Gangster Squad (2013)

In this late-40s gangster piece, Josh Brolin (son of James Brolin) plays an Irish-American no holds barred cop in a world of East Coast, wild west corruption. LA Kingpin Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), has the ambition of ruling over all of LA and buying every cop for sale and doing away with the rest; only Brolin's John O'Mara and his carefully arranged team of age- and race-balanced cohorts can stop him.

I guess you can detect already my cynicism for this film, it's very cliched. Really, beginning to end we have an entirely predictable gangster flick, considerably more stylized than it's predecessors (you can tell from the posters: it's a sort of neon-lit plastic-fantastic noir which reminded me of Tim Burton's Batman series; just think of it as Batman Forever without Batman). The film employs the most overused and boring tropes of the crime fiction genre, and I found myself looking at my watch far more often than anyone should in an action blockbuster.

The best thing in the film is Ryan Gosling as the young chain-smoking hot-shot, he plays the role incredibly well (I've done a complete 180 on my opinion of Gosling since The Ides of March). Emma Stone is Gorgeous, and Josh Brolin does something better than the really quite good Tommy Lee Jones impersonation he gave us in Men In Black 3. Perhaps the worst is seeing Sean Penn and Nick Nolte, both truly gifted actors, wasted in their respective, trite roles.

Briefly I also want to mention the target audience: who the hell is it? The film had the overly-stylized, fast-talking quip-spouting tough-guys vs tough-guys sensibility of a film aimed at male teens, but the amount of violence (quite gory at times) precludes it from a rating low enough for that audience to attend (getting away with an MA15+ in Australia, but an R in the United States). I simply do not understand who, precisely, the film is made for.

Gangster Squad is a pedestrian attempt at a period action blockbuster. It's currently number 4 in US box office sales, but I do genuinely believe that that has much more to do with promotion and the posters, than the quality of film or any sort of word-of-mouth popularity. Don't bother with this one.

Drive (2011)

A man with no name, with an exceptional talent for driving, befriends a neighbour with a troubled association with the mob underworld. Immediately we have the premise for a modern western, but Denmark's "Enfant Sauvage", our director Nicolas Winding Refn, takes the source material as adapted by writer Iranian scriptwriter Hossein Amini, and takes us on a thrilling, nitro-burning adventure.

Drive is a movie of two halves; Refn first introduces the characters and gives us a premise. This is done in an unusual way; despite the fanfare surrounding the film from critics, I was skeptical, and the appearance of a love interest with a husband in jail, paired with a bad boy with a heart of gold, gave me an awful feeling that we were heading down the road of a 'don't you'll end up in prison just like my husband' ... 'a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do' pre-fabricated plot. Before the halfway point, it's not a spoiler to write, this ploy is swerves sharply to the left. I feel this was Refn's intention, to make us feel like we knew what we were about to see, and then quickly deny us that with scenes of palpable tension, hiding that other trite plot under a bridge, and I love that.

Both the dialogue and the acting give the characters depth, and not one actor let the ensemble down. There are three I'd like to talk about in greater detail. Ryan Gosling, who I usually find wooden and lifeless, is surprisingly excellent. I've never liked him in anything he's done, and I now see that he's best when he's underacting. Refn uses a trick of having Gosling use almost no words, but have the camera follow him around at a constant distance (perhaps most noticeably in a scene in a supermarket). What this achieves is a feeling that there is some sort of psychosis bubbling underneath his skin, and this characterisation instantly reminded me of Peter Stormare's "Gaear" from Fargo (AKA the guy who put the other guy in the wood-chipper). There's nothing remarkable about the acting talent of Peter Stormare, but by underacting the part, we are given a sense of something darker and more monstrous beneath his skin, and such is the case with Gosling's nameless 'Driver' character. I don't think there was any accident in this, because Bryan Cranston gives an excellent performance which shows precisely the same type of nervous desperation shown by William H. Macy's "Jerry Lundergaard", also from Fargo. The two films might make for an interesting double bill.

Thirdly and deserving a paragraph all to itself is the appearance of Albert Brooks as a gritty gangster--that's Albert Brooks, who mostly plays a sort of stereotyped Jewish whining character in fluffy comedies, here playing a knife-obsessed gangster killer, and does so credibly and engagingly.

So the film boils down to a contest between Albert Brook's knife skills, and Ryan Gosling's driving ability: that reads awful on paper, but this film is executed just so well.

There is a certain concentration on violence in the latter half which I found unnecessary, but there is a dissonance between the funky 1980's electro-pop soundtrack which works incredibly well with that violence. The gear change from 3rd to 5th works so for the combination of both a) Refn having established that anything could happen, it is an unpredictable film, and because of the visuals, characters, dialogue and story to that plot, we are invested in seeing how it plays out, and b) the romantic subplot it treated artfully. There's a flash of Casablanca somewhere here, and that flash is a very, very welcome. And the ending: there is a right way to end a film, and a wrong way. Drive is an excellent example of the right way.

It's a pity Drive was largely snubbed at the Academy awards, receiving only a single nomination for a minor technical category, as I feel it was amongst the best to hit the big screen in 2011. In my 'Star Ratings System' guide I make specific mention of the need for synergy of a film's elements in order to climb into the four star category, I feel that synergy is exemplified by Drive. Drive lacks the innovation to make five stars, but it deserves every star I've given it on the road trip there.

The Ides of March (2011)

Big names and a trailer suggesting intruiging content made this a must see for me, but would it live up to expectation? Not quite. Here's why.

Pennsylvania Governor Mike Morris (Clooney), portrayed as an idealistic Democratic candidate for President, is the principled politician--but here lies the first of my problems with the film--Atheism is used as a selling point on his way to the White House, so far removed from reality I believe I audibly scoffed during the screening. 
The political landscape, in a word, is incredible. I did appreciate the various ‘shout-outs’ to real life political idiosyncrasies: Morris’ campaign slogan ‘I Like Mike’ and the Obama-reminiscent campaign posters, but found the 'humour' which the filmmakers tried to achieve here to be laboured and almost overplayed.

Our protagonist is Morris' campaign manager, a 30 year old Steven Meyers (Gosling) and, unfortunately, Gosling delivers a thoroughly mediocre performance. The maturity required to portray the campaign manager confronted with the themes of loyalty, idealism vs pragmatism, and vulnerability of women in the 'industry' of American politics are lost to the vacuous expression Gosling seems to carry throughout the film, so much so that I had a constant expectation that his next line might be “Whoa, dude, like, chill out.” This deficiency could not be saved by clever cinematography, either: one rainy scene in which Steven, after an emotional experience, sits in his car to contemplate his future, is shot is taken from outside with the car’s windshield in focus. Because of the rain, the droplets trickling down the windshield seem representative of tears. It is a clever trope and cleverly employed to get the emotion out of the scene which, unfortunately, Gosling's acting could not. Similarly the use or perhaps overuse of chiaroscuro I suspect may have been a late edition as the Director (Clooney) perhaps realised he couldn’t get the necessary dramatic gravity out of his lead.

My only other problem with the film is that we’re given a setting of an important primary election, and Morris needs the endorsement of a state senator to take the state. My problem is that the endorsement (or lack thereof) is given as the climactic event when I wanted and I imagine many other cinema goers wanted the actual vote. I am left feeling the plot isn’t played out to it’s rightful conclusion. This may not have been a problem in the stage play upon which the film is based, but the importance of the endorsement I do not feel is not driven home sufficiently, leaving the end anticlimactic.

It's an artful and sympathetic adaptation from the Beau Willimon play ‘Farragut North’ (the working title of the film, until it was changed to ‘The Ides of March’; nonsensical considering the plot bears little to no similarity to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and there’s nothing in-universe significant about March 15th). Good performances from Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, however, make the film a worthwhile adventure.