TRUE STORY

TRUE STORY is essentially a two-hander between often-time comedic collaborators James Franco and Jonah Hill.  In this film, they try their hand at a straight psychological drama with limited effect.  Hill plays real-life New York Times journalist Michael Finkel who was sacked in the early 1990s for falsifying sources on a story.  Per Finkel/Hill he was doing so to enhance an important ethical story for the greater good.  The result is that Finkel is washed up until a murderer on the lam decides to appropriate his identity in order, in turns out, to lure him into a relationship. And this forms the body of the film. We see James Franco play Christian Longo, accused of killing his family, give up pieces of that story to Finkel in exchange for advice on how to better write his testimony.

Prisoner/journalist stories of this kind have the capacity to be quite spectacular, and at their apex - Capote and In Cold Blood - have the ability to ask frightening questions about how far each side needs the other and is complicit in the other's crimes.  How far does Finkel let Longo manipulate him because he needs the story that resurrects his career? This sort of material requires great skill on the part of both actors - we need to see and feel layers of motivation and ambiguity.  I'm afraid that I just didn't get that from either actor here.  Moreover, and this must be more down to the screenwriter and first-time feature director Rupert Goold - the pacing felt sluggish and the movie overall lacking in tension.  So overall, there's very little here to attract an audience either on the big screen or on DVD.

TRUE STORY has a running time of 99 minutes and is rated R. It played Sundance 2015 and was released earlier this year in the USA, Canada, Brazil, Spain, the UK, Ireland, Germany and France.  It is now available to rent and own.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is crazy gonzo fun for about an hour.  And then it's still sporadically funny but the complete lack of character or indeed plot development starts to nag at you.  And while it's nagging you think, haven't I seen all this before, thematically at least, in GOODFELLAS and CASINO?  And then, in the final half hour of this over-long three hour film, you get the first indication of the dark side of the excesses of greed and addiction - the first actually profound exploration.  And it's just too late.

Which is not to say that Martin Scorsese hasn't achieved a great deal with this film. No-one depicts hedonism with his sense of energy, flair and superb synchronisation of music cues. And my god, Leonardo diCaprio and Seth Rogen really commit to their performances.  To see the two rookie stockbrokers sneak out the back of a restaurant, smoke crack and then go skipping and jumping through the car-lot like naughty children is a joy.  To see them, now super successful, crippled by quaaludes, bodies spasoming, fighting over a kitchen counter is physical comedy of the highest form.   To be sure the intervening two hours contain many a funny scene.  The serious discussion about dwarf tossing, referring always to the dwarf as 'it' is funny as hell.   But there's an uneasiness in the gonzo nature of this film, and Scorsese's resistance to any dark backing.  Surely it must be possible to make a movie about superficial greedy people that is not itself superficial and egregious?

Because, make no mistake, the tone of this film for the majority of the run-time is one of admiration for these charming gonzo folk.  It's swallowed the hype for the most part.  It makes zero attempt to show the impact of these swindlers on the ordinary folk whose money they have invested in worthless stock, while taking massive commission. The 'hero' has an earnest first wife who is dispatched in a divorce quickly and is never seen again.  What's even worse is that Scorsese clearly isn't actually interested in the con.

Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) was a real life broker who operated a 'boiler plate' scheme - that means you set up a call centre and randomly cold call dumb schmucks and get them to invest their money with you. It works because they are ignorant and greedy. The so-called investments are actually in worthless 'penny stocks' - companies so small that they aren't on the main stock market and so fly under the radar of the big investment banks.  And the real con, is that the brokers take 50% commission. So they take your $10,000, invest $5,000 in stuff  that's worthless, and keep the other $5,000.  In addition to this con, Jordan also ran two other cons. First, he would bring a new company to the stock market, but instead of selling the new shares in the market, he would pocket them himself, in secret, drive up the price and then sell.  Second, he was wholesale exporting cold hard cash to a secret bank account in Switzerland.

Scorsese barely tells you any of this. In fact, time and again in Jordan's speeches to the audience he says something like 'You don't understand what I'm saying, or care, so let's just flick to another picture of me snorting coke from a hooker's arse.'  I find this just as patronising as the original boiler plate scam - assuming the audience is as gullible and greedy for excess and dumb as the scammed investors.  Scorsese is truly giving a massive Fuck You to all of us.  Compare the approach taken here to J.C.Chandor's marvellous MARGIN CALL - the only movie to really GET Wall Street.  The tragedy here is not that Scorsese fails, as Oliver Stone did with WALL STREET 2 - the tragedy is that Scorsese doesn't even try.

So when you strip out any interest in Wall Street, and any interest in what's really behind all this excess psychologically, what you basically get is a gag-reel full of drug-fuelled pratfalls and brilliantly kitschy 1980s clothes.  It's funny but it's empty and too long given the paucity of its ambition.

But is it worth seeing anyway? Here I'd have to say 'yes'.  The Matthew McConaughey cameo is genius - as if anyone isn't already convinced that this is truly HIS time in the sun.  The physical comedy is fantastic.  DiCaprio's quaaluded-up attempt to get to his car is worth awards glory on its own.  But be prepared, amid these wonderful set-pieces, for boredom. And don't expect Scorsese to move beyond the thematic work that has, by now, become cliché - sudden wealth, hot wife, doofus sidekick, hubris, nemesis.  Where's the personal growth? Both on the part of Jordan Belfort AND on the part of Scorsese?

P.S. If in your publicity material you're making great claims for screenwriter Terence Winter's background in investment banking, don't show the tickers for Black Monday as GREEN when the RED was dripping on the walls, dumbass.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is rated R in the USA and 18 in the UK for very strong language, strong sex and drug use. The movie has a running time of 180 minutes.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET was released last year in the USA, Canada, France, Albania, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Lebanon, New Zealand, Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia. It was released earlier this month in Egypt, Argentina, Chile, Israel, Uruguay, Finland, India, Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Mexico, Romania, Sweden and Vietnam. It will be released on January 17th in the UK, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Pakistan and Spain.  It will be released on January 23rd in Australia, Italy and Brazil; and on January 24th in Japan; on January 31st in Norway and Russia; on February 7th in Russia, Estonia and Latvia; on February 13th in Hong Kong; on February 21st in Lithuania; and on February 28th in Turkey.

This review is available as a podcast. You can listen directly below or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

Kevin Smith retrospective - CHASING AMY (1997) - Your mother is a tracer!

After the high profile flop of the 6 million dollar budgeted MALLRATS, Kevin Smith's next feature was a dialled back 250k drama called CHASING AMY. The limited budget may have caused producer Scott Mosier a head-ache but it enabled writer-director Kevin Smith to create a movie as funny as CLERKS but darker, more emotionally real, and more affecting. To this day, I think CHASING AMY is Smith's best film and also his most unique. It's his most profound and adult movie - the most bittersweet - the furthest away from the comic-book stylings of JAY AND SILENT BOB - and yet the movie most firmly embedded in the comic-book community. Once again, we're back to the paradoxes.

The movie could share the title of Simon Callow's autobiography, "Love is where it falls" - the story of a passionate friendship between a gay man and a straight woman. CHASING AMY is about a straight man called Holden (Ben Affleck) who has an affair with a lesbian woman called Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) invoking the jealousy of his apparently straight best friend Banky (Jason Lee.) The first half the film depicts Holden's attempt to persuade Alyssa to try a straight relationship. The second half depicts his attempts to reconcile himself with his best friend's feelings for him and his feelings of sexual inadequacy and latent prurience when confronted with Alyssa's sexual past. The movie shows real insight and bravery in dealing with slippery sexual (and indeed racial) politics. It has its moments of real emotional intensity - the declaration of love by Holden to Alyssa is beautifully written - but it also manages to avoid any mawkish sentimentality, especially in its brilliantly ambiguous ending. At the same time, the movie is as brutally, honestly funny as anything Kevin Smith has ever written - and best of all, the comedy is grounded in real life rather than relying on ludicrous and implausible situations.

For me CHASING AMY is the perfect Kevin Smith movie. It's laugh-out-loud funny, but we're laughing at real situations. It's emotionally involving without being hokey. It's speaks honestly about sex and love. And if Ben Affleck struggles at times with Kevin Smith's dialogue and the weight of the emotion he has to portray, this is more than compensated for by the strong central performances from Joey Lauren Adams and Jason Lee and from Dwight Ewell's scene-stealing supporting role as the camp, militant comic book creator, Hooper:

Hooper: Always some white boy gotta invoke the holy trilogy. Bust this: Those movies are about how the white man keeps the brother man down, even in a galaxy far, far away. Check this shit: You got cracker farm boy Luke Skywalker, Nazi poster boy, blond hair, blue eyes. And then you got Darth Vader, the blackest brother in the galaxy, Nubian god!

Banky Edwards: What's a Nubian?

Hooper: Shut the fuck up! Now... Vader, he's a spiritual brother, y'know, down with the force and all that good shit. Then this cracker, Skywalker, gets his hands on a light saber and the boy decides he's gonna run the fuckin' universe; gets a whole clan of whites together. And they go and bust up Vader's hood, the Death Star. Now what the fuck do you call that?

Banky Edwards: Intergalactic civil war?

Hooper: Gentrification! They gon' drive out the black element to make the galaxy quote, unquote, safe for white folks. And Jedi's the most insulting installment! Because Vader's beautiful black visage is sullied when he pulls off his mask to reveal a feeble, crusty, old white man! They tryin' to tell us that deep inside we all wants to be white!

Banky Edwards: Well, isn't that true?

CHASING AMY played Sundance 1997 and was released over the next few years. It won a Special Recognition prize from the National Board of Review, and Jason Lee and Kevin Smith won Independent Spirit Awards for their acting and writing respectively. It's available on DVD.

Kevin Smith retrospective - MALLRATS (1995) - I love the smell of commerce in the morning!

After the dream-come-true distribution deal for CLERKS, Kevin Smith and producer Scott Mosier were given a bigger (remember the base level) budget and professional actors for their full colour follow-up MALLRATS. The basic concept was the same - a day in the life of two best friends talking about sex, bumping into old high school friends, and getting up to shenanigans. Both have gone to the local mall to try and win back their respective girlfriends who are tired of their slacker antics. 

There are two problems with MALLRATS. First, it's just not as tightly scripted as CLERKS - both in terms of the individual scenes of dialogue and in terms of the way in which the scenes stitch together to form the film. Without the constant on-the-button black humour the ludicrous events in MALLRATS seem, well, just ludicrous. There are no earthy insights to pin them down to reality or to make us care. The two lead characters - Brandi and T.S. are earnest but dull and there isn't a rich deck of minor characters to distract us from that. Finally there are no deep emotional insights - no sense of catharsis - as at the end of CLERKS. CLERKS was crude but also clever. MALLRATS is just a low-rent teen sex-comedy.

The second big problem with MALLRATS is that the acting is almost universally terrible. Admittedly, the acting sucked in CLERKS but that just made it seem more charming. On the other hand, you don't shell out money to see professional actors - Shannen Doherty, Claire Forlani, Jeremy London - three out of the four lead actors - uttering lines with all the feeling of my coffee table. 

For all that, I still watch MALLRATS, though less often than CLERKS. I watch it mainly for Jason Lee's performance as Brodie, the smart-talking Randal Graves-esque side-kick to the hero, T.S. and for the occasional flashes of brilliance that were so evident for the full run-time of CLERKS. And let's face it, even a bad Kevin Smith movie is still funnier and more original than most generic teen comedies out there.

T.S. Quint: How is it that I go from the verge of hot Floridian sex with Brandi to man of steel coital debates with you in the food court? 

Brodie: Cookie stand isn't part of the food court. 

T.S. Quint: Of course it is. 

Brodie: The food court is downstairs. The cookie stand is upstairs. It not like we're talking quantum physics here. 

T.S. Quint: The cookie stands counts as an eatery, eateries are part of the food court. 

Brodie: Bullshit. Eateries that operate within the designated square downstairs count as food court. Anything outside, of said designated sqaure, counts as an autonomous unit for mid-mall snacking.  

MALLRATS went on release in 1995 and 1996 and is available on DVD but without the fanfare, whistles and bells of the CLERKS ten year anniversary re-release.

MR WOODCOCK is a big shiny formica coffee-table of nothingness

MR WOODCOCK is a really mediocre comedy. Note that it's not actively piss-poor. It doesn't try hard enough to fail that spectacularly. It's all shiny surfaces and slick production and low on genuine belly-laughs. Billy Bob Thornton does his usual schtick as the eponymous mean, angry sonofabitch. Back in the day, he tortured a kid called John Farley. Years later Farley (Seann William Scott) is a successful author of self-help books and returns home to pick up a prestigious prize. Much to his horror, not only is the bullying Woodcock being feted as the "Educator of the Year", he's also dating Farley's mum. Farley and his best mate (Ethan Suplee) try to frame Woodcock as an adulterous bastard, but basically the son and the lover have to agree to disagree and keep Susan Sarandon's long-suffering Mrs F sweet. Billy Bob is on auto-pilot. Sarandon and Suplee are way too good for this nonsense. And Seann William Scott needs to graduate to proper rom-com roles. This movie, sadly, is too obviously filmed and written by newbies who have yet to get a clue.

MR WOODCOCK is on release in the UK and USA. It inflicts itself upon Singapore on October 11th; on Iceland on November 2nd; on Finland on November 30th; on Turkey on December 28th; on Argentina on January 3rd and on the Netherlands on February 14th.