Movie Review: (500) Days of Summer (2009)

Read our Blu-ray Review

View the Photo Slideshow



Now Available to Own



Get the Infectious Soundtrack
& Zooey Deschanel's Album by She & Him



Or Download the Soundtrack from iTunes

View Music Videos & Concert Footage of Deschanel

Bookmark this on Delicious

Print Page





If you were to ask the screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber why they wrote the amazingly personal and refreshingly relatable, genuinely authentic and male-centric romance (500) Days of Summer--according to Neustadter, "our aim was simple-- tell the story of a relationship, make it real, make it funny, try to make it not suck."

In the production notes for the Fox Searchlight sleeper that's been building momentum since picking up positive buzz and acclaim from the film festival circuit including screening as an Official Selection at the Phoenix Film Festival-- the writers humbly continue on. Noting that they based the screenplay on some of their own heartbreaks, aches, and romantic misadventures-- as Neustadter shares-- they ultimately aspired to craft something more in the vein of their "heroes Cameron Crowe and Woody Allen" wherein audiences could connect with their particular brand of "boy meets girl" rather than trying to force humor out of "some squirrel attack in the woods."

In setting out to chart on paper and in screenplay form a nonlinear, challenging narrative for audiences used to the traditionally straightforward rom-com fodder we're fed every week (and will see again this week in the benign Ugly Truth), Neustadter explains that the men designed, "an anatomy of a romance [that's] equal parts autobiography and fantasy[;] a pop song in movie form."

Although the film begins with both the description in narrative form that it "is a story of boy meets girl," we're also presented with the disclaimer that it's "not a love story." This is an intriguing confession since we see what is the definitive beginning of the young couple's initial interaction with one another as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom works for a greeting card company and finds a dull meeting instantly livened up with the beaming promise of the fresh, sunny face as bright as her name-- embodied by the girl dubbed Summer (Zooey Deschanel) who's been employed as the firm's secretary, new to Los Angeles from the Midwest.

While we see the first awkward moments of bonding over pop culture including a mutual affection for the music of The Smiths and other coincidences that Tom reads much more into than Summer-- the writers and our inventive director Marc Webb throw us for a loop by cutting to what very well may be the disintegration of the relationship before it even begins as we move to a devastated Tom breaking dishware in his apartment.

Later we discover that this followed a conversation wherein Summer ditched him in a diner by saying that the two had become like Sid and Nancy (the notorious couple chronicled on film whose relationship ended in stabbing) but only in Summer's view, she was the man who did wielded the knife.

Of course, the writers credit the films of Crowe and Allen and right from the get-go we see allusions to the sing-along happy feel-great moments found in Crowe that can be matched by the emotional downpour of tears in some male angst moments found in his masterworks of Almost Famous (also starring Deschanel) and Say Anything along with Woody Allen's Annie Hall for revealing the spoiler about a breakup (or possible one at least) from the very beginning.

Yet the writers also noted they initially sought nonlinear inspiration from Christopher Nolan's Memento and set out to write a rom-com in that format. Again, everything links up once more as Gordon-Levitt is next gearing up to work for the Memento auteur but (500) Days of Summer is correctly described in the notes as not just a pop song captured on cinema but it also feels like a cinematic collage that's fittingly indicative of its beautiful, eye-catching poster.

Fans of High Fidelity and the writing of Nick Hornby will note that a large majority of the uncharacteristically masculine overly romantic delusions possessed by Tom seem to stem from pop songs. Obviously pop culture is also a culprit as the screenplay notes Tom underwent a horrid misinterpretation of the ending of The Graduate-- which in itself was dissected brilliantly to comedic effect by Chris Eigeman in Whit Stillman's Barcelona.

Likewise, it's also reminiscent of a cheerier and less fantastical version of Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which subtly revealed that the things that may attract us to someone today may repel us tomorrow, as well as a '60s French New Wave feel from the movies of Jacques Demy like Young Girls of Rochefort and Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Jean-Luc Godard's A Woman Is a Woman and Breathless.

And this seems only fitting for if there's one actress working in the industry today who always seems like she defies a set generation with a Judy Garland '40s like soulful voice, a feminine Audrey Hepburn-esque demeanor, and a taste for the avante garde it would be none other than Zooey Deschanel. Deschanel's work in (500) Days of Summer marks her second quirky indie romance following a supporting turn in the little-seen but highly recommended Gigantic co-starring Paul Dano and John Goodman which hits shelves next month.

Although fans of Deschanel already know that she can sing-- whether it's on film even in small scenes in movies like Jon Favreau's Elf or Julia Stiles' directorial debut short Raving or via her remarkable cult success alongside M. Ward as the female half of the band She & Him so it comes as no surprise to see her cut loose in the movie's karaoke scenes. However, I was pleasantly delighted by the vocal stylings of Gordon-Levitt. Going for Pixies karaoke is brave indeed when he took to the microphone as well but you're truly stunned to see his jubilant energy as he dances it up in a beautiful fantasy sequence choreographed to Hall & Oates to show the invincible power of love.

While in the relationship between the two, Tom's decidedly the one with more to lose as one of my friends had cruelly stated that in any romance one person loves the other one more-- in the case of Summer and Tom-- she makes it clear from the start that she doesn't want to be anyone's girlfriend or anyone's anything. Of course, when you're blinded by your own love and complete conviction that you're soul mates, blindly Tom feels he can love Summer enough for the two of them and that she'll come around eventually and there are moments that-- to anyone else's eyes-- would give off the evidence of pure, unabashed love from her side of the bed as well.

However as the timeline moves throughout the five hundred days of their courtship from bliss to boredom, we're offered that rare gift of looking longer and deeper at young romance in a way that feels amazingly real and likewise may make some couples flinch who aren't rock solid or possibly haven't admitted some true feelings to one another about the pace or course of their relationship. Thus, it make this film a bit dicey for some viewers to tread into without realizing that what you're getting isn't a pre-packaged Sandra Bullock happily-ever-after movie.

Obviously, as the genre dictates--the screenwriters fill it with various quirky friends and/or relatives and this film is no exception as Tom is saddled with a wise beyond her years twelve year old sister Rachel. As played by Chloe Moretz, Rachel curses like Gordon Ramsay and dutifully pedals her bike over late at night to urge her big brother to man up and drink some vodka in a device that feels a bit borrowed from Luke Wilson's precocious younger sister in Bottle Rocket than one that's authentic.

However, whereas some found it a really glaring misstep, I thought it was important to give us a chance to breathe, laugh, and step away from the claustrophobic intensity of love for a minute and likewise gave Gordon-Levitt another actor to play off of and show us his always-increasing range as he continues to impress from one movie to the next.

Whether he's strumming his guitar in his heartbreaking exit of the underrated Stop-Loss, giving a performance in Mysterious Skin that seemed to influence Heath Ledger's even subconsciously in Brokeback Mountain, finding his dreams shattered and unsure of whom to trust in The Lookout or holding his own alongside Oscar nominees like Mickey Rourke and Diane Lane in Killshot (note: I'm the "Jon" quoted on the back)-- in my book, Gordon-Levitt continues to be one of our best kept secrets. In fact on a second viewing of Summer, I realized that the young man who's also set his sights on filmmaking by adapting a great Elmore Leonard piece into a short film starring Carla Gugino and Eric Stoltz (which I'm dying to see... somehow) could definitely could be in awards consideration for his varied, dynamic performance in Webb's film.

Perfectly matched with Deschanel-- with whom Gordon-Levitt had previously starred in the film Manic-- you immediately fall in love with the two characters and actors both as a couple and separately if you hadn't been fans before and considering that the film has already made a splash with its opening in select markets last week as one of summer's sleepers, I'm thinking we'll see much more of them soon.

Blending music from the past and present to weave a highly personal romantic film for those involved as they note that whenever we fall in love, we do inevitably develop a soundtrack of whatever we're listening to at the time-- it's no wonder that the soundtrack is quickly becoming popular as well. Of course it's helped that the selections are wonderful and even go as far as to include my very favorite track by The Doves in "There Goes the Fear."

Cleverly edited with split frames and camera trickery to keep the old "boy meets girl" story fresh as if the film's wondrous dialogue and premise didn't do it already for us-- while romantic works and especially ones about this particular age group don't necessarily catch on with Academy voters-- as far as screenplays go, Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter's (500) Days of Summer is easily the strongest written work of the year so far.

And this is due not only for its creative daring to go against the grain in a genre we know so well and also give us a male's perspective on love but also for doing so in a highly unusual nonlinear way that reminds us that it's never one thing that makes or breaks a relationship and sometimes it's all just there from the beginning like an extraordinary work of writing.

Text ©2009, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com
Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited.

Killshot (2009)

From The Arizona Republic Newspaper Ad
1/18/09:

View the Trailer & Photo Gallery

Now Available on *DVD:

*(Truly honored to be quoted on the box; even if my name did mysteriously change from Jen to "Jon")

A decade after he tackled the Bard in Shakespeare in Love, director John Madden moves onto America's Bard-- Elmore Leonard, that is. Leonard is our generation's Raymond Chandler and an undeniable master of-- what author Carl Hiaasen once called (as quoted by Dave Barry)-- the "south Florida wacko genre" being that most of his works are set primarily in Miami. While to writers and paperback junkies he is revered, to some he is categorized like he's the literary equivalent of fast food as in the case of a certain high school creative writing teacher of mine who called Leonard the scribe of "good old boy" crime novels while expressing her fierce dismay that her formerly Jane Austen obsessed student habitually brought a different library paperback home every weekend to teach herself the real way to write dialogue.

And it's precisely the man's dialogue that has made Leonard an idol even to such contemporary master wordsmiths as Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino-- the latter of whom not only adapted Rum Punch into his underrated Jackie Brown but also helped bring Killshot to the screen. A solid addition to the Elmore Leonard filmography, Killshot is a vintage character-driven-- almost 1940's Humphrey Bogart gangster movie modeled-- crime film that works like a chamber piece.

In other words, it's in the same tonal realm as Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, Chris Eigeman's Turn the River, Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, and Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight or-- to use the most current example-- lead actor Mickey Rourke's most recent film, The Wrestler.

As he did in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (although this was filmed a few years prior), it's ultimately Rouke who propels the film and sets everything in motion giving a multi-layered performance as the professional Toronto mafia hired killer who rarely speaks but packs a big wallop.

And fittingly, if there's one quiet character in a sparsely populated filmic version of the Elmore Leonard universe-- and doubling the pressure he's the lead-- devotees know damn well that we're going to need a quirky foul-mouthed chatterbox to pick up the slack, feed us the delicious conversational snippets we crave to balance it all out.

And filling this role exceedingly well in Killshot is Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a small-time crook who makes up for his inexperience with ridiculous ambition and little success. The product of a bad foster care system who-- although he outwardly ridicules his live-in lover Donna's obsession with Elvis-- carries himself with a little bit of The King in manner and speech.

Following his overlooked lead performances in Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, Greg Araki's Mysterious Skin (which on closer look seemed to influence his 10 Things I Hate About You costar Heath Ledger's Brokeback Mountain portrayal), Scott Frank's The Lookout (incidentally written by the man who penned numerous Leonard adaptations), and Riann Johnson's modern day noir Brick, Gordon-Levitt continues to impress.

Additionally, he's always a commanding force who stays with you even when he's only shown briefly as in his heartbreaking final scene in Stop-Loss. And in Killshot Gordon-Levitt channels stars from a decade past Rourke's '40s style, blending together Elvis, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Paul Newman as the quintessential swaggering, aggressively ignorant yet ridiculously arrogant, charismatic, but ultimately deadly Elmore Leonard villain that Don Cheadle nailed so well in Soderbergh's Out of Sight.

As Richie Nix-- who quickly explains his name is spelled differently than Stevie Nicks's (as if they'd get for mistaken for relatives)-- he gets a majority of the laughs and shockingly steals focus from Rourke who is still fresh from having made the comeback of all comebacks in his Oscar nominated work in The Wrestler.

Opening with a few blisteringly quiet yet violent scenes of Rourke's "Blackbird" at work in a duo of hits-- the first of which leaves one brother dead (from Rourke's gun) and one in jail for life-- he's reluctantly lured back to his day job for one major hit on a mob boss which, given his tendency to leave zero witnesses, makes the Blue Caddy he was provided with for the gig the only payment he receives.



Unwelcome both on the Michigan reservation where his Native American grandmother was a medicine woman and in his old Toronto stomping ground, soon the lone gunman acquires an apprentice, schooling Richie in after the naive crook attempts to hijack the veteran killer.

As they crash at Richie's pad he shares with Donna (Rosario Dawson), they team up for Richie's foolish idea for a big score to blackmail a real estate developer. But when the plan goes awry and the separated married couple Carmen (Diane Lane) and Wayne (Thomas Jane) become witnesses following a bad case of mistaken identity, the two unwittingly become targets of The Blackbird whose one consistent modus operandi is to never leave anyone alive who has seen his face.



Essentially a film that works on the primal goal of survival as its main through-line, it's a deceptively structurally simplistic thriller that uses the basic conflict of "bad men want to kill good people" and although it's aptly described as a thriller, it works on the same near horror like level of films like The Night of the Hunter, Panic Room, or Red Eye since any other plot is unimportant compared to the essential one to outwit the sociopaths and stay out of the morgue.

And Madden and scripter Hossein Amini know their plot well, whittling away any excess with a vicious hand like they were wood carvers, sharpening it up until it squeezes into a sparse eighty-four minute running time, wisely making the decision not to overflow Killshot with unimportant subplots or any over-the-top showdowns (as in Red Eye's finale) that would detract from the logic of the character driven drama.

Likewise it gives Lane a great chance to get out of chick flick territory which she does by ripping into this film with the anger and intelligence of perhaps realizing she had to alternate it with starring in the formulaic and manipulative Nights in Rodanthe. And while she is given considerably less to work with than the villains who always rule the land of Leonard, much like Rourke whose very presence makes him instantly compelling, instinctively we latch onto Lane from the first moment up until the ending when-- true to the title-- bullets will fly and one has to be quick to avoid getting dead.

Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

Read the In-Depth Blu-ray Review

Director: Spike Lee

“Pilgrim, we fought for this country too,” an elderly African-American postal worker and World War II veteran says shortly into Spike Lee’s newest epic, Miracle at St. Anna as he talks back to the ironically “black and white” film starring John Wayne playing on his small television set. While this helps set the tone of Anna, which in an extended flashback chronicles the tale of four black soldiers who get separated from their unit and fall behind Tuscan, Italy enemy lines after a horrendous attack in 1944, incidentally it also serves as a brilliantly subtle and funny commentary on a recent controversy surrounding its director, Spike Lee.

A few months back, Lee publically challenged Oscar winning director Clint Eastwood regarding the absence of black soldiers from his World War II films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima and, not taking kindly to criticism, Eastwood offered an insult to Lee, telling him to “shut his face.” While Lee responded with the quip “We’re not on a plantation,” he decided to Do the Right Thing as his most famous film title denotes, and not engage Dirty Harry any further In the Line of Fire. As an Inside Man, he did the next best thing—since white directors weren’t making enough films about black soldiers, he made one himself.

Based on James McBride’s acclaimed novel and inspired by the experiences of McBride’s veteran uncle who often talked about “how great the Italians were,” the novelist took a scholarly approach as the press release revealed. Namely he began by studying Italian at New York City’s The New School, ultimately moving to the country for six months where he interviewed dozens of Italians (both Partisans and Fascists) as well as African-American soldiers, hitting the books, and visiting Carlisle, Pennsylvania’s Army War College to understand “the whole business of what the 92nd [unit] did… to try to get an idea of what really transpired.” And indeed, McBride admits in the release, “While the story is fictional, there is truth at its core,” and Lee took it one step further, acknowledging that it’s not only a war film but also “a brutal mystery that deals with historic events and the stark reality of war. But it’s also a lyrical, mystical story of compassion and love.”

The film begins abruptly, initially set right around the Christmas holiday in 1983 as the postal worker we meet in the first scene goes about his job kindly but passively until a foreign voice requesting a twenty cent stamp stops him cold. Within an instant, the worker—just three months shy of his retirement—grabs a German Luger and shoots the customer cold. Refusing to talk or eat for days, the mystery increases after a new, young, ambitious reporter (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and other police officers discover a priceless marble bust from Florence that’s over 450 years old.

Worth five million dollars on the black market and missing since the Nazi’s blew up a bridge in the war, news of the humble, quiet man’s hidden antique is quickly leaked to the international press. Refusing to give up on the silent perpetrator, Gordon-Levitt visits him in his holding cell and is puzzled when ultimately the man utters one distinct sentence, namely, “I know who the sleeping man is.”

From there we journey back in time to meet the soldiers whose plight becomes the centerpiece of Lee’s drama. Part of the 92nd Division Buffalo Soldiers—they comprise a unit of all black army men who must endure cruel treatment by some of their fellow soldiers, including one higher-up who dismisses the group as just an experiment of Eleanor Roosevelt’s.

Soon the men are thrust into battle quickly and after explosions rip into the deceptively quiet beginning (save for the annoying German propagandist radio broadcast by a sultry “Axis Sally” trying to lure the black men to the Nazi’s side) we realize that only four have survived. After two try to radio for help and keep away from enemy fire, they’re surprised to discover a moving haystack and even more surprised when the one who’s begun to lose it a bit overseas, the gentle “Chocolate Giant” Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller) puts his own life in jeopardy to rescue an orphaned Italian boy (played by adorable newcomer Matteo Sciabordi).

Moving Haystack

And once the four men, including their intelligent and quick thinking leader Staff Sergeant Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), the fast-talking player Sergeant Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy), and the Puerto Rican soldier Corporal Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) are reunited, they turn to a local Italian family for assistance.

“The Boy Needs Help.”

Although hesitant at first, they find a strong ally in Valentina Cervi’s Renata,whose own husband has been away in the war for years, giving her a unique perspective and insight into the men’s plight. Realizing they’re in constant peril as they’re trapped behind enemy lines, the men plot an escape over the legendary mountain but the Italians, including Renata refuse to go.

“We Will Not Come With You.”

Stunned that the Italians shower the men with hospitality, treating them with the respect they deserve as men in uniform, it’s no wonder when a few of the Buffalo Soldiers begin to grow a bit too attached to their new surroundings, especially The Chocolate Giant, who forges a tight bond with the young boy, whom he looks after as though he were his own child in one of the film’s most moving and effective subplots.

And in fact, Miracle marks yet another in a long line of Italian films since the neorealist era that illustrates the brutalities of life through the innocent eyes of a young boy forced to come of age much too quickly. Additionally, Lee wears his influences like De Sica and Rossellini proudly and some of the exquisite photography, especially early on with its combination of beauty and horror as in an entire sequence where John Leguizamo accidentally drops a newspaper out a window up through the point where it is read, is breathtaking.

While Lee is overly ambitious and clocking in at nearly three hours, the film’s final hour could’ve benefited from strategic cutting and talented, world renowned jazz musician, the trumpeter Terence Blachard’s score is a tad too manipulative and insistent at times (calling far too much attention to itself in the first battle scene), Anna is nonetheless one of the best films I’ve seen since the start of Oscar season.

And although we must admittedly forgive an overly contrived and far too sentimental ending on a white sandy beach--which would’ve been more at home in this week’s Nights in Rodanthe-- Miracle at St. Anna is an overall excellent war film (view the trailer). Additionally it’s strongly acted by its ensemble cast, especially by Omar Benson Miller and the underrated Derek Luke whose career I’ve been following since his breakthrough turn in Denzel Washington’s directorial debut Antwone Fisher.

Unfortunately, while as a finished product it’s not quite on par with Eastwood’s masterpiece Iwo Jima, Lee’s authentically Italian epic is much more riveting than Flags of our Fathers and proves that—just like he did with his brilliant heist puzzle film Inside Man—Lee refuses to be pigeonholed into one specific genre, moving from one to the next with each fascinating project.

And while some like Summer of Sam would’ve possibly worked better on the page than on film, Lee still remains one of the “must see” filmmakers whose work demands attention regardless yet sadly, he’s often overlooked even with mini-masterpieces such as the underrated 25th Hour.

Explore photos, videos & more on Film Intuition: The Trailer Gallery

Read the Book

Stop-Loss

Director:
Kimberly Peirce

Looking for direction in his life, my young cousin enlisted in the Marine Corps on September 10, 2001; little did he or the rest of the globe know that they would be waking up to a very different world on 9/11/01 with the horrifying events that shook our nation. After that fateful day, there was an unrivaled sense of patriotism that seemed to strengthen America across party lines, which united us in our goal of not only helping out the victims and their families in our country but also in trying to seek justice in other countries as well. Large numbers of young men and women voluntarily joined the military and ended up (like two of my relatives) going to Afghanistan and/or later Iraq when that war broke out a few years ago. Boys Don’t Cry writer/director Kimberly Peirce found herself in a similar situation when her baby brother (fifteen years her junior) volunteered for the army and stayed in constant contact with his sister through instant messages as he patriotically fought for America overseas and later returned wounded. After a Thanksgiving celebration, Peirce found herself struck by the sound of rock music permeating from where her brother sat editing together footage he and his buddies shot during the war to songs of his choosing and an obsession was born that eventually led to Peirce’s creation of Stop-Loss.

In order to promote her film in an advance screening months before the 3/28/08 release date, Kimberly Peirce came to Phoenix on Election Day this week to explain the way that her curiosity and obsession with wanting to tell the stories of veterans led her to more than one hundred hours of documentary footage after she flew throughout America, Canada and Mexico to interview soldiers and their loved ones. When she discovered the governmental policy widely referred to as the “back door draft,” a.k.a. the Stop-Loss Policy which, as publicity materials state uses “a loophole in soldiers’ military contracts to prohibit servicemen and women from retiring once their required term of service is complete,” Peirce realized that she’d found the hook she needed to craft a compelling work of fiction. Texas native Mark Richard collaborated with Peirce on the screenplay which came together in just two and a half months and was shopped around until Paramount and producer Scott Rudin gave them the green light to get their personal story of three friends who return after serving in Iraq made.

Veteran ensemble actor Ryan Phillippe (Flags of our Fathers, Crash, Gosford Park) turns in a compelling performance as Brandon King, a naturally gifted leader who manages to guide his troops through countless successful combat missions until a final one goes horribly wrong just before he returns to his small town in Texas where he receives the purple heart for his service. Rounding out the cast is an impressive performance by newcomer Channing Tatum as Sergeant Steve Shriver who finds it increasingly hard to turn off his war mindset on his first night back and charismatic, passionate yet hard drinking and troubled Tommy Burgess (Mysterious Skin, The Lookout and Brick’s star Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who is kicked out by his new bride Jeanie (Mamie Gummer) upon his return. Perhaps the greatest revelation in the fiery young cast is Candy star Abbie Cornish as Sgt. Shriver’s girl Michelle who, as Peirce notes, serves as the perfect way for the audience to vicariously become a part of the tight-knit community due to her status as an outsider. After Brandon learns that he has been stop-lossed when he returns to base to check in his gear, he angrily seeks out his lieutenant colonel (Timothy Olyphant) and proceeds to get into a heated argument that results in his impulsive decision to flee the base and go on the run with Michelle who, feeling alienated from Steve, helps protect her childhood friend out of love and loyalty in trying to aid him in his quest.

One of the biggest recurring problems with movies labeled war films is their tendency to transfer the ever popular video game mentality into cinema by taking a bunch of competent and attractive actors and thrusting them into battle without giving the audience any insight into their personalities. Intriguingly and to her credit, Kimberly Peirce takes the opposite approach of putting the characters into battle in a brief but tense beginning in order for us to grasp their dynamic and then having us becoming attached to the young men upon their return so that we, like the characters, feel a sense of urgent confusion in the fast change of scenery. The brilliantly rambling opening twenty minutes following the Iraq footage (which was shot in Morocco) recalls The Best Years of Our Lives not just because we're faced with three fast friends but also because we see three very different approaches to dealing with the situation and the bond illustrated from the get-go helps keep us riveted as the film continues and they spend much less time together onscreen. Two-time Academy Award winning cinematographer Chris Menges (Notes on a Scandal, The Pledge) and Platoon’s Oscar winning editor Claire Simpson do an expert job at melding together different shots from varied mediums that give the film a sometimes home movie feel along with the combination of intimate close-ups and unnervingly tense action scenes to help produce Peirce’s vision. All in all, it’s both remarkably executed filmmaking and superbly crafted storytelling that succeeds not only on the level of the film itself but also-- more importantly-- based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback of attendees at the screening, including myself, who felt it was a compassionate, human and astute portrayal of servicemen and women. For more information or to hear others sound off, check out the film’s website here.

The Lookout

Director: Scott Frank

Although he’d discussed and worked on his long-time pet project, the screenplay for The Lookout with directors including Sam Mendes and David Fincher, it wasn’t until Academy Award nominated screenwriter Scott Frank (Little Man Tate, Get Shorty, Out of Sight) talked Michael Mann out of directing the film that he realized that he wanted to do the job himself. Explaining his creative mid-life crisis to Elvis Mitchell on KCRW’s The Treatment (see below: available as a free podcast on iTunes), Frank shared that he was in danger of getting bored and wanted the new challenge of controlling a set. Cinematically inspired by the visual look of 2005’s Capote along with the classic films of William Wyler (most notably The Best Years of Our Lives) and Dog Day Afternoon, Frank took the character of a young man with a brain injury, derived after a friend of his suffered a similar injury and decided to place him in a heist film.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt who is quickly becoming one of Generation Y’s most impressive actors with turns in Mysterious Skin (that seems to have inspired Ledger’s Brokeback performance) and Brick, worked on his role as Chris Pratt for roughly one year before shooting the film. As the film opens, it’s nearly black and white in an impressive visual sweep as Pratt speeds along a deserted rural road along with his girlfriend, best friend and best friend’s girlfriend all dressed in prom attire. Feeling that ridiculous and dangerous sense of invincibility and as Mitchell and Frank explained, the idea of “self destruction” meets the “American sense of entitlement,” Pratt switches his headlights off to show off the fireflies and ultimately gets into a car accident so horrifying that the two occupants in the backseat end up dead, his girlfriend is left maimed and he is left a shell of the person he was—the star hockey player whom the town constantly reminds was once great. Picking up a few years later, we meet Pratt as he struggles with everyday tasks, sequencing difficulties, and memory issues—everything from extensive labeling of items throughout his apartment to remind him to shower with soap, to writing down important things in a little notebook, he spends his days trying to learn how to live with his condition, rooms with a blind man named Lewis (Jeff Daniels) and works as a night janitor in a bank. Lewis serves an important function in a film that has the danger of becoming far too grim as the comic relief and Frank seasons the film with humor and surprises that turn what begins as sort of a younger version of Memento, brimming with more tragedy, into a fairly complicated heist piece as Pratt is befriended by Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode) and Isla Fisher (Luvlee) who the audience and Lewis realizes are really using the young man as a pawn to get inside the bank. Literary but without pretension, the film seems to play out with a prologue and epilogue as noted on The Treatment with as Frank calls a two act as opposed to a three act structure consisting of his trademark as a screenwriter, which according to Mitchell is his “divided character” struggling with identity and self-destruction while another character (Lewis) serves as the voice of common sense.

With a nearly forgettable camera, The Lookout is stylistically impressive and aided by deft classical direction by Frank who uses clever blocking to keep his leading man in corners to heighten his sense of alienation and loneliness as everyone else dominates the young man, he told Mitchell that it proved challenging to make sure that Chris Pratt was a reactive character rather than an easier passive character and indeed he turns out to have a satisfying ark, as he must fight his condition and use the skills he struggles with to try and get himself and Lewis out of an increasingly complicated situation that audiences know will lead to foul play. Excellent, clever and unfairly dismissed by audiences—as of this review and research it received a national critical ranking on Rotten Tomatoes as 87% fresh (or positive), it’s a nice twist on an old genre and an even more impressive entry in the disability genre for its accurate, unapologetic portrayal of life with a head injury without once falling into an overly sentimental television drama or gimmicky film mold. Frank, like his leading man Gordon-Levitt, is definitely someone who just keeps getting better with each new cinematic venture.

Subscribe to the Free Podcast:
KCRW's The Treatment With Elvis Mitchell



Download The Lookout