Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2014: Fury

 People seem to be wary of Fury, and I can understand why. I'm not sure that my reason for you to be wary about it is the same as yours - no one has really articulate the reason they seem surprised that I liked it - but of the movies mentioned in this recap that are "difficult to watch," there may be none more so than David Ayer (End of Watch)'s latest. Someone once described it to me as "the beginning of Saving Private Ryan for two hours," which is pretty accurate. Strip all of the Spielbergian sentimentality away from Saving Private Ryan, increase the tension and violence, and what you're left with is a lot like Fury. In fact, you can strip away all sentimentality, replace it with misanthropy that runs rampant, and throw in the "new guy" in the midst, then slowly break down anything that resembles a human being before the violent conclusion. That, in fact, is Fury.

 The "new guy" in question is Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a typing clerk who is eight weeks into his military experience. Despite his protestation, Ellison was shipped off to Germany in the waning months of World War II, and now he's going to replace the right gunner in the crew of Fury. The tank's crew were the only survivors of a battle with Nazis - the aftermath we see in the film's opening moments - and Sgt. Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) is in no mood for someone with no experience to join his crew. Ellison's going to have to earn his spot, and that starts with literally cleaning the remains of his predecessor out of the seat he died in. Collier is at least willing to make the best of a very bad situation, but the rest of his crew - Trini "Gordo" Garcia (Michael Peña), Grady "Coon Ass" Travis (Jon Bernthal), and Boyd "Bible" Swan (Shia LeBouf) - don't want him at all. He's a weak link, and they've survived together by being strong, hardened by combat.

 From the outset, Fury is less a "men on a mission" film, and more about the deliberate attempt to "break" Ellison of being wet behind the ears. Collier, who is in addition to his skills as a tank commander, also speaks German, forces Ellison to shoot an unarmed Nazi in the back. Otherwise, Norman is useless to him. And this, we find, is Collier's way of being helpful: he can't afford for the new guy to have a moment of doubt, not when life and death come at a moment's notice. As they travel through the German countryside, clearing out towns, the team's continued abuse deteriorates Ellison's psyche even further. Moments that seem to offer a brief respite are often uncomfortable at best. Take, for example, the closest thing Fury has to a "sweet" moment.

 After clearing out the Nazis hiding in a small town - one marked on the outside by the bodies of people who refused to fight for Hitler - Collier takes Ellison inside an apartment, where they find two women (Anamaria Rinca and Alicia von Rittberg) hiding. Collier brings in some rations, and asks the older of the two to cook while he cleans himself. Things are already at a high level of discomfort when he tells Ellison to sleep with the younger one, or he will, and Norman reluctantly obliges. His rationale, as he explains in German, is that "they are young." Norman's moment of respite is interrupted when Garcia, Travis, and Swan march into the apartment, drunk and riotous from looting. They take umbrage to the fact they weren't invited to breakfast, and proceed to make Collier's imposition even uglier by showing no restraint in their behavior. What did the kid do to deserve this?

 The logical progression of this scene ends violently, but perhaps no in the way you might expect. Ayer is careful to maintain some level of dignity for the crew of Fury, but that doesn't mean that the horrors of war won't take their toll. This is a film where no one gets a break, where stoicism is the only course of action, and there's no time to grieve. Even as the more brutish of the crew (Gordo and Coon Ass, in particular) become more human to Ellison, it's not out of human decency, but a grudging respect for his transformation from rookie to "man willing to mow down Nazis." These men don't need a good man: they need a man who can kill anybody without hesitation.

 Where Fury excels is in its combat scenes, which have an intensity unlike many war films of the past decade or so. Put aside any notions of tanks as slow, lumbering hunks of metal. The showdown between a Nazi Tiger tank and Fury is a white-knuckle affair. The Tiger destroys the other tanks handily, leaving only Wardaddy and his men to stop it, and they do, by the skin of their teeth. It's a victory that feels earned, not one of convenience, and their reaction is less of celebration than of relief. It's the highlight of a film with many such encounters, including a protracted finale involving an hundreds of SS specialists attempting to destroy the crippled tank.

 Ayer does his level best to keep the protagonists from being monsters, despite the fact that it's very, very difficult to find anything nice to say about them. Often, Fury feels like a refutation of the "Greatest Generation," and while the Nazis aren't painted in a positive light, it's really hard to make a case that any of the main characters is much better. Even Lerman as Ellison eventually breaks, and becomes what Collier needs, earning the nickname "Machine." He fights back against their harsh methods, but ultimately, it's an exercise in futility. This is what being on the winning side of a war looks like, according to Ayer. This is not to say that any of the cast aren't pitch perfect in their roles. There's a sense of camaraderie and loyalty among the tank crew, particularly in the way they bicker. Bernthal and Peña have the most thankless roles, as the least likable characters in this, or really any war film I can think of. Lerman is playing, in a sense, the antithesis of his character in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Pitt, I thought, was very good indeed as a man trying very hard to keep it together for his men. Against his wishes, he has to crush someone in order to keep him alive, and in small moments it comes through. It's not the "tic" heavy performance some complain Pitt is prone to, but one that's largely internalized.

 If you want to accuse Fury of anything, it's that Ayer is too willing to "rub your nose" in the horrors of war, of the degradation of the human spirit. There's nothing that comes even close to a respite from people behaving savagely to each other, and if Ayer worries that there's a chance of it, it's time to wipe that out with sudden finality. Seriously, this is the kind of movie that wants you to be very certain that "War Is Hell." It's going to spit in the face of how World War II has been presented for the last 60 years, and that might make people very angry. Know that going in. If that's cool with you, you're in for a tense ride, one that proves that "tank combat" on screen isn't an oxymoron.

Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2013: 12 Years a Slave

 Unless he's got a light-hearted comedy lined up next, I don't think anybody is ever going to accuse Steve McQueen of making easy movies to watch. That is not to say that Hunger, Shame, and now 12 Years a Slave are not also excellent movies, but you should prepare yourself in every instance for an emotionally draining experience. McQueen makes, stark, unflinching, visceral cinema - films that are as rewarding as they are difficult to endure, and 12 Years a Slave might take the cake. In Hunger, McQueen gave audiences a front and center view of an IRA hunger strike; in Shame, he dropped us in on the meaningless existence of a sex addict. In 12 Years a Slave, he returns to the realm of "based on a true story," and adapts the story of Solomon Northrup, a free man falsely imprisoned and forced into slavery.

 Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) lives in upstate New York with his wife and family as a free man. His violin and fiddle skills draw the attention of Brown (Scoot McNairy) and Hamilton (Taran Killam), who work for a carnival and offer Solomon a hefty payday to join them in Washington, D.C. to perform with them. While in D.C., they get Northrup drunk and sell him to a slave trader, who then sends him on a riverboat to New Orleans. Solomon is sold to the ironically named Freeman (Paul Giamatti), a slave dealer whose mercy "extends only to the end of a coin," and who renames Northrup "Platt." Thus begins his odyssey of life as a slave, in a world where no one cares Solomon was (or is) a free man, and where dignity is often punished.

 "Platt" spends the next twelve years with three owners: the first is the cowardly William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who recognizes that Solomon is more than merely a slave but who is too afraid to stand up against the societal norms in the South. He appreciates Solomon's ingenuity and gives him a violin, but when Ford's carpenter Tibeats (Paul Dano) takes exception, he does little to curtail his abuse of Platt. When Solomon can take no more and lashes out at Tibeats, he's strung up and left hanging, with just the tips of his toes touching the ground, and would be dead save for the fact that Ford is summoned. Nevertheless, if the movie to this point hadn't driven into you how callous life is for slaves (including the point where Liza J. Bennett, as Ford's wife, sends one of the women away because being separated from her children is making her cry), the long sequence of Northrup hanging, desperately trying to keep his feet on solid ground, will. As Solomon slowly rotates, life on the plantation continues as it would any other day, and all of the other slaves do their best to ignore him hanging there. It's better that way for everybody.

 When Ford finally returns and cuts Solomon down, he's less relieved to have saved his life and more frustrated at what "Platt" has done. Now he has no choice but to sell him in order to prevent Tibeats from bringing a lynch mob to his home, and the only man that would take a renegade slave is the loathsome Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbinder). Like Ford, Epps considers himself to be a man of God, who quotes the Bible to justify his right to own and to hold dominion over his property. He beats his slaves, demeans them, and takes a special interest in Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o), much to the disgust of his wife (Sarah Paulson). Patsey becomes a pawn in their increasingly harsh war of words, and Platt discovers that life under the vindictive Tibeats was nothing compared to what Epps is willing to subject his property to daily.

 There is no respite, no moment of calm in 12 Years a Slave that is not followed by something more horrible than the last. Solomon finds no one he can trust, including a shamed worked named Armsby (Garret Dillahunt) who takes Platt's earnings from a sugar plantation owner (Bryan Batt) and promptly tells Epps. When it appears he might be free from Epps and in the hands of the more moderate Judge Turner (Batt), who also appreciates his violin skills, Northrup is pulled back into the mind games and brutality of the Epps farm, and for nothing greater than a bar of soap is forced to do something unthinkable to Patsey, in what is arguably the most difficult scene to watch in 12 Years a Slave. By the end, we feel a sense of relief, but not of joy so much as of emotional exhaustion, as Mr. Moon (Tony Bentley) finds him in the cotton fields and takes him home, while Epps curses them for stealing his "property." Even the final title cards rob us of any actual satisfaction of having endured this plight, based on the actual experiences of Solomon Northrup: the last card tells us that no one knows the details of where, when, or how Solomon died, only that his legal case against Brown and
Hamilton was unsuccessful because he was forbidden to testify in Washington, D.C.

 I suggested in last year's review of Django Unchained that perhaps the film's popularity had something to do with a "white guilt revenge fantasy" on the part of Quentin Tarantino, and I'm still not sure that isn't the case. 12 Years a Slave is a stark contrast from the perspective of a British filmmaker, with a a cast whose leads are primarily non-American. Much had been made leading up to the release of the film about whether that contributed to the frank portrayal of slavery, without many of the contrivances one would expect, but I would chiefly attribute that to John Ridley's screenplay and McQueen's direction. If you are in the least bit familiar with Hunger or Shame, you should know going in what to expect of his depiction of slavery in the South.

 The cast is uniformly impressive, even though half of them play the most disgusting examples of humanity you'll see on screen. Chiwetel Ejiofor is on screen most of 12 Years a Slave, and his quiet desperation to cling on to Solomon's dignity, to not give up or cave in, is something to marvel at. When he finally cracks, the scene is heartbreaking, but he pushes forward. Cumberbatch has moments of a spine as Ford: he calls out Freeman's callous decision to split up a family but goes no further to stop it, but his role in the film is minimal. Dano specializes in playing petty, weasel-y scumbags, and he's so good at it that you hate Tibeats the moment you see him.

 Much of 12 Years a Slave is a three person drama between Ejiofor, Fassbender, and Nyong'o, with Paulson on the wings, waiting to interject in critical scenes. Fassbender is a study of horrors, a righteous, libidinous mess of a man, who bellows and beats and emotionally manipulates as is his wont. He's a study in contrast from his quiet desperation in Hunger and his charming but hollow Lothario in Shame. As Patsey Nyong'o is asked to shoulder much of the suffering in the mid-sections of 12 Years a Slave, and does so admirably without resorting to overacting. She plays it right down the middle, afraid to say too much but with enough boldness from Mistress Shaw (Alfre Woodard) to end up where she does over a bar of soap. Her last scene with Solomon mirrors an earlier scene where "Platt" watches a man he befriended leave Freeman with his "rightful" owners, and we as an audience shudder to think what lies in her future with Epps.

 If there's a false note in the entire film, or at least one that stands out among the other excellent performances, it's the presence of producer Brad Pitt as Bass, the Canadian carpenter who agrees to deliver Solomon's letter to his family and the authorities in New York. It's not that Pitt does anything wrong, to speak of, but his presence draws attention away from the story. With Legends of the Fall hair and an Amish beard, Pitt's Canadian has a strangely Southern drawl and represents the only character in the film opposed to slavery. While Samuel Bass was a real person and he did, in fact, help Solomon Northrup deliver his letter to Saratoga Springs, the sudden appearance of Brad Pitt late in the film does disrupt the verisimilitude McQueen works so hard to establish.

 Beyond that, I have no qualms about saying that 12 Years a Slave is a powerful film. Difficult to watch? Absolutely. There's an intense effort to avoid any sentimentalization of Solomon's plight, to eschew any of the uplifting beats an audience would need to feel comfortable watching this story, and the pervasive despair is palpable. I disagree with Armond White's dismissal of 12 Years a Slave as "torture porn" (a position that ended with the long time contrarian reviewer being expelled from the New York Film Critics Circle earlier this month), in large part because there is no relish to be taken in the violence of this film. This is slightly closer to a reality often washed over, or as close as any Hollywood version of slavery could be. It's a reminder of where we've been, and like Hunger, where we are now. Sometimes, it needs to be difficult to face that, and sometimes that difficulty is what makes it necessary for us to do so. 12 Years a Slave comes highly recommended, but you should come in knowing that it won't be a pleasant two hours, and that's a good thing.

Retro Review: Burn After Reading

 editor's note: In his continuing quest to re-post older reviews that never made it from the old Blogorium to its present home, Cap'n Howdy has been delivering piles of digital bits to me in the hopes I know what to do with it. Some movies are older than others, but most of these come from a period between 2006 and 2009, when the move took place. Enjoy

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I promised Eck's Mass schwag, and we'll get to that momentarily. I wanted to start by thanking Tom for the awesome gift he delivered unto me via my box at work, Burn After Reading.

  About halfway through the last semester, the film students started yapping about how excited they were about Burn After Reading following No Country for Old Men yadda yadda, and it wasn't a total surprise to hear almost all of them bagging on the movie the week after release. It didn't come as much of a surprise because I suspected a retread of the Fargo to Lebowski situation in the late nineties, and having finished Burn After Reading, that's exactly what happened.

  It seems like the bigger a phenomenon a Coen Brothers film is, the more likely they are to follow it up with something totally off the wall. After O Brother Where Art Thou turned into a bluegrass sensation, they made The Man Who Wasn't There, a really bizarre tribute to film noir in black in white that lost pretty much all but the die hard fans. Going back before that, Fargo proved to be something of a curious hit that caught on with non-Coen fandom, and then they released The Big Lebowski, a movie that confounded average audiences and took five or six years to really achieve the cult status it has now.

  Burn After Reading is not likely going to have that kind of cult audience ten years from now, but that doesn't make it a disappointment. If anything, it might be remembered as a sort of Hudsucker Proxy for aficionados down the line*. Burn After Reading is the Coens take on espionage films, packed (like Lebowski) with idiots.

   What's funny is how straight they play the "thriller" angle, down to the way too serious music. But that's not actually what the movie's about. As Adam put it, BAR is about "one woman's quest for plastic surgery by any means necessary", and it's really hard to argue against that, especially by the end. Everything in between is a comedy of errors set in motion by selfish morons trolling around and being generally despicable. It's not hard to see why people find this movie difficult to like.

  Of course, if I boiled down The Big Lebowski to "a stoner who wanders around trying to get his rug back while dealing with a series of selfish assholes", you might not rush to see that either. Plot is rarely the most important part of a Coen Brothers film. They're more interested in seeing how characters interact, and damn do they have an interesting cast assembled.

  By now you've seen Frances McDormand and George Clooney all over the trailers, with a smattering of John Malkovich and Brad Pitt. Pitt's Chad Feldheimer steals every scene of the movie he's in, and you've really never seen him play a character like this. I would liken it to Clooney in O Brother Where Art Thou, where he really cuts loose and feels free to be goofy.

  However, I don't want to take anything away from Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, or my two favorite parts of Burn After Reading, the CIA agents in charge of making sense of the shenanigans you'd call a plot. J.K. Simmons and David Rasche pop in at various points in the film, not so much to catch us up but to further address how ridiculous the plot twists get. Many of you know who Simmons is, but it was a real treat to see Rasche, of tv's Sledge Hammer in the movie.

  The film may never attain "cult classic" status, but it's nowhere near the mess you might have heard it was. Of course, film students who cannot remember their film history are doomed to repeat it...

Blogorium Review: Moneyball

 I'm a little perplexed by all of the attention Moneyball received during "Awards Season." It's not that the film isn't good (because it is) or entertaining (which it is as well), but the movie is inherently anticlimactic, and by necessity can't actually go anywhere at the end for any of the main characters. I get that the combination of Academy Award winners Steve Zallian (Schindler's List) and Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) with Academy Award nominee Bennett Miller (Capote) is going to get the attention of Academy voters, and they all do fine work. The cast also does fine work, and the story - based on Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, itself based the true story of Oakland A's manager Billy Beane - is an intriguing one.

  Beane (Brad Pitt) is facing the prospect of rebuilding the Atheltics after a crushing defeat that cost them a spot in the World Series, coupled with the loss of his three star players: Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi, and Jason Isringhausen to teams that can pay them more. With no budget to work with, Beane is trying to make desperation deals with the Cleveland Indians when he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale economics graduate working for the organization. Brand has a different notion of how to build talent on a team, based on statistics and on base percentages, and Beane likes it. Almost immediately, they run into resistance - from the scouts, from manager Art Howe (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), and from sports media insiders and pundits. Despite the pressure to do otherwise, they pick up Jeremy Giambi (Nick Porrazzo), David Justice (Stephen Bishop), and Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), all of whom have been given up on by other teams. But Howe refuses to play the lineup that Beane and Brand put together, and things don't go south quickly. Can the unlikely strategy turn around the Oakland A's and allow them to compete with teams who money to spend, or is Beane looking at his swan song as general manager of the team?

 In fact, the story behind Moneyball the film is almost as interesting as the actual story of Billy Beane's experiment on Oakland: the film was, up until 2009, a project Steven Soderbergh planned to direct, starring Brad Pitt with Demitri Martin playing Beane's actual assistant, Paul DePodesta (Peter Brand is a composite character). Soderbergh also wanted David Justice and Scott Hatteberg to play themselves, but Sony put the film on hold and let Soderbergh go, replacing him with Miller and hiring Sorkin to rewrite Zallian's draft.

 You don't necessarily need to know anything about the Oakland A's or Billy Beane to watch Moneyball, and I guess if you don't know anything about baseball at all - maybe the combination of Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, and (to a smaller degree) Phillip Seymour Hoffman brought you in - then it might be surprise how it ends. That surprise, alas, doesn't seem to be one that people are really happy about. Moneyball is a somewhat atypical version of the "underdog" subgenre of sports pictures. A rag-tag group of misfits get together and try to do something different because what's in place doesn't work. They fail at first, but then against the expectations of everyone else, they begin an improbable journey to proving everybody wrong. You've seen it before, and Moneyball is basically that film, just based around the management side of baseball and less about the players.

 Except that (I guess this is a SPOILER) the Oakland A's don't win. They do break the single season record of 20 consecutive wins, but lose in the first round of the postseason to the Minnesota Twins. Like their loss to the Yankees the year before, it's a hard pill to swallow for Beane, but it does get him an interview with the Boston Red Sox, the team that hired away Johnny Damon the year before. They want him to come on board, and he decides to stay with Oakland. Two years later, the Boston Red Sox, using Beane's example, broke their 86 year long championship drought. They did it with a combination of the payroll that Beane didn't have and the sabremetric system (see link above).

 A few friends of mine have rightfully pointed out that it's just as rough for viewers as it is for the fictional Beane that not only does the precedent he put into practice not work for him, but the team that does use it successfully is the very team that took one of Oakland's star players. There's even a title card at the end of the film to tell us this, as Moneyball doesn't really know quite to to finish the story: Peter shows Billy footage that metaphorically describes what happened and then Beane drives through Oakland listening to a song his daughter Casey (Kerris Dorsey) recorded for him. Moneyball's ending isn't ambiguous in a way that makes much of a difference, because the stark black and white title cards break the bad news to anybody watching the film that thought "well, maybe next year!"

 I don't actually like having to point out that Moneyball is a tease of a movie, one that is eternally heading in a direction it can't actually go, and one that the film itself has to grudgingly admit hasn't happened before the credits roll. Moneyball is a solid film with great dialogue, understated performances, and is compelling even when you know how things end. I like that Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane as kind of a dick, an aloof general manager who doesn't like traveling or associating with the players because he's going to need to trade them. He's not exactly a likeable character but you like him anyway, because he makes the best of a bad situation. He's also almost always eating something: I feel the need to point this out because I began to notice it halfway through the film and then couldn't stop paying attention to the fact that Pitt is constantly chewing on something during Moneyball.

 Jonah Hill is also very good and I guess un-Jonah Hill-esque as "Peter Brand," a guy who spends the first half of the film in awe of Beane and the second half trying to keep him engaged with the team's success. While I thought he was good, I don't exactly understand the nomination of "Best Supporting Actor" as the only real difference between Moneyball Jonah Hill and every other Jonah Hill performance is that he isn't cracking sarcastic jokes. It's a little like his character from Cyrus - a movie I really didn't like - but without the manipulative streak in that film. Hill was as good as Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Howe as a guy that doesn't get or approve of what Beane is doing but instead of being a jerk because he can, also makes the best of a bad situation. He thinks he's on the way out because Beane won't discuss renewing his contract, but instead of being vindictive, he plays the team that will help him get a job next year. Why Hill was nominated and Hoffman wasn't, I couldn't say. They're both as good as Pitt, who was also nominated for reasons I don't quite get.

 Now this sounds like I'm knocking Jonah Hill or Brad Pitt, and I'm not. I liked Moneyball, and I liked everybody in Moneyball and will probably watch it again, but I didn't see why the film was Academy Award material. There are really good movies that don't need to be nominated for Academy Awards, or aren't nominated, I guess I should say, and I'd put Moneyball in that category. It wouldn't make my "Top" list from 2011, but it would be in that bracket with Bridesmaids and Attack the Block and Conan O'Brien Can't Stop. To be fair, that's where I'd put The Artist, too, so that shows how much I understand about Academy Awards politics. What I'm saying is that you should check out Moneyball, even if you aren't into baseball, but understand that like real life, sometimes things don't work out, or necessarily end.

After all, Billy Beane is still in Oakland and this season he's decided to sign Manny Ramirez to a minor league deal with the option to play for the A's. Manny Ramirez played for the Boston Red Sox when they won the World Series in 2004 (and again in 2007). You never know - there might be a Moneyball 2 someday...