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Posts Tagged ‘David Fincher’

“THE KILLER”: Ruthless efficiency

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 11, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Michael Fassbender

“THE KILLER” My rating: B (Netflix)

118 minutes | MPAA rating: R

David Fincher’s latest is a minimalist epic about  a contract killer who appears to have no personality whatsoever.

Despite all this, it is a wildly entertaining effort.

Michael Fassbender is our unnamed protagonist, whom we meet in an under-renovation apartment in Paris.  He’s been there for days awaiting the arrival in the building across the street of his target.  We don’t know who he’s supposed to kill. or why.

All we know is that the Killer exhibits an astonishing level of patience. He passes the time scanning the street through a scope and doing yoga.

In the film he says almost nothing.  Well, that’s not quite true. In the first 30 minutes he gives us, in narration, a sort of primer on hitman etiquette.  In this he is quite chatty, holding forth on the necessity of anticipation and the dangers of improvisation.  As for the moral consequences of his actions… there’s no mention of that.  Doesn’t seem to matter.

The screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, Alexis Nolent and Lucy Jacamon is astonishingly straightforward.

The Paris job goes wrong. The Killer flees to his  palatial home base in the Dominican Republic only to find that rival killers from his employer have beat him there, torturing his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) so badly that she’s in the hospital.  

This calls for revenge.  Quickly, methodically and implacably the killer goes about eliminating the threats against him.  

Tilda Swinton

That means paying a visit to the crooked New Orleans lawyer (Charles Parnell) who hands out his deadly assignments, the Florida thug (Sala Baker) who beat up his girl, the thug’s New York-based co-killer (Tilda Swinton) and finally the impossibly rich mover and shaker (Arliss Howard) who ordered the Paris hit.

As I mentioned, the Killer rarely says anything.  Not so most of his targets, who when facing death become remarkably loquacious.  A lot of good it does them. (The only one as silent as the Killer is the hulking goon in Florida; the two of them have a mano-a-mano smackdown for the ages.)

Now this all sounds terribly grim, and it should be pointed out that “The Killer” is often slyly amusing.  For example, our protagonist has a collection of fake identities (with attendant IDs, passports, credit cards and other documentation) in the names of classic TV sitcom characters: Felix Unger, Oscar Madison, Archibald Bunker, etc.

And then there’s the Killer’s clothing choices.  In voiceover he announces that the whole idea is to be so freaking bland that nobody can remember you; for much of the film he wanders around looking like a suburban dad at Disney World.

There’s no moral to “The Killer,” hardly any plot and certainly no characters you’d want to actually meet (okay, maybe the girlfriend, but she got beat up protecting a man she knows is a murderer).

Nevertheless, it’s a fun ride precisely because of its menagerie of cooly calculating/brutal/smooth talking creeps. 

| Robert W. Butler

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“MANK”: Cinematic revenge

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 5, 2020| 1 Comment »

Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies, Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz

“MANK” My rating: A-

131 minutes | MPAA rating: R

David Fincher’s “Mank” is both a work of genius and a foolhardy gamble, a backstage-Hollywood epic that, for maximum effectiveness, requires its audience to be intimately familiar with Orson Welles’  “Citizen Kane.”

Great. I watch “Kane” a couple of times a year; I’ve even played it on slo-mo so as to appreciate every little nuance of its visual splendor (though one needs to set aside a full 12 hours for that act of devotion).

But I’m not sure how your average 2020 moviegoer is going to react to Fincher’s effort, since “Mank” is literally crammed to the gills with visual, aural and thematic references to “Kane.”

For this viewer, at least, it is two hours of cinematic heaven.

As presented in the screenplay by Fincher’s late father, Jack Fincher, “Mank” is not about the filming of “Citizen Kane” or about the controversy generated by the finished film. (In fact, I’m not sure the words “Citizen Kane” are even uttered here until the last five minutes.)

Rather it centers on the writing of the screenplay in 1940. Orson Welles, the boy wonder director of “Kane” (Tom Burke, who sounds like Welles even if he doesn’t much look like him), is here little more than a walk-on character.

The film’s “hero” is Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), a Hollywood screenwriter who has worn out his welcome at the studios thanks to his boozing and bitterly dismissive attitude toward Tinseltown’s power structure.

As played by Oldman, Mank is adept at wrapping his verbal poison pills in the soothing charm of a born  ranconteur. He’s just this short of being openly contemptuous of his studio bosses, but even they cannot hate him.

Although he is a miserable SOB, there’s something about Mank that inspires devotion and loyalty. His wife (Tuppence Middleton) — known universally as “Poor Sara” —  wearily cleans up after his boozing and insane gambling habit.

Now Mank’s been hired by Welles — the wiz kid’s been given carte blanche by RKO to make his first movie — to come up with a screenplay about a newspaper tycoon inspired by real-life media mogul William Randolph Hearst.  Mank, nursing a broken leg, has been installed in a bungalow in remote Victorville CA, far away from temptation.

He’s accompanied by producer John Houseman (Sam Troughton), who is to edit his daily pages, and by a somewhat stiff British lady (Lily Collins) who is expected to see to his physical care and keep him off the sauce…although before long he’s made her his collaborator in mischief.

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“GONE GIRL”: Through the lens darkly

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 2, 2014| 4 Comments »

Rosamund Pike, Benn Affleck...in happier times

Rosamund Pike, Benn Affleck…in happier times

“GONE GIRL” My rating: A- (Opening wide on Oct. 3)

minutes | MPAA rating: R

The Affleck smirk — the way Ben Affleck, without even trying, looks like a high school halfback who has just initiated one of the new cheerleaders beneath the bleachers — is put to spectacular use in “Gone Girl.”

In David Fincher’s first-rate adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s dark suspense novel, Affleck plays a  handsome husband suspected of killing his beautiful wife, who has inexplicably gone missing. Here’s a poor jerk who — despite his best efforts to appear sympathetic in front of the cops, the cameras and the court of public opinion — can’t help coming off as insincere and smug.

Damn that Affleck smirk!

Or, rather, all hail the Affleck smirk, imbued as it is with ambivalence and leaving us uncertain about whether we should be cheering or booing the film’s protagonist.

That indecision could be problematical (moviegoers like being told what to think and feel), but “Gone Girl” nevertheless sucks us into the bitter (and bitterly funny) world fashioned by Fincher and Flynn (who adapted her own book for the screen — and in many respects actually improved upon the novel).

It’s a thoroughly satisfying mystery and suspense tale, sure, but “Gone Girl” also is one of the cinema’s most supremely cynical statements about the institution of marriage. It makes “The War of the Roses” seem warm and fuzzy.

And as if that wasn’t cake enough, we get for icing a hugely perceptive and bleakly comic depiction of the tabloid media, Internet opinion-making, and the astoundingly shallow fickleness of the American public.

There’s enough great stuff in here for three or four movies.  That Fincher (“The Social Network,” “Zodiac,” “Fight Club”) and Kansas City-reared Flynn keep it all in perfect balance is some sort of miracle.

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