OVP: The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

Film: The Trial of the Chicago 7

Stars: Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Alex Sharp, Jeremy Strong, John Carroll Lynch, Noah Robbins, Daniel Flaherty, Yahya Abdul Mateen II, Kelvin Harrison, Jr., Mark Rylance, Ben Shenkman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Frank Langella, Michael Keaton

Director: Aaron Sorkin

Oscar History: 6 nominations (Best Picture, Supporting Actor-Sacha Baron Cohen, Original Screenplay, Original Song-"Hear My Voice," Cinematography, Film Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I have said many, many times on this blog when it comes to biopics, I think they are one of the most limiting of film genres, because they are so intertwined with reality.  Their story structure is therefore more routine (the good guys almost always win, if not within the confines of the film surely within its future, because otherwise why would you make it into a movie?), and kind of dull.  Aaron Sorkin apparently agrees with me on this point, as is evidenced by The Trial of the Chicago 7, based on real-life events following the 1968 Democratic National Convention.  Unfortunately for anyone watching the film, Aaron Sorkin's idea of how we should bend real-life is to make the entire world be modeled on Aaron Sorkin.

(Real Life Doesn't Have Spoiler Alerts) The film, as I mentioned, is centered around the Chicago 7, seven leaders in the anti-Vietnam War protests who were charged with conspiracy and the intention to start a riot during the 1968 DNC in Chicago.  As the film unfolds, the movie alternates between flashback & the present-day court trial, in which Richard Schultz (Gordon-Levitt) is winning, largely due to Judge Julius Hoffman (Langella) basically indicting the seven men without the benefit of the jury helping him, harming any attempts from attorney William Kunstler (Rylance) to defend these men in a way that might actually win the case.  While the case is waging, behind the scenes three of the men involved with the trial (Abdul-Mateen's Bobby Seale, Baron Cohen's Abbie Hoffman, and Redmayne's Tom Hayden) are debating the merits of their movement, and where they go forward with it.  The film has its climactic moment when former Attorney General Ramsey Clark (Keaton) takes the stand, and basically accuses the prosecution of this being a revenge attempt against him by current-Attorney General John Mitchell.

In real life, five members of the Chicago 7 were indicted, though charges were eventually dropped and several of the men went on to great success in the public sphere, particularly Hayden, who was a longtime member of the California State Legislature & at one point was married to actress Jane Fonda (a fact that somehow wasn't mentioned by notorious name-dropper Sorkin into his script).  The trial itself definitely makes sense as a film-it's dramatic, has lots of colorful characters, and some truly astonishing moments (while it didn't happen in the same way that it did in the film, Bobby Seale really was bound-and-gagged at one point by Judge Hoffman, a true low point for the American justice system).

But much of Chicago 7 is fiction, to the point where it should probably come with a "loosely-inspired events" tag.  In real life, Ramsey Clark (who deserves his own biopic-not many former Attorneys General ended up counting Saddam Hussein & Muammar Qaddafi as their clients) didn't call the trial political, and Tom Hayden didn't read the names of the fallen soldiers of Vietnam.  Much of the film is heightened to try and increase the drama, and quite frankly I don't have a problem with that-I think film needs to be loose in order to work, and sometimes real life is too chaotic or formulaic to be interesting.  Sorkin is not pretending the film is a documentary, and I can get behind this.

What I can't get behind is how egotistical the film becomes without someone like David Fincher or Bennett Miller to reign in Sorkin's worst impulses.  All of the characters in the film speak in Sorkin's fast-talking, hyper-intellectual dialogue, but as a result they all sound the same-the personality work that someone like Sacha Baron Cohen or Jeremy Strong is putting into the film doesn't matter when, closing your eyes, you can't tell them apart.  It makes for a really bad movie, almost laughably bad after a while, because the film feels grounded in a partisan reality where everyone agrees with each other, and has out-loud debates more to show they agree than to actually talk about anything.  The script, which Sorkin could win an Oscar for, is its worst asset as a result.  The film looks good (it's very handsome, and has some bouts of good acting, though that also is more miss than hit), but the script is just insufferable, the worst thing I've seen Sorkin put to the screen, as it's drenched in ego that sinks the movie.

OVP: Treasure Planet (2002)

Film: Treasure Planet (2002)
Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brian Murray, David Hyde Pierce, Emma Thompson, Martin Short
Director: Ron Clements & John Musker
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Animated Feature Film)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

On a total whim this weekend, I decided to start plugging away at not only some upcoming OVP years, but also with a bit of a lens on the Animated Feature Film race.  I saw three of the movies (one more review coming out later this week, the other one you've hopefully already seen but here's a link if you didn't).  With this viewing, I can now count on one hand the number of Animated Feature films I've seen (and still have a finger or two to spare), and weirdly, I am now officially done with every Disney-Pixar film that has ever been nominated in the category.  I don't have a great excuse for why I didn't see Treasure Planet when it came out (I was still living with my parents as I was just a teenager, and we made something of a point of seeing every Disney film, though like most families around this era we'd kind of moved on to Pixar).  Regardless, this movie, which I always thought looked fantastic in posters, has finally been watched, and today you're going to join me on my weird sojourn into animated films past.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a loose retelling of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel Treasure Island, though set in space.  We have Jim Hawkins (Gordon-Levitt), a young man obsessed with pirates as a child who as an adult is always getting into trouble, to the point where toward the end of Act I, he destroys his mother's inn.  When he does this, a dying pilot gives Jim a golden sphere which turns out to be a map that will lead him to buried treasure, a whole planet of it.  Along with one of his mother's nerdy customers Dr. Doppler (Pierce), Jim sets off on a voyage to this planet.  The ship is captained by the disciplined (but morally sound) Captain Amelia (Thompson), but her crew is a group of pirates in disguise, led by John Silver (Murray), who takes a shine to Jim, but is still intent on winning the treasure.  Once they get to the island, they discover the planet is in fact real, but a mutiny stakes Jim, Amelia, and Doppler against the pirates & their crew, including John Silver who doesn't want to hurt them, but take the gold for himself.  However, the planet is booby-trapped, and as a result the treasure disappears, with John Silver forced to choose between getting the treasure and saving Jim, and being that this is a Disney movie, he saves Jim.  He thus avoids prison time, and Jim uses some of the treasure to fix his mother's inn...with his eyes still focused on the stars & adventures he might have in the future.

The film on original release didn't do well.  While box office numbers are always rough to get at (studio's pad their grosses and under-report their expenditures), the film is generally considered to be a flop, one of a string of movies at the time from the Mouse House that made everyone think that Disney's reign was being superseded by Pixar.  However, nearly twenty years after-the-fact, I both understand why it didn't do well and am perplexed, since the formula for a good Disney movie is there, even if it doesn't always gel.

The film's best attribute is the animation.  The movie uses a winning combination of 2-dimensional drawing atop 3-dimensional computer animation, and it's gorgeous.  There's very few shots in the film that aren't frame-worthy, and some (like the one I picked for this article), stand out as some of the most beautifully-drawn scenes of this era of animation, where the transition was happening into entirely computer-animated animation.  If you're an animation enthusiast, this is worth checking out simply because it's so pretty, and honestly was enough for me to give the thumbs up regardless of the plot.

The plot is mixed.  I liked Murray's interpretation of John Silver, and his adorable sidekick Morph is super cute and would be a bigger deal if this movie had been a hit (I could see the animated shorts from here).  That said, Jim isn't as well-defined of a main character as I'd usually hope given Disney had just gotten off riveting front-line characters like Belle, Pocahontas, and Mulan, and that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was about to become a very seriously-considered actor.  He's better than some of the side characters, though.  David Hyde Pierce & Emma Thompson had been doing this schtick for years at the time, and honestly are still doing some version of it, and Martin Short's BEN (a robot that they find on Treasure Planet) stands apart as one of the most annoying, unnecessary sidekicks in Disney's annals (and I love Marty Short).  These keep me at about a three, but don't confuse that with a bad movie or one where you'll just enjoy the scenery-it's a fun film.  It's just never going to be Beauty and the Beast, and there's a reason this was a disappointment so soon after the Disney Renaissance.

Don Jon (2013)

Film: Don Jon (2013)
Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Tony Danza, Glenne Headly, Brie Larson
Director: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Sex...now that I've got your attention.  We all had some wiseass in our high school or college that decided to put this on their student government posters (and they always won, proving once and for all that sex does indeed sell).  This seems to be the way that we are introduced to Don Jon.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Jon discusses the true passions in his life, and like the rest of us, they include family, home, and sex, and then he adds in his taboo guilty pleasure: porn.  While images of breast implants and Nicki Minaj-style butts fill our giant movie screen, Jon waxes on about the benefits of pornography, and how he prefers it to actual intimacy.

The thing about Don Jon is that this is hardly taboo.  With shows like Sex and the City becoming wildly popular, the "prefers porn" guy has become a regular part of the television and movie landscape.  Even in Jon's case, where he clearly is exhibiting considerable signs of sex addiction, this isn't a topic we are coming to for the first time; Steve McQueen's dangerous and sensual Shame a few years back gave a difficult to top look at what sex addiction can do to a human being.  So I was glad that after a while JGL the director (he wrote, directed, and starred in the film) decided to move away from trying to stun us with more images of naked bodies and instead brought us into the comic exasperation of Jon's life when he decides it's time to fall in love.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie's second act, with Jon wooing the goddess Barbara Sugarman (Johansson), is easily the strongest portion of the film.  The movie follows Jon, so self-confident and sexually satisfied, trying to come to terms with Barbara, clearly beautiful and a woman worth chasing, staving off his advances.  This wouldn't work if Scarlett Johansson wasn't firing on all cylinders (ScarJo hasn't been this excellent in years and years, and is well worth the price of admission).  She plays Barbara as both an unattainable deity, a supermodel as untouchable as the women in Jon's fantasies, and then as a girl who knows what she wants out of life.

Barbara, as Brie Larson in a killer moment later in the film points out (the only time in the whole movie she talks, and man does that bit payoff), is really not good for Jon.  While Jon clearly has major issues and does need to get his life in order, Barbara has a specific vision in mind for the man she wants to marry, and isn't afraid of putting down Jon in order to make him her ideal mate.  The great thing about Johansson's performance is that you find yourself justifying what she's doing because you're comparing Jon's one deviant activity to what she's asking him to change, and she's always the moral winner.  It isn't until Larson's Monica points this out that we see Barbara for what she truly is-just as obsessive, just as narcissistic, and just as addicted as Jon, but in this case it is to getting what she wants.

The film drags when she's not onscreen, giving us this complicated performance.  I know a lot of people have been enamored with Julianne Moore's work in the film, but I just don't get it.  Moore is always worth watching (she's one of the best), but I didn't see anything remotely interesting or new about this performance, except of course that she cries like a pro (but we all knew that about Juli).

Gordon-Levitt, like Moore, is very watchable, though he too suffers when he doesn't have ScarJo's Barbara to bounce off of as a scene partner (you almost get the feeling that JGL wrote the script entirely so this character would have a movie to be built around her).  Since this is JGL's first feature, you definitely can feel that energy of trying to get a vision, a personality onto the screen.  This lends to a lot of the comedy in the film (you will most definitely laugh), but he also exhibits some of the classic first-director sorts of mistakes.  He spends too much time underlining his points; for every clever bit like Larson's, there's more drilling into the audience that, say, Jon is wildly superficial.

He also needs a slightly better editor, particularly when it came to Tony Danza's performance as Jon's father.  This entire plotline, quite frankly, could have been cut.  There's no payoff in the frayed relationship between Jon and his father, and though the role felt like it was written with Danza in mind, it's been too long since he's properly acted, and the lines were showing.  Glenne Headly as Jon's mother was far better, and quite frankly, their relationship was the parental one you cared about as the film progressed.

But the film was still fun, and thanks to ScarJo's work, definitely worth a glance.  For those of you who have seen it, would you also recommend viewing the film?  What sort of movie do you hope that JGL takes on next?  And why can't we get this fun, game, perfectly-executed Scarlett every time she makes a movie?  Let us know in the comments!

Looper (2012)

Film: Looper (2012)
Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo, Jeff Daniels
Director: Rian Johnson
Oscar History: None
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

One of my favorite realizations over the past decade in cinema has been the recent and obvious rise of Joseph Gordon-Levitt from quirky kid on an okay television series to genuine movie star.  Gordon-Levitt has an affability you don't see on screen as much these days-a sense of whimsy, of intelligence, of nerdiness that I find quite endearing.  It was on display most and best in the charming and lovely (500) Days of Summer, a romantic dramedy that I totally fell in love with a few years back.  And yet, since then, about the only thing that I feel he's truly added to a film is the smoldering sexual tension he brings to Inception when he spends half of the movie drooling over Tom Hardy.  He's a great presence off-screen and definitely has talent, but his work in Lincoln and The Dark Knight Rises just doesn't seem to fit into the universe that it's trying to inhabit, and sadly, I don't think that he could possibly have saved Looper, even if he wanted to have made the attempt.

(This review is about to get all kinds of spoiler-y) The movie is about, well, it's about every hackneyed Sci-Fi cliche you could possibly imagine, but it's mostly about time travel.  The film takes place in 2044, and talks about how in the future (2074) there is time travel, but it's only used by crime bosses to kill enemies and to ensure that no one discovers in the future that people have been killed, they send them back in time to be killed by "loopers," scummy paid assassins, of which Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is one.  They're called loopers because eventually they have a golden pay day and will have to kill themselves.  You know, of course, where this is going even if you haven't seen the movie or the previews or Gordon-Levitt's stunningly realistic makeup.  Bruce Willis comes back as Old Joe, and because he's a major film star and not some random character actor, he manages to escape from Young Joe and go on the lam.

Here's where I have my first major problem with the movie.  See, I get that Gordon-Levitt is young and short-sighted and doesn't realize that 58 or 62 (whatever age Willis is supposed to be, but it's surely in that range) is right around the corner, but I just don't think anyone is so stupid that they'd want to kill their future selves.  It seems bizarre to me that you wouldn't count your blessings, quickly go on the run, and take comfort in knowing that you lived for at least another 30 years.

And yet, Young Joe chases down Old Joe, and manages to find him in a cafe, and we learn that Old Joe, after years (and years) of debauchery and killing for hire, eventually meets a lovely woman who changes his life, and is killed on the day he is brought back to be looped.  His mission this time around is to destroy the person who put the hit on him (he has the date of birth and hospital code of the 5-year-old in 2044 that he must kill) and hopefully stop his lady love from being murdered.

The film chases on, with Young Joe acting brazenly and quite idiotically.  He's seen what happens to other people who don't close their loop, and yet he still seems to trust that his life will someday return to normal, and again, keeps trying to kill himself.  Old Joe, too, proves that age does not grant wisdom, and decides to murder an innocent child just to save his wife. At this point in the movie, without showing some perspective or more insight into Old Joe, the entire Old Joe plotline is lost to me, and he became a bit of a villain, which may have been Johnson's intention.  The guy is fine with killing two random kids just to try to save himself from a life he chose as a grown man?  This seems most unpleasant and the sort of thing that should be addressed by a film that is too busy trying to please fanboys with random gadgets and "awesome" concepts than to address the psychological torment that is right there for the creative writing plucking.

The Young Joe story also seems to be deeply silly and overblown.  Emily Blunt's character, completely tough-as-nails in her first scene, about faces and gets all doe-eyed and gooey the second Young Joe talks back to her, and proceeds to be more of a random sidekick than an actual strong, independent woman, (which I was so in the mood for after seeing that Piper Perabo's character was simply a prostitute), but in the mind of Rian Johnson, women's roles in the future will either be hooker, waitress, or a mother waiting to be saved.  Not a great moment for feminism.

The film's ending, though, is where a lot of the vitriol is going for me.  Time travel is fuzzy, and in the movies there are dozens of situations that it just doesn't work in (even the greatest of them all, Lost, had trouble with it), and in the (double spoiler warning) ending, where Young Joe kills himself to prevent Old Joe from killing Emily Blunt's son (who is the future guy who puts a hit out on Old Joe), so Emily Blunt's son won't have a reason to enter into a life of crime?  If that didn't happen, then Old Joe would never have sought him out in the past!  It's the paradox of time travel and change the past sorts of situations-once you remove that need, you're no longer coming back to the past for a reason.  It makes literally no sense, and is a big slap-in-the-face to those of us that stuck around through the nonsense to make it to the final scene.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Film: The Dark Knight Rises
Stars: Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Director: Christopher Nolan
Oscar History: In an absolute stunner, it didn't get a single Oscar nomination in the tech categories
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Typically when I write a review I know an approach that I want to start with, but here, I have so many thoughts racing through my head about the film it's hard to know where to begin.  My first thoughts, and I think most of our first thoughts, are on the senseless tragedy that took place in Aurora, CO.  It's hard to imagine, even years later, that we won't think of the movie and the incident as intertwined.  My second thought is on the Batman films that preceded it, and whether it's fair to compare and contrast the films.  And my final thought is on Nolan himself, the magician who has every fanboy in the country clamoring for his every cinematic thought and nuance.  I'm going to comment right now on the latter two.

The Dark Knight Rises, for those of you who have been living under a rock on Mars (and even if you are living there, you've probably still seen the movie and also skipped John Carter), is the third installment of Christopher Nolan's epic Batman trilogy, and indeed, epic is the optimal word here.  Spoilers are coming, so avert your eyes if you haven't yet caught the latest Caped Crusader flick.  It's been years since I've seen the first film in this trilogy, but I still remember a handsome, sturdy production with a charismatic and shadow-y villain in the Sandman (ably played by Cillian Murphy).  The film opens with a darker, more sinister Batman than even Tim Burton could have imagined.  Despite some silliness (Katie Holmes does not have the acting chops of Maggie Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, and what is with the bad Clint Eastwood impression for Batman's voice?), it was a strong, if slightly vacant, superhero film.

The second film, on the other hand, I get the hype around.  While I'm not one of those blind Nolan fans who will praise his every decision (I thought the Two-Face arc was a bit forced and a bit too quick for my tastes), that doesn't stop me from enjoying a truly spectacular film.  Nolan knows how to make some truly stunning and awe-inspiring visuals, and the opening scene, with a descending camera zooming in on a bank robbery that's about to get a little...stranger-it's just deliriously good cinema.  It's easily the best scene in the entire series, possibly one of the best scenes of the past decade.  And Nolan went for the top of the heap with Heath Ledger's Joker, a carnal and live-wire performance by a gone-far-too-soon actor who still managed to give us two of the finest performances I've ever seen on film (for those who are confused, the other one is in Brokeback Mountain, not 10 Things I Hate About You).

All this is to say that I came into this with expectations that couldn't possibly be met, but I was aware they weren't going to be met, so I was expecting to be underwhelmed when I knew I would be overwhelmed (only Chris Nolan himself would be able to understand that sentence, so let's move on).  The opening plane-hijacking scene is strong, though it's a teensy bit been-there/done-that compared to the Bank Robbery in The Dark Knight, and it gives us the new "haunt-our-dreams" villain, Bane.  I'd start to compare him to the Joker, but I think if we spend this entire review comparing the previous films to this one, it's going to get dull, but let's just say that this was a promising choice of villain, even though I don't particularly agree with having the gorgeous Tom Hardy's mug covered the entire movie (yes, I'm aware that's what the character looks like, but the double standard comes in here-when was the last time a female super villain didn't look like she'd wandered out of Victoria's Secret catalog?).

I'm not going to detail every inch of the movie (that's what the entire rest of the internet is for, apparently), but I will highlight some of my best and worst moments in the movie.  I loved the first half of the film's Bane, a menacing, physical brute whose crusade against the 1% (I made it five paragraphs before mentioning Occupy Wall Street-I think that deserves a freaking medal) gives a shade of grey to his character that I found rather remarkable for a big-screen movie (since most summer action films deal so exclusively in strong levels of black-and-white never allowing for a complicated villain).  I also adored Catwoman, as Anne Hathaway plays her as a woman who doesn't know what she wants for her future, she just knows she doesn't want her past.  And while much has been said about JGL's "right place, right time" character coincidences, I think his strong, morally upright cop is a great counterweight to Batman's more fluid code-of-ethics (similar to Gary Oldman's outstanding work in The Dark Knight...dang it, I compared again).

However, I think that the latter half had some messiness.  While the snow-coated Gotham was a rather sharp and clear visual (many things can be said of Nolan, but a lack of vision is not one of them), the late twist of Talia al Ghul's secret identity was a slap in the face to the entire idea of Bane.  Instead of him being a man with a mission gone too far, he is simply a gun-for-hire at the mercy of a madwoman with daddy issues.  By throwing this in, the shades of grey are now gone, and Nolan has taken the most interesting aspect of his movie away.  And did we really need the entire cave sequence?  Come on-we all know that Batman's going to get out of that prison.  And how the hell did he survive a nuclear blast when he's five feet above the bomb-this isn't Superman we're dealing with?

And what about you-have you seen The Dark Knight Rises?  Where does it rank in your personal Batman list?  Did you like the choices of Bane, Talia, and Catwoman, or were you (like me) hoping more for a Riddler and Harley Quinn duo?  And what about Nolan-the next David Lean or simply the next Michael Bay?