A Great Crime Drama In A Most Violent Year

In the new movie A Most Violent Year, you see the work of the three most-Oscar-snubbed artists in 2015 - director J.C. Chandor, lead actor Oscar Isaac and supporting actor David Oyelowo (snubbed for his leading role as Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma).

By now, I've seen all three feature films by J.C. Chandor - the first two were Margin Call and All Is Lost. All three were brilliant in their own ways and with A Most Violent Year, Chandor has once again established himself as one of the most versatile and potent directors of all times. If Hollywood breeds more of such fine directors and writers, its potential would be limitless!

There's very little violence in the movie with "Violent" as its title. Even though there were illegal activities throughout the film and intimidating scenes with guns, it's the innuendos and the mood around this crime drama that were captivating. The movie juxtaposed evil versus good; ruthlessness versus a law-abiding conscience; bold ambitions versus cowardice and fear. It's the story of an ambitious immigrant from Colombia who's trying to achieve the American dream while protecting his business and family.

The Juilliard-trained Oscar Isaac is, in my opinion, one of the finest young actors of our times. I never understood why the Oscars overlooked him for his role in Inside Llewyn Davis last year. Now, yet again, his excellent performance as Abel Morales in this most recent film was snubbed one more time. As much as he could convincingly portray a nerdy musician in the Cohen brothers' film, Isaac gave a tour de force performance as the ambitious, but morally stubborn businessman in this flick. It's hard not to think of the young Al Pacino when you saw Isaac's doleful eyes and camel-brown coat in this movie. Physically, Isaac is not much taller than Pacino at 5 feet 81/2 inches; but he commanded a huge presence in the film and, in spite of the numerous comparisons by film critics to Pacino's role as Michael Corleone in The Godfather II, I think Isaac carries his own weight and is a much less exaggerating actor than Pacino.

Isaac got this role because co-star Jessica Chastain, who went to Juilliard with him, recommended that he be cast as Morales after Javier Bardem has backed out. Isaac's own Hispanic roots (born to a Guatemalan mother and a Cuban father) made him the perfect fit as the Colombian immigrant Morales in the movie. It also gave him an opportunity to speak in his native Spanish tongue during parts of the film.

I love the way the movie was shot in a tinted yellow kind of lighting that gave New York City its 1981 look. It's the depth of winter in the middle of the most dangerous year according to NYC crime statistics. Most of the landscape was industrial; the Manhattan skyline was beautiful, nevertheless, reflecting the never-ending American dream.  Kudos also went to cinematographer Bradford Young who was also responsible for another wonderful movie Selma.

I haven't said much about Jessica Chastain's performance not because she wasn't impressive as the Lady-Macbeth-like character in the film, but because after seeing her in The Help, everything became possible for her in our eyes. Apart from her vintage Armani outfits in the drama, it's her extraordinarily long, sharp manicured nails that became her trademark in the entire film. I think any other fine actress could have possibly played her role equally well, but the scene stealer was definitely Oscar Isaac throughout the entire movie.

There's nothing to dislike about this crime drama. There are no cliches and not enough blood to be categorized as a violent movie. But what's not said was as important as what's being said in the film - this was what kept me on the edge of my seat for the entire two hours of the movie!

The Horror of Losing One's Memory

There's a line in the movie Still Alice that keeps referring to "the Art of Losing." In reality, after seeing the movie, there's nothing artistic or aesthetically pleasing about losing one's memory - there are only horror and extreme vulnerability!

Still Alice is a terrific movie on the trauma of the early onset of Alzheimer's Disease faced by a 50-year-old female linguistic professor Alice Howland (played by the 55-year-old Julianne Moore) and her immediate family members. Unlike other movies, such as Away From Her (back in 2006 starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent), exploring the disease, this is about a much younger victim with an accomplished career and a happy family. So the focus of the film was very much on the 'early onset.'

What I like about the movie is the positive message it sent to the victims and their families. Everybody is in it together and trying to cope with it. There are characters in the film who are more selfish than the others. And the seeming theme of Shakespeare pervades in this drama as well - what you see may not be what you get!

I also particularly like the constant butterfly analogy - there are butterfly motifs everywhere from decorations to Alice's necklace once she's been diagnosed with the condition. Alice herself said something to this effect in the movie, "Butterflies don't live very long; but they are beautiful when they are alive and they've lived a very full and good life."

Apart from Julianne Moore who, by now, will probably be a sure win in the Best Actress category at the Oscars, Kristen Stewart also gave a very strong performance as Alice's youngest daughter Lydia who didn't go to college. I personally think that although Moore was excellent in this film, she should have been nominated for her role in David Cronenberg's Maps To The Stars instead. According to the novel's author Lisa Genova, before Julianne Moore was cast, the part was offered to Michelle Pfeiffer, Julia Roberts, Diane Lane and Nicole Kidman who all turned down the opportunity. So all the more credit goes to Moore for taking on this project and giving her very best to win her the accolades of her lifetime (this is her fifth nomination at the Oscars and she has never won)!

I also understand that co-director Richard Glatzer suffers from ALS and cannot speak. Not only did he co-write the screenplay, but he also directed the film using a text-to-speech app on an iPad.

Still Alice is a touching, realistic movie. It is also very scary because this could happen to any of us boomers and if it happened, we should really take the film's positive ending as an encouragement!

American Sniper Not Worthy Of Six Oscar Nominations

Bradley Cooper's American Sniper was disappointing! After all that hype and box-office-breaking records, it is, at best, an entertaining war movie. But does it deserve six Oscar nominations? Absolutely not.

You've got to admire Bradley Cooper's focus nowadays. Since he's become famous and wealthy, he has been using his own money and energy to try to make movies and Broadway shows on subjects that are close and dear to him. For instance, in 2011, he produced the film Limitless in which he played an author suffering from writer's block, living in New York, and then accidentally coming across a miracle drug called NZT-48 which helped bring his creative mojo back. The film was not a box-office success, but it was nevertheless very unique and creative.

Ever since he was a child, Cooper has been fascinated with The Elephant Man John Merrick. So, it's now his dream come true when Cooper is currently playing the lead in The Elephant Man on Broadway to great critical acclaim. He was the executive producer for Silver Linings Playbook in 2012 and for American Hustle in 2013 - two movies that need little introduction because he was the male lead in both of them and garnered him Oscar nominations for Best Actor.

And now in 2015, his American Sniper was released and earned him a third consecutive Oscar nomination for Best Actor. The other five nominations for this film are Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. I understand that David O. Russell (director of Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle) originally considered directing the movie at one point, but a deal with Warner Brothers didn't work out. Then Steven Spielberg was interested in the project but he subsequently moved on as well. Eventually, Clint Eastwood became the director as well as one of the producers of the film.

When Cooper initially bought rights to the movie, he intended to only produce it with Chris Pratt starring, but he later changed his mind and decided to take up the role himself. In fact, he bulked up 40-plus pounds to look like the real sniper Chris Kyle and worked with a vocal coach twice a day to talk with a heavy Texan accent like Kyle. Having seen some footage of Kyle, I personally think that Chris Pratt would have been a better choice because he looks like a twin brother of Kyle's.

Apparently Cooper built up his physique just by Olympic lifting and went from 185 pounds to 225 pounds for this role to look huge like Kyle and according to IMDb, he even sported a gut for the film. All the more respect goes to Cooper for demonstrating that he's not just a pretty face and the sexiest man alive according to People Magazine. But in spite of all these efforts, I think his performance in this film was less impressive than his acting in Silver Linings Playbook  and American Hustle. If those two previous roles didn't earn him an Oscar, I doubt very much whether this one would.

But I'm not an American and, therefore, cannot understand the patriotism and fascination with a Navy SEAL who is known as The Legend for achieving 160 kills in the Iraq war over four tours. To me, this is just another war movie that depicts the inhumane decisions soldiers in combat have to make to protect themselves and their comrades. The battle scenes were tense but I can count so many other war movies such as Black Hawk Down and Zero Dark Thirty which are 10 times better than American Sniper.

Some may argue that Chris Kyle's Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the film was provocative and sad. Yet, not even this subject was dealt with profoundly enough in this film when compared to the very successful TV drama Homeland.

What really bugs me about this film is the lack of authenticity when it comes to attention to detail. By now, you might have already heard about the big hoopla around the fake baby doll from the social media. I understand that when a production assistant approached director Clint Eastwood about real baby #1 being sick, and then real baby #2 being a no-show, Eastwood immediately settled with a doll faking the baby of Kyle and wife Taya (played by Sienna Miller) in the film. Now, Eastwood might have bragged about how Morocco looked like Iraq in the movie and how the battle scene in the sandstorm was executed to great precision. But a fake baby? How insulting to us the audience!!

I'm not sure whether Kyle's memoir (from which the screenplay was adapted) actually mentioned The Legend sniper talking to his wife while in full action on the battleground. But, for more than once, Kyle was communicating with Taya via something that looked like an Iridium satellite phone while others were firing away and he was supposed to watch the enemy so that he could protect his fellow marines. Now how credible was that?

I'm not an expert in sound editing in movies, so if this film won an Oscar for Film Editing, Sound Editing or Sound Mixing, I might not have an objection. But I would be very unpleasantly surprised if it won a Best Picture Award or a Best Actor Award even though I like Bradley Cooper and agree that he's come a long way from being a reformed alcoholic and a hotel bell boy in his youth!

Hitchcockian Flick By Canada's Golden Boy

Whether you like Xavier Dolan's 2013 movie, Tom At The Farm (Tom a la ferme), or not, you'll be impressed by the tension and discomfort it created on screen. This is the fourth movie by the 25-year-old wunderkind from Quebec, Canada, who has just won the Jury Prize at last month's Cannes Festival for his latest film, Mommy (not yet available for public screening in Canada).

This was my first movie experience with Dolan as a director although at this young age, he's already had four others with critical acclaim - I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats, Lawrence Anyways and Mommy mentioned above. On top of his directing talent, he is also an experienced writer, editor, producer and costume designer. It's a very dark movie about a gay guy Tom (played by Dolan himself) from Montreal visiting his dead lover's family for the first time in rural Quebec. His visit became a discovery of surprise, horror and manipulation. Dolan also wrote the screenplay by adapting a play by Michel Marc Bouchard.

There's definitely a Hitchcockian supspense throughout the film created by Dolan's masterful delay of our visual image of the characters. So we saw the backs of the characters or their hands when they first appeared on screen. Dolan did not reveal the faces of his principal characters until their dialogue with Tom enabled us to imagine for a few seconds what they could have looked like physically.

The musical score by renowned composer Gabriel Yared, who made his film debut in 1980 with the score  for Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man For Himself, played an essential role in making this movie an ultimate thriller. Ironically, Jean-Luc Godard also shared the Jury Prize Award with Dolan at Cannes. As I was viewing the movie, I couldn't help but compared it to its previous genre as a play. The differentiating factors that made it such a creepy movie were definitely the music, the country-farm scenes, the stand-alone farm house in adverse weather, and the fresh blood from the cattle.

The cast was also superb, particularly Pierre-Yves Cardinal, who played Francis, the brother of Tom's deceased lover; and Lise Roy, who played the mother Agathe. It's also interesting that both Roy and Evelyne Brochu, who played Sara, also performed the same characters in the original play.

It's also obvious that Dolan is not a fan of America. From the bomber jacket worn by Francis to the music during the violent scenes, Dolan was telling us that all violence stemmed from our southern neighbour.

My favourite scene was the sexually-charged tango scene at the farm - it made you question the sexuality of Francis and who's really the manipulator here! I didn't like the film's ending at all. Many directors left the conclusion for the audience to figure out, but the final scene was strangely abrupt in this film.

I don't think Tom At The Farm is a masterpiece, but you might want to see it if you're curious about why Dolan is the current 'it' boy in Europe!

Love Lost, Found and Impermanent

The Face Of Love is a movie for boomers. Director Arie Posin talked about the challenges of financing the movie. There were three strikes working against the film - a woman in the lead role; starring actors (Annett Bening and Ed Harris) not in their 20s and on the cover of US Weekly; and it's a drama, not a thriller, a comedy or a science fiction. But eventually it got made with a moderate budget and an ace cast, including Robin Williams in a rare, non-comedic role and Jessie Weixler, best known as one of the  investigators, Robin, in the popular TV drama The Good Wife.

Professional film critics weren't kind to the movie, but I liked it - perhaps, from a baby boomer's perspective. All three principal actors in the film portray boomers looking for love after a major change in life. They've all lost their partners or spouses either through death or divorce. So they all choose somebody whom they like to believe in - Nikki (played by Annette Bening), the real estate staging agent, wants to relive her romance with her late husband; Tom (played by Ed Harris) wants to seek love before his health crisis implodes; and Roger (played by Robin Williams) wants somebody to replace his dead wife.

It's an artsy movie with scenes shot in the L.A. County Museum of Art and within a beautiful house designed by a successful architect. So even if you don't like the plot which, at times, seems incredulous, it's a pleasing picture for the eyes. Every character in the film is living in delusion. Nikki wants to cling on to a "clone duplicate" of her late husband without telling him the truth. Tom wants to seek temporary love without telling Nikki about his health crisis. And Roger just doesn't want to accept the reality that his next door neighbour doesn't love him.

Both Bening and Harris are in their best form although the former has not aged well. The film is about love lost, love found, but eventually gone again. The only thing that lasts is a painting capturing the essence of love. The movie manages to tell a romantic story between two aging boomers without being overly sappy!

Revenge and Reconciliation

The Railway Man was shown in Australia when I was visiting there last X'mas, but I never had a chance to see the film until it finally appeared in Canadian cinemas this past weekend. The film was shot in Thailand, Scotland, England and Australia and with a partial Australian production team, maybe that explained why it was shown in Australian cinemas so much in advance than North America.

I've always loved trains as a mode of transportation, and this film features some of the best shots of the railway in the countryside as old and new trains moved through the scenic villages and countryside throughout the years. The railway scenes were mostly shot in West Lothian, Scotland, and in the Ipswich Railway Workshops in Queensland, Australia. The English, Scottish and Australian countryside scenes were also breathtakingly beautiful.

The film is a psychodrama based on the true story and memoirs written by the former British Prisoner of War Eric Lomax. Like many others, Lomax was tortured during the Second World War by his Japanese foes and suffered from post-traumatic disorder after the war. He went back to seek revenge, but, instead, reconciled with his Japanese torturer and moved on with his life.

The torturing scenes were difficult to watch, but if you managed to stomach 12 Years A Slave, you should be able to sit through this film. My first impression after seeing this movie was that the current Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, should watch this movie and learn that in order for reconciliation to happen, one needs to first acknowledge the war crimes that have been committed. Other film critics have commented that perhaps former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney should be seeing this movie to see the terrible impact of the "waterboarding torture" on the lives of prisoners of war. But, in reality, neither Abe nor Cheney has any remorse about what they've done and that remains a problem.

The plot is quite incredulous, but it's based on a true story which makes the film touching in many ways. Lomax was a railway enthusiast even though he's a soldier. Trains and railways became a major part of his adult life - it's ironical that his personal demons tormenting his middle years were caused by his capture during the war to build The Burma Railway. Yet, he found love on the train where he met his wife and he reconciled with his captor and torturer on the Burmese railway track when he went back to confront his former Japaense rival.

Colin Firth, in his usual elegant, understated way, plays a very convincing and tormented Lomax. He's a lonely soul for most of the time standing alone on deserted beaches and bridges. The heavy fog in most of the scenes enhanced his sadness and inner struggles. His big, heavy glasses became part of his link between the past and present. The young British actor from Cambridge, Jeremy Irvine, also did an outstanding job in portraying the young, geeky Lomax. Nicole Kidman, for the first time, is less irritating in in this movie playing a dowdy, middle-aged woman.

I've never heard of the director Jonathan Teplitzky before this movie, but he's done a great job with The Railway Man which took 15 years to develop. Many women audiences in the cinema were bawling towards the end of the movie, but I found this film encouraging rather than sad and depressing!

Grand Budapest Hotel: An Iconic Comedy

Comedies are always more challenging than tragedies to write and produce - whether they are plays, movies or books. Appealing to the vulnerable emotions of human beings is always easier than making people laugh. Even the Bard's tragedies are better plays than his comedies, in my opinion.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when I saw Wes Anderson's latest comedy, The Grand Budapest Hotel, on its premier night in Toronto. Having never seen any of his films before, I didn't know what to expect except for the fact that I found the promotional trailer for this film absolutely hilarious. Anderson's previous works always seemed too quirky for me but like the Coen brothers, Anderson has a huge following, particularly among younger fans.

According to Anderson, his screenplay was inspired by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig who also wrote Letter From An Unknown Woman and Marie Antoinette. So Anderson wrote the story about the adventures of a legendary concierge, Gustave H, at a famous hotel between the wars, and the lobby boy Zero Moustafa who becomes his protege. A lot of people thought the movie is about a hotel in Budapest, but the whole fictional hotel is actually located in an imaginary place in Europe that looks more like Switzerland, but the film was actually shot in Saxony, Germany.

The result of Anderson's writing and direction is a highly-creative film which is not only extremely cartoonish and funny, but it's so beautifully shot that I felt like I was watching a flawless fairy tale for grown-ups! But beneath the laughter also lies a satire about the end of the European aristocracy with the brutal onslaught of the Nazis during the war. Comedies are all about timing, and Anderson's situational and caricatural work would certainly go down in history as one of the most iconic comedies of our times!

The movie, of course, is very much a success because of its cast of 'substantial' thousands, some of whom are regulars in Anderson's works - Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Ed Norton, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, Owen Wilson and Tom Wilkinson. Everybody is extremely funny, but the charmismatic Ralph Fiennes deserves the biggest kudos as he demonstrates his talents way beyond his usual melancholic and brooding leading roles from Shakespeare to Dickens.

It's not just a good laugh, but The Grand Budapest Hotel is a hilarious masterpiece worth watching again and again on the big screen!