Analyzing Crazy Heart

Crazy Heart (USA)

Piercing, authentic and personal, Crazy Heart sticks with us long after the end credits roll. A trite story perhaps is quickly sobered (perhaps an intentional pun) by an all-encompassing Jeff Bridges performance. We care for “Bad Blake” as he is both pathetic and a believable talented has-been who seems to be his own worst enemy, an alcoholic who we cheer and continue to be disappointed with, as we feel he knows better. “Bad” Blake becomes a victim of his own celebrity, someone who feels an obligation to perform his songs until he dies out either through his own slovenly alcoholism or other self-destructiveness. Love is as fickle and spontaneous as creating a new ballad for “Bad Blake” until he meets his true love, journalist Jean Craddock. Even that becomes a struggle to overcome his many weakness. The songs sung by Jeff Bridges (including a duet with Colin Ferrell) are terrific, produced by the incomparable T-Bone Burnett, who’s career spans 40 years, and who also produced “Walk the Line” and “O Brother Where Art Thou.” Ryan Bingham’s Oscar-winning song “The Weary Kind,” much like Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed,” which he won for “Wonder Boys” encapsulates our protagonist’s weariness, despair and guilt-ridden conscience. Crazy Heart is a great, great music biopic of a fictitious character that carries real weight in its depth.

A Review of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Michael Douglas once said that Oliver Stone has an insatiable ability to make actors unearth things within the deepest recesses of their souls. The actor also recalled the director once quipping to him while shooting the original Wall Street: “Are you OK? Is everything fine? Are you on drugs?” To which the actor responded, “No, Oliver. I’m fine.” “Because you’re acting like you never acted before in your life,” Stone mocked. His politics aside, Oliver Stone— as the consummate film director— is a brilliant artist, and often a thorn in the side of many well-known actors. James Woods and Stone, for instance, had memorable duels on set, once when Woods stormed off the set of “Salvador” (in a guerrilla-controlled area of Mexico!), only for Stone to comb the town looking for him. Also, Stone and Sean Penn have apparently yet to reconcile with one another since he directed “U-Turn“ in 1997, though Stone does contend that things between them are now amicable. Even if Stone is known to pester, provoke and irritate many of his famous talent on his films, the performances he elicits from them are often some of the best of their careers. Douglas’s performance as Gordon Gekko garnered an Oscar win. Other leading, mostly male, performances in other Stone films, like Val Kilmer in “The Doors,” Kevin Costner in “JFK” and Tom Cruise in “Born on the Fourth of July,” are so memorable, and iconic that his abilities as a director often overshadow his reputation as being a hard-ass. In fact, it demonstrates the mark of a relentless artist. Which brings me to “Wall St: Money Never Sleeps,” Stone’s sequel to the 1987 film. Unlike taking center-stage as Gordon Gekko in the first film, Douglas chews up the scenery playing his role mostly from the periphery. As the film opens, Gekko is just released from prison for a host of white-collar crimes. Stone presents Gekko as the embodiment of a character whose vision has seeped into the core of jaded insiders and their greedy instincts. “I used to say greed is good,” Gekko lectures. “Now it seems that it’s legal.“ Interestingly, much of Gekko’s dialogue echoes Douglas’s real-life, notably that the unquenchable thirst to make more money is like a “cancer,” something Douglas literally is battling today. That makes the performance most remarkable. Douglas is now undergoing Stage 4 throat cancer treatment. Also, true to his own life, his character also has demons which involve his surrogate screen son. In real life, Cameron Douglas, Michael’s son, is serving five years in jail for drug-related charges. It seems to me that only Oliver Stone can unearth these fiendish qualities to generate a maximum artistic performance from his protagonist. Like the original aspires to be, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” is a morality tale of a young and naïve upstart who learns how to swim with the sharks of corporate America. Perhaps not as angry and hard-hitting as some have come to expect from an Oliver Stone picture, he’s known for his conspiracy theories after all, the film offers witty insights, jokes and above all an intriguing lens into a post 9-11 and yet just as flashy and gaudy world. The film surprisingly does not veer towards its excesses. As Gekko advises the young Jake, “It’s not about the money – it’s about the game.” Jake, as played by Shia LeBeouf, is the young Wall Street trader, who is engaged to Gekko’s daughter. Jake must also choose to which world he wants belong: taking up a business relationship with Gekko or working for rival Bretton James, whose name in itself seems allegorical, to perhaps another well- known symbol of greed. Plot is secondary to Stone’s sweeping sequel as the zeitgeist of today’s corporate Wall Street. The vernacular is just as hard-hitting, insider-esque and perhaps just a bit foreign to those not so accustomed to this world of money-laundering and racketeering. From a film perspective, it is comfortable in its own form— as a sequel. Stone throws in surprises, and cameos aplenty, that surely underscore the joys he must have had while making this movie. Despite the lighter tone of the picture, Stone still brings out the best, and most visceral in his performers; no one else could get Douglas to address things so true to his own life. Though “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” never aspires to serve as a critique of modern day avarice, ignoring the Madoff scandal entirely, it does give the audience a perceptive lens into the powerbrokers’ wheeling and dealing ways. Perhaps as filmmaker, Stone suggests that power-hungriness and avariciousness have always lurked around all of us, and that the term “greed” while may not being good is perhaps necessary to fulfill the American Dream. Fortunately, Frank Langella’s character serves as the guiding moral conscience for young LeBeouf, and for us. He reminds “to rise above it” –”it” being the lure of the corrupted side of wealth. “It” could punish the soul. Ultimately, the film is about redemption, as Gekko seeks to redeem his own soul, but is unable to do so fully as his urges get the better of him. After serving time in prison, he is forced to choose between family and more personal gain. “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”is a fun film, particularly if you loved the original. It educates, entertains and above all reminds, “the mother of all evil is speculation” and “idealism kills every deal.”

A Look At Goodbye How Are You?

Goodbye How Are You? (Serbia)

A Serbian “documentary-satire” that doesn’t really have a genre other than the fact, “thank goodness you don’t live in Serbia.” Broken up in 24 vignettes in a mere one hour, this deadpan and morbidly hilarious take on “modern” Serbia looks like a society so backward even Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat would complain about its primitiveness. It’s a sad tale, to be sure, but an important one that gives strange insight to a society ravaged by war, sex, poverty and an overall emphasis on a helpless society. It is sad because many have commented that Serbia is making great strides to be younger and more vibrant. The quality of the film’s stock is primitive to coalesce with the bleakness of Boris Mitic’s narration. His narration often includes subtle jokes to belie the tragedy he shows; one joke stands out. “I feel horrible; my wife is cheating on me with my best friend,“ he laments. The response: “Don’t worry, he’s not your best friend.” BLEAK!

Reviewing Slovenka (Slovenian Girl)

Slovenka (Slovenian Girl)

A bit brutal, a bit familiar and also even sly in the various twists and turns it takes, Slovenian Girl find itself in its own genre. Something Kieslowski would be proud of it, incorporating female interiority to a protagonist who is both a liar and an empathic rustic student trying to get by in a big city. The story of a call girl by night and sweet and demure country-girl by day suggests that first glances with someone are not always as they appear. The pace of the film is relaxed in tone; those familiar with Kieslowski’s Trois Colours series will see stark resemblances to Nina Ivanisin’s Aleksandra to the female protagonists in Red, White and Blue (actresses Juliette Binoche, Irene Jacob and Julie Delpy respectively) and , since the camera never veers away from her. It is her story, alone; she teases the audience as much as her clients, but her sadness to the weirdness of her profession is palpable, and funny enough the film begins with many extras staring at her. Sasha also carries a secret throughout that only the audience knows, and soon will the other players. She is known as the ’Slovenian girl” to her clients, but her home life she is Sasha, a pretty 23-year old college student from Krsko, a small Slovenian town. Her life in Ljublijana is much different. Throughout this moody film, we witness her world filled of Russian pimps, German diplomats as her clients and her loving father (and not so loving mother), woefully ignorant of her duplicitous life. We also observe the nature of secondary characters that are not just merely human in their foibles, but oft-times unethical fully cognizant of what they can get away. The audience learns of dark secrets. Perhaps most telling in the film is the universal motif of urban alienation. This is Nina Ivanisin’s debut in film acting, and I am confident her name will be passed along to more mainstream fare for her natural beauty and tantalizing presence.

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