MY MOVIE SHELF: True Grit

 

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 14 Days to go: 12

Movie #426:  True Grit

This movie is spectacular. I’ve never seen the John Wayne original, but I can’t imagine it holds a candle to the crisp filmmaking of the Coen Brothers and the sensational performances of Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon as Mr. LaBoeuf and especially Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross. (I would’ve given her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in a heartbeat.)

The story is narrated by the grown Mattie (Elizabeth Marvel), recounting the time when she was fourteen and her father was killed by the villain Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). He had been away from home on an errand, so Mattie travels to have his body sent back and to capture the criminal herself, since no one else there will care enough to.

The title comes from Mattie’s declaration to Rooster that she has chosen to hire him — a U.S. Marshall — to track down Chaney because she’s heard he has “true grit,” but it’s Mattie who has grit, as she demonstrates over and over. She’s clever, strong-willed and formidable. She has a keen mind for business and law and she takes pains not to trifle with silliness, but she’s not without soul or spirit. She can outsmart a grown man on financial negotiations one minute and cheerily reminisce about the time her father took her on a coon hunt the next. She won’t give up her quest to find Chaney, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t delight in telling ghost stories around the campfire. She’s resolute, but she is open to new opinions and admits when she’s misjudged people, and she gains the respect of nearly all that she encounters, kind of by the sheer force of her will, including notorious criminal Lucky Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper), who they find Chaney riding with. She feels fear, anger, sadness and deep affection over the course of her journey with the Marshall and the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf and proves herself to be a deep and richly drawn character, who, despite being so young, carries the whole film.

There’s something to be said, too, for the way Rooster and LaBoeuf are also changed by Mattie, both in their relationship with each other and their feelings toward her. They are truly comrades on this quest, working together and coming to respect and appreciate one another in a way only people who have shared a great trial can. All have flaws — and the dialogue snaps with crackling insults and banter as they pick at each other — and all have strengths, and out of these characters flows the story.

I’ve never really considered myself a fan of westerns, but True Grit is the clear exception. The ride is harrowing, the stakes are high, and the action is compelling. Even the largely unlikable broad strokes of the characters (Rooster is gruff, LaBoeuf is arrogant and Mattie herself is stubborn) are made sympathetic by their words and deeds, each one coming to the assistance of the others, and proving there is more to them than their outward appearance. The film is stark and unforgiving, as traditional westerns are, but it is full of heart and courage and perseverance, and I absolutely love it. (I’ve already seen it more times than I can count.)

MY MOVIE SHELF: Rounders

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 211  Days to go: 148

Movie #227:  Rounders

On the surface, Rounders is about poker, and while it’s the only real poker movie I’m aware of, it’s also one of the best movies poker could ever hope to have about itself. These guys get poker. I don’t play the kind of poker these guys play — I don’t play high stakes, and I don’t hustle and I certainly don’t visit shady poker houses in seedy corners of the city (any city) — but for anyone who is a serious player (at any level), Rounders knows what it’s like. It knows poker is about the read of the people you’re with. It knows it’s a skill. It knows other people don’t get it. It knows most people can’t play for shit. It knows sometimes you’re the sucker. It knows splashing the pot is a dick move and the only people who string bet are schmucks who think they’re big time even though everything they know about the game came from stupid movies. It knows the rush of getting a great read or playing a perfect hand. It knows the obsessiveness with which you replay all your worst beats. It knows there’s actually information to be gleaned by watching other people play. It knows everything.

Mostly, Rounders knows that the real draw of poker is not the cash. The cash is a benefit; the cash is a necessity. The real draw is the prestige of sitting down with a monster player and out-playing him. The real draw is in the finding out of whether or not you can hang. I’m not a high stakes player, and I don’t get to play nearly as often as I’d like to anymore, but I promise you I could sit down against anyone heads-up. Me and Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) have that in common — that confidence, at least. In my case, it’ll probably be a lifetime before I can put anyone’s money where my mouth is, but such is life. We can’t all be Johnny Chan.

On the surface, Rounders is about poker, and it’s a great poker flick, but it’s also about friendship. Mike has this no-good buddy from way back named Worm (Edward Norton), and the two are like brothers. Or at least, Mike has it in his head that they’re like brothers, so he lets Worm take advantage of him. Rounders is about that kind of toxic friendship, where the friends you had as a kid just aren’t your friends anymore — you’ve outgrown them, they haven’t grown up at all — but you keep hanging on. It’s about how tough it is to let go, and how easy it is to be drawn into their drama again, no matter how much time has passed. And as the realization gradually dawns on Mike that Worm is full of shit and not his friend at all, as he’s already in way too deep to dig himself out, it’s positively cringe-inducing. It’s a painful rite of passage, and it costs Mike a lot. It costs him his girlfriend Jo (Gretchen Mol, who was this fresh-faced little gem in 1998 that I have a hard time reconciling with the hard-scrabble Mrs. Darmody from Boardwalk Empire), and it costs him his potential law school career, though maybe he doesn’t care about that as much as he thought (because the movie is also about finding yourself). Norton and Damon actually have great chemistry as dysfunctional friends, and Norton’s Method acting really sells him as quite the worthless wastrel (who, quite frankly, talks the table way too fucking much). Their camaraderie and their dissolution both feel earned, and it adds a higher level of stakes to the film than the money involved ever could.

John Tuturro is kind of fabulously understated as all-knowing, no-playing grinder Joey Knish, and Famke Janssen is sexy as ever as fellow shark Petra, but the real scenery chewer is John Malkovich (naturally) as Teddy KGB. Of course, Malkovich’s accent is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard, and his ridiculously simplistic Oreo tell is like child’s play, but his hilarious pantomiming and gesticulating and trash talking are things of beauty not to be missed. Plus, Martin Landau is off to the side as the minister of sage life advice Professor Petrovsky, and what’s not to like about that?

My only complaint about Rounders, honestly, (except for not liking Worm at all, but that’s kind of the point) is that for a kid who’s supposed to be some sort of table-reading, tell-observing prodigy, Mike (or Matt Damon’s face, one) has more tells than just about anybody. You’d think someone would’ve picked up on that.

Then again, maybe Mike isn’t quite as good as he thinks he is. I could probably take him.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Ocean’s Thirteen

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 178  Days to go: 181

Movie #199:  Ocean’s Thirteen

It drives my husband crazy that I own Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen but not Ocean’s Twelve, but the only reason I own Ocean’s Thirteen is to get the horrible taste of Ocean’s Twelve out of my mouth and do the best I can to forget it ever existed. That’s the God’s honest truth.

In this one, the crew is once again scattered to the four winds, but they return to Vegas when Reuben (Elliott Gould) is double-crossed out of ownership of a brand new, hot casino on the strip by hotel mogul Willy Bank (Al Pacino, only slightly less a mockery of himself than he was in Godfather III). Bank is a ruthless businessman and an egomaniac. He prides himself on having the hottest, best hotels in all the land, on getting the 5-Diamond award for each one, and for buying an exquisite diamond necklace — which are all in a tower display in his suite — each time he gets that praise. And of course, he’s obsessed with money and power. In order to avenge Reuben, Danny (George Clooney) and his crew — Rusty (Brad Pitt), Basher (Don Cheadle), Virgil (Casey Affleck), Turk (Scott Caan), Yen (Shaobo Qin), Frank (Bernie Mac), Livingston (Eddie Jemison), Saul (Carl Reiner) and Linus (Matt Damon) — work out a way to strip Bank of all of that.

This movie is structured differently than the first, in that it’s more upfront about the cons. It doesn’t try to hide the plan from the audience, as much as reveal step by step how they’re going to dismantle Bank’s casino on opening night by having it pay out millions to everyone on the floor. In addition, since status and reputation are so important to Bank, they have Saul act as the hotel’s reviewer so Bank and his assistant Abigail Sponder (Ellen Barkin) are inclined to give him special treatment, while Danny’s crew secretly sabotage the real reviewer’s stay. (Poor David Paymer, who plays the real reviewer, gets no love his entire stay, but he does win big at the airport on his way home, so that’s something.)

Unfortunately, the team hits a financial snag and have to go through their old nemesis Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia, much more put together and less gross than he was in Godfather III) — a plot line that has a lot to do with what happened in Ocean’s Twelve, but let’s forget that ever happened — in order to bankroll this elaborate con. Terry has a condition: he wants Banks’s diamonds as well. Too bad they’re impossible to get.

There are still a few things Ocean’s Thirteen holds off on revealing, the con is pretty satisfying, and Matt Damon wears a ridiculous nose as part of his role in seducing Ms. Ponder (She’s a “cougar.” He read about the term in Maxim magazine.), so overall the film works for me. At least, it works a hell of a lot better than Ocean’s Twelve did.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Ocean’s Eleven

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 179  Days to go: 181

Movie #198:  Ocean’s Eleven

Do you remember how fantastic and surprising Ocean’s Eleven was when it came out? I do. It was charming and slick and utterly unexpected. It took an old Rat Pack movie so boring and dull nobody even remembered it anymore and made it a bright, memorable, amazing heist film that is still as great today as it was then.

George Clooney is Danny Ocean, a thief getting paroled from prison and, despite his claims to the parole board, immediately on the lookout for his next big score. He contacts a former cohort and current blackjack dealer — Frank Catton, posing as Ramon since his real identity won’t get him past the gaming commission, played by the late great Bernie Mac — and finds out his partner in crime Rusty (Brad Pitt) is out in L.A. So off he goes.

Rusty is teaching poker to young celebrities (Topher Grace, Joshua Jackson, Shane West, Holly Marie Combs, and Barry Watson), which looks like its boring him to tears. When Danny shows up, the two have a little fun with the group, fleece them of several thousand dollars, and set out to learn the job, which is this: Danny has a plan to rob the Las Vegas casinos, The Bellagio, the Mirage and the MGM Grand. The score is upwards of $150million, but that’s not all. Danny’s ex-wife Tess (Julia Roberts) is dating Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) now, the owner of these three particular casinos, and Danny hopes to get her back while hitting him where it hurts. To do it, he needs a crew.

Reuben (Elliott Gould) is the money. He has a history of owning Las Vegas casinos himself and knows the risk, however he has a grudge against Benedict himself, so he’s in. The first time I saw his gaudy shorts and robe outfit the first time he’s on screen, I laughed so hard I completely missed their entire conversation.

Frank comes out from Atlantic City and gets a job inside the casino. He’s the inside man. “You might as well call it White Jack!” He also has a serious interest in moisturizing techniques.

Casey Affleck and Scott Caan are the Malloy brothers, Virgil and Turk. I forget the cool heist nickname they have, but their competitive chemistry together is spectacular. They bicker and bait each other, both for fun and for profit, but Turk’s laugh when he runs over Virgil’s remote control monster truck (with Turk’s life-sized monster truck), is the best thing in the film.

Eddie Jemison is Livingston Dell, the technology guy. He’s nervous and he sweats a lot. This proves dangerous later.

Shaobo Qin is Yen, a Cirque de Soleil performer who is crazy flexible and acrobatic to an almost frightening degree. He’s the grease man. I’m not sure why they call him that.

The fabulous Carl Reiner is Saul Bloom. He got out of the game a year earlier because of ulcers, but came back in because of the score. He is maybe not in the best of health. Will it harm the team?

Matt Damon is expert lifter Linus Caldwell, who mostly gets treated like a kid and pretty much resents the hell out of it. After all, these guys have rap sheets longer than his … they’re very long.

Finally, my boyfriend Don Cheadle is Basher, the munitions guy. He has a cockney accent and crawls around in the sewers on occasion, but he’s really good in (and with) a pinch.

Ocean’s Eleven is set up as the perfect heist movie, giving away part of the plan, letting more of it play out as it happens, and leaving some hidden even then, only revealing their secrets after the boost is successfully completed. It works flawlessly this way, offering obstacles and red herrings and misdirections to the audience to keep them not entirely sure of how this is going to play out or if it’ll even be successful. And in the end, the con is extremely satisfying.

Be careful what you say, though, because in Terry Benedict’s hotels, “someone is always watching.”

MY MOVIE SHELF: Good Will Hunting

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 248 Days to go: 251

Movie #129: Good Will Hunting

I think about Good Will Hunting a lot. I think about how Minnie Driver lost weight from her breakout role in Circle of Friends, where she played a slightly heavy but completely lovable girl, and then achieved a higher level of stardom from her role as Skylar here. I think about Robin Williams getting the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Sean, playing such a calm, centered nurturing guy (the Oscars love it when you play against type), and whether or not I agree with the win (of the nominees, yes — overall, I still don’t know). I also think about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s friendship and how these two dudebros managed to write this great little script, win a freaking Oscar for it, rocket into superstardom, and forever be referred to in movie trailers as “Academy Award Winner” so-n-so. And then I get really pissed off and have to stop thinking about Good Will Hunting for a while.

Matt Damon has won one Oscar, for writing Good Will Hunting. He has been nominated for two more, once for Lead Actor (in Good Will Hunting) and once for Supporting Actor (in Invictus). If Matt Damon is starring in a movie, touting him as an Academy Award Winner, while technically correct, is misleading. Unless he wrote the movie, his only relevant Oscar contribution is as an Academy Award-Nominated actor.

Ben Affleck is even worse. He has no acting awards, no acting nominations. He’s won two Oscars, one for writing Good Will Hunting and one for producing Best Picture winner Argo. Unless he’s written and/or produced the movie you’re promoting, you really have no place trading on his Academy Award Winner status. I am not a crackpot.

On the serious side, I feel like somewhere down the line a piece of Good Will Hunting seeped into my subconsciousness and made me a more patient, more caring person. (If you are reading this and you know me personally, don’t laugh. I really am more patient and caring than I was pre-1997, I swear.) The movie is ostensibly about this genius kid Will (Damon) who solves impossible math problems in his free time and maybe has an eidetic memory but grew up in a tough neighborhood with a tough childhood, lives at or below the poverty line and has a history of run-ins with the cops, but who gets a chance at a promising future of limitless possibilities from a renowned professor (Stellan Skarsgard) who arranges for him to avoid jail for his latest assault on the condition Will meets with him to do math and goes to therapy with Sean (Williams). What it’s really about, however, is someone who’s more interested in being a smart-ass than being authentic or sincere. It’s all defense mechanisms and walls put up to keep anyone from getting too close to him because deep down he doesn’t think he’s worth loving and he doesn’t want the people he cares about to figure that out. That could maybe come off clichéd, but it doesn’t because of how real Will’s character is — not the super genius part, but the angry young man throwing his life away because he’s convinced it doesn’t mean anything part. That’s a character I know well — it’s someone I’ve been, and it’s people I’ve loved — and I really believe something about this movie helped me be more patient with those people (myself included), helped me build them up and support them instead of being petty and judgmental. But it also helped me be more frank and open about my needs, my hopes and my limits.

Will doesn’t want to hear Sean or Jerry (Skarsgard) tell him how crazy it is to throw his life away, because he doesn’t think they understand him and he believes they’re supposed to say that sort of stuff to him. When his buddy Chuckie (Affleck) tells him how stupid he’s being, however, his ears perk up. He takes heed of that advice because it’s coming from an unexpected source, in an unexpectedly blunt manner. “Look, you’re my best friend, so don’t take this the wrong way but, in twenty years if you’re still living here, coming over to my house, watching the Patriots games, working construction, I’ll fucking kill you. That’s not a threat, that’s a fact, I’ll fucking kill you.” Sometimes that’s what it takes to get through to someone, and somewhere along the line, I’ve internalized that little nugget of truth as well.

So just remember: If I tell you something is fucking stupid, it doesn’t mean I’m not being patient and caring.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Dogma

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 287  Days to go: 276

Movie #90: Dogma

As the disclaimer states at the start of Dogma, this movie is a comedic fantasy. It tells the story of two angels cast out of heaven that are trying to get back through a Catholicism loophole and a ragtag band of crusaders trying to prevent that from happening because to prove God wrong would unmake existence. And like any Kevin Smith movie, it’s filled with fast-paced dialogue, witty observations and a lot of silliness wrapped up in a lot of profanity. Also, in the same way every other Kevin Smith film is basically a stage for Smith to expound on his numerous pet theories, Dogma is a single, consolidated location for all his theories on religion.

Unsurprisingly, Smith has a lot of theories on religion — particularly Catholicism, which I assume he’s most familiar with — and everything is presented here in both a wry, discerning way and a completely tongue-in-cheek one. But in the midst of all this wildly overblown farce are some actual thoughtful and enlightened ruminations on the concept of faith.

Linda Fiorentino plays Bethany, a lifelong Catholic who has lost her faith (though she still goes to church out of habit). Bethany is the last Scion (the last living descendant of Jesus — the movie doesn’t posit Jesus himself had any children, but that Mary and Joseph had other children after Jesus was born and that Bethany is his many-times-great-grand-niece) and is tasked by the Metatron (the voice of God, played of course by Alan Rickman because I assume Morgan Freeman wasn’t available) with stopping fallen angels Bartleby and Loki (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, naturally) from transsubtantiating into human form, being wiped clean of all sins, and ascending into heaven. The two angels were long ago servants of God but were cast out when they questioned His/Her orders and have been roaming the cheese-headed wasteland of Wisconsin ever since. Like Bethany, Bartleby has lost all faith, is disillusioned by the seeming capriciousness of a God that can be so forgiving with some and so cruelly unjust with others. Even coming from a comedic fantasy, that’s a feeling I know for a fact many people have felt in their lives.

Bethany is joined by thirteenth apostle Rufus (Chris Rock), former muse Serendipity (Salma Hayek) and supposed prophets Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith), and they all have quite a lot to say about religion, the Bible and belief systems in general — well, everyone but Jay and Silent Bob, who are mostly around for comic relief. Serendipity talks about the Bible’s gender bias, while Rufus has a beef with its racial homogeny — both pointing out the obvious fact that, moved by divine inspiration or not, (white) men wrote the Bible and inserted their own agendas and prejudices into it — not necessarily intentionally, but that it’s a known risk factor in the translation. People always see things through the lens and perspectives of their own experiences, and so mankind has to find a way to filter through the biases of the hundreds of generations who came before and simply connect with the truth of the original message. It’s not an easy thing to do, but I think it’s such an important part of living a full life. Faith is not about taking things as they are spoon fed to you, never questioning the things you are told. Faith is about humbling yourself enough to know that you don’t know the answers — that no one does — and seeking out the truth in your heart and in your soul. Faith is about simply believing that we have a purpose, even if we never know what it is — that something out there is bigger than we are.

Of course, it’s not easy to promote that kind of faith. That kind of faith is difficult and taxing. It’s much more convenient to simply follow a bunch of rules and take the required steps and go through the motions that many of us are taught in childhood. But as Rufus and Serendipity point out, God is bigger than all that, and no single religion has it truly figured out. Real faith is work because it requires toil and acceptance and humility. It requires tolerance and patience beyond what most of us have naturally. Bethany initially rejects her role as a leader of this kind of faith, because it’s scary and it’s hard. Nobody could fault her for resisting that path, because most people would do the same — it would feel like too much of a burden, too heavy a responsibility to carry. I like that the film accepts this about us as humans, and doesn’t make judgments about the innate flaws we all have.

Where it does make judgments is everywhere else, from Loki smiting a bunch of Mooby executives for laughs, to Bartleby and Loki being mere pawns of the demon Azrael (Jason Lee) because as far as Azrael’s concerned going back to the nothingness before existence would be better than Hell, to the cynical idea that a pompous man of God (Cardinal Glick, played by George Carlin, OF COURSE) would bless his own golf club in order to improve his game. It also winks at God’s sense of humor, casts street hockey punks as minions of Hell, accuses someone of selling his soul to Satan to up the grosses on Home Alone, says that God is a woman (played by Alanis Morissette, duh), and indicates She has a serious love of Skeeball. Like, who doesn’t?

Obviously I don’t think Dogma is the last word on God and religion, any more than I think religions are the last word on God and religion, but I do think that open-mindedness and discussion and meditation on a subject — even one as fraught with the perils of questioning closely-held belief systems as religion is — are the true paths to enlightenment. I think we learn more by opening ourselves up to the views and experiences of others than we do by insisting that our way is right and nothing else is possible. As Rufus says, wars are fought and lives lost over beliefs, but ideas are much more flexible. If our faiths were built on ideas — changeable, malleable, evolving ideas — I think we’d be a lot closer to peace and acceptance than we are now.

I’m not so naive as to think anything like peace or total acceptance is even a possibility in this world, but it certainly is a nice idea.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Departed

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 294  Days to go: 281

Movie #83: The Departed

Of all the 21st-century-era Scorsese movies people were clamoring to give him the Best Director Oscar for (Gangs of New York, The Aviator and The Departed) after not having won any of the previous  times he was nominated (for Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ and Goodfellas), I’m really glad the one that finally did it for him was The Departed, because it was the most deserving of the three. Gangs of New York is uneven, and the only truly great performance is Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). The Aviator is a show-stopper, no doubt, and I thought much more of a grand entertaining picture than eventual Best Picture/Director winner Million Dollar Baby, but, while it won a handful of statuettes, parts again felt uneven, and though I disagreed, I understood the Academy’s preference for the Eastwood flick. The Departed, however, is fantastic. With that, I will brook no argument.

Dealing with the corrupt world of south Boston organized crime and the police force tasked with taking down crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), The Departed is a twisted, layered film of intrigue and betrayal. Costello has rats inside the police force. The state troopers have undercover guys inside Costello’s crew. Good guys are bad guys and bad guys are good guys. Nobody can be trusted.

Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is an up-and-coming state police detective with a lot of ambition and a lot of upward mobility. He’s also informing to Costello about police movements in the Special Investigation Unit. William Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a Southie kid with a bad reputation who makes good by becoming a trooper, but is placed in deep undercover with Costello by the State Undercover Unit, run by Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg). Both men are consumed and torn apart by their double lives, always afraid someone knows who they are, always looking over their shoulders as both Costello and the SIU come to realize their have a traitor in their midst. What follows is a tense and terrifying game of cat and mouse, with no way of knowing who, if anyone, is going to get out alive.

I admit to having a soft spot for these thick Boston accents, and the constant profanity-laden insults warm the New York cockles of my heart, but I honestly love the performances in this one. Everyone is hard, everyone is angry, everyone is throwing their dicks around trying to prove whose is biggest, and it’s great. Male competitive machismo is something Martin Scorsese is great at, and that’s quite a niche. However, out of all the excellent work here I think DiCaprio really does some of the best of his career. For the first time in a long time, he manages to shed every ounce of his own persona to take on the two competing ones of Billy Costigan. He’s tortured and scared and tough and vulnerable and badass and smart and sexy as hell. (Like most Scorsese movies, there’s not much room for women to do anything, but Vera Farmiga does amazing work as police psychologist Madolyn, who is torn between Sullivan and Costigan herself, for different reasons — girl has got a type.)

Sadly, this is one of the roles DiCaprio didn’t get nominated for — not that he would’ve won; the Academy has some sort of grudge against Leo — but it won Best Picture and Best Director (as well as Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing), so I can’t really complain I guess.

Scratch that. I want somebody to come at me asking who I am to question the Academy’s decisions just so I can counter with “Who am I? I’m the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy.”

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Bourne Ultimatum

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #37: The Bourne Ultimatum

First of all, I would like to thank Robert Ludlum for titling this initial Bourne trilogy of his to fall sequentially into alphabetical order. I appreciate that on behalf of my neuroses.

Secondly, I made a point to look at The Bourne Ultimatum with a critical eye to the fight scenes, and I still contend that director Paul Greengrass (who also helmed The Bourne Supremacy) orchestrates a tight, controlled chaos in his action sequences. The chase scene through Tangiers, and the culminating fight between Damon’s Bourne and the asset sent to kill him and Nicky (Julia Stiles), is shot close and fast, but is still orienting enough for the audience to track all of the action. And what action it is. Tense, thrilling, slow and cautious in places, panicked in others. Nicky is fleeing Desh (Joey Ansah), not knowing where Jason is. Desh is chasing Nicky, thinking Jason’s dead. And Jason is chasing Desh to prevent him from killing Nicky. It’s fantastic.

It is weird, though, that Nicky doesn’t say a single word to Bourne after that. There are two or three scenes where they’re together, before she goes on the run without him. He’s talking to her, but she only ever looks at him with so much clearly on her mind — questions, regrets, fear, resignation — and never says a word. It’s odd. Not that I think it takes away from, again, Nicky’s strength as a female character in this series. She makes smart, thoughtful decisions at lightning speed. She acts quickly, hurrying away from Desh when she knows he’s after her, destroying her phone so she can’t be tracked, always keeping an eye out, but never dissolving into tears or whimpering while trying to hide. She’s constantly on the move, and her intelligence and calm helps her elude him. Really well done.

Joan Allen also returns as our indefatigable Pamela Landy, and once again she is fearless and determined. The end of The Bourne Supremacy teased the scene where Bourne calls her in New York, but what it didn’t reveal is that Pamela reached out to him, paging his old alias at the airport so he would know she had information for him and she was not a threat. Pamela has determined that her counterpart CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) is hiding something and is up to no good. And while he has a team of agents, she has loyal agents of her own and works in unspoken concert with Bourne to mislead Vosen, to expose Blackbriar, and to lead Bourne to the Blackbriar training facility, where his identity as a CIA asset was formed. And when she’s exposed the operation, and is confronted by Vosen, she doesn’t even flinch. She tells him she hopes he has a good lawyer and she walks out the door LIKE A BOSS. Not even kidding, I would watch an entire trilogy of movies about Pamela Landy.

And so Blackbriar is exposed, and Jason Bourne is free. Noah Vosen and Blackbriar head honcho Albert Hirsch (Albert Finney) are arrested and charged with all kinds of illegal activities. (Fun fact: In Hirsch’s CIA file that Landy is reading in one scene, it lists Hirsch’s place of birth as Utica, NY, which is more or less where I grew up.) And Jason Bourne jumps-slash-falls into the East River from ten stories above, possibly with a fresh bullet wound somewhere on his body. We are treated to a shot almost identical to the opener in The Bourne Identity, when Bourne is found shot and unconscious in the sea. The news report informs us that his body has not been recovered, though, and Nicky smiles a secret smile as we cut to Jason regaining consciousness in the water and swimming away.

That secret little smile is my favorite part of this truly excellent movie.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Bourne Supremacy

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #36: The Bourne Supremacy

The Bourne Supremacy is a transitional movie, there is no denying it. Its structure and purpose is to get us from where we were in The Bourne Identity, to where we have to be in The Bourne Ultimatum. But where most transitional movies fall short, not supplying enough of a plot of their own to stand as separate films, this one focuses on the twist of a conspiracy within the former Treadstone, tying together the first film with the third, but also working as its own separate mystery.

It starts with some nefarious goings on in Berlin that thwart the operation of CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) that will set her hot on Bourne’s trail. We are brought back to Jason and Marie still living in bliss off the grid in India, and then Marie is quickly dispatched by some bad guys (by accident — they were after Bourne) because she has served her purpose as a plot device in the last film and her death will serve as motivation for Bourne in this one.

This time the structure is different, because the audience knows who Bourne is now, and knows he’s being framed for something. What that something is will be resolved by the end, but it will also provide a window into the events of the next movie, where everything is laid bare. We even get two closing scenes that will carry into the next movie: Bourne’s meet up with Irena Neski in Russia, immediately after which Ultimatum will pick up, and a scene much later in the timeline, that will feature prominently near the climax of Ultimatum, when Bourne is back in New York, calling Landy from a rooftop with a clear view of her through an office window — a trick used to get effect earlier in this film as well.

Julia Stiles is back as Nicky, and while she does do some grovelling here, it’s while Damon’s Bourne has a gun to her head, so I’ll allow it. Joan Allen’s presence only adds to the strength brought to the film by Nicky — she’s decisive, authoritative, intelligent, focused, and in charge. I’m not sure if the film technically passes the Bechdel test, given that Nicky and Pamela only talk about Bourne, but since Bourne is the target of a CIA investigation that is their job and not some dude one or both of them happen to be crushing on, I’m going to say that it does, which, for action films, is kind of a big deal.

I always watch these movies, with Bourne in and out of almost every different country in Europe, with a bit of curiosity about the feasibility of that. I know he’s a super spy or whatever, but as a regular person, how easy is it to just travel across Europe? Having only ever been across the ocean to England, I don’t really know. I think that means a trip to France is in order. And maybe Russia. I took Russian in college, so any movie set in Russia (which this is, at the end), I always watch intently for Cyrillic, trying to at least sound out the words, even if I have no chance of gauging what they mean. Here the Cyrillic goes by a little too fast for me to do it without slowing the movie down, so I don’t really catch most of it.

However, even with its frenetic pace and furiously chaotic chase and fight scenes, The Bourne Supremacy still is filmed in such a way as to allow me to follow what’s happening in the chase or brawl. More and more recently, films are sequencing these things so chaotically, with such close and quick-cut editing, that it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. This one, it’s still quite clear. We’ll have to see if that changes by the time we get to The Bourne Ultimatum.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Bourne Identity

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #35: The Bourne Identity

What people forget about Matt Damon is that he actually was a working film actor long before Good Will Hunting. He even had a lead in a movie — The Rainmaker — that came out about a month before (both were fall 1997). What no one forgets about Matt Damon, however, is that the role of Jason Bourne, starting here with The Bourne Identity in 2002, completely changed the trajectory of his career. He had always been funny, and he’d been a “serious” actor for years, proving his chops not just in Good Will Hunting but in The Talented Mr. Ripley as well. But Bourne made him an action star, and for an actor, there is simply nothing more bankable than an honest-to-god action hero.

The best thing about the Bourne movies in general, and The Bourne Identity specifically, is its tense pace. There are brief moments to catch one’s breath, have a romantic interlude, whatever, but then we’re immediately on to the next obstacle, the next threat. And the fact that no one really knows — not even Bourne himself — whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy, keeps the adrenaline pumping. Is he escaping the clutches of villains or is he eluding capture from the law? Truth is, it’s a little bit of both, and that works too. There is a simple through-line: Get away.

Everything is kept simple on purpose, actually. A complicated mystery would clog the story, so we’re given the simplest one: Who is he? Other questions arise along the way, answered in bits and pieces — the audience finding out when Jason does — but they all revert to that central question and Bourne’s driving force. Who is he?

I always felt the resolution that Bourne stopped himself in his final mission for Treadstone because of the children present was a bit too pat, as if Robert Ludlum himself, author of the original novels the films were based on, felt a need to give the audience something truly heroic about Bourne to empathize and sympathize with. I’m not sure it needs it, frankly. But I’ll take it.

I’ve always liked Julia Stiles, and I enjoy her here as Nicky. It’s a small role that could be considered thankless, but I’ve always found it encouraging that in this stealth and dangerous organization peopled almost entirely by men, here’s this young woman in this very precarious position in a field office/safe house, who is strong and calm and focused on her job. She doesn’t fall into that emotional breakdown space that a lot of women are forced to in these types of movies when men are shooting and fighting and dying, and I appreciate that.

I also like the end, where the asset we’ve been led to believe is after Bourne turns out to have been after Conklin (Chris Cooper) all along, and in the tiniest of glimpses, we see a Congressional hearing with a mention of Blackbriar — a sequel teaser that is so well-hidden between the Conklin hit and Bourne’s triumphant return to Marie (Franka Potente) just before the closing credits, that if the movie had bombed it could have been completely discarded without anyone being the wiser. However, with the movie being the blockbuster success it was, it gives astute viewers a small taste of what’s to come.