10. Out of The Furnace

There’s the good guy with a gun and the bad guy with a gun. Only justice is blind and the world is ambivalent.

9. Gravity

The most brilliantly executed movie about space since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.

8. Side Effects

A deep meditation on the human stain of pharmaceuticals and mental illness, featuring Rooney Mara in the most understated role of her career.

7. Mud

The McConaissance continues.

6. Captain Phillips

The first 10 minutes of Captain Phillips feel unsettling and earnest, with (screenwriter) Billy Ray telling a lot of the things he’d be much better showing. But Captain Phillips hits its mark from that point forward, thanks in large part to an ongoing lack of grandstanding. Tom Hanks is very good, but Barkhad Abdi steals his thunder.

5. Spring Breakers

A gorgeous, rhythmic, candy-colored tragedy. Spring break. Spring break. Spring break, forever.

4. Frances Ha
Perhaps every generation should have its very own Manhattan.

3. Inside Llewyn Davis
One of several key differences between a good movie and a great one is that a good movie may entertain you for two hours, providing a variety of twist and turns, but a great one’ll stick with you for a lifetime, revealing untold secrets every time you play it over.

2. American Hustle
David O. Russell doing his best Martin Scorsese.

1. The Place Beyond The Pines

A vastly overlooked motion picture focusing on fathers and the inevitable – sometimes even inescapable – legacies they hand down to their sons. The most unexpected surprise occurs about a third of the way through. From that point forward, this triptych only grows much more intriguing.

1. Gordon Gekko is an incredibly likable egomaniac. Jordan Belfort is just an egomaniac.
2. Wall Street is a fictional story that feels vital and real. The Wolf of Wall Street is a factual story that feels passe and hyperbolic.
3. With a running time of 126 minutes, Wall Street feels incredibly tight. With a running time of 180 minutes, The Wolf of Wall Street feels unnecessarily laborious.
4. Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is Good” speech will always feel iconic. Jordan Belfort’s “Land of Opportunity” speech will always feel sardonic.
5. Most of the characters in Wall Street are pursuing their own sense of class. Most of the characters in The Wolf of Wall Street are pursuing their own sense of flash.
6. Whereas Bud Fox and his father seem well worth rooting for, The Wolf of Wall Street offers no major characters worth rooting for.
7. The Wolf of Wall Street is guilty of employing a variety of bush-league winks, including a brief cameo by the real Jordan Belfort (portraying someone else), an equally brief cameo by Fran Lebowitz (portraying someone else), and a pair of passing references to Gordon Gekko and Bud Fox.
8. Whereas Oliver Stone’s original screenplay actually elevated the performance of Charlie Sheen, Terence Winter’s bloated adaptation equally diminishes a stellar turn by Leonardo DiCaprio.
9. You never get the sense that Jordan Belfort is going anywhere but down, and – what’s infinitely worse – you never really seem to care.
10. Wall Street ends like a movie that delivers on its promises. The Wolf of Wall Street ends like a movie that ran out of financing.
11. Wall Street feels like the ambitious work of a young director on the way up. The Wolf of Wall Street feels like the overwrought work of an aging archetype facing decline.

(The Wolf of Wall Street is currently playing in theaters nationwide.)

Surprise someone today.

“The wall surrounding memory misremembered is clean and wide and high, similar in effect to the wall one finds in certain airports in other countries, clean and wide and high like that, banking in or letting go those who want to remember clearly or don’t. Passengers coming or going in the field of memory are a tangle of arms and legs, hands, hearts, hair, and minds that – if you do not stand too close or listen too carefully – speak a shared language, remarkable in its oppressive loneliness, its denial: What a horrible memory, and so forth. Regardless of where many of us believe we land – in that field encumbered by not too much baggage or entirely too much – we all come from the same place, which is a road rutted by experience so banal, nearly remarkable, that memory tricks us into remembrance of it again and again, as if experience alone were not enough. What are we to do with such a life, one in which we are not left alone to events – love, shopping, and so forth – but to the holocaust of feeling that memory,
misremembered or not, imposes on us?”

1. IFB Presents: 7 Classic Springsteen Stories That Are Well Worth Mass Retelling
2. 19 Reasons Why 6 Souls Is The Absolute Worst Movie Julianne Moore Has Ever Agreed To Be a Part Of
3. Moving On: The Year of Losing Dangerously
4. IFB Presents: The Top 20 Recurring Characters from AMC’s Breaking Bad
5. Film Capsule: What Maisie Knew
6. Good Pictures/Bad Camera: This Is Wildwood, New Jersey
7. Moving On: Every Road Leads Back to Wildwood
8. Why Laura Marling May Very Well Be The Most Important Folk Artist To Come Along in 40 Years
9. Moving On: The Vacationer
10. Good Pictures/Bad Camera: The Fog

(All 2013 images taken with a Canon PowerShot A1300 digital camera.)

(Good Pictures/Bad Camera is a regular feature on IFB.)

David O. Russell’s American Hustle is an incredibly likable film that moves so quickly one seldom notices the lapses. By lapses I mean the fact Russell’s film is so loosely based on historical record it actually borders on absurd. How can this be, one might ask, especially given several of the public figures involved are still living? Answer: America Hustle is a byproduct of Hollywood, a billion-dollar land-of-make-believe where securing clearances and changing names represents more than ample grounds.

Based on the box office success of Inglourious Basterds – specifically, one unforgettable sequence during which, “history went one way and [Tarantino] went the other” – major studios came to recognize the skyrocketing potential for revision. The primary issue being only a handful of screenwriters – and even fewer directors – maintain the delicate touch of a Quentin Tarantino. As such, what most studios end up with is a schizophrenic chunk of cinema, one in which the truth is simultaneously slipping both in and out of focus. Uproariously entertaining, if not utter hogwash, all the same.

Enter American Hustle – a screenplay that’s so expertly taut historical record never really seems to matter. Here we find David O. Russell doing his best Martin Scorsese – all quick cuts and dolly shots, multiple zooms and montages. Hustle‘s storytelling is non-linear and it’s related via the perspective of two essential narrators. The result is a furiously-paced bonanza, one in which Russell is clearly encouraging his entire cast to go for broke. To that end, Hustle‘s A-List ensemble is a shoe-in for multiple Oscar nods. Here now – in that spirit – is a breakdown of American Hustle‘s five principal cast members, listed in descending order based on how vigorously each one deserves an individual Academy Award:

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“In my country you’re seeing a horror show. You’re seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you’re seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You’re seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we’ve put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are. We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate, a socialist impulse.

Socialism is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the beginning of every speech, ‘Oh by the way I’m not a Marxist you know.’ I lived through the 20th century. I don’t believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I don’t. I’m utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument’s over. But the idea that it’s not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn’t going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that’s astonishing to me.

And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That’s the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted. And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labor. They would want labor to be diminished because labor’s a cost. And if labor is diminished, let’s translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.

From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism. Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It’s a great tool to have in your toolbox if you’re trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn’t want to go forward at this point without it. But it’s not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides
that quarterly profit report.

The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximize profit is juvenile. It’s a juvenile notion and it’s still being argued in my country passionately and we’re going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I’m astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?

If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans are going to offer the world when it comes to something really complicated like global warming. We can’t even get healthcare for our citizens on a basic level. And the argument comes down to: ‘Goddamn this socialist president. Does he think I’m going to pay to keep other people healthy? It’s socialism, motherfucker.’

What do you think group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, ‘Do you have group health insurance where you …?’ ‘Oh yeah, I get …’ you know, ‘my law firm …’ So when you get sick you’re able to afford the treatment. The treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so you’re able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able to have the resources there to get better because you’re relying on the idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go ‘Brother, that’s socialism.
You know it is.’

And you know when you say, ‘OK, we’re going to do what we’re doing for your law firm but we’re going to do it for 300 million Americans and we’re going to make it affordable for everybody that way. And yes, it means that you’re going to be paying for the other guys in the society, the same way you pay for the other guys in the law firm,’ their eyes glaze. You know they don’t want to hear it. It’s too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected. I’m astonished that at this late date I’m standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don’t mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don’t embrace some other values for human endeavor.”

(For a complete edited transcript of Simon’s impromptu remarks, visit The Guardian‘s website.)

Click through for full-size gallery.

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At some point during the opening third of Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles, he describes Greenwich Village during the winter of 1961 as follows: “T.S. Eliot wrote a poem once where there were people walking to a fro, and everybody taking the opposite direction was appearing to be running away.” This is the Greenwich Village that Joel and Ethan Coen seem consumed with, a perennially cold and unforgiving stretch of Babylon where self-interests rule the roost. In true Coen fashion, Inside Llewyn Davis nails it, separating myth from reality. All the early folk scene staples are accounted for – The Gaslight and Gerde’s, Cafe Wha?, The Kettle of Fish, Bob Dylan and The Clancys, Albert Grossman, Dave Van Ronk … an entire movement tuning its pitch inside the confines of some club. Basement cabarets represent the sole means of communication throughout Llewyn Davis, outlets which provide a voice for the voiceless, a soapbox for the soul. Otherwise, the entire landscape feels barren, a bleak and guileless palette void of virtue or compassion. Llewyn Davis isn’t Joel and Ethan Coen’s finest moment, and it really doesn’t need to be. It’s entertainment enough watching the two of them thread the needle, this time chronicling the foibles of yet another hapless cat, just trying to make his way back home.

(Inside LLewyn Davis opens in limited release today, with a national release scheduled for next Friday.) Continue reading →