Film Reviews from Two Guys in the Dark: January 2015

Thursday, January 29, 2015

American Sniper and A Most Violent Year

Ready, Aim, Fire (… repeat … repeat …)

Review by Ken Burke

American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014)

True story of Iraq War superb marksman Chris Kyle, his victories in the field but the emotional toll they take on him overseas that continue when he’s home with his family.

A Most Violent Year (J.C. Chandor, 2014)

Set in 1981, a struggling home-heating-oil businessman is trying to succeed and expand even as his competitors rip him off and the D.A.’s office is threatening to indict him.

Take care, curious readers, for plot spoilers gallop rampantly throughout the Two Guys’ superbly insightful reviews. This is how we write, so as to explore what must be said as art transcends commerce (although if anyone wants to pay us for doing this ...); therefore, be warned, beware, and read on when ready to be transported to—well, wherever we end up. Now, onward to illumination; you may want to protect your eyes from the dazzling brilliance.

The cinematic subjects of this week’s posting have a reasonable interconnection around the idea of our institutionally-violent society so this will be one of those integrated reviews of both films.

What Happens: Based largely on Navy SEAL Chris Kyle’s book, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (a title which should easily give you insight into the mindset of this film’s protagonist), Eastwood’s presentation begins with our sharpshooter (Bradley Cooper) having to decide whether an Iraqi woman and her young son are innocent civilians or potentially-deadly-combatants; from there we flashback to young Chris growing up in Texas, learning to be a hunter from his stern father who emphasizes the need to be successful with his shots (acting as a “sheep dog” protecting “sheep” from “wolves”). As we cut to the present, Kyle’s decision is made when he sees through his long-range-sniper-scope that the Iraqi pair have hand grenades so they’re quickly dispatched by his expert firings. That’s the essential conflict throughout American Sniper most of the time: who deserves to be shot by a guy so skilled (at least 160 confirmed kills, many others claimed) that his buddies call him “Legend,” while he agonizes over the need to bring sudden death to his combat opponents as well as the constant choices he must make on his own as to whether the target in his sights is truly a dangerous operative or just an innocent guy on a cell phone (as well as guilty trauma about how Iraqis who aid the Americans may be brutally killed by their own countrymen, plus how he's compelled to keep coming back overseas to avenge the deaths of other SEALs). Along the way we get additional flashbacks within the present flow of action that show us how he met his “I-don’t-date-SEALs”-but-soon-to-be-wife, Taya Renae (Sienna Miller); how he got inspired by the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, then the 9/11/2001 massacres on NYC and Washington, D.C. citizens, to take his black-or-white-red-white-and-blue-patriotism to the battlefield for revenge (a position you just have to accept as his, whether you find it in yourself or not—I don’t—just as you have to accept that it was his Commander-in-Chief’s decision to extend that revenge into Iraq with virtually no invasion justification, yet it was still Kyle’s duty to prevent his designated opponents from killing American Marines, so ideology becomes less relevant as other snipers, such as Mustafa [Sammy Sheik], are shooting at you); and, ultimately, how the constant, insane stress of war made him a dangerous aspect of his own family when he finally stopped taking new deployments (after 4 tours in Iraq), until work with wounded vets brought him relief from PTSD only to be cut short when an extremely troubled vet suddenly killed him at age 38 in February 2013 (the film concludes with documentary footage of his massive memorial and funeral procession).

In A Most Violent Year we enter the territory of genuine fiction, although it may reflect the reality of the times in which it is set (in this case, 1981 NYC, a quite unsettling period, even worse than when I lived there in 1972-73, with the nightly news opening each time on a quick count of the murders, rapes, assaults, etc. in the past 24 hours) but isn’t firmly based on some historical record, as is American Sniper (this year’s Best Picture Oscar hopefuls for 2014 releases reflect this situation with an even split: American Sniper, The Imitation Game [Morten Tyldum], Selma [Ava DeVernay], and The Theory of Everything [James Marsh] all are based in fact while Birdman [Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu], Boyhood [Richard Linklater], The Grand Budapest Hotel [Wes Anderson], and Whiplash [Damien Chazelle]* all offer fictional ruminations on historical periods at best). Instead, what we get in our other featured film for this posting is a grueling meditation on the difficulty of maintaining morality and/or ethics, let alone legal operating procedures, in any profession or endeavor where it’s clear that illegal activities are going on all around you, enhancing the performance of your competitors (something that Chris Kyle was painfully aware of, as are—in lesser degree—baseball sluggers and pitchers who didn’t take steroids while they watched others set lofty records or the Baltimore Colts who didn’t use deflated footballs in their 2015 conference championship game against the victorious New England Patriots—although at least the identified “pumped-up” baseballers have so far been kept out of the Hall of Fame while some more learned football commentators than me have suggested that the Colts needed overinflated balls of another kind entirely if they hoped to top the Pats) while you watch your hopes recede into obscurity.

* Reviews, respectively, in our December 23, 2014; January 15, 2015; November 19, 2014; November 6, 2014; July 31, 2014; April 3, 2014; and October 16, 2014 postings.

That’s the dilemma facing Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac—and before you complain that yet another Hispanic role went to a person of European ancestry, please note that he’s Guatemalan-born with only a French maternal grandfather not part of his Caribbean-based descent; his full name is Oscar Isaac Hernández), attempting to expand his Standard (home) Heating Oil Company (“We Set the Standard”) without taking help from wife Anna’s (Jessica Chastain) mobster father or brother, even though apparently one of his competitors keeps hijacking his tanker trucks, his drivers (especially previously-beaten Julian [Elyes Gabel]) want to carry illegal guns to ward off their vicious attackers (and are being pressured by their Teamsters bosses to do so), an armed intruder shows up at the Morales’ huge new suburban home (but Abel chases him away), and an overeager Assistant District Attorney (David Oyelowo) is after Abel’s business, even though it’s clear he’s likely one of the cleanest in this “oily” game. Meanwhile, Abel’s trying to finalize an expensive deal to buy some adjacent property from a group of hard-bargain Hassidic Jews in order to expand his business (bought from his father-in-law) but his bankers back out because of the indictment threats so he’s forced to work with his own sleazy lawyer, Andrew Walsh (Albert Brooks), to get the money by taking out a second mortgage on an apartment building owned by Abel and his “I-don’t-want-anything-to-do-with-your-business”-brother, getting a difficult loan from one of his competitors, discovering who was stealing his trucks (after a wild chase during a hijacking attempt) then demanding restitution from this confronted guy, with the major balance reluctantly coming from a secret account that Anna maintained from skimmed profits (just in case the business failed) after they almost come to blows over her tactics. In the end, the deal is finalized so that Standard will likely be quite profitable in the future (especially with Abel’s competition put on notice that he won’t tolerate any further intrusions into his territory), Julian killing himself in desperation rather than surrender to the police and rat on fellow (assaulting) drivers, and the Assistant D.A. agreeing to drop his intended charges against Abel in return for future financial support as his own ambitions grow larger. A less trustworthy bunch you couldn’t imagine, but it all seems to be business as usual in 1981 NY, NY (one of the almost-final-images says it all, with Julian’s lifeless body bleeding in the snow while an even more important liquid for this story—oil—slowly drips from a storage tank where Julian’s suicide bullet ultimately ended up).

So What? It’s a bit of a shame that Bradley Cooper’s marvelous acting in American Sniper (extending his range very nicely beyond even the step-up from those Hangover movies [Todd Phillips; 2009, 2011, 2013] we’ve seen in his notable work with David O. Russell [Silver Linings Playbook, 2012; American Hustle, 2013]—good enough to get him nominated for this round of Best Actor Oscars [as did both of those Russell-directed-roles]; he also bulked-up considerably, presenting himself as a quiet, believable beefy hunk rather than the wiry verbal guy we’ve previously come to know) is being generally overlooked, both by the attention going to Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything and Michael Keaton in Birdman (with the former recently getting the Best Actor prize from the Screen Actors Guild and both of them being honored with Golden Globes, where there are separate categories for Drama and Comedy or Musical films) and by the ideological controversy about the propaganda intentions of this film where you have commentary from such opinion-givers as Bill Maher and Noam Chomsky (be aware of low audio in the clip contained at this site) that complain American Sniper is too simplistically-pro-war, contributing to our “global assassination program,” vs. the defense by director Eastwood that it’s really an anti-war statement focused on the debilitating impact on the soldiers who risk their lives every minute in a kill-or-be-killed-environment (the detractors also argue that Chris Kyle wasn’t the decent, disturbed family man depicted in Eastwood’s box-office-smash but rather a harsh hater of the Iraqis that he so successfully terminated [not having read the book that this film is largely based on, I’ll leave that argument to the vociferous debaters, but screenwriter Jason Hall says he also fashioned his work’s depiction of “softer” SEAL Chris on hours of conversations with both Kyle and his widow]).

Still, there are individual vets and many others, from the various Vietnam to Iraq wars, who find great solace in this story so I hope that their often-neglected-opinions—and lives—are also respected, along with those of us stateside film critics who’ve never been in combat (believe it or not, though, while in Ball High School’s large ROTC unit in 1966 I actually won the medal for Outstanding Senior Cadet but that’s as close as I ever got to serving in the military as my total rejection for the premises of the Vietnam War—and the good fortune of drawing #304 of 365 in 1969’s Draft Lottery—led me on another path from what was originally intended as a short-term-post-college-enlistment in order to build up my bank account for some future career). All of the above extra-filmic-considerations aside, American Sniper does a fine job of showing how surrealistically-brutal wartime conditions are for those doing the fighting (especially when the only way you know for sure who your enemy is comes from seeing a weapon aimed at you), how agonizing it is for the families back home who can easily lose their patriotic fervor when confronted with the daily possibility of death for their loved ones or who curse the politicians who took those spouses/lovers/parents away mentally even if they physically return with massive emotional scars, and how genuinely a soldier can be invested even in an unpopular war if he (or she) is so dedicated to the concept of defense of the homeland or retaliation for deceased buddies that nothing else matters, even as the homeland family is losing all connection.

As for A Most Violent Year, its impact is based on an amorphous cluster of situational ethics where you easily accept that Abel Morales is the most moral character in the story, but somewhat by default (as with Chris Kyle), given the others he’s dealing with (especially when we find out that he’s being ripped off by his own accountant-wife, but only for their mutual benefit of course). Chastain is marvelous in this role as the tough-as-nails-but-still-traumatized-by-the-escalating-circumstances-around-her-woman, just barely out of the realm of her mobster family but not that opposed to their methods, particularly when she sees what she and her husband are up against with some of their ruthless competition; I’d easily give her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination belonging to Laura Dern (Wild [Jean-Marc Vallée, 2014; review in our December 11, 2014 posting]), but I’d also like to replace Keira Knightley’s nomination for The Imitation Game (despite the quality performances offered by both her and Dern) with Agata Kulesza as the surprise aunt in Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2014; review in our June 3, 2014 posting), with the final acknowledgement here that I think Uma Thurman has them all (and the other official nominees) beat with her short scene of a scorned wife in Nymphomaniac: Volume I (Lars von Trier, 2014; review in our March 20, 2014 posting) although I’m sure that few in the Academy would even admit they saw this challenging narrative. Numerous comments have already been made by other reviewers (with the benefits of advance screenings that I rarely share, allowing them into print much sooner than me) of A Most Violent Year’s evocation of the great NYC-based films of Sidney Lumet, such as Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Prince of the City (1981), so all I can do at this point is agree but further note that we’re lucky to have a contemporary filmmaker such as Chandor who’s able to pull off such an accomplishment now that Lumet is no longer with us. We can only hope that we continue to get such fine work from him, as we’ve briefly seen here, along with Margin Call (2011), and All Is Lost (2013). (A final note about A Most Violent Year is the dearth of promotional imagery available for it—at least to the unpaid chatterers such as myself—which forced me to use a promo poster above because there were plenty of those, as well as several similar shots of Isaac and Chastain; with all that goes on in this film you’d think that the distributors would offer a bit more to illustrate it, but you’ll just have to make do with Abel’s expensive overcoat and Anna’s expansive bosom.)

Bottom Line Final Comments: While American Sniper doesn’t seem to be a strong contender for Oscar’s Best Picture nor Best Actor, it’s got 4 other chances (Adapted Screenplay, Editing, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing) so it may well be taking home some gold in a statue. If not, it’s already pulled in plenty of gold at the box-office, raking in an unanticipated $209.6 million in domestic sales after 5 weeks (against a restrained $58.8 million budget), which would have placed it at #10 (likely higher when its run is done) for calendar year 2014 releases, probably also figuring handsomely in the income rankings when the 2015 tallies are done a year from now. I’m among those who don’t believe that it glorifies war, praises the American military for its racist slaughter of Muslims, nor simplifies the life, convictions, or complexities of Chris Kyle (neither do I think of him as some grand hero simply because he was so adept at killing people from a distance, including Mustafa at 2,100 yards away, putting Kyle at #8 on the unofficial twisted-trivia-list of Confirmed Kills at 1,250 meters [1,367 yds.] or Greater—although I've just seen a news report that challenges the veracity of that shooting, so who knows what to believe at this point). Instead, I find American Sniper to be an uncompromising portrait of a self-proclaimed-yet-emotionally-damaged-patriot, set in the context of a story that shows how arbitrary, sinister, and grotesque the whole concept of war and its aftermath can be, even if it is justified in the minds of some participants (including me, where the Allied victory in WW II was concerned—abstaining for the moment from the vital related argument over the morality of dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities), just as Eastwood had done previously in his magnificent point-counterpoint presentation of WW II warring sides in his Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) films (I say this, however, as a guy who had no interest in his "Obama chair act" at the 2012 GOP convention).

A Most Violent Year has stronger critical acclaim than American Sniper (90% positive for … Year at Rotten Tomatoes vs. 72% for … Sniper, 81% for ... Year vs. another 72% for ... Sniper in the Metacritic tallies [extremely rare for both groups to come up with the same score]; more details below if you like) but is almost nonexistent in income (about $1.3 million in domestic ticket sales after a month in release), as well as striking out completely with Oscar voters (although the respected National Board of Review members gave it their Best Picture of 2014 award, along with their accolades for Best Actor to Isaac [although tied with Keaton for Birdman] and Supporting Actress to Chastain). The alternate critical voice in our household—my lovely, charming, and talented wife, Nina—wasn’t all that impressed with it, either, but she admitted that with the crime-influenced NYC setting and her perception of Isaac as reminiscent of a much-younger Al Pacino as Michael Corleone confirmed that what she really wanted to see was The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)—hard to argue with that, but in case anyone ever wants to do a remake of that film (Perish the thought!) Isaac might be a strong casting possibility (he could also get away with playing John F. Kennedy Jr., in our mutual opinion). I, on the other hand, was impressed with this examination of a conscience on the borderline (at least in Abel’s case; Anna and Walsh basically admit they’ve over the line into criminal activities—“standard industry practices” or not—while the Morales competitors, the drivers, and even the D.A. all admit that they play by whatever expeditious “rules” are in vogue, no matter the costs to others), shown in the context of the various negotiations, verbal and otherwise, that go into survival in a “city that never sleeps” where being “king of the hill” requires more than just waking up one day to find you’re “A, number one.”

So, now that we’ve wandered into Musical Metaphor-closing-number-territory let me suggest for both of these films something that’s more about allusion than description, Willie Nelson’s “Time of the Preacher” suite (from his 1975 Red Headed Stranger album) at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Mf1w66uijqU&list=PL90282D77CC64751A&index=1 (a YouTube location that allows you to flow right through clips 1-15 to hear the whole original recording—followed by the 4 other tunes that were included on the 2000 reissue—something you’d somewhat need to do anyway to get through clips 2-7 to see how this main narrative of sorrow and revenge plays out and understand why I chose it, then you can continue with the story’s follow-up aspects and musical interludes if you like—sorry about any pop-up ads that disrupt your flow—with clips 8-15 [or 19]). The melancholy feeling I get from these songs fits in my (strange?) sensibilities with the confused-homicidal-satisfaction that Chris Kyle gets from his battlefield triumphs (and carries over in the grief that accompanies him back to stateside) while it also speaks to the desperate sense of resignation that Abel and Anna Morales confront in trying to weave their way through the constant pressures being put on them by the law and the lawless. Or, if Willie’s too weird for you in these contexts then maybe you’d prefer a song from A Most Violent Year’s soundtrack, Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” (from the 1971 What’s Going On album) at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Et-hbNXTWaQ, a live video seemingly from the 1980 Montreux (Switzerland) Jazz Festival (but you might also like the original music video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Ykv1D0 qEE with black-and-white-inner-city-footage of the concerns being voiced in the song—if the high-pitched-vocals aren’t that clear to you, though, here they are in printed form; however, because I gave you a chance to hear all of Willie’s album here’s Marvin’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inFDgCSGWDs), another true metaphor for the themes of these films and the troubling situations that confront all of their characters, even if the images evoked in the words (or shown in the official “Inner City Blues” video noted above) are symbolic rather than literal of the crises faced by the Kyle and Morales families, although everyone in all of these songs and films could find relevance in the “I’m praying a prayer for each and everyone of you” line from this latter song, which may be something you could use in your life as well so I’ll sign off with that positive wish, then join you again soon with comments on films about a couple of women who’ve almost lost all hope for anything useful about their lives in Cake (Daniel Barnz, 2014) and Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2014). After that, I think I’ll finally be ready for true 2015 releases.

We encourage you to check your tastes against ours with the summary of Two Guys reviews (please note that Two Guys critic Ken Burke is a bit odd—in more ways than one—using a 5-star-rating-system but rarely going to the level of 4 ½ or 5 stars, reserving those rankings for films that have been or should be acknowledged as time-honored masterpieces so that a 4 is about the best you can hope for from star-stingy Ken). But we ask you to be aware that the links we recommend within our many reviews may have been removed or modified without our knowledge. Other overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage.

AND … at least until the Oscars for 2014’s releases have been awarded on Sunday, February 22, 2015 I’m also going to include reminders in each review posting of very informative links where you can get updated tallies of which 2014 films made various individual critic’s Top 10 lists and which ones have been nominated for and/or received various awards. You may find the diversity among the various critics and the various awards competitions hard to reconcile at times—not to mention the often-significant-gap between critics’ choices and competition-award-winners (which usually pales in comparison to the even-more-noticeable-gap between box-office-success, which you can monitor here, and what wins the awards)—but as that less-than-enthusiastic-patron-of-the-arts, Plato, noted in The Symposium (385-380 BC)—roughly translated, depending on how accurate you wish the actual quote to be—“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder,” so your choices are as valid as any of these others, especially if you can offer some rationale for your decisions (unlike many of the awards voters who simply fill out ballots, sometimes for films they’ve never seen).

To save you a little scrolling through the “various awards” list above, here are the Golden Globe winners for films and TV from 2014 and the Oscar nominees for 2014 film releases.

If you’d like to know more about American Sniper here are some suggested links:

http://www.americansnipermovie.com//

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QoAZ2norMo (an extended trailer at 5:17, done as a wide-screen insert in the video box, though, so you might want to click it into full screen mode)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDHWawsSnbk (11:30 exploration by conspirancy-theorist Alex Jones claiming Pentagon manipulation of American troops—even to the point of killing those who challenge the “official story”—for pro-war propaganda, including Chris Kyle’s reputation as a decent guy who was troubled by his participation in the American-led Iraq war actions)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/american_sniper/?search=american%20sniper

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/american-sniper

If you’d like to know more about A Most Violent Year here are some suggested links:

http://amostviolentyear.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o87gG7ZlEAg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL_TWsy6-cA (26:53 interview with writer-director J.C. Chandor and actors Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, sponsored by the Screen Actors Guild Foundation)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a_most_violent_year/?search=a%20most%20violent%20year

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/a-most-violent-year

As noted above, we encourage you to look over our home page (ABOUT THE BLOG), found as the first one in our December 2011 postings, to get more information on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, including our formatting forewarning about inconsistencies among web browser software which we do our best to correct but may still cause some visual problems beyond our extremely-limited-level of technological control.

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By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile. Ken

P.S. Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar, with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Still Alice, Inherent Vice, and The Duke of Burgundy

One Oscar Race Is Practically Over,
“The Dude” Goes to the Beach by Way of Chinatown,
and Sad Lesbian Love in a Box

Reviews by Ken Burke

This week’s cluster of reviews has no reasonable internal connections (except for all of the films being projected onto screens) so I’ll take them one at a time after my standard warning:

Take care, curious readers, for plot spoilers gallop rampantly throughout the Two Guys’ superbly insightful reviews. This is how we write, so as to explore what must be said as art transcends commerce (although if anyone wants to pay us for doing this ...); therefore, be warned, beware, and read on when ready to be transported to—well, wherever we end up. Now, onward to illumination; you may want to protect your eyes from the dazzling brilliance.

Still Alice (Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland; 2014)

A highly-respected linguistics professor is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, destroying her sense of personhood and causing great trauma within her family.

What Happens: Distinguished linguist academic (Columbia University, NYC), Dr. Alice Howland (Julianne Moore), in her 50^th year, suddenly experiences disturbing lapses of memory—loses an easy word in her field’s vocabulary in the midst of an important lecture, goes for a run from her home to the nearby campus but finds herself lost (shown successfully by keeping only her in focus as the rest of her fuzzy environment becomes as unclear to her as it is to us)—only to get the terrible news that she’s developed hereditary-early-onset-Alzheimer’s disease. She’s distraught at the news (shaking her back into the kind of vulnerability she felt when at age 18 her mother and older sister were killed in an auto accident); her husband, John (Alec Baldwin), offers unquestioned support; her eldest daughter, lawyer Anna Howland-Jones (Kate Bosworth), is devastated (especially when it’s determined that she has the gene for it as well, as might her in-progress-twins); med student son, Tom (Hunter Parrish), seems aloof from this tragic discovery; while the youngest sibling, Lydia (Kristen Stewart), is concerned for Mom but wants to stay in L.A. to pursue her aspiring-but-minimal-acting-career, even as she continues to resists Mom’s insistence on college as providing for a back-up-occupation. As Alice’s condition worsens she leaves herself a video message with overdose-suicide-instructions for a future escape from a total loss of herself, but when the time comes that goes awry, leaving her trapped in active deterioration. John (also a Columbia professor; I never did catch which discipline) secures a new post at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic, in hopes advanced treatments there might also aid Alice, but she wants to stay in Manhattan where she has what’s left of her connections and memories. Eventually, the grief of the situation overwhelms John who takes the Midwest job, even as Lydia makes the choice to come home for added caretaking duties (along with a full-time pro), allowing mother and daughter to better connect as Alice is quickly slipping away from higher cognitive function, heartbreakingly uncoupling from the person she was. By the end of the film, she’s barely “still” the Alice that anyone (including herself) has known, although her limited awareness is taking on another definition of “still” in that her mind is becoming sedentary, barely aware of or at least hardly responsive to the stimuli around her.

So What? Moore is frightfully-terrific in this role, fighting through the anger and trauma that’s overwhelming her as the comfortable life and career that she’s grown accustomed to goes into recession, leaving her no choice but to “Live in the moment” because long-ago-memories and immediate impressions are now all she has (with the former beginning to fade as a fairly short amount of time passes in this narrative), not allowing her to construct the ongoing understandings of how distant past, recent past, and present events interweave to construct the consciousness that all of us expect to experience, then frantically grasping for if it begins to unravel (as an academic myself, I had to face up to my own mildly declining ability to instantly pull up words, names, and facts while in the immediate flow of lecturing, but for me—so far, I hope—it was only a series of normal “senior moment” aging conditions, not any form of dementia, but I can relate somewhat to the horror of having the primary skills that have helped define your public/private identity suddenly abandon you, leading to the questioning of the worth of your continued existence). Moore says that she did extensive research for this role, in order to honor the dignity—lost or partially-remaining—of the people she observed, a noble effort given how easy it can be to recoil in fear (of what might be awaiting you someday) from groups of the seriously-deteriorated, seen in the film when early-diagnosed-Alice visits a nursing home of elderly dementia patients—mostly women, possibly because many of the men in this condition have already died; you can see the quiet terror on her face when she realizes that this will likely be her end-of-life-phase, leading to the suicide-strategy she devised for her future less-competant self, which, sadly for her, doesn’t materialize. (I’m also reminded of my own deceased parents when watching these scenes as my father harbored an Alzheimer’s-like-potential which began to slowly manifest itself as he approached his early 90s then became rapid in the few months before he died; my mother kept her wits—and her sharp tongue against the many things she didn’t approve of—but not her eyesight, so she also spent her final years in assisted-living-facilities where I frequently saw first-hand those lost-consciousness-elders that Alice—and I—so feared becoming one of.)

Bottom Line Final Comments: Despite the strong contenders that Moore faces in her quest to add this year’s Best Actress Oscar to her already won or pending awards (including her recent Golden Globe triumph in their Lead Actress-Motion Picture Drama category) she’s already at the victory podium in my mind (I admit I haven’t seen Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night [Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2014] nor Jennifer Aniston in Cake [Daniel Barnz, 2014] yet, and I would have like to have seen Charlotte Gainsbourg from the 2-volume Nymphomaniac [Lars von Trier, 2014; review in our March 30 and April 3, 2014 postings] in the competition over Reese Witherspoon [despite her strong, physically-challenging-performance] for Wild [Jean-Marc Vallee; review in our December 11, 2014 posting]), with a well-deserved-win, if it should come, for an outstanding display of the full range of joy-to-sorrow-human-emotions presented in a manner that tries (and succeeds) in exploring this tragic situation but neither sentimentalizing it nor presenting her character as wallowing in despair. Based on Moore's past work I understand completely why the directors set out to cast her when they began adapting Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel, as she embodies the dignity needed to properly pull off this presentation of a person in internal dire straits who ultimately must provide her own sense of rescue (as best she can, for as long as she can), just as her potentially-suicidal character, Laura Brown, finally did in The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002; Moore was nominated for Oscar’s Best Supporting Actress), even though that self-rescue by moving to Canada ultimately contributed to the toll on her abandoned son (these 2 films would make a great double-feature for those with the stomach for so much emotional agony in 1 sitting). However, the real surprise for me was in the fine performance of Stewart, not quite Oscar-worthy (especially with the competition she’d face this year) but still wonderfully raw, sincere, underplayed as an independent spirit willingly confronts her own obsessive needs, then sacrifices for a higher good (fortunately for me, I kept myself as far away from the Twilight series as possible, allowing me to better appreciate Stewart for several well-played roles, especially as Joan Jett in The Runaways [Floria Sigismondi, 2010], that aren’t so “vampy”).

With full disclosure, I’ll note that Still Alice has resonant relevance for me in that a friend of mine (another academic, in fact) died last year, after suffering from Alzheimer’s for a decade, aware (at times, as best I understood) of his personal loss but probably not fully cognizant of the (continuing even now) emotional drain on his loving wife, family, and many caregivers over that unusually long period of suffering. I can’t claim to know even a tenth of what it must be like to live with someone undergoing such an ordeal, watching the steady loss of a once-vibrant, engaging loved one (let along what it must feel like to be the victim of this disease, with a mind floating ever-more-aimlessly within an outwardly-appearing-normal-body), but at least I’ve gained valuable insights into some sense of this awful, unwarranted penance, which just helps me all the more to appreciate what Still Alice offers graciously to a society where so many of us will succumb to this dreadful disease (unless we make our own escape plans or a cure is found), giving us some understanding of what many of our relatives, friends, and neighbors are enduring as they watch helplessly while the ship that holds their memories of another beloved person sails sadly out of sight beyond the horizon.

Alice delivers a powerful speech to a group at the Alzheimer’s Association far into the film (where she highlights with a yellow marker every word as she reads it so that she knows what’s already been covered, what still needs to be said) in which she explains how she’s struggling to hold on to whatever she can of herself, knowing that reclaiming what was lost is now beyond hope. Given the rest of the film as context, this brave act by a woman who wants the world beyond her troubled brain to understand what it feels like to be her constitutes a scene award-worthy in its own right, but when you put it together with the rest of ex-Professor Howland’s story it just makes this compelling character (fictional, but certainly representing an enormous number of actual “Alices”) all the more inspiringly-memorable, while verifying that Julianne Moore has offered us a performance for the ages. I’ll conclude these comments with my usual Musical Metaphor; in the case of Still Alice I think an appropriate choice would be “Brain Damage/Eclipse” from a Roger Waters-less Pink Floyd concert at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiYv1dIR4js (Earls Court, London, October 20, 1994, song pair from the 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon; if you want to get Roger in there, here’s the same music from the original recording with him on lead vocals at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=DVQ3-Xe_suY, but if you’d like to indulge in that full 2 hr. 26 min. concert it’s available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhFUD2NmrGc&list=PLWsPdBjhn3_ugYAXkC9PhYpmcIT22 PNCs&index=2 [each number separately, though, but they flow from one to the next]); however, please understand that I see the “lunatic” referred to here as the dementia demon that attacks its human host, not the innocent victim of the awful events brought on by this horrible disease.

Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Follow, if you can, the convoluted story of detective “Doc” Sportello as he wanders through 1970 L.A. attempting to solve a crime before a dozen more suddenly appear.

What Happens: Attempting to summarize the plot of Inherent Vice is sort of like trying to untangle another L.A.-set detective yarn, The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), famously obscure in clarity in its own right, so much so that even Raymond Chandler (author of the original 1939 mystery novel of the same name) claims he doesn’t know if a central character was murdered or committed suicide. Therefore, forgive me if I don’t attempt to offer a lot of detail regarding Inherent Vice beyond my appreciation for the overall cast of crazy characters, welcome presence of some enjoyable actors, and a lot of scenery set near Southern California surf (the suburbanish setting here is fictional Gordita [“little fatty” in Spanish] Beach, played marvelously by Manhattan Beach, a favorite location of mine next door to even-more-desirable Hermosa Beach and its marvelously quaint Sea Sprite Motel). I’ll start by saying that Inherent Vice reminded my marvelous wife, Nina, of a cross between Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) and The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen, 1998, with the usual producing and writing help from brother Ethan), although this new offering disappointed her because she wanted more of the former reference (especially in terms of plot clarity) while I was satisfied with its goofy resemblance to the latter. In general, this 1970 L.A. trip (in more ways than one) is about how druggie private eye Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix, doing his best 1970s John Lennon imitation in this photo above) gets a visit from his ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), asking for Doc’s help in protecting her current lover, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), a Jew with neo-Nazi aspirations, from being shut away in an asylum by his wife (and her lover!) in order to keep Mickey from acting on his conversion to altruism by wanting to give away his real-estate-fortune. When Doc visits Mickey’s in-progress Channel View Estates he finds a brothel masquerading as a massage parlor, succumbs to a knockout clobbering from behind, awakens next to a dead body, then endures a grilling from vicious, hippy-hating police Detective Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (an hilarious Josh Brolin; he could almost have had a shot at a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination) about the corpse and the disappearance of both Shasta and Mickey.

From that start the insanity just increases exponentially, as the “plot” rambles along through Doc’s meeting with Mickey’s wife, Sloane (Serena Scott Thomas), unconcerned about her husband’s disappearance or the general lack of clothing covering her body; his meeting with Hope Harlingen (Jena Malone), actually concerned about her missing husband, Coy (Owen Wilson)—whom we find out later is essentially held captive by a cult in order for him to continue as a police informant; his meeting with Deputy D.A. Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon), who’s willing to help him as long as he provides the sex and drugs; his discovery of Mickey at an asylum where he’s watched over by FBI agents; his attempt to get information at a dentist’s office run by Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short) but this guy also turns up dead; his further attempt to get info from loan shark/police dept. hired killer (he even terminated Bigfoot's former partner years ago) Adrian Prussia (Peter McRobbie), leading to Doc’s capture, escape, and death of Prussia; culminating in a finale in which drug smugglers are caught, Coy is given his freedom, and Shasta and Doc are (possibly) reunited. As a bonus, you also get infrequent appearances from Sauncho Smilax (Benicio del Toro), acting somewhat as a lawyer for Doc. While there’s a lot more meandering detail here that I’m not even attempting to cover you can read more about it if you wish at this site.

So What? While the mere mention of Paul Thomas Anderson releasing a new film during Oscar-contention-season usually draws great interest (and I have great respect for his past work, especially There Will Be Blood [2007] and The Master [2012; 1 of only 2 films explored at this site to earn my coveted 4 ½ star rating—you’d have to be at The Big Sleep or Chinatown-level to ever hope for a 5 from me—review of The Master in our September 27, 2012 posting], although I think I need to rescreen Boogie Nights [1997] to recall why so many others are so effusive about it), I quickly admit I hardly expected anything except maybe a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination for Inherent Vice (an honor which it did achieve; soon we’ll see how it holds up against the oddly-placed-Whiplash in that category [see the final paragraph of my non-reminder-comments below for more on this matter]). However, there was some enthusiasm for this film simply because Inherent Vice is the first film adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel (not that I’ve read it, given my usual lowbrow-avoidance of respected literature, although with its 2009 publication date it might contain some influences from other media products noted here that it certainly seems to parallel in places; however, by chance I have read Pynchon’s 1966 postmodern satire, The Crying of Lot 49, which, I admit, I cannot remember a damn thing about, although there’s a summary of it that intrigues me toward a reread); overall, though, critical response toward Inherent Vice has been reasonable, not wildly wonderful (Rotten Tomatoes 70% positive, Metacritic 81%; more details if you like in the links far below). Nevertheless, I flowed well with the dark humor (absurdities in many cases, including that Chick Planet Massage shop, offering a full menu such as “Pussy Feast” for $14.95), the rambling plot which I didn’t even bother to try to keep up with, and the extreme characters (now I really want to read the book, if I can ever finish the monstrously-long Edgar Allen Poe anthology I’m trying to march myself through … but I may just have to put it aside in favor of the wonderful wackiness of a depth-immersion into Pynchon).

Bottom Line Final Comments: Sure, Inherent Vice doesn’t offer the masterful nuances of Chinatown and it’s even harder to follow than The Big Lebowsky (intended by the Coens, so they say—even if it’s just a good after-the-fact-excuse—to be a Chandleresque plot-clarity-nightmare just for the fun of it), but watching all of this silliness flow together (augmented by some nice tunes on the soundtrack) in an L.A. that seems more romantically-private-eye-mysterious rather than more-likely-racially-potboiling made it a great diversionary pleasure for me (of course, any movie that features some windblown driving along Southern California beaches has a lot going for it already, just as I enjoy watching the current version of TV’s Hawaii Five-O every week, despite the torturedly-convoluted-plots, just to bask in high-def-images of that gorgeous scenery). So, as long as you don’t expect Inherent Vice to be notably coherent nor are you bothered by how it refuses to take itself very seriously (despite all of the danger of violence and actual homicide that follows Doc around like a pot-infused-haze), I think you might enjoy it as well as long as you can grab it soon because with only about $7 million gross at the domestic box-office after 6 weeks in release I don’t think it’s destined to be around much longer. As for Musical Metaphors to complement Inherent Vice, I’ve picked a couple of tunes from its soundtrack by Neil Young, “Harvest” (from the 1972 album of the same name) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-Oz-M0UBN0, a live performance (date and location unknown to me) that ends with a nice multi-image-video-collage, and “Journey Through the Past” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73oO2XA_ihk, a 1971 live performance at the BBC, along with his random comments (my hero!) about harmonica playing (this song is on Young’s 1973 Time Fades Away album, but you could get confused looking for it because it has the same name as his 1972 soundtrack album from a film—also of the same name—directed by Young, with concert footage of Buffalo Springfield; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; and recording sessions for the Harvest album, along with artsy interludes, but this song isn’t part of that soundtrack’s contents). Listening to early Neil Young music just puts me into that dreamy, laid-back sense of late 1960s-early 1970s L.A. that underlies this crazy film so it seemed the right choice to evoke the mood—if not the actual content—of Inherent Vice.

The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland)

A lesbian couple living in the French (?) countryside continually play out scenarios of dominance and submission but with more complexity than we first understand.

Repeated SPOILER ALERT here because this film is just now opening in my San Francisco are so it may be newly arriving in your neighborhood as well. Read on with caution!

What Happens: Set (seemingly but not definitively) in the French countryside (but a British production where everyone speaks English, even though somewhat with accents that often sound French to my Anglo ears), we find a story that begins with a timid maid, Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), arriving at the home of her employer, Cynthia (SIdse Babett Knudsen), for regular cleaning duties of this old, large country home. Cynthia seems to be a rude, demanding woman who distains her employee, but we soon realize that this is a bondage and domination relationship between these two woman, with Evelyn in the willing role of someone who cleans carpet spots on her knees and meticulously polishes Cynthia’s boots in order to be chastised for her incompetence so that she can be punished accordingly. We also see that these women have much more conventional, passionate bedroom encounters that don’t require any role-playing. Yet, the biggest surprise is that Cynthia’s not really a dominatrix but is simply following daily scripts from Evelyn, who at times is frustrated that her lover’s not more assertive in her actions, just as Cynthia tires of the games, the tight clothing that goes with her role, and the inability of Evelyn to even have a masturbatory orgasm without additional verbal reminders of their B & D scenarios. Eventually, Evelyn intensifies her submission needs by requiring Cynthia to tie her to a couch then sit on her face while reading a book or bind her hands before locking her in a large wooden chest in their bedroom for the night. This situation is uncomfortable enough for the “dominant” one of the pair, but when she gets wind of Evelyn coming on to a mutual acquaintance she finally displays sincere anger toward her mate, coming up with scripts of her own that frighten Evelyn when she experiences the irony of being truly bossed around (required to bake her own birthday cake, then lie on the floor while Cynthia eats it), of not actually being in control of her fantasies. Eventually, Cynthia finds herself incapable of keeping up the domination façade so they lay off the games, allowing the tensions between them to recede, but the story closes with them receding as well back into the “downtrodden maid” scenario that we began with, showing both of them caught in an unfulfilling union that neither has the strength to overcome or change.

So What? By the way, the film’s obscure title refers to a somewhat rare species of European butterfly, reflecting both women’s amateur fascination with lepidoptery (the study of moths and butterflies), shown in this film through beautiful shots of hundreds of these varied insect specimens pinned into wood-and-glass-cases and the lovers’ attendance at lectures (sometimes Cynthia delivers them, generally to almost-all-female-audiences; both are fascinated by minutia regarding this topic) about these attractive flying creatures (although Strickland’s equally capable of offering mundane-yet-evocative-images of underwear in a sink, as part of the maid game where Evelyn’s punished for not washing Cynthia’s intimate apparel properly). This story and its presentation seems to be fascinating those who’ve previously reviewed it although it’s not having that effect on me; I’ll admit it gets much more intriguing after the opening scenes that seem to be little more than “perfume ad porn” of well-designed, well-shot “punishment” situations, but the progression to me is just into the realm of broken dreams, as neither of these women is truly getting what she wants but is simply accepting the status quo as needed to keep their union functional. Visually, though, there are some fascinating dream scenes with imagery that could come straight from David Lynch, as we have shots that move slowly into Cynthia’s darkened crotch, a skeleton in the bedroom chest where Evelyn’s supposed to be, Evelyn actually in another chest in the woods, etc. It’s all very evocative and disturbing but merely gives us a respite from the increasingly-strained-connections between these frustrated lovers whose mutual needs are not being resolved as their power games progress.

Bottom Line Final Comments: While I often find myself being close to the rounded-off-scores of the critics surveyed in the Rotten Tomatoes and/or Metacritic sites, when I differ from them (and the local lights-of-insight in my San Francisco area) it’s usually toward higher scores from me, as I find fascination with just about anything on screen so that a film has to sabotage itself in execution beyond its potential in order to pull me down into the 3-stars-or-below-range. However, with The Duke of Burgundy I’m going in the opposite direction from those who find it “emotionally wise” (The Hollywood Reporter), “A considerable work of art” (The Guardian), or “an erotic masterpiece … incredibly romantic” (The Hollywood News); to me it’s just a beautifully-shot (I’ll agree with The Hollywood Reporter’s statement of “Visually ravishing”) but sad story of a love entanglement that’s undercut with obsession on the one hand and melancholy on the other. While the rest of the critical establishment is in high spirits over this film (an astounding 100% positive from the Tomato Tossers—although based on just 21 reviews, a smallish number for them—89% from the lofty Metas—but with that average taken from an even smaller 9 examples at the time of this writing; you might check back later to see if any changes evolve) I just felt bad for each of the women involved in that neither of them was getting the willing cooperation of the other to fully immerse themselves in their sexual agreements, with Cynthia longing for something other than an involvement “kinky as a coiled rope” (The Hollywood Reporter again; I admit I’m jealous that they can pack into one sentence what takes me most of a paragraph to elucidate) and Evelyn getting her submission needs met but not by a partner who truly delights in the control that she envisions (even though Paste claims that The Duke … “weaves quite a spell”) but simply follows her directions through a daily rote performance.

I have nothing against lesbians, same-sex sex, or erotic bondage, it’s just that here I find that eroticism has been generally been replaced (except for some truly intimate bedroom scenes where the women seem to be fully enthralled by just the close contact of each other’s bodies) with a labored form of intimacy in which neither woman is truly getting her needs met, as they both seem incapable of finding some more acceptable mutual arrangement so they simply revert to their established patterns. As for a Musical Metaphor for The Duke of Burgundy I think immediately not of something that speaks to an exotic form of erotic love but instead a pronouncement of well-enjoyed-domination from a singer proud to be subjugating his lover, The Rolling Stones reveling in “Under My Thumb” (from the 1966 Aftermath album) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM8X ekYI8kI, an October 22, 2006 concert at immense Zilker Park in Austin, TX (where I spent a lot of college-era-time, but without the Stones or even being stoned—because in those days in Texas getting caught with even a single joint could get you a 99-year-jail-sentence). But on a darker note, reflecting my opinion of what happens when B & D scenarios up the ante into the dangerous realm of S & M (if you like it, that’s your choice, but for me that level of pain just seems to deny all sense of real eroticism, replacing it with a type of violence that speaks to hatred, including self-hatred), here’s that song again at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShLJnqMg__s from the (in)famous 1969 San Francisco-area Altamont concert where drug-fueled-fan Meredith Hunter (seen briefly in a green suit) pulled a pistol, leading to his brutal stabbing death from the Hell’s Angels “security forces” (you can get a lot more detail on this from the Gimme Shelter documentary [Albert and David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin; 1970]). I fear that with the contained-resentment that both Cynthia and Evelyn find in their relationship arrangements their “power exchange” games will someday inadvertently explode into something more vicious, unanticipated but uncontrolled until the results are unredeemable, like Alice’s loss of identity to forces beyond her control in our first film under review in this collection of analytical comments. Such a disaster isn’t inevitable with Cynthia and Evelyn, but the constant concern I feel for it goes a long way toward diminishing my potential enjoyment of something others find to be “surprisingly relatable” (The Hollywood News).

And the (Questionable) Envelope Please …

I’m sure you’re aware that the Academy Award nominations for films released in 2014 have been announced (see link a bit below for details) but in addition to the usual responses over perceived snubs (most famously for the omission of Selma’s lead actor David Oyelowo and director Ava DuVernay [review in our January 15, 2015 posting], whom I think could easily replace Steve Carell and Bennett Miller, respectively, from Foxcatcher [review in our November 19, 2014 posting]; here’s a related article about that) there’s another controversy over the placement of the script for Whiplash (Damien Chazelle as scriptwriter as well as director, 2014; review in our October 16, 2014 posting) in the Adapted Category because Chazelle made a short version of this story which was honored at the 2013 Sundance Festival, even though the Writers Guild of America has nominated Whiplash for their Original Screenplay award, with the rationale that both versions are all part of a continuous narrative. Honestly, I think it has a better chance of winning Oscar gold for Adapted Screenplay but that could penalize other contenders which more clearly fit this category, so we’ll just have to wait until February 22 to see what comes of this anomaly. Given this problem, though, and the various interpersonal conflicts in our 3 reviewed features this week I’ve decided to offer a final Musical Metaphor for all of these troubles, the Everly Brothers’ 1961 hit, “Walk Right Back,” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OwRp49x-FI (written by Sonny Curtis, included on the 1962 album The Golden Hits of the Everly Brothers, taken here from a 1983 London concert), given how so many of the above-involved want someone to “walk right back” (including Alice Howland‘s former self in Still Alice) to how something used to be while admitting the melancholy sense that such a result may not come to pass (even the repeat of the song’s single verse and chorus underscores the ongoing sense of constantly-manifested-loss felt by all that I’m dedicating this tune to). However, in using those Neil Young songs with Inherent Vice I’m reminded of a more optimistic statement from him about good times still in action with “Harvest Moon” at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF0AVn813g8 (a performance of the title song from his 1972 album, shot at some unknown time [to me], once again in Austin, TX, used here also because of its rhythmical similarity [and, probably, chord pattern, if I were a good enough musician to know such] to “Walk Right Back” and its embrace from my loving wife, Nina, whom I haven’t had any occasion to spot check in these postings for awhile so I just wanted to remind everyone how her support for this silly enterprise of mine serves as inspiration to keep me going on weeks when the writing and posting feels more obligatory than enjoyable—although this one hasn’t been any such chore).

Finally, if you’d like to Like us on Facebook you’re welcome to find us on our Film Reviews from Two Guys in the Dark page by typing that name into their “Search for people, places and things” box or just Google https://www.facebook.com/filmreviewsfrom twoguysinthedark. We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it!

AND … at least until the Oscars for 2014’s releases have been awarded on Sunday, February 22, 2015 I’m also going to include reminders in each review posting of very informative links where you can get updated tallies of which 2014 films made various individual critic’s Top 10 lists and which ones have been nominated for and/or received various awards. You may find the diversity among the various critics and the various awards competitions hard to reconcile at times—not to mention the often-significant-gap between critics’ choices and competition-award-winners (which usually pales in comparison to the even-more-noticeable-gap between box-office-success, which you can monitor here, and what wins the awards)—but as that less-than-enthusiastic-patron-of-the-arts, Plato, noted in The Symposium (385-380 BC)—roughly translated, depending on how accurate you wish the actual quote to be—“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder,” so your choices are as valid as any of these others, especially if you can offer some rationale for your decisions (unlike many of the awards voters who simply fill out ballots, sometimes for films they’ve never seen).

To save you a little scrolling through the “various awards” list above, here are the Golden Globe winners for films and TV from 2014 and the Oscar nominees for 2014 film releases.

If you’d like to know more about Still Alice here are some suggested links:

http://sonyclassics.com/stillalice/ (be sure and click the screen after the trailer plays—or before if you prefer—to get to more of this site)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrXrZ5iiR0o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMT6ig_MqRM (33:45 interview with co-directors [and spouses] Wash Westmorland and Richard Glatzer [now suffering from ALS, communicating via computer as with Stephen Hawking] and actors Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/still_alice/?search=still%20alice

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/still-alice

If you’d like to know more about Inherent Vice here are some suggested links:

http://inherentvicemovie.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZfs22E7JmI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqQ_7CpU-_g (29:31 press conference from the 2014 New York Film Festival with director Paul Thomas Anderson and actors Joaquin Phoenix, Katherine Waterston, Benicio del Toro, Maya Rudolph, Joanna Newsom, Michael K. Williams, Hong Chou, Jena Malone, Owen Wilson, Sasha Pieterse, and Martin Short; be aware that the audio level is low)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/inherent_vice/?search=inherent%20vice

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/inherent-vice

If you’d like to know more about The Duke of Burgundy here are some suggested links:

http://www.protagonistpictures.com/films/the-duke-of-burgundy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-xIMBnclyA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iJfrwDWg5I (17:49 press conference from the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival with director Peter Strickland and actress Chiara D’Anna [her Q & A audio isn’t very loud either)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_duke_of_burgundy/?search=the%20duke%20of%20bur

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-duke-of-burgundy

If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my new email at kenburke409@gmail.com. Thanks.