Review: Waking Life (2001)

* * * *
Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Wiley Wiggins

He can't always tell whether or not he's dreaming. At times he believes he's woken up, but as he goes about his business he picks up a clue that what he's experiencing isn't real and he's right back where he started, drifting from one philosophical conversation to the next. Richard Linklater's Waking Life is a film about dreams which aims to replicate the feeling of dreaming, submerging the viewer in a realm of deep, existential questions explored in a free flowing style, going "nowhere" but touching on everything. With its incredibly talky screenplay, loose narrative structure, and rotoscoped animation, Waking Life is a film that probably sounds like an acquired taste, the kind of exercise that only a film buff could love, but approached with an open mind, it's a film that I reckon can be embraced by any kind of viewer it's so engaging and utterly engrossing.

Review: Gone Girl (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: David Fincher
Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike

Because professional film critics seem to be taking great pains to avoid talking about spoilers in Gone Girl, I'm going to state right off the top that this is going to be a fairly spoilery review. If you've managed to remain unspoiled about this story, then don't read any further - although the fact that I'm not even sure how that's possible is one of the reasons I decided to go full-spoiler. I didn't even read the novel but went into the film aware of the plot twist because the book was so ubiquitous. The other reason I have no hesitation in discussing the plot in some detail is because the twist is, frankly, the least interesting thing about this story. That's not a knock on Gone Girl, which is a first rate thriller that unfolds with the sort of ferocious precision we've all come to expect from David Fincher; it's just an acknowledgment of the fact that there's so much going on here that the inner workings of the plot are really a secondary concern.

Hollywood Book Club: Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939

From the perspective of 2014 it can be sort of hard to imagine a time when people took a "wait and see" attitude to Hitler and the Nazis. Objectively, of course, one understands that such attitudes existed, given that Hitler was in power for 6 years before the commencement of World War II and the policy of appeasement that resulted in, among other things, the Munich Agreement; but because those of us living now have the benefit of hindsight, it's nevertheless difficult to imagine what it would have been like to live through a time when Hitler was treated as just another world leader and the Nazi party as just another political party rather than symbols for the depths of evil. Even more difficult to imagine, given the sheer number of Hollywood films in which the Nazis have appeared as the villains, is a time when filmmakers were reluctant, and even afraid, to alienate Germans by acknowledging the evils of the Nazi party. Thomas Doherty's Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 is a fascinating book about a bizarre period in the history of Hollywood (and the world) and the ways that film can be a powerful medium for what it does and for what, unfortunately, it sometimes does not do.

Review: Neighbors (2014)

* * *
Director: Nicholas Stoller
Starring: Seth Rogan, Zac Efron, Rose Byrne

It may seem odd to describe as "ambitious" a film which relies so heavily on humor deriving from bodily fluids and pratfalls, but Nicholas Stoller's bro versus slightly older bro comedy Neighbors is just that. It could, quite easily, have let the premise - frat house moves into family-oriented neighborhood, war ensues - do all the work for it and ended up with a passably entertaining comedy that would have raked in money. Instead, it uses that premise as a springboard for a comedic take on what inter-generational conflict looks like in an era when "adolescence" lasts until about age 35. This isn't to say that Neighbors is mind-blowing in its thematic depth or even especially thoughtful in its examination of growing up, but it gets points for having more on its mind than getting from one outlandish gag to the next.

Friday's Top 5... Performances in David Fincher Movies

#5: Brad Pitt, Fight Club
Brad Pitt has been a movie star for two decades and counting, but if you had to chose just one performance as his "signature" one, it would have to be Fight Club's Tyler Durden. If you drew a venn diagram of Pitt's career as an actor, the grungy charisma of his performance as Durden would be the intersection between his character roles and his movie star roles. Pitt's depiction of Edward Norton's raging, violent, ultra-masculine id is one of the strongest elements of a film which has nary a weakness.