Tag: Jonah Hill

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Film Features Film/TV

Don’t Look Up

Jennifer Lawrence (left) and Leonardo DiCaprio

When Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s satire of the nuclear age, was released in January 1964, it began with a disclaimer: “It is the stated position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film.”

As journalist Eric Schlosser discovered while researching his book Command and Control, the disclaimer turned out to be wishful thinking. Dr. Strangelove’s central scenario, in which an American general goes murderously insane and orders his bombers to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, was completely plausible. Kubrick created what is arguably the greatest comedy ever by simply telling the truth.

The key to Dr. Strangelove’s success is Kubrick’s tonal tightrope walk between the hilarious and the terrifying. Now, with Don’t Look Up, it’s Adam McKay’s turn on the tightrope.

Michigan State University Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is studying supernovae when she accidentally discovers a new comet inbound from the Oort cloud. Her adviser Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) figures out that Comet Dibiasky is headed directly for Earth. We’ve got six months to stave off utter destruction.

Meryl Streep

Kate and Randall call Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (which, the film notes, is a real thing), and they get a meeting with President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep). To their dismay, the president and her Jared Kushner-esque son Jason (Jonah Hill) are more concerned with the upcoming midterm elections than with saving humanity. When they leak the news to the press, their appearance on a Good Morning America-type TV show hosted by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry is overshadowed by celebrity gossip generated by pop singer Riley’s (Ariana Grande) sex life. The end of civilization is just too big a bummer to get traction in today’s competitive media environment.

It’s obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that Don’t Look Up’s comet is an allegory for global warming. McKay, like Kubrick, has been met with some bad reviews, and it’s true that Don’t Look Up lacks the perfection of Dr. Strangelove. The editing is choppy, and the story veers off into useless romantic subplots.

But what McKay gets right, he gets really right. The earnestness of the scientists trying to save the world becomes their biggest handicap. Legacy admission Ivy Leaguers in government dismiss the threatening discovery because it came from a state school. The elite news media descend on the subject — until the online engagement metrics fade. Most chilling of all is Mark Rylance as Peter Isherwell, a Steve Jobs-like tech billionaire who discovers precious metals on the comet and decides a couple of billion deaths is a small price to pay for propping up his company’s market capitalization.

Don’t Look Up was written before the pandemic, but if anything, the experience of the last two years has made McKay’s point for him; you could replace “comet” with “coronavirus” and the film would still work. When the comet becomes clearly visible in the night sky, Streep’s Trumpian president exhorts her red-hatted followers, “Don’t look up!” I thought about that scene on January 1st, when Memphis set a new high temperature record of 79 degrees. Crazy weather we’re having, huh?

Don’t Look Up is streaming on Netflix.

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Film Features Film/TV

War Dogs

“Bush opened the floodgates in Iraq,” Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) tells his junior-high best friend turned gun-running associate David Packouz (Miles Teller) over breakfast in a Miami, Florida, diner. “It’s a fucking gold rush.”

War Dogs, Todd Phillips’ first film following The Hangover trilogy, is a true story about the Bush administration’s brutalized American dream. As it became apparent that corporations supplied munitions to the United States military through sole source contracts, biddings opened to small businesses — allowing them to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars running guns for Uncle Sam.

Enter Packouz and Diveroli, two aimless and ambitious 20-something stoners reminiscing on their glory days (“I miss not taking shit from anyone,” Packouz says). Packouz is a part-time masseur who empties his savings on a business selling bedsheets to senior citizen homes, and Diveroli, a spray-tanned, sociopathic bro who discovers Pentagon contracts that let the little guy in on the military industrial complex’s “crumbs.” Diveroli and Packouz reconnect at a funeral, to Packouz’s fortune, and partner under Diveroli’s business moniker AEY — a name that stands for nothing, as Diveroli’s life stands for nothing, as the long-drawn out Iraq war came to stand for nothing.

Packouz and his pregnant girlfriend Iz (Ana de Armas) are anti-war, but he can’t really support her selling bedsheets. As Diveroli tells him, “The war is happening. This is pro money.” Packouz lies to Iz. Money rolls in, but trouble mounts at AEY. The two-man business is forced to travel overseas to right a deal trafficking Beretta pistols gone awry. “God Bless Dick Cheney’s America,” Diveroli says during a chase scene through Fallujah, Iraq, as a squad of U.S. soldiers save them from machine-gun slinging rebels while Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” plays overhead. A taste of success carries Diveroli and Packouz to their demise when they meet global gun dealer Henry Girard (Bradley Cooper) at an arms convention in Las Vegas. Girard helps AEY land their biggest deal yet, a $300 million contract selling 100 million rounds of AK-47 ammo to the Afghan military.

Teller and Hill lack the chemistry to create a believable duo. During the nearly two hours spent with Packouz and Diveroli, the surface is scratched, but their relationship never digs deeper than a shallow good-guy-bad-guy rapport. Independently, they shine. Teller’s best when his moral compass points north, and Hill’s performance as an over-the-top cerebral calculator with a Tony Montana admiration lands at the top of his resume. In Packouz and Diveroli’s web of deception and more — themes that drive the film — Armas shines with a grounded portrayal of Packouz’ girlfriend. While Packouz’ humility corrodes, she remains unmoved. Cooper’s charisma is fine-tuned, but don’t get it wrong, this is Hill’s show: a coked-out, conniving looney tune who makes deals with a blade ready for the back.

Those looking for the hijinks and one-liners that characterized The Hangover will be disappointed. With shots from clubby Miami Beach to desolate Albania, cinematographer Lawrence Sher (The Hangover trilogy) keeps Phillips’ vision consistent. Phillips pulls pages from Martin Scorsese’s playbook — all while peppering War Dogs with the gags that have branded his adolescent comedy since 2000’s Road Trip. His latest effort asks to be taken seriously, though, and falls short. War Dogs, a worthy attempt, spends too much time redeeming Packouz and Diveroli. In Scorsese’s hands, a more gripping film might have been made. It’s an important step for Phillips, though, one that shows he should improve with time.

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Film Features Film/TV

True Story

The crusading reporter character has a deep history in America. Superman, the very embodiment of the American ideal, chose a journalist, Clark Kent, as his alter ego. But even though we have the institution of the press enshrined in our founding documents, our portrayals of reporters reveal an ambivalent attitude toward the Fourth Estate. For every Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein uncovering the truth about Nixon’s corruption in All the President’s Men, we have a Kirk Douglas as the cynical Chuck Tatum, the self-serving tabloid writer who jazzes up a story by letting his subject slowly die in a dark cave in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole.

Jonah Hill’s portrayal of real-life magazine writer Michael Finkel in True Story falls somewhere between those two extremes. When the film opens, Finkel is at the top of his game. He’s had 10 New York Times Magazine cover stories in three years, and he thinks his latest one about slavery in Africa might just earn him the Pulitzer he wants so badly. But there’s a problem: It seems he has conflated — or perhaps wholly invented — the lead subject in his story, and when his bosses at The Gray Lady find out, he gets the boot. But did Finkel punch up the story on purpose, or was it a mistake by a writer who was relying on translators and bribery to get a story in an unfamiliar land?

How you interpret the opening sequence of the film, based on a memoir by Finkel, will determine your attitude toward the meat of True Story‘s story. Hill is a sympathetic presence in the film, but his disgraced reporter character operates under a cloud of suspicion, both from colleagues and the audience. While he’s frantically pitching comeback stories from his cabin in Montana (The Times clearly pays more than Memphis journos are accustomed to), he gets a call from another reporter asking why a fugitive from justice in Mexico was claiming to be Michael Finkel when he was caught.

Finkel finds out the fugitive using his name is Christian Longo (James Franco), an Oregon man accused of killing his wife and three children. Now, Finkel’s got a killer story with a winning angle, and when he travels to Oregon to meet Longo in the flesh, it gets even better. Longo is an aspiring writer and fan of Finkel’s work who says he is innocent. But even though he writes novella-length letters to the reporter from his holding cell, he won’t reveal who the real killer is. With a charismatic, articulate white guy who is about to be wrongly convicted of murder as his protagonist, Finkel’s magazine story turns into a book deal with Harper Collins. But is Longo really, as he says, a “nice guy 99 percent of the time,” or a low-key Hannibal Lector?

Hill is playing against the type he created in comedic roles such as Superbad and 21 Jump Street. I was reminded of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre where Humphrey Bogart played a completely unsympathetic and unscrupulous character, but his onscreen charisma made him appear to be a hero. Even Finkle’s wife Jill (an underused Felicity Jones) expresses her doubts about his reporting skills, but he dives deep into the case, and we’re along for the ride as he vacillates between the conviction that Longo is innocent and that he should be convicted. Franco has more experience at playing charismatic sociopaths. His road to leading manhood took a deliciously devious turn as Alien, the archetypal Florida gangbanger in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. Franco deftly walks the tightrope between soulful boy next door and cold-blooded murderer, and his finely tuned performance ultimately saves True Story from the turgid, CSI melodrama the source material suggests.

Director Rupert Goold has roots in the English theater, and he’s more interested in watching the sparks fly when he puts Hill and Franco together in a prison visiting room than he is in composing compelling images. True Story lacks the technical bravado of Gone Girl, but it’s a worthy addition to the true crime genre — even if it leaves viewers questioning the meaning of “true.”