Review: Birdman (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Starring: Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Edward Norton, Zack Galifianakis, Naomi Watts

Gimmicks are a double-edged sword. On the one hand a gimmick can bring attention to a film which, in a crowded marketplace, might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. On the other hand, a gimmick can dominate conversation in such a way that the movie itself gets lost even as people are talking about it. Designed to look like it is unfolding in one long, continuous take, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Birdman has a gimmick that can't be ignored, but it is more than a mere exercise in form. A vital and exciting film as much for its technical wizardry as for the bravura performance as its center, Birdman is a singularly entertaining movie and an experience that shouldn't be missed.

Netflix Recommends... The Italian Job (2003)

* * *
Director: F. Gary Gray
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Jason Statham, Mos Def, Seth Green

This week Netflix apparently thinks I'm super into Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington, putting 3 films starring each (though, curiously, not that one movie that stars both) in my Top Picks. I went with Wahlberg and was rewarded with the 2003 version of The Italian Job, a slick heist movie loosely based on the 1969 Michael Caine movie of the same name. I had never seen this one before, but vaguely recalled the advertising for it which highlighted the chase involving three mini Coopers and a showdown between one of the minis and a helicopter. What I'd forgotten was that Wahlberg, at that phase in his career, was a much lighter onscreen presence, more twinkly-eyed than glowering - though in the twinkly-eye department he's got nothing on Donald Sutherland, who shows up just long enough to look like he's having a blast and provide the film with its inciting incident. The Italian Job may not be the sort of transcendent caper that raises it above its genre, but it's near-perfect as a genre movie and pretty damn entertaining.

Review: 25th Hour

* * * *
Director: Spike Lee
Starring: Edward Norton

For 24 hours Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) will walk around his city, spend time with his friends, with his father, and with the woman he loves, have one last party, and settle an outstanding score. On the 25th hour, he'll turn himself over to begin a seven year sentence for drug dealing. Spike Lee's "day in the life" film, based on the novel of the same name, is a great character drama, but it's also a beautifully elegiac ode to a city which, at the time of the film's production, was still freshly scarred. Eleven years on, 25th Hour remains a vital and moving film, and one of Lee's absolute best.

Review: Leaves of Grass (2010)

* * *
Director: Tim Blake Nelson
Starring: Edward Norton, Tim Blake Nelson

With Leaves of Grass the number of films in which Edward Norton physically fights himself now comes to 2. I'm not sure any other actor can boast such a feat. This beleaguered film, delayed for so long and then given an extremely limited (and brief) theatrical release before being rushed to DVD, is smart and funny (albeit occasionally quite violent) and definitely deserves better than to be lost in the shuffle or stigmatized as a straight to DVD blemish on the filmographies of those involved.

Leaves of Grass is the story of two brothers: Bill and Brady (both played by Norton). Bill is a professor of philosophy on the fast track in academia. Brady runs a high-end marijuana operation in Little Dixie, the town where he and Bill grew up. Brady's got trouble because Pug (Richard Dreyfus), the man who funded his business, now wants to see a big return on his investment and is pushing Brady to start producing other kinds of drugs to make up the difference. Brady refuses, arguing that he won't produce something he wouldn't injest himself, and comes up with a plan. For the plan to work, however, he needs to trick Bill into coming back to Little Dixie, a place he's determined to avoid forever.

Brady gets his best friend Bolger (Tim Blake Nelson) to call Bill and inform him that Brady has been murdered, which brings Bill back to town. When he learns the truth, Bill is furious but ultimately agrees to do what Brady asks, which is to pretend to be Brady and visit their mother (Susan Sarandon), giving Brady an alibi so that no one will suspect that he's gone into the city with Bolger to take care of business with Pug. Things go according to plan at first but then start to go horribly awry, leading to multiple deaths and an epiphany, of sorts, for Bill.

As the brothers, Norton delivers two really great performances. Bill is the uptight academic, Brady is the laidback pothead, but that's not the be all and end all of either of them and Norton brings a nice complexity to each. He also makes them distinct from each other in such a way that you can tell them apart even aside from the hairstyles or the accent (Bill has worked to rid himself of his natural accent while Brady still has his, though his speech is much more about the rhythm than the twang). He plays well against himself and against the supporting cast, all of whom are rather excellent in their own right. Keri Russell has a small role as Bill's love interest, a woman who is essentially a happy medium between Bill's academic intellect and Brady's just folks ways, and her scenes with Norton are funny and touching and her performance is understated but quite beautiful.

Written and directed by Nelson who, in addition to being solid behind the camera is also a great character actor in front of it, Leaves of Grass is smart and has a great comic sensibility (particularly given how much blood is ultimately shed during its course). He has an obvious affection for these characters which helps to keep the story afloat even when it gets very dark and even though it carries on a bit longer than it probably should. There isn't quite enough narrative momentum to push the film to where it ultimately ends up, and it takes a few more twists than it really needs, but it's still an engaging and enjoyable movie.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Fight Club (1999)

Director: David Fincher
Starring: Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter

Fight Club is not a movie about men who fight. Rather, it is about the feminization of men through consumer culture and the subsequent alienation of men from their own bodies. The idea here is that the only way to reclaim the essential masculinity that has been lost is by beating the ever loving Jesus out of another man, and by getting your own ass kicked in turn. These are men boiled down to their primitive essence which, as the protagonist discovers, only leads to a different form of chaos.

Short version: An unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton) who can’t sleep, whose possession have all come from an Ikea catalogue, who spends his free time crashing various support groups, meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on a plane. They get into a fight. They get into more fights. They start a club. The club becomes a cult. The cult deals a blow to the Capitalist infrastructure. The end.

Long version: The Narrator can’t sleep because he can’t reconcile his conception of masculinity to the way that he and the men around him live their lives. He goes to support groups, including one for men suffering from testicular cancer, where all the men cry and one has developed breasts. “This is Bob,” the Narrator says. “Bob has bitch tits.” We then see Bob hug the disgusted Narrator to his chest. Bob is no longer a “man” in the traditional sense because of what he now has (the aforementioned “bitch tits”) and because of what he’s lost (his testicles). Instead, he’s a grotesque mutation representing what the Narrator fears that he himself is becoming mentally, if not physically. In contrast to Bob, the group also includes Marla Singer (Helena Bonham-Carter) who, like the Narrator, is a support group crasher. “I have more of a right to be there than you. You still have your balls,” she tells him. When the Narrator asks if she’s kidding, she replies, “I don’t know… am I?” When the women are “men” and the men are “women,” how can anyone develop a stable sense of identity?

But the Narrator’s problem isn’t just the support groups, it’s also the way that he’s surrounded himself with catalogue merchandise. He informs us that everything in his apartment has been ordered from Ikea, that each item only fed his desire for the next. This is problematic because men are not meant to be consumers. Women are supposed to be the consumers, women like Marla Singer (as in the sewing machine). Being a consumer invariably leads to being image conscious (when the Narrator asks Tyler, “Is that what a man is supposed to look like?” he’s asking the central question of the film), they become brand loyal, they become feminized through their heightened awareness of how they look. “Do you know what a duvet is?” Tyler asks. “It’s a blanket. Why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is it essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then? We are consumers. We’re the bi-products of a lifestyle obsession.” This is why Tyler, the soap salesman’s (the creator of product, not the buyer) first task is to cleanse the Narrator’s life by ridding him of all his possessions. Once free of his “things,” the Narrator is free to embrace his true, primal self. He gets in fights, he doesn’t care if he shows up to work with a swollen face and bloodstained clothes. He’s a real man, the way that he’s supposed to be.

Or is he? The fact that the Narrator and Tyler are the same person becomes apparent fairly early to anyone who is paying attention. The fact that the Narrator kills Tyler, or, rather, the Tyler part of himself, suggests that the lifestyle Tyler is promoting is just as wrong as that which he rejects. When Tyler turns the Narrator away from the dominant culture, he isn’t encouraging him to embrace his individuality, but a different version of conformity, where the male body is fetishised not according to the aesthetics of advertising, but in correlation to its ability to give and take punishment (it might as well have been called Fight Porn for the way the camera lingers lustily on Pitt’s bloodied torso). There are no individuals in Fight Club, just uniform creatures seeking to attain a kind of ultra-masculinity that is no more real or true than the feminized masculinity they were embracing at the beginning. Both are just images, poses that have been adopted to suit a lifestyle they’ve decided to live. What the Narrator discovers in the end is that his identity (both his gender identity and his identity as a person) depends not on how he looks or what he does or the items that fill his life, but instead on what and how he thinks about those things. It’s individuality that he attains at the end, which is freedom from neither the feminine nor the masculine, but rather from the Image Cult that both sides attempt to impose. While this message can sometimes be lost in the blood and gore of the story, it remains that this film has more to say about the way the we relate to – and are defined by – culture than any other film to come out in the last decade.