"I have a feeling in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people." - Mark Baum
Adam McKay's style reminds me of the Tarantino maxim that if you need to feed detailed information to the audience, call it out in a splashy way. That technique is used to maximum effect in The Big Short, a comedic take on the 2008 mortgage crisis.
Amongst the "weirdos and outsiders" who saw the crash coming, we spend most of our time with Michael Burry (Christian Bale), Mark Baum (Steve Carrell) and Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling).
Burry is a numbers obsessive and goes completely against all known strategies to call out the inevitable demise of mortgage backed securities. Baum learns about it through Vennett and each man bets against the market, in the sick hope of the corrupt bond system disintegrating.
Corrupt bond grading system you say? What the hell is that? Using flashy cut away scenes laced with humour we learn about the levers used in financial and political systems that lead to predatory practices in mortgage backed securities.
The film is funny and the performances are solid. The ensemble cast is note perfect and the pacing is great. Recommended...
AND YET...
Let us remember, that these wealthy white men, were not saints. It is a strange story where these captains of capital with enough access to create a financial instrument to bet on a crash can be seen as real "weirdos and outsiders". Let me tell you something that people in finance are unequivocally interested in: making lots of money. If you make them money, there is nothing off-putting about you at all. Even the suggestion of making millions from people being put on the street. What is an outsider after all in this context but a rugged individualist?
They become the centre of the story.
Pair with: The Other Guys, Magic Mike (on my future list is 99 Homes)
Donald P. Bellisario 1h 43m [Day 12, 2024 - Trashy Tuesday]
"You are all witnesses! The wop started it!" - O'Bannon
Last Rites is what happens when you want to make a cool mafia film, but plot, good casting and assured direction are incidental. But still, it will be so cool!
Packed with Italian American cliches, this movie has more cheese than a Kraft factory.
It essentially follows a film noir framework, with all of the gravitas of Chef Boyardee.
Tom Berrenger plays mafia connected priest Father Michael Pace (pah-chay), who smokes, drinks, and bullies the other priest in his parish.
Word spreads quickly through the Italian mob community that underboss, Geno has been taken out. But who killed him?
It was mafia daughter Zena, Geno's wife who shot him - catching him in the arms of his Mexican mistress Angela (Daphne Zuniga), doing it against a lot of curtains.
Angela narrowly escapes the gunfire, and with possibly the least convincing Mexican accent of all time, finds herself at church in a confessional spilling the beans to Fr. Pace.
Angela doesn't know it, but Zena is Fr. Pace's sister.
He vows to keep her safe, despite his ties to Zena (Anne Twomey - giving her best Anjelica Houston impersonation). He also vows to keep it in his pants.
Fr. Michael is not great at the whole "keeping your vows" thing.
I still viscerally remember how much Roger Ebert hated Last Rites, calling it, "easily the most offensive big budget picture of 1988". I waited decades to experience what he was talking about. And it is so wonderfully, unintentionally funny. *
The film draws from some great inspirations. A little Scarface, some Fatal Attraction. It had me wondering if Jonathan Demme or Brian De Palma could have done something with this material. I think the first thing they'd do is rewrite it.
It's terrible. I'll probably watch it again.
Pair with / watch instead: Prizzi's Honor, Married to the Mob
TRAILER:
* So sidenote...
I was really trepidatious about watching Last Rites. I kept pushing it off. I remember the terrible Siskel & Ebert review - Ebert went in hard and it stuck with me. I was worried it would be terrible and I wanted it to be awesome. In my mind, there could be nothing more appealing than this Berenger/ Zuniga pairing. Before watching, I get to imagine everything this movie could be and watching it locks in a specificity I sensed I would find distasteful, like nationalism or spaghetti straps. But I had to confront it. Just watch it and accept history as it is and not the poster. Sort of like Electric Dreams.
Neil Jordan 1h 39m [Trashy Tuesdays – Day 6, 2024]
"Madam, for you I missed my wedding for the first time in years, that's how much I want you. Sure, I know I'm a ghost and a murderer but forget about all that." - Martin
Good heavens! High Spirits is not what I would call a good movie. Yet, what it lacks in refinement is more than made up for by campy stupidity.
The plot is something like Beetlejuice meets A Midsummer Night’s Dream; different groups of characters with their own drives and interests set in a “magical” locale.
Peter (Peter O’Toole) and his mum run a hotel out of a dilapidated castle in Ireland. Business is not great - they need a new “hook” to get tourists interested. Cheekily they hit upon the idea of marketing the place as haunted and convince the staff to rig all manner of tricks to frighten the next crop of guests.
The Americans arrive as a series of types: Jack (Steve Guttenberg) and Sharon (Beverly D’Angelo) are the bickering couple; paranormal investigator Malcolm has brought his family along while he investigates the hotel; Miranda (Jennifer Tilly) is just a single, lonely girl on vacation, and Brother Tony is a just single lonely priest (Peter Gallagher).
Unbeknownst to them all, Castle Plunkett really is haunted by Mary Plunkett (Daryl Hannah) and her betrothed Martin (Liam Neeson), repeating their ghastly wedding night over and over – the night that Martin killed her.
One evening Jack stumbles upon this murder loop and interrupts it, hijinks ensue!
The production design of the film is lovely. Of note, the castle lobby set is used very successfully to stage many scenes and gives you a real sense of the looming quality of the place without being scary. Bubbly but gray. The costume design is also expertly used to distinguish between the main groups: the locals, the tourists and ghosts[1].
It’s not the kind of film I associate with Neil Jordan who had just done Mona Lisa before this and would go on to release The Crying Game a few years later. At the time of High Spirits release, Siskel & Ebert panned it – no one liked it really.
"What's the point of living if nobody loves you? Nobody sees you? Nobody touches you" - Minnie
It's 1976 San Francisco and Minnie is overwhelmed with self-satisfaction. You see Minnie has just had sex for the first time, the thing that she has been longing so desperately for. Because if you are not being desired do you even exist?
Thus is the setup for "The Diary of a Teenage Girl", and while Minnie is 15, this is not a film geared toward that age group.
We quickly learn that Minnie's paramour (Bel Powley) is her mother's 35-year-old boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), so we know immediately that her bravado is misplaced and that she's being taken advantage of. Minnie cannot see it that way. Love is attention from her point of view.
Minnie lives with her single mom Charlotte (Kristen Wiig) and her sister Gretel (Abby Wait) in a rented place, where any night could become a party.
We get the sense that Charlotte has also run through a string of relationships to get to this point in her life. When it comes to looking for care from the wrong people, the apple did not fall far from the tree.
In this world of free love, minimal supervision and no social media we see transformational events happen in secret with their impact oozing into the day to day.
I appreciated the onscreen relationship between Minnie and Charlotte. There is love between them, but neither is equipped very well. It's a thorny relationship, and true.
The film does a good job of not pitying Minnie, and not letting Minnie feel like she's broken in any way. Her lessons all arrive the hard way.
Explicitly so. We see the sexual encounters that occur, which made me grateful to learn that Bel Powley was 22 at the time of filming.
"The Diary of a Teenage Girl" does not pull it's punches, and it benefits from this approach. It's the quotidian horror of abuse. It's also about moving forward with your scars and your humanity.
Recommended
TRAILER:
PAIR WITH: I'd pair this movie with Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank". It's about a 15-year-old in a Scottish housing project who dreams of leaving to become a dancer and the desperate lengths she'll go to for attention.
Scott McGehee & David Siegel 1h 36m [What? Wednesday - Day 7, 2024]
"I'm a very wealthy man, expensive things all around me, and I am forced to protect what's mine against the people who might feed off my privilege, feed off what doesn't belong to them." - Vincent Towers
Clay has just met his brother Vincent at their father's funeral. Vincent (Michael Harris) is aloof and suspicious toward Clay, despite his welcoming words and Clay (Dennis Haysbert) lets him know he's not after any money.
What's more, they're both shaken by the striking resemblance between them. It's like being in a dream where you don't know who you are anymore.
Clay doesn't know that Vincent needs to elude the police and he plans on killing his brother to do it.
Surviving attempted murder, Clay wakes up in hospital with amnesia, with every person telling him he's Vincent. With no memory of his own, his life seeps into his brother's existence.
So much of who we can say we are is bound up in who will vouch for us. Existence is the testimony of others.
Shot beautifully in black and white, with classic crisp production design and sweeping camera work, the film brings you into it's world. The clever use of opera betrays the passion beneath the facades.
Suture is a film noir dream of brotherhood and identity*.
Highly Recommended
Film Pairings: Get Out, The Third Man, The Man Who Wasn't There
