraduates wrestle with on a daily basis. As a bunch of young men living away from home for the first time and away from those male figures in our lives who defined manhood for us, we began asking what exactly does it mean to be a man? What does it mean that so many of my male friends were raised by women because their fathers ditched out on them? Is the narrative that we are to go to college, get a job, and then get married the only one out there? The film tapped into the angst of comfortable, middle class young adults who wonder, “Is this all there is?” much in the same way the grunge music did at the start of that decade.

There was something especially visceral about the film’s violence that fit within our disillusionment. In the midst of a deep-seated frustration with the common trajectory Western society tells us our lives should take and our seeming powerlessness to change that narrative, it seems the only sensible thing is to beat ourselves up. It is an act of deconstruction, a way of going back to square one in order to understand what is real and important rather than merely adopting what was given to us. As Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) says in the film, “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”

War Is God: Blood Meridian Review

Of the novels I have read from Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is perhaps the most difficult to describe. It is a harrowing epic following a gang of scalp-hunters across the US-Mexican border in the 19th century. Unlike Homeric epics, however, it has little plot, little drive to move the action from one scene to the next. There is plenty of action, but it seems to arise organically and for no human reason like lava from the ground or like water particles gathering overhead into storm clouds. The kid, who is the closest thing to a main character in the story all but vanishes from the narration for a large swath of the book — he is present in the gang, but McCarthy allows him to fade into the group. As in all McCarthy’s fiction, it reads like a prose poem. The book is perhaps the most violent thing I have ever read and it has little direct commentary on the violence. In other words, Blood Meridian is a nightmare. It does not fit in the genre of horror. It is horror.

McCarthy does not offer horror as Hollywood gives it to us. This is not voyeurism, nor does the book try to make us jump with twists and turns and monsters who show up outside our window. People like to go to horror movies to feel momentarily frightened, but then realize that they are really safe. McCarthy does not let the audience feel safe afterward.

Animated Heroines Who Aren’t Princesses

Over at NPR.org, Linda Holmes, while praising Pixar’s latest film Up, asks Pixar to create a film with a female lead who is not a princess. It’s an interesting read.

Floating in Authenticity: Up Review

Pixar makes films that capture one of the primary reasons I love going to a theater, sitting in the dark, and staring at a screen for a couple of hours. I love all sorts of films, including those gritty and realistic stories that speak directly about our daily lives. Pixar’s films, on the other hand, are wonderful escapism and enjoyment. Like all good art, no matter how fantastical the subject matter may be, the Pixar movies do show us something about ourselves, they help us see the world differently. I go into a Pixar movie expecting great things and to this point, I have not been disappointed. Some films soar higher than others, but even at their “lower” moments, the movies Pixar produces are better than most other films released. With their ability to craft wonderful stories and worlds inhabited by memorable characters while pushing the technological envelope, I can say that with each Pixar movie, I have always seen something I had never seen before.

The streak continues with Up, which is not one of Pixar’s lower moments. The film is Pete Doctor’s second directorial project for Pixar. (His first was Monsters Inc., which somehow gets overshadowed by the other Pixar films.) It is hard to write a review about this film because I want to give nothing away. It is best experienced with as little knowledge as possible so that the viewer can ensure maximum surprise. Briefly sketched, the film follows Carl Fredrickson (Ed Asner), a seventy-something curmudgeon who sees the wonderful life he had lived for several years taken from him in a series of setbacks. Doctor and his screenwriting partner and co-director Bob Peterson set up the movie with deftness and aching beauty in just five minutes. The opening sequence of Up is one of the most moving film beginnings I have ever seen. It is not hard to get me to cry at a film, but I cannot remember the last time I cried within five minutes of a movie starting.

The Road Has a Trailer…

And I’m not impressed. Did they read the book? Thankfully, an article in Esquire says that the trailer does not reflect the film that well — the film is much closer to the novel in its pacing and dialogue. According to the article, the film, like Cormac McCarthy’s novel, offers no explanation for the post-apocalyptic setting. The trailer makes it look like another post-apocalyptic action story like, I Am Legend, rather than a beautiful story of the love between a father and his son in the midst of a harrowing future. I hope that the trailer truly does not give us a good picture of the film and that The Road merely goes down as another example of a bad trailer for a good movie. My hall of shame includes trailers for The Truman Show and Cast Away, which gave away significant plot points that the films try to keep hidden for, you know, dramatic purposes. The trailer for Master and Commander made a cerebral epic look like Gladiator at sea. Then there is the all-time king of a bad trailer for a good movie: The Princess Bride. “It’s as real as the feelings you feel”? A saxophone? Really?

Standing Against the Tide: Changeling Review

Clint Eastwood needs a hug. He makes some of the most sure-footed films in American cinema, with memorable characters facing real problems. But if we trace his latter career work from Unforgiven to Mystic River to Million Dollar Baby to the two Iwo Jima films and Changeling, we find films of spectacular beauty and chasms of despair. His films seem to continually make the point that we are alone in the world, fighting a battle we cannot win against death. I am surprised he has not adapted any of Cormac McCarthy’s work since their outlooks seem to match each other so well. Eastwood comes across so sweet and cheerful in interviews that I am nearly always shocked by the violence and darkness of his films.

Eastwood’s recent work Changeling tells the true story of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mother in 1920’s Los Angeles. One day she returns from work and finds that her son Walter is missing. She begins to work with the Los Angeles police department and months later they say that they have found Walter. When Christine sees the boy, both she and the audience knows immediately that the boy standing before her is not her son, Walter. As she challenges the LAPD during one of their most corrupt eras, she fights against an organization that will do nearly anything to keep their image in the press in a positive light. The Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich) befriends Christine and publicizes her plight. The LAPD retaliates by having Christine institutionalized for psychiatric reasons without any due process. As Christine continues her fight, the LAPD discovers a horrific series of crimes that take place in Wineville (near Riverside). These crimes are of such an evil and infamous nature, that the town of Wineville changes its name to Mira Loma. Christine’s story and the Wineville crimes may or may not be related.

Out-Dickensing Dickens: Slumdog Millionaire Review

I saw Slumdog Millionaire back in November and now that it just won several Golden Globes, I suppose I should write my review.

No one is ever going to fault director Danny Boyle for making boring films. His movies brim with energy while never flinching from the harshness of life. Boyle makes movies in the same vivacious stream as Baz Luhrmann and Martin Scorcese. All three directors make highly charged films shot with fervency, edited so that the pace never slows from a sprint, and that use music as another plot-driving device. Boyle’s latest film, Slumdog Millionaire is a Dickensian story of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), an orphan who grows up in the slums of Bombay (later Mumbai). The story follows Jamal, his brother Salim, and their fellow orphan Latika through three periods of their young lives. We meet Jamal as a contestant on the Indian version of the game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? As Jamal progresses through the questions, the show’s producers suspect that he is somehow cheating since they believe an uneducated slumdog could have no way of knowing the answers to all these questions. His interrogation by the local police inspector (Irrfan Khan, who gives another excellent performance after The Darjeeling Limited and A Mighty Heart) allows Jamal to tell the details of his hard life from his early youth to the time on the show, when he is eighteen and working as a tea-gofer at a telecommunications firm.

“Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.” John Adams Miniseries Review

Director Tom Hooper screenwriter Kirk Ellis teamed with HBO to create a mini-series adaptation of David McCullough’s biography of John Adams. The gigantic scope of McCullough’s book suits itself well for a multi-part telling rather than a two or three-hour film, which would have felt like a greatest hits version of the biography. The book and the mini-series follow one of the most important thinkers and shapers of the United States of America beginning at the Boston Massacre and ending with his death. The miniseries’ scope is large, following Adams from his farm in Massachusetts, to the Continental Congresses in Philadelphia, to his work in Europe as one of the new nation’s primary diplomats, to his work as Vice President and President of the union, and finally to his retirement, again, back at his family farm in Massachusetts.

Overall John Adams makes good on its high aims of recounting history and exploring the characters who shaped this nation during some of its most tenuous moments. Ellis’ scripts appear faithful to the time while remaining accessible for modern ears. The characters express their thoughts and emotions believably without resorting to annoying soliloquies or civics lectures. Ellis must have had the most fun with the second installment, “Independence,” which shows Adams defending the product of Thomas Jefferson’s work, the Declaration of Independence. In the biography McCullough writes that no transcript or record of Adams’ speech before the Congress was made — since these meetings were supposedly fairly secretive — but that it was likely the finest speech he had made in his career. Because no record exists, Ellis had free reign to craft Adams’ words.

Screwball Nihilism: Burn After Reading Review

It seems whenever the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen release a full-fledged work of film noir, they often return with a screwball comedy. After Blood Simple they came out with Raising Arizona. Then, after Fargo came The Big Lebowski. They followed The Man Who Wasn’t There with Intolerable Cruelty. And now, after their Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, they bring us Burn After Reading. While the humor moves to the front in their comedies, they are often just as philosophically bleak as their more serious films. Likewise, their dramas always contain a certain amount of humor. The people of the Coen brothers’ films are selfish, often stupid, and get themselves into situations beyond their capacity. Life in their films is random yet intertwined, violent, and ironic.

Their comedies also serve as farces of different film genres. For example, The Big Lebowski sends up the Los Angeles private eye story. Now Burn After Reading skewers the spy thriller, beginning with a satellite view of the Washington, D.C. area as the credits come across the screen in electronic type. It is a character-driven comedy, so it takes time for the humor to build. Initially, there are not many laughs, but by the film’s end, the theater laughed at almost every other line. Burn After Reading stars John Malkovich as Osbourne Cox, a Balkans expert in the CIA who has been “reassigned” (read, fired) because of his temper and drinking problems. He tells his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) that he quit his career and he wants to begin writing his memoirs. Katie secretly begins divorce proceedings against Osbourne while having an affair with the serial and married philanderer Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Seemingly unrelated, we meet Linda Litzke (Francis McDormand) who is in search of love via internet dating and personal improvement via several costly plastic surgeries. When her co-worker at the Hardbodies gym Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) finds a compact disc containing special information that belongs to Osbourne, Linda sees an opportunity to extort him for the money she needs for her surgeries. If that doesn’t work out, she’ll resort to committing treason to get the cash. Linda’s dating service eventually hooks her up with Harry and thus the relationships in the film become more complex. Because this is a Coen brothers film, no one is bright enough or capable enough to carry out their plans. Everyone is equally earnest and that commitment to fulfilling bad ideas leads to everyone getting in over their head. Burn After Reading is a Coen brothers comedy, so be prepared for lots of profanity and some very shocking violence. The plot is difficult to explain, but not to watch, unless you’re one of the CIA operatives charged with keeping tabs on the story’s events. The point of the film is not to examine causes and effects. Rather, the viewer should allow the Coens to work their magic, resting assured that everything and everyone will cross paths, or more accurately, everything will crash into everything else. And meaninglessness will win over meaning.