VELVET BUZZSAW (US - 2019) Written and directed by Dan Gilroy. Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Toni Collette, John Malkovich, Zawe Ashton, Tom Sturridge, Natalia Dyer, Daveed Diggs, Billy Magnussen, Marco Rodriguez, Mark Steger, Steven Williams, Alan Mandell, Pat Healy, Nitya Vidyasagar, Mig Macario, Sedale Threatt Jr, Andrea Marcovicci, Christopher Darga, Ian Alda. (R, 112 mins) Since shifting to directing with 2014's acclaimed NIGHTCRAWLER, veteran journeyman screenwriter Dan Gilroy (FREEJACK, CHASERS) has demonstrated a knack for getting top-shelf performances from his actors. Jake Gyllenhaal's work in NIGHTCRAWLER remains his career-best and one of the most egregious Oscar snubs in recent memory. Gilroy guided Denzel Washington to yet another Academy Award nomination for 2017's legal thriller ROMAN J. ISRAEL, ESQ, and while those two films share common themes, they also share similar flaws. Gyllenhaal is so great in NIGHTCRAWLER that he single-handedly allows you to overlook the borderline naivete of the film's core observation that--SPOILER--people in the news media often resort to dubious tactics for a scoop and even--find the nearest fainting couch--sensationalize stories for ratings, something that wasn't even a shocking notion when NETWORK came out in 1976. Likewise, ROMAN J. ISRAEL, ESQ is carried by the exemplary work of Washington in service of a story that blows the doors off the idea that lawyers might become cynical and greedy after years on the job and may make decisions that aren't in the best interest of their clients. There's nothing wrong with the stories of NIGHTCRAWLER and ROMAN J. ISRAEL, ESQ in and of themselves, but while watching them, one gets the feeling that Gilroy thinks he's really on to something that no one's ever considered before. His two directorial efforts up to now are pretty good movies blessed by stars who heroically carry them on their shoulders and take them to the next level.
Gilroy's luck runs out with his latest, the Netflix Original VELVET BUZZSAW. More of an ensemble piece--he's likened it to Robert Altman's THE PLAYER, which is hubristically wishful thinking--VELVET BUZZSAW can't rely on just one actor to carry it, which only magnifies the weaknesses and, again, the obviousness of the points he's attempting to make. A bit outside Gilroy's comfort zone, VELVET BUZZSAW is a supernatural horror film set in the pretentious, self-important L.A. art world, centered mostly on snooty critic Morf Vandewalt (Gyllenhaal), a powerful mover-and-shaker in the scene who enjoys the constant sycophantic ass-kissing he gets from gallery owners, artists, and agents all looking for a good review. Just out of a relationship with Ed (Sedale Threatt, Jr), Morf falls hard for Josephina (Zawe Ashton), an ambitious assistant to top gallery owner and one-time '80s punk rocker Rhodora Haze (Gilroy's wife Rene Russo). Leaving for work one morning, Josephina discovers the dead body of a neighbor (Alan Mandell) in the hallway. The neighbor turns out to be an enigmatic mystery man named Vetril Dease, a janitor who left behind well over a thousand sketches and canvases in his HOARDERS-esque apartment, with specific instructions that they be destroyed upon his death. No one in the art scene has any info on Dease, but Josephina sees something in his work, steals it all from his apartment, and through shady legal machinations, ends up bringing them to Rhodora, who, along with rave blurbs from Morf, turns the late Vetril Dease into the scene's newest star. But those who come into contact with Dease's work start having bizarre hallucinations. Before long, there's a body count as everyone around Morf and Josephina start dying in inexplicable accidents involving Dease's work coming to life, almost as if part of his soul remains trapped in all of the art he's left behind.
Playing like an ill-advised collaboration between Clive Barker and Banksy, VELVET BUZZSAW (the name of Rhodora's old band, with their logo tattooed on the back of her shoulder--a cool title but it has virtually nothing to do with anything that happens) manages some occasionally decent satirical digs at L.A. art scenesters--like Morf showing up at one Dease victim's funeral and harshly critiquing the casket--but when almost every character is either an over-the-top caricature or a ruthless, self-serving asshole, it's kinda like shooting fish in a barrel. Gyllenhaal doesn't recapture his NIGHTCRAWLER mojo here, operating in two modes: incredulously condescending or Nic Cage freakout. Ashton's Josephina goes from the sympathetic moral center to heartlessly cruel viper out of nowhere, while Russo more or less plays her NIGHTCRAWLER character transferred to an art gallery. Gilroy doesn't really know what to do with either Toni Collette, as an art museum director turned buyer for Rhodora's chief rival Jon Dondon (Tom Sturridge), or John Malkovich, cast radically against type as "John Malkovich," playing a cynical recovering alcoholic and L.A. art legend who realizes right away that something is very wrong about Dease's work. There was some potential here, but Gilroy doesn't seem aware of the horror genre's cliches--paintings and art coming to life, Dease's work being painted with his own blood, a robotic exhibit called "Hoboman" (Mark Steger) that's an obvious attempt at creating a new Pinhead-type horror icon--and one attempted jump scare involving a roll of film on a projector might've worked if movies like SINISTER and IT didn't already exist (also, nothing here is as creepy or as unsettling as any random moment Gyllenhaal is onscreen in NIGHTCRAWLER). There's a valid point to VELVET BUZZSAW--that commerce trumps art and all anyone cares about is how much money they can make from it--but in criticizing this world in such a smug and pompous way, whether it's silly character names or a demonstrable lack of familiarity with horror in general (and the CGI splatter is really terrible), VELVET BUZZSAW is ultimately just as empty and vacuous as what it purports to be skewering. Just don't be surprised when "Hoboman" gets his own spinoff franchise.
Coming off like a shelved pilot for the dumbest CBS police procedural ever, the barely-released HANGMAN, aka DIPSHIT SE7EN, is easily one of the most idiotic, nonsensical, and intelligence-insulting thrillers to come down the pike in some time. There's no logic in its structure or how its characters obtain the clues that lead them to the next crime scene. They just go where the script needs them to go to advance whatever semblance of a plot the filmmakers have concocted. In a non-descript Southern city (this was shot in Georgia but might be New Orleans, as "House of the Rising Sun" is heard a few times because of course it is), former FBI profiler-turned-homicide detective Ruiney (Karl Urban) is assigned to babysit New York Times reporter Christi Davies (Brittany Snow), who's doing a ride-along for an investigative piece centered on her hometown. It isn't long before Ruiney stumbles onto the kind of elaborately-staged, time-intensive murder scene that only exists in movies and TV: a woman hanging outside a school with an "O" carved in her chest, and inside in a classroom, mannequins arranged like students, staring at the blackboard displaying the letter "O" in a ten-letter game of "Hangman." And carved into the teacher's desk? The badge numbers of Ruiney and his retired ex-partner Archer (Al Pacino). Archer has nothing going on except sitting in his parked car people-watching and doing Latin crossword puzzles, so he ends up tagging along on the investigation, which gets more gruesome and exponentially illogical with each new victim and letter.
Where to even start? I guess this is as good a spot as any: why don't they ever try to solve the puzzle? The whole "Hangman" element is ultimately a moot point, and when the word is finally revealed, they don't even explain what it means. The word is Latin, but how does the killer know Archer enjoys doing Latin crossword puzzles? Ruiney is provided with a tragic backstory about his wife's unsolved murder, but it takes Christi catching a nanosecond glance at her file to see the huge "V" carved into Mrs. Ruiney's torso to conclude that she must've been the Hangman's first victim. How could Ruiney and Archer never put that together? Even Archer mumbles "I missed it!" Why? Because the plot needed him to be stupid. Why is such a high-profile serial killer case being investigated by just one active cop, one retired cop, and a "Pulitzer Prize-winning" (as she mentions numerous times) reporter who has no business traipsing through blood-splattered crime scenes? And how does the killer know Ruiney's and Archer's badge numbers? When they finally confront the killer, the Hangman has no idea who Archer is, but then confesses that his whole M.O. is based on a childhood incident involving Archer 20 years ago when Archer was, if the flashback and makeup job on Pacino is to be believed, a 57-year-old rookie patrolman. The story and the motivations don't even make sense from shot to shot, let alone with plot developments and character arcs over the course of the movie. 77-year-old Pacino looks so groggy and sleepy here that he could easily be doing that old Three Stooges trick of drawing eyes on his closed eyelids. He's also dusting off the same inconsistent "Foghorn Leghorn Goes to Mardi Gras" drawl ("He sod-swapped mah caah!") that he used in MISCONDUCT, another instantly-forgotten VOD clunker from a couple years back. It's easily the worst performance of his career, simply because he isn't even motivated enough to liven things up with some vintage Pacino shouting (even junk thrillers like 88 MINUTES and RIGHTEOUS KILL got a little boost from Pacino's unbeatable combo of random yelling and his crazy hair). Remember great Pacino cop vs. serial killer thrillers like SEA OF LOVE and INSOMNIA? Does Pacino remember them? A scowling Urban doesn't fare much better, but he at least does a passable job of looking awake. And if you don't find the story lazy enough, then check out a CGI train wreck midway through where director Johnny Martin (VENGEANCE: A LOVE STORY) and the production design team don't even bother to stage any debris, metal, or anything resembling an accident scene. A train crashes into a car, there's a huge fake explosion, and then...there's nothing there except dirt and track. Even a 25 mph fender-bender will probably leave some plastic from a busted taillight. No one associated with this movie cares about anything. Over two decades after SE7EN, HANGMAN is still trying to scrounge for serial killer table scraps, but even a formulaic, by-the-numbers thriller has to have some kind of internal logic. This is just terrible storytelling, terrible filmmaking, and terrible acting from a slumming living legend who shouldn't have to resort to drek like this to get a lead role. (R, 98 mins)
JUST GETTING STARTED (US - 2017)
Writer/director Ron Shelton hasn't made a feature film since the 2003 Harrison Ford/Josh Hartnett action-comedy HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE (you forgot all about that one, didn't you?). With that in mind, it's hard telling what prompted the maker of BULL DURHAM, WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP, and TIN CUP to end a 14-year big-screen sabbatical with something as generic and depressingly uninspired as the Christmas 2017 box- office bomb JUST GETTING STARTED. Starring in yet another geezer comedy after LAST VEGAS and the pointless remake of GOING IN STYLE, Morgan Freeman is Duke Diver, the freewheeling, fun-loving resident manager of Villa Capri, a posh retirement community in Palm Springs. He's got a pretty good gig: he's well-liked by everyone, treats the petty cash fund like his personal ATM, cleans up at his weekly poker game, and has a rotating cast of lovely retired ladies succumbing to his charms. His party comes to an abrupt end with the arrival of Suzie (Rene Russo), an internal auditor sent by the corporation that owns Villa Capri to take a look at Duke's creative accounting and fire him if necessary. But an even bigger annoyance to Duke is new resident Leo (Tommy Lee Jones), a wealthy mystery man in a ten-gallon hat who's spent time in the military, and regales Duke's lady friends--Roberta (Sheryl Lee Ralph), Lily (Elizabeth Ashley), and Marguerite (the late Glenne Headly in her next-to-last film; she died six months before the film's release)--by quoting Baudelaire and telling tales of his adventures in Machu Picchu. Duke and Leo begin a childish competition trying to one-up the other in chess, golf, weightlifting, and romance, with both vying for the attention of Johnny Mathis superfan Suzie, who finds herself falling for Duke's charms after he manages to get Mathis (playing himself) to play a gig at Villa Capri.
The GRUMPY OLD MEN-derived storyline eventually gets sidelined once the other plot is introduced: Duke is in witness protection. He's a former New Jersey mob lawyer who ratted out his boss and a hit's been put on him by that boss' vengeful wife (Jane Seymour). There's probably supposed to be some mystery as to whether Leo is the hit man, but of course he's not, as Shelton turns the film into a poor man's MIDNIGHT RUN, with Leo and Duke hitting the road and bonding as they evade the assassin sent after Duke. The comedic elements of JUST GETTING STARTED are so lackluster that the film never once displays any real amusement or spark of life. Sequence after sequence passes with jokes that don't land or weren't there in the first place. And the very premise doesn't stand up to any scrutiny: early on, Duke wins some local "Man of the Year" award and declines to go to the awards luncheon, presumably because he's in witness protection and doesn't want to risk being seen outside of his Villa Capri comfort zone. Makes sense. So why then, would he allow himself to be seen smiling at the camera in a nationally-broadcast Villa Capri TV commercial that Seymour's character happens to catch, thus setting the entire story into motion? And hasn't Palm Springs historically been a big mob hangout and vacation destination? What FBI handler would put him there in the first place? Other than the unusual casting of Seymour--which Shelton squanders by completely forgetting about her--no one shines here, certainly not Freeman, Jones, and Russo, who have never looked more lethargic and ambivalent than they do here. Lots of things might read better on paper than they play out in execution. No one sets out to make a terrible film, but sometimes you can watch actors in a movie and you can see on their faces that they know it's just not working. But they're professionals, so they grit their teeth, do what they've been paid to do, and just get it over with. This is such an occasion, as JUST GETTING STARTED simply never does. (PG-13, 91 mins)
Written and directed by Dan Gilroy. Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Bill Paxton, Riz Ahmed, Kevin Rahm, Michael Hyatt, Price Carson, Ann Cusack, Chad Guerrero, Jamie McShane. (R, 117 mins)
When it was shown at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival, the buzz on NIGHTCRAWLER was that it was a NETWORK and a TAXI DRIVER for today's media. While it does take place in the high-pressure world of TV news and the central character is twitchy and unstable loner who lives in a tiny apartment and just needs a little nudge to go over the edge, the comparisons were to the wrong films. NIGHTCRAWLER is more of an ACE IN THE HOLE for the TMZ and cable news generation. And Jake Gyllenhaal's wiry, sociopathic Louis Bloom is cut from the same cloth as vintage Robert De Niro, but with his smug and endless recitation of self-help platitudes and self-aggrandizing salesman jargon, he's more akin to THE KING OF COMEDY's Rupert Pupkin than TAXI DRIVER's Travis Bickle. It's a committed performance--he lost 20 lbs for the role and just looks creepy and greasy--and the latest in a series of outside-the-box projects for Gyllenhaal, following his work in PRISONERS (where his detective character was more interesting and complex than Hugh Jackman's central one) and the Cronenberg-esque ENEMY. For an actor who could just as easily keep doing franchise gigs like PRINCE OF PERSIA or romantic comedies like LOVE & OTHER DRUGS, Gyllenhaal seems to be deliberately avoiding formulaic commercial assignments. I'm not saying he's the most gifted actor of his generation, but over the last few years, he's certainly proving himself to be one of the most serious and most interested in challenging himself.
NIGHTCRAWLER opens with skeezy L.A. denizen Bloom stealing some chain-link fencing and copper wire from a railyard and helping himself to a security guard's expensive watch after knocking him out in a scuffle. Denied a job by the scrapyard owner after presenting himself in the most grating and pushy way imaginable ("I don't hire fuckin' thieves," says the guy buying stolen copper wire), Louis heads home but stops by a car accident on the freeway where he observes Joe Loder (Bill Paxton), a freelance videographer, at work. Loder, a "Nightcrawler," arrives at accidents and crime scenes and sells the footage to the highest bidder. Seeing easy money, Louis steals an expensive bike and pawns it for a video camera and a police scanner, and after some initially fumbling attempts, starts honing his skills and eventually sells his first bit of footage--of a battered, bloodied car accident victim dying as paramedics work on him--to Nina Romina (Rene Russo), the graveyard-shift news director at the lowest-rated station in L.A. Pressed by Nina's accolades over his work, Louis gets more ambitious, hiring an assistant, Rick (Riz Ahmed), and earning enough to buy a new car and more expensive recording equipment. Before long, he's beating Loder at his own game and becomes the city's top Nightcrawler, providing Nina with the kind of sensationalistic footage that brings attention and ratings to the station. But that's not enough for Louis, who soon begins arriving at calls before the cops, with enough time to reposition bodies to make for a better visual presentation. When he arrives at a home invasion before the cops and sees the perps leaving, getting a clear shot of them and their license plate, Louis sits on the footage and starts following the men around. This was the latest in a series of similar incidents and Louis' plan is to catch them in the act and call the cops at the last possible moment so he can be both there to record the events as they unfold and be the hero helped nab the bad guys.
Writer/director Dan Gilroy (brother of MICHAEL CLAYTON writer/director Tony Gilroy) provides a sterling showcase for Gyllenhaal, who turns in a mannered yet never overdone performance as the reptilian Louis. It's tough to sell a film centered on someone so repulsive (even the way he laughs at Danny Kaye's THE COURT JESTER on TV is unsettling), but Gyllenhaal is outstanding. NIGHTCRAWLER is, at its core, a black comedy, but Gilroy doesn't do it any favors when he occasionally delves into self-serious statement-making. He seems to think he's blowing the doors off some earnestly antiquated notion that TV news isn't about sensationalism and ratings. "If it bleeds, it leads" is too old-fashioned for these vipers. To Nina, the news is about white, suburban, well-off people. "Nobody cares what happens in poor neighborhoods," she says, adding that her ideal news image is of "a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut." Nina knows Louis is an unethical shitbag (even dismissing a news editor who points out that Louis got at least one piece of footage by entering someone's home without permission), but she wants the notoriety--she's washed-up, getting old, and TV news is a young person's game. If the film has any NETWORK analogies, it's in imagining Russo's portrayal of Nina as how things might've turned out for Faye Dunaway's Diana Christensen a few decades and several rungs down the ladder later. Nina is so desperate to keep her job that she even allows herself to essentially be sexually extorted when Louis demands more money and threatens to take his footage elsewhere ("My lowest price is what I want to be paid!" he demands after one negotiation, "and I want you to do the things I tell you to do when we're alone in your apartment together!"). The codependent interaction between a pair of pathetic bottom-feeders like Louis and Nina provides some of NIGHTCRAWLER's most interesting and uncomfortable scenes, and it's nice to see the semi-retired Russo (who's married to Gilroy) in her first substantial, non-THOR role in almost a decade.
A lot of NIGHTCRAWLER's points are obvious and the film isn't as substantive as it could or should be. ACE IN THE HOLE was a lot more hard-hitting 63 years ago because media oversaturation wasn't so ubiquitous. And NETWORK was a satire with entirely too many elements that have become alarmingly real over the last four decades. But today, unscrupulous media whores--many of whom are behind a news desk, using it as a pulpit--vie for around-the-clock viewer attention. In an era of partisan hackery and news-as-entertainment, it's hardly shocking to see a "news" figure manipulating a story to give himself an advantage or to suit a narrative, or to witness a desperate news director running with it, ethics-be-damned, so they stick out from the crowd. The world's a bit more cynical than it was when Billy Wilder made ACE IN THE HOLE in 1951 or when Paddy Chayefsky wrote NETWORK in 1976, and as outrageous as Louis' behavior is throughout NIGHTCRAWLER, none of it is very surprising. After an episodic first hour, Gilroy does settle into a groove and NIGHTCRAWLER becomes a solid, nail-biting thriller as Louis and an increasingly reluctant Rick start following the home-invasion perps. While it's uneven and not the media-condemning Truth Bomb that Gilroy probably imagines it to be and likely not something that mainstream multiplexers are going to embrace, the frequently-inspired NIGHTCRAWLER is powered by an intense Gyllenhaal. And it does earn one legitimate TAXI DRIVER comparison in the way cinematographer Robert Elswit (THERE WILL BE BLOOD) captures the foreboding essence of a big city at night. While 2014 Los Angeles after dark isn't quite as flavorful as 1976 NYC, it does have its own unique aura that other films (DRIVE being a great recent example) have presented just as effectively, but in an era with an increasing reliance of greenscreen and digital compositing, the utilization of actual location shooting does make a vital difference in the visual presentation and in establishing the living, breathing mood and feel of a film.
