FILM REVIEWS: Blue Jasmine

Although Woody Allen is definitely showing signs of repetition in his technique, you don't fix what isn't broken. Blue Jasmine is a stylish, eloquent, funny, and very realistic take on a trophy wife's fall from grace after her husband is exposed as a fraudulent, tax evading Bernie Madoff spoof. The film juxtaposes flashbacks to Jasmine's rich and spoiled past and her present state of affairs expertly, and although it definitely jumps around, the story is remarkably fluid. It might not reach the classic status of Allen's early-period films, but it's definitely a beautiful showcase of what this great director is capable of.

Blue Jasmine stars Cate Blanchett as the title character, a former Manhattan socialite forced out of her home and stripped of her money by the government. She is forced to move in with her sister in San Francisco. This is where my review becomes a little biased, as San Francisco is both my home city and the best city ever (what a coincidence!). So any film shot here is definitely going to get a bit of a bump in the Final Score. However, something annoyed me about this aspect of the film: When Allen films a city (New York, Rome, Paris), he makes a habit of romanticizing it. So why not do that for San Francisco, the original city of love? It smacks of East Coast pretentiousness.

However, the movie is superb. Cate Blanchett plays the part of a mentally unstable rags-to-riches-to-rags-again character with precision, believability, and grace. There's not a moment in which her tour de force becomes anything less than gripping. The supporting cast is also great, featuring Peter Sarsgaard, Alec Baldwin, Louis CK, and Andrew Dice Clay as... well... Andrew Dice Clay. This might be one of the best casting decisions of all time, as the innate unlikability that Clay carries with him makes the character even more obnoxious. Clay hasn't seemed to notice that audiences don't care for him, so everyone else is content to laugh at him behind his back.

The real achievement in Blue Jasmine is the resistance to making Jasmine a sympathetic character. She's a definite antihero, and at no point in this movie did I want things to end well for her. It's never quite clear whether she's willfully ignorant of her husband's law-bending, or if she's just apathetic and naive. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter, as both of these actions are reprehensible in their own ways.

The story is inspired, but the dialogue is really what makes this movie. It clicks along rapidly, never slowing down or giving the audience a breath. Even though a lot of themes and cliches seem recycled from previous Allen movies, it's not enough to drag Blue Jasmine down at all. Like Christopher Nolan, Allen tends to reuse his actors, but Alec Baldwin is perfectly cast here. After seeing him as the Capital One Venture card guy, you can't help but think that he's a little sleazy.

Much like his earlier films, Allen doesn't seem to feel the need to provide closure to this story. It ends with Jasmine just as despondent and seemingly hopeless as she was when the story began. But somehow, everyone else's lives have improved because of her. Perhaps it's just because she provides the perfect example of what not to do for people, but she's definitely had a positive effect on her sister's life by the end. And even if she didn't get to marry the State Department guy and go off to Vienna, you get the feeling that she won't have too much trouble becoming someone else's trophy wife further down the line.

Final Score for Blue Jasmine: 8/10 stars. If this were the first Woody Allen movie I had seen, I would probably have loved it, but I've seen enough of his other work to know that this is not his best. He has absolutely no range when it comes to the feel and themes of his films, but he's so assured in his direction that it doesn't matter. It's an articulate, authentic, thought-provoking film that could actually make you feel sorry for rich people. And that's an incredible feat just on its own.

HORROR WEEK: American Psycho

Good news, drama fans-- Social commentary is alive and well in the world of cinema. It’s not often that a director can blend horror and scathing humor in such an effective way as in American Psycho, but it’s definitely pulled off here. One doesn’t usually look for biting wit in a horror movie-- especially not one about a psychopathic Wall Street partner who murders people in his spare time-- but the beauty of American Psycho is that you don’t even have to look for it. It hits you over the head with the bludgeoning force of pure insanity.

American Psycho stars Christian Bale as Pat Bateman, a well-off member of the creme de la creme of Wall Street. He has a corner office, a hot secretary, a fiance, and a beautiful penthouse with an epic view. However, he also has a crippling addiction to murder. Firstly, let me say that I loved how well the film plays off of horror movies of old, giving Psycho a fresh and undeniably entertaining twist, while still being original enough to have merit of its own. Instead of presenting us with the typical horror tale, it puts a twist on everything, making the killer the lead, and in the process forcing the audience to become accomplices to his killings. Undoubtedly, those watching it will feel the same malice that Bateman does when murdering innocent people. Which is unsettling... but that’s the point.

Before seeing American Psycho, I was under the impression that Bale was a bit of a bland, boring, and overrated actor. His performances in The Dark Knight trilogy and Rescue Dawn were overrated at best, and his line delivery (especially if it sounds like he has throat cancer) is weak. However, this performance blew me away. Never before have I seen the character of a serial killer tackled with such precision, intensity, and outright glee. He injects an incredible amount of energy into an otherwise one-note character, and the result is some truly classic scenes. Bale has never been more entertaining to watch, and if for nothing else, see American Psycho for him.

The dialogue is spectacular for the most part, but the haphazard scripting is often saved by Bale’s giddy insanity. Coining such seemingly innocuous (yet, in context, extremely creepy) lines such as “Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?” the movie trucks along at a mile a minute, keeping the audience riveted. When one makes a shock/thriller like this, they are forced into outperforming themselves in every scene as the movie progresses, so as not to let up on the suspense. But American Psycho will keep asses in the seats... provided that the audience members don’t have weak stomachs.

But although American Psycho definitely deserves commendation for its epic scripting and memorable performances, it can’t help but be a little scattershot. At the end of the day, the movie boils down to a series of well-done yet emotionally empty scenes that have little weight to carry. It’s pretty haphazard, but as long as you don’t expect it to be very coherent, you’ll have a good time. And really, it’s hard to be picky when you get to see Christian Bale axing a guy in the forehead yelling “TRY GETTING A RESERVATION AT DORSIA NOW, YOU FUCKING STUPID BASTARD!!!”

And really, American Psycho is a horror/thriller, but it’s also a commentary on the mentality of Wall Street, capitalism, and society in general. There are scenes that borrow heavily from horror classics, sure. But the movie is at its best when it shows the insanity of the banking world as crazier than Bateman himself. One scene, in which Bateman and his friends sit around a table comparing each other’s business cards and sizing the competition up, speaks a lot more about the world of money than the world of serial killers. Not only is it entertaining, but those who have soul-crushing jobs in the industry should take away a lot from it.

Final Score for American Psycho: 8/10 stars. Not only is this film terrifying, it’s terrifyingly ACCURATE. It portrays a man who is crazy in two ways: For power and for blood. And surprisingly, the time when he is craziest is when he is leading a normal life, pretending to be a whole person. “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

TV REVIEWS: Breaking Bad

I once thought that, in all the history of television, there weren’t many stories that people dared to do. Sitcoms always had the plucky and sarcastic lead, the straight man friend, the love interest, and the goofball. Dramas always had the mysterious lead, the shallow friend, the hot love interest, and the crazy guy. Westerns were always westerns, medical dramas were always boring, and cop shows always began with CSI and ended with ‘Vice.’ In short, yes, I had lost all faith in TV and decided that movies were the medium with which to spend my entertainment time. And then... a one in a million show like Breaking Bad came onto my radar. Those who call it one of the greatest shows of all time are underselling it-- this is THE GREATEST TV drama of all time. It dispenses of every gimmick, every trope, and everything you ever thought you knew about TV. And what you’re left with is the most original television series of all time.

But before I go full fanboy, let’s tell the story-- Breaking Bad is the sordid, morbid, and increasingly depressing tale of Walter White, an underachieving high school chemistry teacher who is hit with an unexpected cancer diagnosis. He begins cooking the purest meth of all time, first to provide for his family, and later because (in his own words) “I’M GOOD AT IT.” My biggest beef with people who don’t like this show is the argument they always present about it: IT’S JUST A SHOW ABOUT METH. Yes, that is the setup. Yes, that is what sets the events in motion. But the actual cooking of the meth is shown only on occasion. Most of the time, you will get so sucked into the characters, you will forget that meth was even part of it in the first place. This show is all about Walt, and how through the process of cooking a product that kills people, he corrodes his soul to the point of no return. In short, he ‘breaks bad,’ hence the title of the show.

The biggest feat this show accomplishes is the way it can make the audience feel sympathetic for Walt, even after he lets a girl suffocate in her own vomit, poisons a child, and is indirectly responsible for an airplane collision. But he’s not evil; he’s just an ordinary man driven to enormous extremes under incredible circumstances. Bryan Cranston’s performance as White is one of the best of all time, as he leads a remarkable double life, hiding his secret from his family and friends. As the show progresses, you begin to understand that maybe Walt was like this all along, and it just took this final insult to push him over the edge and allow him to become what he always was deep down: A cold, hardened, and frightening criminal mastermind. The more the audience sees, the more we understand that the shallow and lighthearted personality he puts on at home is the act, and his real persona is that of Heisenberg, his alter ego and secret identity that he uses while dealing with the meth underworld. His transformation isn’t really a transformation-- it was just a change waiting to happen.

Accompanying Walt is Jesse Pinkman, a druggie burnout who was once a student of Walt’s, and whose favorite insult word is ‘bitch.’ Jesse was supposed to be killed off near the beginning of the show, but fortunately, the writers took another path-- and thank God they did, because it’s impossible to imagine the show without him. Jesse, although he is a drug addict with emotional problems, is still hands down the heart and soul of the show. He is easily the most intrinsically sympathetic character in the series, and as his character is explored more and more, we understand that he’s not really a bad person. He’s just a good person in increasingly bad situations. Which makes it all the more painful to see him in pain as Walt attempts to drag him down with him. His story arc with Jane is enough to leave no dry eyes in the room, but unfortunately he consistently allows himself to be manipulated by Walt, which makes him a bit of an annoying character. Still, Aaron Paul is perfect in the role, even if the stories that are done with him aren’t always so enthralling.

A plethora of supporting characters surround these two. Anna Gunn plays Walt’s controlling wife Skylar, the weakest character on the show at the beginning, but an incredibly sympathetic one towards the end as we witness her mental breakdown after she discovers Walt’s true nature (but she’s still a bitch). Dean Norris, a virtual unknown before he started on the show, proves himself to be one of the most powerful actors working right now with his tour de force as Hank Schrader, Walt’s brother-in-law who works for the DEA, and acts as the show’s moral center. Bob Odenkirk of Mr. Show also stands in as the consistently hilarious comic relief Saul Goodman, the criminal lawyer (and I mean CRIMINAL lawyer) who Walt and Jesse hire to be the Tom Hagan to Walt’s Vito Corleone. And if that wasn’t enough, Giancarlo Esposito gives the performance of a lifetime as the cool, calm, and self-assured drug kingpin Gustavo Fring, who makes Walt’s double life look like child’s play. Each of these characters have incredibly powerful story arcs (except that bitch Skylar), giving masterful performances and acting out some of the best-written and most amazing scenes in all of TV. Gus’s death at the end of season four is spectacularly done. Hank’s sudden realization about Walt in the episode “Gliding Over All” is the ultimate cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers. Every scene crackles with authenticity, incredible dialogue, and unforgettable characters. It’s totally mesmerizing.

Credit must be given to Vince Gilligan, who I am ready to elect president now, forget about the Emmys. He saw something in Bryan Cranston back when the two worked together in The X-Files, and that made him pick Cranston for the role. Every character is perfectly cast, and everyone is relatable (except that bitch Skylar), but the choice to put a comedic actor in the role of Walter White is simultaneously the most eyebrow-raising and massively entertaining move in all of TV. But I can’t complain about anyone really (except that bitch Skylar), because all of the actors are so well cast, all of the characters are so deep and well-explored, and all of the dialogue is so realistic and powerful. This show has given us some of the most iconic viewing experiences of all time, from episode one in which Walt stands in the middle of the street in his tighty whities, to the final installment, where he rigs a car trunk to open and an automatic rifle to spray a building with bullets. Along the way, we bear witness to dissolved bodies falling through ceilings, bike lock strangulations, Pontiac Aztek killings, roof pizza, crawlspace screaming, bell ringing, an incredibly obnoxious fly, rocks (sorry, minerals), tracking devices, magnets, meth that is not meth, science (BITCH), face removals, breakfast, a meth superlab, the saddest moment for an RV in recent memory, garage confrontations, and the inevitable spiral into darkness for the most conflicted main character of all time. It will have you riveted.

Final Score for Breaking Bad: 10/10 stars. This show is perfect (with the exception of that bitch Skylar), with not a moment that should be left out or changed. Everything works here, and it’s the kind of dialogue-driven drama that people should be craving nowadays. As much as the prudes and wimps of the world would like it to go away, it won’t-- this show is cemented in its legacy as the ultimate example of what TV should be like. Not only has it paved a way for more dramas like (but not equal to) it, it has claimed its place at the top of the television pantheon. It’s the one show that lives up to its hype. It’s something that truly has to be seen to be believed. It’s incredible. It’s awesome. And you will be rooting for its tortured lead all the way to the end. It’s Breaking Bad.

FILM REVIEWS: Spring Breakers

If you make shit intentionally, and you call it art, is it still shit? This is the question that director Harmony Korine asks with Spring Breakers, and unfortunately, the answer is yes. Challenging Only God Forgives for the best cinematography yet worst script of the year, this rote heap of manure is uninspired, unoriginal, and completely offensive to good taste and everything it stands for. To call this bikini-clad onslaught of decadence, filth, and disgusting imagery a movie in any sense of the word is an enormous insult to actual cinema. This thing, whatever it is, is clearly not a movie, as it lacks characters, a plot, a coherent story, and dialogue that a potty-mouthed second-grader couldn’t have written. It’s the anus of cinema.

Spring Breakers is the story of, and I shall put this bluntly, four dumb sluts who rob a redneck fast-food joint in order to pay for their retarded spring break. They then proceed to drive down to Florida for the three Bs of spring break: Bongs, beaches, and boobies. For those of you expecting some sort of scathing social commentary from the infamously subversive director of this atrocity, look elsewhere. It is nowhere near as deep or as blunt as it should be, and it ends up getting too enthralled with showing the audience the disgusting side of youth in America, while simultaneously forgetting to actually satirize it. The result is an enormous, pointless, and borderline unwatchable mess that qualifies as one of the worst movies of the year.

Spring Breakers stars Selena “Getaway Bitch” Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Rachel Korine, and Ashley Benson as the four constantly bikini-clad main characters, and co-stars James Franco as a rapper by the name of Alien who takes them under his wing. Franco has been praised for his performance in this film, and I can see why, as he clearly gives it his all. But he’s playing such a one-dimensional character (“LOOK AT ALL MY SHIT!”), it’s impossible to give a fuck about him, no matter how invested he is in the role. Meanwhile, the four girls are virtually interchangeable, each having the occasional breakdown but always getting better just in time for a little more insanity.

The begrudging exception is Gomez as Faith, who acts as the highly religious moral center of the film. She’s still a dumb slut, but it’s really not that hard to be the moral center of a movie with characters this detestable and one-dimensional. I was waiting for her to somehow guide the movie to a close, or at least provide a mildly relatable character for the audience to take an interest in, but no-- she went home halfway through the movie. And the audience is then left with nothing but James Franco and three idiots jackassing around Florida and shooting shit up.

The sole saving grace of this film is the cinematography, which blends mind-bending slow motion with technicolor neon lights to create an incredibly weird effect. Supposedly, the film was supposed to resemble an acid trip, and the director definitely succeeded on that front. But even when the camerawork is magnificent, which it often is, it’s still filming repetitive shit. Yes, Harmony Korine, we get it-- you like boobs. But showing them to us for ninety minutes isn’t really a movie. It’s softcore porn.

The dialogue, when it even shows up, is some of the worst ever written. “Spring break... spring break forever...” I don’t know who the sadist is who had James Franco say that line eight hundred times over the course of this shitfest, but he deserves a special place in hell. For ninety minutes that feel like ninety hours, this movie plods along contributing nothing to society, much like the knuckledraggers who made it. The damage this kind of movie wreaks on people’s minds is unforgivable. I’d say that it was a career-killer, but to be honest, none of the people in this thing really had a career to begin with. And rightly so.

Final Score for Spring Breakers: 2/10 stars. Even though it features an inexplicably committed performance by James Franco, this painful mess is impossible to recommend on any level to anyone. It’s not only bad, it’s aggressively bad-- so bad, in fact, that it makes the audience feel as though they’re missing some biting piece of social commentary that, if noticed, will make Spring Breakers instantly enjoyable. But that aspect of this film does not exist, and if it does, it will elude any viewer who hasn’t taken a bong rip in the past half-hour. It’s the anus of cinema.