Movie Review The Two Faces of January

The Two Faces of January (2014) 

Directed by Hossein Amini 

Written by Hossein Amini 

Starring Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac, Kirsten Dunst 

Release Date August 28th, 2014 

Published November 17th 2014

I feel as if I missed something essential in “The Two Faces of January.” For the life of me, I don’t know why the film is called “The Two Faces of January.” I feel the film must have introduced this information at some point but I don’t recall it. I could speculate that the two faces are those of stars Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac as they seem to be counter-weighted to each other throughout the film but what was the ‘January’ bit? It’s not a reference to the month, it’s a not a name, unless that’s what I missed. It nags at me that I missed this or if I didn’t miss it and am puzzling over something that doesn’t matter.

“The Two Faces of January” is an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. Thus, it is set in Europe, in this case Greece, among beautiful, vacationing Americans. Oscar Isaac is Rydal Keener, an ex-pat con man and tour guide with aspirations to be rich. For now, he’ll settle for not being at home at his father’s funeral. Rydal’s con is to find fellow Americans who don’t speak the language and don’t understand foreign currency. It’s an almost victimless crime as his victims have plenty to spare and he’s really only skimming off the top.

Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst are Chester and Colette MacFarlane. At first, we’re to wonder if they are set to be Rydal’s next meal ticket. Director and screenwriter Hossein Amini however, has something more sinister in mind. Like Rydal, Chester is something of a conman, an American stock swindler. On the run with Colette in Europe he has conned his young wife into a game of pretend; pretending they’re going to go home and he isn’t going to be sent to prison or worse.

The game ends when an American private eye finds Chester and Colette and sets about a shakedown for the missing money of one of his clients. The detective dies and when Rydal arrives at the wrong moment to return a lost bracelet, he’s roped into a life-changing plot. Using his connections as a conman Rydal will attempt to get his new friends out of Greece without their passports. Phony documents take time however and with Grecian police acting efficiently to ferret out the plot, a road trip is undertaken to remain under the radar.

That’s the crux of the plot. What’s left is spoiler filled so consider yourself warned.

Ok, fine, I decided to look up the title of the movie to see what I missed. It turns out that it is a reference to the Roman God Janus which is said to have had to faces, one to see the future and one to see the past. Janus was the God of beginnings and transitions. That, naturally, is quite fitting for this story as the past plagues the future of all three characters. Janus by the way was eventually honored by the first month of the year, as January.

Throughout the introductory portion of “The Two Faces of January” we come to see Rydal admire both Chester and Colette. We can see his envy for Chester but also a deep respect for his station. We can sense a desire to usurp Chester even as Chester becomes a father figure. Yes, it’s all very Freudian and Shakespearean with the son who wishes to replace the father at the side of the mother. Yada, yada, yada. Here however, is where our director smartens up. By removing Colette via the film’s second accidental murder the dynamic shifts and what was beginning to be a draggy psychological thriller shifts gears to become a noir thriller.

Having failed to also kill Rydal in the wake of his murder of Colette, Chester finds himself chained to his new ‘friend’ as he attempts to leave the country. Each man has it out for the other but the game playing brings them together, as does the revenge each seeks on the other. Rydal is driven to avenge Colette and his having been framed for her murder. Chester, on the other hand is seeking escape but also to redeem the manhood he lost in his cuckolding.

That’s the psychological motivation for the action of the the final act of the film. Mr. Amini however, has by this point, as much as we have, has lost interest in psychology. The final act  of “The Two Faces of January” is instead played almost entirely in the language of film noir camerawork and staging.

As each man evades capture by police the cobblestone streets of Crete are alive with moonlight. Narrow corridors like those out of Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” shimmer with moonlight illuminating a path toward inexhaustible death. That Chester is to die is not in question here but the style with which his death arrives is classically crafted and elevates the film. We also get a very unusual and soulful moment as the dying father figure gives back to his son his life with a helpful confession of his crimes.

Much like the God Janus looking forward and backward at once, “The Two Faces of January” looks to be two movies at once. One movie is a pop-psych thriller with a little Shakespeare for flavor. The other is a tribute to the noir mysteries of the 40’s and 50’s complete with the mistaken identities, the wrongly accused man and the wet, reflective streets that always seemed to await a chase and a death.

That is the film’s beauty and its curse. It is two movies in one and neither is enough to satisfy in full. I loved the ending but the pop-psych stuff plods and the chemistry of the stars never bring it to life. The ending is almost good enough for me to recommend the movie but I wonder how many of you will last that long once the film is available on home video and you can simply stop and do other things.

Movie Review Ouija

Ouija (2014) 

Directed by Stiles White 

Written by Juliet Snowden, Stiles White 

Starring Olivia Cooke, Darren Kagasoff, Bianca Santos 

Release Date October 24th, 2014 

Published October 25th, 2014 

Ouija, based on the Hasbro board game about contacting the dead, is one of the laziest movies I have ever seen. There is not a single original moment in the entire barely feature length of the film. The only redeeming thing about Ouija is it's potential role in a new game I created in my head while watching it called Horror Movie Cliché Bingo. Each time you see a Horror Movie Cliché that matches a cliché on your card, mark it off. When you have five in a row on your card, stand up in the theater and yell Bingo. I had Bingo about 45 minutes into the movie.

Movie Review The Other Woman

The Other Woman (2014) 

Directed by Nick Cassavetes 

Written by Melissa Stack 

Starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Upton, Leslie Mann, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau 

Release Date April 25th, 2014 

Published January 2nd, 2024 

Cameron Diaz is back in theaters this weekend with "The Other Woman," a comedy that casts her as the the unknowing mistress of Nikolaj Coster Waldau who falls into an unlikely friendship with with his wife played by Leslie Mann and his other mistress played by supermodel Kate Upton. "The Other Woman" doesn't look like much from its trailer but the movie is quite good featuring a strong central performance from Diaz and a scene-stealing comic performance from Leslie Mann who's best known for her work in husband Judd Apatow's comedies. 

Leslie Mann, Cameron Diaz, and Kate Upton, have one thing in common, Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster Waldau, in the movie, The Other Woman. All three are the 'other woman' in their relationship with Waldau. Leslie Mann plays the wife, Cameron Diaz is mistress number one, and Kate Upton is the youngest and hottest of the the trio of woman whose lives revolve around this one narcissistic man fooling around on all of them. 

Once our trio of hero ladies come together, The Other Woman takes on a comic revenge plot as the trio takes revenge on Waldau's ladies man. It's a lot more fun than that description sounds. Leslie Mann, for one is having a ball as the wronged wife who meets and bonds with her husband's mistresses. In a rare leading role, outside of the work of her comic legend husband, Mann is a treat in The Other Woman, throwing herself headlong into physical comedy and into this comic revenge plot. 

Cameron Diaz is in the role of the straight man. Diaz reacts to Mann's craziness and Upton's hotness all while grounding the movie in a recognizable reality. It's certainly farfetched that any man could be with three woman as attractive as Mann, Diaz, and Upton in a single lifetime, but Diaz manages to make this unbelievable scenario work. She's such a pro and, when called upon, she can be just as funny as Mann and hotter than even Upton, once named the sexiest woman on the planet. 

The Other Woman is much sharper than the plot would indicate. This trio of female stars has such incredible chemistry that it doesn't matter how seemingly impossible it would be for one man to have bedded down with these three women in one lifetime. Nick Cassavetes' direction is breezy and the tone always remains fun and funny. The jokes are good and Leslie Mann earns some of the biggest laughs of her career in a career best performance. 

Classic Movie Review The Pelican Brief

The Pelican Brief (1993) 

Directed by Alan J. Pakula 

Written by Alan J. Pakula 

Starring Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Hume Cronyn 

Release Date December 17th, 1993

Published December 27th, 2023 

The Pelican Brief stars Julia Roberts as Tulane Law School student, Darby Shaw. Darby is your average 23 year old who happens to be sleeping with her law professor, played by Sam Shepherd. After a pair of Supreme Court Justices, Rosenberg and Jensen, are assassinated, Darby develops a theory as to why these to seemingly opposing judges were killed. It turns out, the two Justices, had one thing in common, the environment. Each voted regularly against major corporations that risked polluting the environment or those that did pollute the environment received significant penalties for doing so. 

Taking out Rosenberg and Jensen reshapes the court in someone's favor and that someone is likely the person who arranged two assassinations of Supreme Court Justices within hours of each other. For some reason, only 23 year old law student who is sleeping with her professor, is capable of figuring out this conspiracy. So, Darby writes a legal brief and gives it to her professor boyfriend. The boyfriend passes it to his pal at the FBI, played by John Heard. From there, what comes to be known as The Pelican Brief, reaches the desk of the President's Chief of Staff, played by Tony Goldwyn, who takes it to the President, Robert Culp, and a conspiracy unfolds to kill Darby and bury the brief.

On a second track of story, Washington Post reporter Gray Grantham, played by Denzel Washington, is following his own theory on the assassinations. Gray has connected with a Washington lawyer who claims to have seen a memo implicating his bosses at a big time law firm in the deaths of Rosenberg and Jensen. The lawyer, calling himself Garcia, reaches out to Grantham for help but ultimately backs out of a meeting with the reporter out of fear for his life. In the midst of trying to follow the bread crumbs left by Garcia, Gray meets Darby and the two begin working together to solve this conspiracy while running for their lives from ruthless assassins. 

There is something ever so slightly off throughout The Pelican Brief. While the film is perfectly watchable, it feels weightless for a movie about the assassination of TWO Supreme Court justices and a college professor. Oops, spoiler alert. There's actually an even bigger body count than that but I don't want to give everything away regarding this 30 year old blockbuster. The Pelican Brief never feels like anything more than a trashy beach read, perhaps because that is exactly what the movie was based upon. Legendary author John Grisham may have had the pretense of a law professor, but his books were straight melodrama inflated with legal jargon. 

That said, I expected a little something more from writer-director Alan J. Pakula. After all, he's the director behind two iconic 70s movies, one of which is the gold standard of political thrillers, All the President's Men, and the other is the remarkable mystery, Klute. Pakula was more than capable of making throwaway blockbuster style movies, even in his heyday, but, paired with the two most radiant stars of the day and a book that had a solid base for an exploration of corruption and politics, I got it in my head that The Pelican Brief should be more than it is. That's on me. The Pelican Brief, away from my expectations and desires, is fine. It's breezy, it moves quickly, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. 

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest (2023) 

Directed by Jonathan Glazer 

Written by Jonathan Glazer 

Starring Sandra Huller, Christian Friedel 

Release Date December 15th, 2023 

Published 

The Zone of Interest is a devastating work of art. It's an unflinching and horrific movie but not because it depicts the holocaust in any direct fashion. Rather, The Zone of Interest places the horrors in your mind all while an affluent family headed up by the Nazi Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp goes through the daily routines of your average suburban family. It's the casualness of it all that drills the horror of the holocaust into your subconscious. I should not have been so gobsmacked by seeing the family of a Nazi casually carrying on as if what their father does is just like any other job but it just kept hitting me again and again how horrific this all is. The normalization of the systematic murder of six million people leads you the revelation of how we normalize the horrors of the world every time we turn a blind eye to suffering and death. 

The Zone of Interest centers its story on Commandant Rudolph Hoss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Huller). As he goes off to work, she attends to the house staff and gets the kids off to school. It's all so familiar and normal. You see this tableau unfold in every suburb. Except for the part where Rudolph is wearing a crisply detailed Nazi uniform and is walking next door to his job as the commandant at Auschwitz where he's charged with finding the most efficient way to murder Jewish people while keeping just enough of them alive for slave labor for the camp or industry. His approach to his job is no different from your average middle manager holding meetings with higher ups while filing efficiency reports on the number of people he's able to brutally murder. 

Meanwhile, his wife is entertaining friends and family in their well appointed home. The film unfolds a number of callous and cruel scenes as packages are delivered to the home and it slowly dawns on us that the various pieces of clothing and personal items are those of Jewish people being murdered next door. For example, Hedwig receives a package containing a mink coat. She tries it on and poses in front of a mirror. She finds a lipstick in the pocket and starts applying it. She's as carefree as if she'd just purchased these items and they belong to her. If she cares at all where these items came from or how she's taking things that belonged to people her husband is murdering, you can't see it on her face or in her eyes. There is a sociopathic level of not caring in Hedwig. Her sense of cruel entitlement is soul shaking for anyone with a conscience. 

In a later scene, Hedwig's mother comes to visit and they have a conversation about a former neighbor, an elderly Jewish woman. The conversation casually discussed the woman's curtains and how the mother envied those curtains before wondering if the woman had been murdered next door. The mother indicates that she's far more upset that she wasn't the one to end up with those curtains than she's bothered by the fate of her former neighbor. Director Jonathan Glazer does not flinch in his presentation of these scenes. The mundanity of this conversation, the casual disregard for the lives of Jewish people is chilled my spine and that's the point. If you don't find this monstrous, there is something horrifically wrong with you, just as there is something absolutely wrong with these characters. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Maestro

Maestro (2023) 

Directed by Bradley Cooper

Written by Bradley Cooper, Josh Singer

Starring Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan. Maya Hawke, Matt Bomer 

Release Date November 22nd, 2023 

Published ?

There are many things to like about Bradley Cooper's Maestro. This biopic of legendary composer Leonard Bernstein is incredible to look at. Cooper and his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, and production designer, Kevin Thompson, have put exceptional craft into the movie. Several of the films scenes simply pop off the screen in composition, detail, and the use of color. There is no denying that Bradley Cooper has a wonderful directorial eye aided by an exceptional team behind him. Where Maestro falters, sadly, is storytelling where the tenets of the movie biopic restrict and restrain. It's as if there was simply too much life in Leonard Bernstein to be constricted to the film form. 

Maestro begins its story with Leonard Bernstein being interviewed about his life and reflecting mostly on his beloved wife Felicia. Then we are thrown into a flashback, black and white, a young and eager Leonard Bernstein gets the phone call that will change his life. The main conductor of the New York Philharmonic is ill and cannot perform. His replacement is snowed in upstate. The 25 year old Bernstein with no rehearsal time, will have to fill in. He crushes it, he delivers an incredible performance that skyrockets his career. 

Meanwhile, in his private life, Bernstein is enjoying life as a gay man in New York, collaborating on various musical projects and spending time with his lover, David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer). These moments are brief but show a playful and wildly creative Bernstein constantly in creative mode, in the flower of his youth. Soon after however, he's met a woman at a party. Her name is Felicia (Carey Mulligan) and the two spark immediate chemistry. It's never stated that Bernstein is bisexual and the movie is remarkably vague on this point, perhaps because, until late in his life, Bernstein himself was vague on this point. 

The two undergo a whirlwind romance accompanied by Bernstein's remarkable successes on the stage, screen and as a composer of numerous symphonies. A lovely scene has Bernstein take Felicia to the stage where a musical he's working on with Jerome Robbins is rehearsing. The two get swept up in the dance rehearsal before being pulled apart. The symbolism rages aloud in this scene as the two sides of Bernstein's sexuality are pulled in different directions, one toward Felicia, one away from her. Dancers keep pulling both in different directions with Felicia imagining a man who might have taken her from Bernstein earlier in their life. It's an exceptional and exciting sequence that demonstrates Cooper's terrific direction. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review American Fiction

American Fiction (2023) 

Directed by Cord Jefferson 

Written by Cord Jefferson 

Starring Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown 

Release Date December 15th, 2023 

Published December 23rd, 2023

American Fiction is the sharpest American comedy of 2023. This brilliant deconstruction of writers, writing, society, and popular culture from Cord Jefferson fearlessly points an accusing finger at the audience while not letting its main character off the hook either. Featuring one of our finest actors, Jeffrey Wright, at his absolute best, American Fiction takes elements from classic literature and mixes them with a touch of the angsty self-analogizing of the formerly great Woody Allen, and crafts a near perfect comedy. 

Monk, played by Jeffrey Wright, is a dyspeptic college professor and long struggling author. Despite having published several books, he cannot escape the specter of being a 'black author' and he's desperately frustrated. After suffering a loss in his family and the decline of his mother's health, Monk gets drunk and writes the kind of novel that he despises. It's a novel filled with stock characters from popular culture centered on the supposed 'black' experience. 

It's written in broken English and Monk's fictional author, Stagg R. Lee, is supposed fugitive from the law. He hopes to use the book to shame those that claim this kind of book is 'important' and 'raw' and explores the 'black' experience. It centers on a gang member with a deadbeat dad and no mother. The book is cobbled together from every 'important' piece of black popular culture aimed at white liberal guilt of the late 20th and 21st century. And in what should come as no surprise, it becomes a massive hit when Monk's agent sends it out to white publishers. 

Faced with the conundrum of having written a book he despises and being offered big money to publish the book he despises; Monk begrudgingly takes the money. With his mother being in declining health and needing round the clock care and his brother, Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), being of little help as he drugs and sexes his way through a nasty divorce, Monk needs the money, even if it is coming at the cost of his self-respect. Where this story is headed, you will need to see for yourself. I can only tell you that it is an exceptionally smart and funny journey to get there. 

Writer-Director Cord Jefferson has written one incredibly nimble and lithe comic script. It bubbles with wit and a contempt for a culture that reduces people to stereotypes. At the same time, the keystone of the movie is revealed in a terrifically awkward and deeply uncomfortable opening scene. Here, Monk in his job as a professor is teaching about the work of Flannery O'Connor. When he writes the title of one of O'Connor's short stories on the board, the title of which I can't comfortably write in this review, the student, a young white woman objects. The title contains the N-word and while the young white woman expresses her discomfort at having to see the word, Monk becomes frustrated and berates her. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media