Nocturnal Animals (2016): adapted by Tom Ford from the novel by Austin Wright; directed by Tom Ford; starring Amy Adams (Susan Morrow), Jake Gyllenhaal (Edward Sheffield/ Tony Hastings), Michael Shannon (Bobby Andes), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Ray Marcus), and Armie Hammer (Hutton Morrow): Fashion designer Tom Ford previously directed the Colin-Firth-starring A Single Man several years ago. That film prepares one in absolutely no way for the weird magnificence that is Nocturnal Animals.
In the past, we watch the characters played by Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal meet, get married, and fall apart. In the present, Amy Adams works as one of the directors of a very high-end, pretentious Manhattan art gallery. And in the novel that Jake Gyllenhaal sends Adams, a man's family is abducted by hooting rednecks along a lonely stretch of desert highway. Gyllenhaal also plays the protagonist in scenes from that novel as imagined by Adams while she reads it.
Production design and cinematography separate the three strands of the narrative, beautifully (or grungily) dividing the dirty world of the novel from the naturalistic scenes from the past and the high-contrast colours of the artificial present. Adams and her cohorts at the gallery wear often hilarious outfits. A meeting of the gallery's directors, shot against stark white backgrounds, looks like what might have happened had Stanley Kubrick shot a talking-head ad for Chanel in the late 1980's.
Gyllenhaal and Adams are terrific, as is Michael Shannon as the vengeful cop of the novel. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is unrecognizable, and terrific, as the monstrous leader of the murderous thugs. He's got a scene on a toilet that's... startling. So, too, the opening few minutes of the movie, which depict a very... startling gallery installation.
This is an accomplished, witty, horrifying movie. I hope Ford doesn't wait 8 more years before doing another. He's already a better director than the vast majority of directors out there with many more films on their CVs. Highly recommended.
Life (2017): written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick; directed by Daniel Espinosa; starring Jake Gyllenhaal (David Jordan) and Rebecca Ferguson (Miranda North): A movie riddled with scientific, engineering, logical, and character idiocies -- that's Life!
I'm pretty sure the pitch for this movie was "Gravity meets Alien!" even though Alien was also set in and around space because Life has a lot of zero-G shots and ostensibly takes place in the present day, albeit a present day with radically different laws of physics.
There could easily be a good version of this movie in which a Martian octopus with an eating disorder attacks the International Space Station. Indeed, there have been many good versions of this movie, from both versions of The Thing to Alien to, I don't know, Hitchcock's Lifeboat.
This version, though, is an exercise in grim dumbness, surprisingly from the screenwriters of the jaunty Deadpool. By the end, you will be cheering for the Martian octopus, which is smarter than an entire station filled with astronauts because as we all know from Armageddon and many other movies, astronauts are really stupid when compared to Just Plain Folks. Not recommended.
Everest: based on a true story and written by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy; directed by Baltasar Kormakur; starring Jason Clarke (Rob Hall), John Hawkes (Doug Hansen), Michael Kelly (Jon Krakauer), Emily Watson (Helen Wilton), Keira Knightley (Jan Arnold), Josh Brolin (Beck Weathers), Robin Wright (Peach Weathers), and Jake Gyllenhaal (Scott Fischer) (2015): Enjoyable movie based on the true story of a disastrous couple of days on Mount Everest in May of 1996. Journalist Jon Krakauer's terrific Into Thin Air (1998) documented the affair, and while the movie isn't based on that book, Krakauer does appear as one of the characters.
The movie mainly follows the efforts of the first commercial Everest climbing company on the Nepalese side of the mountain as it returns to Everest and proceeds over six weeks of preparation towards another ascent of the peak. Jason Clarke plays the founder and first guide of the New Zealand-based company, while Emily Watson runs things at Base Camp. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the head of a newer, rival climbing company. Much of the rest of the cast, including Josh Brolin and John Hawkes as two American climbers, is involved with Clarke's team, as is Krakauer, who is covering the climb for Outside magazine.
I could maybe have used a bit keener characterization. There are a lot of characters, and some are given scant time to stick in our minds. The main characters stand out, though, whether it's Clarke's Rob Hall, who may be too sympathetic to the burning desire of his climbers to summit, or Gyllenhaal's goofy, somewhat reckless counterpoint to Hall. Brolin manages to invest his almost-stereotypical Texan with an increasing amount of frailty and indecision as the film progresses. Hawkes is typically fine, as is Watson.
But Everest is the protagonist of Everest. There are a satisfying number of Sublime moments in the shot selection, interspersed with the sweaty, nervous efforts of climbers spanning crevices on extension ladders, falling, wheezing, and struggling like Beckett characters just to crawl somewhere. The section of the film covering the disastrous efforts to reach and return from the summit of Everest are especially tense and thrilling. You know things have gone sideways when a massive storm comes straight up at you.
Much of the film really is factual, including two incidents that seem like pure Hollywood invention, one involving a pair of satellite phone calls and the other involving the improbable survival of a seemingly dead character. I'd have liked more Sublime. And I think the movie could have spared a few more minutes for some necessary exposition in order to provide context for some of the climbers' decisions.
Hypoxia causes bad decision-making, and those making decisions during the summit were clearly afflicted by it at points. There's human error involved throughout the disaster, along with dreadful timing as a massive storm heads straight out of the Indian Ocean towards Everest on the day of the summit. But some of that human error was clearly the result of Nature defeating Man, and not simply Man Screwing Up. At the summit of Everest, 30,000 feet above sea level in the jet stream, the human brain is far out of its element. There's a reason they call this elevation The Death Zone. Recommended.
Zodiac (The Director's Cut): adapted by James Vanderbilt from the non-fiction book by Robert Graysmith; directed by David Fincher; starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Robert Graysmith), Mark Ruffalo (Inspector David Toschi), Anthony Edwards (Inspector William Armstrong), Robert Downey Jr. (Paul Avery), Chloe Sevigny (Melanie), Brian Cox (Melvin Belli), Elias Koteas (Sgt. Jack Mulanax), Dermot Mulroney (Captain Marty Lee), John Carroll Lynch ( Arthur Leigh Allen) and Donal Logue (Captain Ken Narlow) (2007): What I consider to be director David Fincher's finest film, and one of the ten best American movies of the last ten years, is a crime procedural about the hunt for the Zodiac, a San Francisco-area serial killer of the late 1960's and early 1970's. In its calculated retro-look, Zodiac is both an homage and an addition to the ranks of great 1970's docudramas that include The French Connection, Serpico, and All the President's Men.
Mirroring the investigation, the film's pace is slow and deliberate. As the movie only shows Zodiac crimes for which there were witnesses, the first known Zodiac killing is discussed but never shown. And what we are shown of the killings is horrifying but not gratuitous. There's far more gore in an average episode of CSI. Or Dirty Harry, for that matter, itself based partially on the Zodiac killings.
This is a film to be savoured and mulled over. Fincher gets fine performances from his entire cast, though I think Mark Ruffalo -- as (real) Inspector Dave Toschi, gives both the best and the most period-accurate performance. Ruffalo looks like a 70's actor in this film, a slightly more conventionally handsome Gene Hackman. Everyone else is good as well, with Jake Gyllenhaal, as the editorial cartoonist-turned-amateur-sleuth Robert Graysmith, playing the straight-arrow heart of the movie (it's his book that the film is based on).
The opening scene, set to Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man", is one of the most striking set-pieces I've seen in any film. And Donovan's daughter, Ione Skye, has an uncredited cameo later in the film. Weird stuff. The Zodiac too is weird: a mixture of the malign and the banal and the lucky, the killer is accurately portrayed as a windbag who craves media attention. His interactions with celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli (played with smarmy, self-satisfied gusto by Brian Cox, the first movie Hannibal Lecter) look like rehearsals for every ridiculous Nancy Grace and Geraldo Rivera moment of the past 20 years. Belli even appeared in an episode of the original Star Trek, "And the Children Shall Lead", as evil alien angel Gorgon!
Whatever and whoever he was, there's nothing Luciferian about Zodiac, nothing of Hannibal Lecter. John Carroll Lynch (Marge's husband in Fargo) nails his few scenes as the prime suspect in the case, an angry white guy with a really awful trailer full of awful stuff.
The Director's Cut DVD also gives the viewer about three hours of new documentary material on the Zodiac investigation, much of it shot and edited in the style of Errol Morris. This, too, is riveting stuff, and the filmmakers play fair: the documentary material raises doubts about the film's conclusion as to who the Zodiac really was. Highly recommended.
