Tag: David Fincher

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Mank is a Timely Tribute to a Hollywood Legend

Hey, did you hear the one about the starlet who was so stupid she came to Hollywood and slept with the writer? As you can tell by the misogyny, that joke is very old. Here’s another one for you: What’s the difference between a writer and a savings bond? One day, a savings bond will mature and produce income.

I got a million of ’em.

In Hollywood studio parlance, there are above-the-line jobs and below-the-line jobs. If you’re above the line, that means you’re irreplaceable. Below the line, you’re an interchangeable part. Producers, directors, and stars are all above the line. Technically, so is the writer — but every screenwriter who has ever suffered in Tinseltown is acutely aware that they are at the bottom of the hierarchy, and likely to be replaced at the whim of their betters. Thus, the cliché of screenwriters as self-pitying wrecks who are too smart for their own good.

Gary Oldman is screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz in David Fincher’s Mank

Mank is the story of one of the greatest wrecks, Herman Mankiewicz, as he works on the screenplay that will become Citizen Kane. It opens with Mank (Gary Oldman) decamping to the desert town of Victorville on an enforced writer’s retreat. He’s practically immobile because of a broken leg, sustained, as we see in the first of many flashbacks, in a car accident, so he’s attended by his housekeeper, Freda (Monika Grossman), while under the watchful eye of his handler, John Houseman (Sam Troughton). He’s just getting settled in when Orson Welles (Tom Burke) informs him the deadline has been shortened from 90 days to 60 days, so he’d better get started dictating to his secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins).

Mank’s script, called simply “American,” is about one of the most powerful people in the world of 1940: William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance). As a top writer in the studio system of the 1930s (Mankiewicz came up with the idea of switching between black and white and color in The Wizard of Oz), he was a close friend of Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), a decidedly non-stupid Hollywood starlet who was Hearst’s mistress. As a frequent guest at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, Mank had a front row seat to the court intrigue of one of the richest men in the world as the Depression ravaged his fortune and political winds swirled around him.

Oldman, Arliss Howard, and Tom Pelphrey

As the flashbacks pile up, we see some of the real-life events that were inspirations for incidents in Citizen Kane. Most importantly, it was Hearst’s sudden turn from progressive supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to stealth backer of California Republican gubernatorial candidate Frank Merriam over his former friend Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye) that rankled Mank.

When word spreads in Hollywood that upstart outsider Welles and old-school insider Mank were teaming up to take on Hearst, the knives come out. Everyone from his brother Joe (Tom Pelphrey) to Marion herself tries to stop Mank from committing career suicide. But even his worst enemies agree that the radical 327-page script is a masterpiece.

Director David Fincher has been trying to make Mank since the late 1990s from a screenplay by his late father Jack Fincher. The Finchers’ film finds direct inspiration in the subject, taking Citizen Kane‘s nonlinear structure of nestled flashbacks and Mankiewicz’s dialogue-driven approach to drama. Mank’s high-contrast black-and-white photography and rapid-fire wit would fit the bill if the picture was produced in 1940. Oldman is perfection as Mank, whose hard living makes him look 44 going on 74. He’s a raging alcoholic who cheekily sneaks booze onto the teetotaling ranch in a crate labeled “support devices.” He’s usually, as he ruefully observes, “the smartest man in the room,” and his lack of filter often leads to catastrophe.

The rest of the cast is equal to the task, led by Arliss Howard as chief Hearst sycophant Louis B. Mayer. The MGM head honcho gets a stunning walk-and-talk intro as he strides through the lot on the way to tell his entire company he’s cutting their pay. Howard plays Mayer as the inspiration for Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane, but aside from a slight Brooklyn accent, Amanda Seyfried’s Marion Davies is nothing like the hapless Susan Alexander Kane.

Mank and Marion recognize each other as alcoholic fellow travelers, existing only in this world of extravagant wealth by blind luck. They bond on a walk through the Hearst Castle zoo after being ejected from a tense dinner party conversation where the super-rich discuss the comparative threats of Soviet communism and Nazi fascism.

That’s the scene where Mank rises above film nerd-vana to deep contemporary relevance. Mank has a front row seat (and not a little responsibility) for the confluence of money and propaganda that still dominates our politics today. Donald Trump has said his favorite movie is Citizen Kane. When Kane runs for governor of New York, his biggest promise is to “lock up” his opponent. When Kane loses, his newspapers’ headlines declare “Fraud at the Polls!”

Mank is streaming on Netflix.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Gone Girl

Gone Girl is based on a bestselling crime novel by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay. With its byzantine plot, morally ambiguous characters, and obsession with peeling back layers of “reality,” it is the perfect material for director David Fincher. It is the stylistic and thematic cousin of Fincher’s masterpiece Zodiac, and may surpass the 2007 film in reputation. One of the few useful notes I took before surrendering to Fincher’s dark spell was: “Perfect frame after perfect frame.”

Gone Girl is currently teaching me how much of my weekly word count is taken up with summaries. The expertly executed whiplash plot has earned word of mouth that is the envy of Hollywood, and yet recounting it here would be useless. If you’ve read the book, you already know what happens. If you haven’t, you don’t want to know. Here’s the setup: On their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) comes home to find his wife Amy (former Bond girl Rosamund Pike) missing, apparently the victim of a kidnapping. In less than 48 hours, the case becomes a full-blown media circus. Then things get weird.

Gone Girl is about the media. It’s probably the best filmic critique of our industry’s effect on society since Natural Born Killers predicted the metastization of the 24-hour news cycle 20 years ago. It’s marketed as a mystery, but it’s closer to Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole or Sidney Lumet’s Network than a classic mystery like The Big Sleep. Once observed by the media’s electron microscope, the characters behave like a quantum particle forced into choosing a definite state. Is Nick a hero, villain, or victim? Like Schrodinger’s cat suspended between life and death, he exists as all three at once. In a memorable exchange near the end of the film, he confronts his greatest tormentor, talk-show shouter Ellen Abbot (Memphian Missi Pyle), with all of the lies and distortions she has spread about him. “I go where the story is,” she says, even if that means inventing details to support the most lucrative narrative.

Ben Affleck in Gone Girl

Gone Girl is not misogynistic. Nor is it misandristic. It is misanthropic. Its worldview is so cynical it makes Double Indemnity look like It’s a Wonderful Life. Everyone in the film stoops to their basest level, confirming their sexes’ worst stereotypes. Nick’s glibly charming exterior hides a lazy, emotionally distant philanderer. Amy’s perfect woman exterior hides untold depths of emotional manipulation and cold-blooded lies. As she says, “We’re so cute, I want to punch us.” If, as has been suggested, Fincher’s adaptation tips the moral scales toward the male, it’s because Affleck’s job description as a movie star is: “Be sympathetic on camera.” And Affleck is very good at his job.

Gone Girl is exquisitely well acted. Pike shows complete control over her instrument, shifting into whichever version of Amy the director needs her to be as the points of view change. Kim Dickens shines as Detective Rhonda Boney, the Marge Gunderson-like investigator who proves impotent in the face of overwhelming evil. Neil Patrick Harris manages to take his character Desi Collings from creepy to nice and back again with very limited screen time. But the best of the bunch may be Tyler Perry as the Johnnie Cochran-like defense attorney who cheerfully plots the character assassination of a missing woman who, for all he knows, could be rotting at the bottom of a lake.

Gone Girl is about class. It’s one of the most insightful movies made about the Great Recession, exposing films like Up in the Air as classist dreck. The fear of losing economic status permeates everything. The story’s real inciting incident isn’t Amy’s 2012 disappearance; it’s 2009, when the couple lose their media jobs and are forced to move from New York City to a Missouri McMansion, propped up by debt and illusion. In one telling moment, when one of the movie’s many middle-class Machiavellians finds themselves confronted with actual, desperate lower-class criminals, they are summarily beaten at their own game.

Gone Girl is circular. It’s an appropriate structure for a story where everyone is trapped, either by their sex, their class, their perceptions, or by a whole sick society whose death throes make missing white girls into a growth sector for cable conglomerates.

Gone Girl is a very good movie. You should go see it.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Sweet Thereafter

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Memphis Flyer (our first quarter quell, as it were), I have chosen my personal favorite film from each year since the Flyer began publication. Then, for each of those films, I unearthed and have excerpted some quotes from the review we ran at the time. — Greg Akers

1989: #1 Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch (#2 Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee)

“While all the scenes in Mystery Train are identifiable by anyone living west of Goodlett, their geographical relationship gets altered to a point where we start to trust Jarmusch more than our own memories.” — Jim Newcomb, March 8, 1990

“Filmed primarily at the downtown corner of South Main and Calhoun, Jarmusch does not use the Peabody Hotel, the Mississippi River, Graceland, or most of the other locations that the Chamber of Commerce would thrust before any visiting filmmaker. His domain concerns exactly that territory which is not regularly tread by the masses, and his treatment of Memphis is likely to open a few eyes.”
— Robert Gordon, March 8, 1990

1990: #1 Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese (#2 Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder)

“This may not be De Niro’s best-ever performance, but he’s got that gangster thang down pat. His accent is flawless, his stature is perfect, and, boy, does he give Sansabelt slacks new meaning.”
— The Cinema Sisters, September 27, 1990

1991: #1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron (#2 The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme)

“Terminator 2 is an Alfa Romeo of a movie: pricey, sleek, fast, and loaded with horsepower. By comparison, the first Terminator was a Volkswagen. On the whole, I’d rather have a Volkswagen — they’re cheap and reliable. But, hey, Alfas can be fun too.” — Ed Weathers, July 11, 1993

1992: #1 Glengarry Glen Ross, James Foley (#2 The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann)

“Mamet’s brilliantly stylized look at the American Dream’s brutality as practiced by low-rent real estate salesmen who would put the screws to their mothers to keep their own tawdry jobs doesn’t relax its hard muscle for a moment. In the hands of this extraordinary cast, it is like a male chorus on amphetamines singing a desparate, feverish ode to capitalism and testosterone run amuck.”
— Hadley Hury, October 15, 1992

1993: #1 Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater (#2 Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg)

“Dazed and Confused is a brief trip down memory lane. The characters are not just protagonists and antagonists. They are clear representations of the folks we once knew, and their feelings are those we had years and years ago. Linklater doesn’t, however, urge us to get mushy. He is just asking us to remember.”
— Susan Ellis, November 4, 1993

1994: #1 Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino (#2 Ed Wood, Tim Burton)

“Even though Tarantino is known for his bratty insistence on being shocking by way of gratuitous violence and ethnic slurs, it’s the little things that mean so much in a Tarantino film — camera play, dialogue, performances, and music.”
— Susan Ellis, October 20, 1994

1995: #1 Heat, Michael Mann
(#2 Toy Story, John Lasseter)

“I’m sick of lowlifes and I’m sick of being told to find them fascinating by writers and directors who get a perverse testosterone rush in exalting these lives to a larger-than-life heroism with slow-motion, lovingly lingered-over mayhem and death, expertly photographed and disturbingly dehumanizing.”
— Hadley Hury, December 21, 1995

1996: #1 Lone Star, John Sayles
(#2 Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Although Lone Star takes place in a dusty Texas border town, it comes into view like a welcome oasis on the landscape of dog-day action films … Chris Cooper and Sayles’ sensitive framing of the performance produce an arresting character who inhabits a world somewhere between Dostoevsky and Larry McMurtry.”
— Hadley Hury, August 8, 1996

1997: #1 L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson (#2 The Apostle, Robert Duvall)

L.A. Confidential

“L.A. Confidential takes us with it on a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we’ll go to hell or, if we do, whether we’ll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes … to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least the possibility of trust.”

— Hadley Hury, October 2, 1997

1998: #1 Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg (#2 The Big Lebowski, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Spielberg is finishing the job he began with Schindler’s List. He’s already shown us why World War II was fought; now he shows us how. … Spielberg’s message is that war is horrifying yet sometimes necessary. And that may be true. But I still prefer the message gleaned from Peter Weir’s 1981 masterpiece, Gallipoli: War is stupid.” — Debbie Gilbert, July 30, 1998

1999: #1 Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson (#2 The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan)

“Magnolia is a film in motion; there’s a cyclical nature where paths are set that will be taken. It’s about fate, not will, where the bad will hurt and good will be redeemed.”
— Susan Ellis, January 13, 2000

2000: #1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee (#2 You Can Count On Me, Kenneth Lonergan)

“Thrilling as art and entertainment, as simple movie pleasure, and as Oscar-baiting ‘prestige’ cinema. Early hype has the film being compared to Star Wars. … An even more apt comparison might be Singin’ in the Rain, a genre celebration that Crouching Tiger at least approaches in its lightness, joy, and the sheer kinetic wonder of its fight/dance set pieces.”
— Chris Herrington, February 1, 2001

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2001: #1 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg (#2 Amélie,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

“What happens when Eyes Wide Shut meets E.T.? What does the audience do? And who is the audience?”
— Chris Herrington, June 28, 2001

2002: #1 City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
(#2 Adaptation., Spike Jonze)

“The mise-en-scène of the film is neorealist, but the cinematography, editing, and effects are hyper-stylized, as if The Bicycle Thief had been reimagined through the post-CGI lens of Fight Club or The Matrix.”

— Chris Herrington, April 3, 2003

Lost in Translation

2003: #1 Lost in Translation, Sofia
Coppola (#2 Mystic River, Clint Eastwood)

“Lost in Translation is a film short on plot but rich with incident; nothing much happens, yet every frame is crammed with life and nuance and emotion. … What Coppola seems to be going for here is an ode to human connection that is bigger than (or perhaps just apart from) sex and romance.”
— Chris Herrington, October 2, 2003

2004: #1 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry
(#2 Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino)

“This is the best film I’ve seen this year and one of the best in recent memory. Funny, witty, charming, and wise, it runs the gamut from comedy to tragedy without falling into either farce or melodrama. Its insights into human loss and redemption are complicated and difficult, well thought out but with the illusion and feel of absolute spontaneity and authentic in its construction — and then deconstruction — of human feelings and memory.”
— Bo List, March 25, 2004

2005: #1 Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee (#2 Hustle & Flow, Craig Brewer)

“The film is a triumph because it creates characters of humanity and anguish, in a setup that could easily become a target for homophobic ridicule. Jack and Ennis are a brave challenge to the stereotyped image of homosexuals in mainstream films, their relations to their families and to each other are truthful and beautifully captured.” — Ben Popper, January 12, 2006

2006: #1 Children of Men,
Alfonso Cuarón (#2 The Proposition, John Hillcoat)

“As aggressively bleak as Children of Men is, it’s ultimately a movie about hope. It’s a nativity story of sort, complete with a manger. And from city to forest to war zone to a lone boat in the sea, it’s a journey you won’t want to miss.”
— Chris Herrington, January 11, 2007

2007 #1 Zodiac, David Fincher
(#2 There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson)

“[Zodiac is] termite art, too busy burrowing into its story and characters to bother with what you think.”
— Chris Herrington, March 8, 2007

2008: #1 Frozen River, Courtney Hunt (#2 The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan)

“Frozen River is full of observations of those who are living less than paycheck to paycheck: digging through the couch for lunch money for the kids; buying exactly as much gas as you have change in your pocket; popcorn and Tang for dinner. The American Dream is sought after by the dispossessed, the repossessed, and the pissed off.”
— Greg Akers, August 28, 2008

2009: #1 Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze (#2 Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron)

“I know how ridiculous it is to say something like, ‘Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best kids’ movies in the 70 years since The Wizard of Oz.’ So I won’t. But I’m thinking it.”
— Greg Akers, October 15, 2009

2010: #1 Inception, Christopher Nolan (#2 The Social Network,
David Fincher)

“Nolan has created a complex, challenging cinematic world but one that is thought through and whose rules are well-communicated. But the ingenuity of the film’s concept never supersedes an emotional underpinning that pays off mightily.”
— Chris Herrington, July 15, 2010

2011: #1 The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick (#2 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson)

“The Tree of Life encompasses a level of artistic ambition increasingly rare in modern American movies — Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood might be the closest recent comparison, and I’m not sure it’s all that close. This is a massive achievement. An imperfect film, perhaps, but an utterly essential one.”
— Chris Herrington, June 23, 2011

2012: #1 Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow (#2 Lincoln, Steven Spielberg)

“Zero Dark Thirty is essentially an investigative procedural about an obsessive search for knowledge, not unlike such touchstones as Zodiac or All the President’s Men. And it has an impressive, immersive experiential heft, making much better use of its nearly three-hour running time than any competing award-season behemoth.”
— Chris Herrington, January 10, 2013 

2013: #1 12 Years a Slave, Steve
McQueen (#2 Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón)

“Slavery bent human beings into grotesque shapes, on both sides of the whip. But 12 Years a Slave is more concerned with the end of it. McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley are black. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t be notable but is. If you consider 12 Years a Slave with The Butler and Fruitvale Station, you can see a by-God trend of black filmmakers making mainstream movies about the black experience, something else that shouldn’t be worth mentioning but is.”
— Greg Akers, October 31, 2013

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

All the Murderer’s Men

Blame David Fincher and Anthony Hopkins. With Fincher’s 1995 film Se7en and Hopkins’ portrayal of the Hannibal Lecter character in The Silence of the Lambs four years earlier, “serial killer chic” was born. These well-made, unavoidably entertaining movies imagined fictional murderers as charismatic anti-heroes, setting the stage for a series of equally gratuitous but far dumber entertainments to take this disreputable conceit to the bank.

Fincher makes amends with Zodiac, a return to the serial-killer genre, which recounts, through actual case files, the investigation into the real-life “Zodiac” killings that terrorized the San Francisco Bay area in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

The Zodiac killer announced himself through code- and symbol-heavy letters to area newspapers and law-enforcement agencies, one of which threatened to target children aboard school buses. But, unusually, Fincher’s focus here isn’t on the public hysteria engendered by the Zodiac’s publicity ploys, or on the killer himself, or even his victims. Instead, Zodiac focuses on the men — cops and reporters, basically — who investigated the case and grew obsessed with it.

In this regard, Zodiac is more reminiscent of All the President’s Men than Se7en, with one key factor that distinguishes it from either: a lack of resolution. The “Zodiac” killings remain unsolved, and Fincher refuses to invent a tidy conclusion. The characters here — most importantly, crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and political cartoonist-turned-true-crime-writer Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Frisco detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) — are constantly striving toward a resolution that keeps slipping away. And this makes Zodiac a different kind of serial-killer movie. It isn’t as “pleasing” as a Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs, but the lack of resolution keeps the movie alive in your mind. You don’t leave the theater sated but still mulling it over, working through the details in your mind like Graysmith and Toschi, in particular, have been damned to do.

One of Fincher’s triumphs is that his movie is as obsessed with the procedural details of the case as his characters are, so that the movie becomes its own subject. Zodiac never inflates its killer — indeed, it implies that the Zodiac took credit for crimes he didn’t actually commit — and consistently undercuts the validity of its protagonists’ obsession. Avery and Armstrong eventually peel off the case, with Avery telling Graysmith, “More people die in the East Bay every week than that idiot killed.” And yet, Zodiac, like an increasingly obsessive Graysmith, can’t shake its pursuit of elusive truth, even as that truth seems less and less important.

Always a great technical filmmaker, Fincher is as virtuosic as ever, but here style and content mesh more seamlessly than ever before. The film was shot in digital video, but Fincher and cinematographer Harris Savides lend the form a weightiness I don’t think it’s ever had before. Creepily handsome throughout, Zodiac is filled with imaginative flourishes, from an opening POV shot to a dizzying bird’s-eye view of the Golden Gate Bridge. And where Se7en lingered on murder victims as gruesome art objects, the murder scenes here are quick and realistic — flashes of somber pop art.

The result is easily Fincher’s best film. Se7en was artful and gripping but gratuitous, too willing to indulge the fake mystique it helped make too common. Fight Club was bullshit brilliant with doodles. Both of these movies were white elephants in a way — impressive, but even more impressed with themselves. By contrast, Zodiac is — even at a two-and-a-half-hour length that leaves you helplessly wanting more –termite art, too busying burrowing into its story and characters to bother with what you think.