Capone (1975)

  Hopefully this will go up when it's supposed to.  Content warning:  slurs, nudity, gun violence

Alphonse Capone (Ben Gazzara) started as a low-level thug in Brooklyn in 1916.  He had ambition, however, spotted by Johnny Torrio (Henry Guardino), the mafia godfather of Chicago.  And when Torrio needed a junkyard dog to help him break into bootlegging during Prohibition, he knew exactly who to call.  Capone served under his mentor but soon grew frustrated by what he perceived as an unwillingness to implement extreme measures.  He forced Torrio into retirement and set his sights on eliminating all the other organized crime outfits in Chicago, sparking a bloody series of ambushes and reprisals.  Untouchable thanks to kickbacks in all the right places, the authorities were at a loss as to what to do about Capone without also destroying their careers and lives, until Al's own lieutenant, Frank Nitti (Sylvester Stallone), turned over his bank records to the IRS.

This is an unapologetic and unromantic view of Capone, who has been softened with age.  People focus on how he created expiration labels for milk (true) and not how he regularly gunned down people in the street.  A Robin Hood mythos to balance out the corrupt cops and politicians.  But this is a false dichotomy.  Capone can be a bad guy as well as responding to a bad system.  Gazzara is great as the burly, scarred kingpin, while Stallone is extremely toned-down compared to later roles.  

It's unfortunately only available to stream for rental but physical copies still exist.  It's a nice corollary to Scarface.  Like a biography versus hagiography.

Anna Karenina (2012)

(This was supposed to go up on Saturday while I'm out of town but apparently you can't schedule a post for the future if you've already posted it, so do me a favor and don't read it until then, k?)

I know I said I wasn't going to watch it again, but there it was on my server.  I had forgotten how incredible the production design was.  I was less invested this time and was able to appreciate it much more as an art piece than an adaptation of a novel.  I still think the blond hair on ATJ is awful but the costumes and jewelry are a nice distraction from it.  

If you are a fan of Pining and Forbidden Love, this is probably right up there for you.  If you are a fan of shiny things and gilded trappings, congratulations on also being a magpie.  Originally posted 18 Feb 2013.

Nominated for:  Best Cinematography, Best Costumes, Best Original Score, and Best Production Design    This was an incredibly beautiful-looking film.  From opening credits to close, there was not a single frame that was not gorgeous.  It probably deserves every Oscar it's nominated for.  

I read the book a long time ago, back when I was going through my Russian novelist phase, and did not care for it.  This is actually what broke the phase if you want honesty.  Mild spoilers ahead.

Anna (Keira Knightley) is a Russian noblewoman who lives a life of luxury.  She gets called from St. Petersburg to Moscow by her brother (Matthew MacFadyen) after his affair with a governess.  He wants Anna to get his wife (Kelly Macdonald) to forgive him.  She is also happy to see her childhood friend Kitty (Alicia Vikander) who is about to be engaged to a young cavalry officer named Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).  Unfortunately, the moment Vronsky sees Anna, all thoughts of Kitty are gone.  They have a torrid affair, bringing shame to Anna's straitlaced husband Karenin (Jude Law) and causing the lovers to be ostracized by polite society.

Drama, drama, drama.  This was like the trashiest soap opera of the 19th century.  It doesn't read as well today with the change in social mores on divorce, and Anna comes across more bi-polar than torn apart by love.  I felt like it was weird to see Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a love interest after Kick Ass and that blond hair was awful on him.  This was probably Jude Law's most unattractive movie as well, with the glasses and receding hairline, but he carried it better than his younger rival.  Christy said she found the movie hard to process as "Russian" since the entire cast was British, but that didn't bother me so much.  How many Russian actors can you name after all? 

Almost the entire production is set as though it was on a stage, which was a bold choice but an elegant one.  It really carries the feel of a Moulin Rouge! type of spectacle, minus the singing.  I don't think I could watch it again because it's depressing as hell, but Christy said she'd most likely end up buying it because it's so beautifully shot.

Crows Zero (2007)

  I think I put this in my queue in 2009.  Netflix made it unavailable and it has remained so ever since.  Fortunately, the whole movie (subbed or dubbed, your choice) is available on YouTube.  Video quality isn't great, but it's not bad.

Genji (Shun Oguri) has just transferred to Suzuran Senior High School for Boys.  The school is a battle royale and Genji has been promised his father's (Gorô Kishitani) position as head of the yakuza if he can become King of the Crows.  He recruits Suzuran dropout and minor rival yakuza henchman Ken Katagiri (Kyôsuke Yabe) for help in forming a faction to challenge the reigning champion Serizawa (Takayuki Yamada).

This is a fun, violent movie with a lot of camaraderie through beating the shit out of each other.  If it feels a little familiar, it is a tried and true method of male bonding in film.  The action is good, the music is good, and it even comes across as rather sweet.  Equal opportunity this one is not, however, as the only female character with any lines is reduced to damsel in distress pretty quickly.  The only other parts available were Victim and Sex Worker.  Otherwise, it's not bad.

I've been watching Critical Role as my Comfort Show and I signed up for YouTube Premium because their ads are the freakin' worst so I have no idea how many ad breaks Crows Zero has.  The free trial is three-months long and I'd encourage anyone who uses YouTube more than once a month to just go for it.  Just remember to cancel before you have to pay.

A War (2016)

  You can skip to the last 45 minutes of this film and not miss anything.  In fact, I think it would have been a tighter drama if they had just focused on the courtroom element and not dragged it out.

Claus Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk) is a commander with NATO forces in Afghanistan.  During combat, he calls for an air strike on a compound, saving the lives of his men but killing 11 civilians.  He is sent home to face trial for not having positive identification on the enemy before ordering the strike.

Honestly, the least realistic thing about this is the accountability.  Maybe that's how it works in other countries.  In America, the military would write this off as collateral damage and that would be the end.  We barely investigated friendly fire.  You think we'd spring for airfare to transport some dude home for a trial every time a civilian died?  (Not saying it's right, just that it's realistic.)

So I found this annoying for multiple reasons.  All the scenes with his wife and family back home that are supposed to show how strained and distracted his mind was are completely extraneous and just padded the run time.  I watched about half an hour and then just fast-forwarded through to the trial.  It's not worth the time, even if it is streaming for free on Kanopy.

Hard Times (1975)

  This is the directorial debut of Walter Hill, who also co-wrote the film.

Cheney (Charles Bronson) rolls into 1930s New Orleans looking for a fight.  Coincidentally, Speed (James Coburn) is looking for a fighter, both to make money and enact a little personal revenge on a contemporary who embarrassed him.  It is a match made in heaven, as they say.  But Cheney's only planning to make a little money, then bounce, while Speed owes some unscrupulous men a lot of cash.

You don't see this kind of straightforward plot anymore.  There's no twists, no revelations, just "man fights man in underground bareknuckle boxing ring".  It makes the film feel a little more simple, a little old-timey, and very fast.  It's a shade under two hours but it goes by like a blink.

Ah, Coburn and Bronson.  The Jay and Silent Bob of their day.  I love them.  And keep an eye out for Bruce Glover, whose son, Crispin, looks so much like him, it'll make you contemplate cloning.  Hard Times is currently streaming on Tubi.

The Salt of the Earth (2015)

  I feel like Wim Wenders is the anti-Werner Herzog.  Like, they just have two completely different outlooks on humanity.  

Content warning:  starvation, child death, animal death (tribesmen shoot monkeys with arrows), genocide

Okay, so those are objectively terrible things to warn you about but you should make time to see this documentary if you can.  And as an aside, fuck the MPAA that gave this a PG-13 for nudity but didn't mention all of the corpses.

Photographer Sebastiao Salgado has spent a lifetime behind the camera, traveling the world to capture intimate portraits of humanity at its humblest, most vulnerable, and forgotten.  Gold miners in Brazil, flood-displaced Nigerians, famine-stricken Ethiopians, and the victims of genocide in Yugoslavia, Congo, and Rwanda.  The last sickened him so much he retreated to his family farm in Brazil, now a wasteland of erosion.  His wife, Lelia, came up with the radical idea of replanting the Matá Atlantica, the Atlantic rain forest that had been cut down for cattle grazing.  Two million trees later and Salgado was inspired to create a photo project documenting pockets of hope, places around the globe that still retained their natural, almost primeval state.

Wenders is already one of the most empathetic filmmakers.  His sense of humanism, of the capacity for joy, and his sensitivity with his subjects is matched and hightened by Salgado's bottomless reserves of empathy.  As a person who struggles with even identifying emotions, much less expressing them, seeing the depths of feeling on display in this film was nothing less than revelatory.  It is delicate and powerful all at once.

It's currently streaming on Starz, which I get through Amazon.  If you need to remember that all hope is not lost, give it a try.

No (2012)

  Hey, it's a Pablo Larraín film!  He is rapidly becoming one of those directors that I will watch regardless of the subject.  

In 1988, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was forced to hold a plebiscite to legitimize his authoritarian regime.  Two option were to be presented on the ballot:  Yes for eight more years of Pinochet or No for literally anyone else in charge.  Each side would get 15 minutes of television airtime for the 27 days leading up to the referendum.  The No campaign hired René Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), an advertising executive to produce its content.  Saavedra discarded attack ads and footage of the violence perpetuated by Pinochet's coup in favor of fun, poppy jingles and a bright rainbow message of happiness.   

Emotional appeals are the backbone of advertising.  Most people don't buy with their brain, despite what they want to believe about themselves.  They buy with their feelings.  Politics is feelings writ large.  Political ads sell concepts like safety, security, hope, fear.  This movie pulls back the curtain a little bit to show the Mad Men-esque machinations that go behind all those appeals.  It's also a fascinating corollary to our current hellscape.

For those of us who grew up in the '80s, the cinematography is shockingly perfect.  That weird three-strip Technicolor with the yellow bleed and the sodium lights.  Everything just slightly fuzzy.  It's some incredible attention to detail.  No is currently only available to rent or to buy but it is worth the rental.  

Burke and Hare (2010)

  Continuing my trend of fun movies, here's an overlooked gem.  

William Burke (Andy Serkis) and William Hare (Simon Pegg) are a couple of grifters trying to make ends meet in 1828 Edinburgh when they stumble upon an incredibly lucrative venture:  supplying corpses to Dr. Robert Knox (Tom Wilkinson) for dissection.  Dr. Knox has been stymied by a rival, Dr. Monro (Tim Curry), in the acquisition of criminal bodies for medical research, and is therefore willing to pay top dollar for fresh bodies.  Burke and Hare luck out when an old man kicks it at the boarding house run by Burke's wife (Jessica Hynes), but subsequent bodies are thin on the ground.  So the enterprising duo create supply to meet the demand.  By murdering people.  

Burke and Hare were real men who really murdered sixteen people in order to sell their bodies to the medical college.  The movie makes them as sympathetic as it possibly can but they were straight-up killers.  History is kinder to Knox, who used these bodies to further medical research, but the movie is more critical, presenting him as being fully aware of how these bodies came into his possession and not really caring that they were assisted off this mortal coil.  There's also a subplot about how it parallels to Macbeth that is just pandering.  

Keeping in mind that this is not a documentary,  it is an extremely fun dark comedy with some major cameos (Jenny Agutter!  Christopher Lee!).  Plus, it's nice to see Andy Serkis without a mo-cap suit.  

Burke and Hare is currently streaming on Kanopy for free, if you have a library card, and on AMC+ with a subscription.
 

Spy (2015)

  This one I think I can blame on Christy.  She loves Jason Statham. 

Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy) is the analyst behind super-spy Brandon Fine (Jude Law).  She sits in a basement while he sips champagne and quietly pines over him.  But when Fine is killed by Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne) and the identities of all the CIA's top agents are revealed, Susan volunteers to go undercover to find a briefcase nuke Rayna is preparing to sell.

It's fine.  Sure.  As a spy spoof it's got all the requisite elements.  McCarthy can be very funny with the right vehicle but I'm not a fan of this particular style of humor.  It relies on a lot of low-hanging fruit.  None of the insults are particularly witty or biting, just sophomoric comments on clothes or hair.  The physical comedy is low-brow and it just seems likes it's trying way too hard to capture some kind of zeitgeist moment but doesn't bring anything new to the table.  It's serviceable but nothing that's going to make a statement.

It's currently streaming on Amazon's free service FreeVee, a terrible name that replaced the equally terrible IMDbTV.

Barefoot (2014)

  I don't even think I can blame Christy for this one.  I think Netflix recommended it to me and they were wrong and should be ashamed of themselves.

Jay Wheeler (Scott Speedman) is a perennial fuck-up who owes a ton of money to a loanshark and has to work in a state psychiatric hospital as part of his probation.  He lies to his parents, telling them he's gotten his life back on track and even gotten a girlfriend with a respectable job as a nurse.  Which immediately blows up in his face when they ask to meet her at his brother's wedding in New Orleans.  Fortunately, a new patient named Daisy (Evan Rachel Wood) is being admitted and she's hot so Jay springs her from the clink and takes her with him to impress his dad (Treat Williams).

There's a trope called Born Sexy Yesterday.  You see it a lot with movies about AI or aliens, where a sexually mature woman has the naivety of a child and relies completely on the male protagonist for everything.  That's what's happening here.  Daisy is completely untutored in the ways of the world and clings to Jay like a strawberry blonde dryer sheet.  He gets to be her knight-in-shining-armor, her father figure, and her love interest by virtue of the fact that she's never even met another man her age before.  It's an incel's idea of a love story.

Otherwise, it follows every cliched story beat in every other rom-com you've ever seen, to include the "post-makeover pause at the top of a staircase so the male love interest can see her as if for the first time" bit.  Jay is an unlikeable character and the main message of the story is that rich white dudes have zero consequences.  It's a no from me.

Barefoot is currently streaming on Netflix.  Avoid, and watch The Sandman instead.