Skeletons In The Closet: Best Actor 2016

Every year I try (and mostly fail) to catch every film nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and I will continue that tradition this year. But I also want someone to root for in the Performing categories as well. But here's the thing. I don't have the patience to sit through quite that many Oscarbait movies, so I've decided to Brennan up the joint and run a new experiment:

I will watch a horror film starring each of the Best Acting nominees to honor the performances they gave long before they made the A-list. Let's begin with mini-reviews covering the male performers being honored at this year's ceremony.

Skeletons in the Closet: Best Actor Nominees

Casey Affleck

Nominated For: Manchester by the Sea

I actually caught this one, as it's also nominated for Best Picture, so you can read my review right here. Affleck plays Lee Chandler, a grief-stricken man who must take on the responsibility of caring for his late brother's teenage son. But before that, he was a teen himself, and he wound up on the wrong end of a post-Scream horror extravaganza.

Skeleton in the Closet: Soul Survivors (2001)

Director: Steve Carpenter

Cast: Melissa Sagemiller, Wes Bentley, Casey Affleck 

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

After a fatal car crash, Cassie begins to see ghostly visions of her boyfriend as mysterious happenings disturb her midterms week.

Seriously, what the f**k is p with Soul Survivors? As evidenced by its headshot lineup poster, crane shots of school buildings, and grotty pop metal soundtrack, it’s meant to be a post-Scream teenybopper slash-em-up, (during the prolonged death rattle of that particular trend), but it rams head-on into that other horror trend of the early 2000’s: the Sixth Sense-esque reality-bending parapsychological thriller. Toss in Dorm That Dripped Blood co-director Steve Carpenter, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for an unholy disaster, even if its cast is a stunning result of the collusion of the B-movie gods, uniting millennium Scream Queen Eliza Dushku, a Wes Bentley fresh from American Beauty, and B-side brothers Luke Wilson and Casey Affleck.

This seems like it would be so far up my alley it’s blocking my back door, so why exactly does it fail so miserably? It’s certainly not Affleck, who’s giving a performance similar enough to his turn in Manchester by the Sea that I’m sure he’s praying nobody notices. And the rest of the ensemble is perfectly serviceable for this kind of movie (look, in the 90’s we got two films in a row starring Jennifer Love Hewitt’s breasts, so this is a step up). And the cinematography is TV movie bland, but at least it’s in focus.

I think the bulk of the blame will have to settle on the script, also by Steve Carpenter. It so vaguely resembles anything even remotely similar to a feature film that you have to wonder if this wasn’t some 85-minute Kuleshov experiment, juxtaposing random images to see if any meaning rises from them whatsoever. It doesn’t. Among the shattered fragments of motion Soul Survivors calls “scenes” are Elm Street nightmares, interminable clubbing shots that mimic Buffy’s The Bronze, an allegedly adorable wall-painting sequence that is frighteningly overzealous, and… Well, I have no clear idea who is where and why, because this movie had such a multitude of interlocking layers of dream, hallucination, and reality, but somebody definitely had sex with a ghost.

It’s a ten-car pileup of a story, one that could be called “nightmare logic” if the film was well-made enough to be scary to any degree. As it stands, the only shock gags it can come up with are shadowy figures that look like Eliza Dushku turning out to be Eliza Dushku. It has all the thrills of looking at things without your glasses on. It throws every spooky element it can think of into a pot (masked serial killers, ghosts, crypto-lesbians) but it fails to spice things up with any sort of atmosphere before forgetting to resolve anything it introduced in the first place.

In short, Soul Survivors is haphazard, poorly paced nonsense, and its very existence is an affront to everything I love. Don’t watch Soul Survivors, for the love of God.

Rating: 2/10

Andrew Garfield

Nominated for: Hacksaw Ridge

Andrew Garfield is a fresh face, having just hit the scene in 2010's The Social Network, but before he played a pacifist in Mel Gibson's Best Picture nominee Hacksaw Ridge he... Well, he didn't have much of a chance to work in horror before he escaped the B-list, but here's a mildly supernatural short film he did, which was incidentally directed by the screenwriter of another Best Picture nominee: Lion.

Skeleton in the Closet: "Air" (2009)

Director: Luke Davies

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Felix Benton, S.A. Griffin 

Run Time: 18 minutes

An English geologist meets a young boy with a mysterious secret on his travels through Texas.

It’s perhaps unfair to compare “Air” to a cliché-ridden, desperately overserious student short film, because that’s in all likelihood what it actually is. If you’ve seen a  single ghost movie, you’ll be able to guess at least one of the two plot twists within seconds. Considering that I too have made my share of crappy student films, I’ll keep this short and polite.

The plot is overly straightforward, too much to justify the 20-minute run time, but one takeaway from this is that Garfield has an inherent neurotic charm. Even in this microbudget environment, he gives a performance that – if not superlative – is at least natural and engaging. Do I recommend anybody ever watch “Air?” No, of course not. But I’ve sat through enough short film festivals to know that it could have been much, much worse.

Rating: 5/10

Ryan Gosling

Nominated for: La La Land

Another flick I’ve seen and reviewed! It’s almost like I didn’t need to do this project after all. Oh well. In La La Land, Ryan Gosling reteams with Emma Stone for the third time (after Crazy, Stupid, Love and Gangster Squad) as Sebastian Wilder, a down-on-his-luck jazz pianist with big dreams. But before that, he was a Canadian child star with even bigger dreams, of being a famous actor. But if you want that Oscar, you’re gonna have to slum it...

Skeleton in the Closet: Are You Afraid of the Dark? S5E3 "The Tale of Station 109.1" (1995)

Director: Ron Oliver

Cast: Gilbert Gottfried, Zachary Carlin, Ryan Gosling

Run Time: 22 minutes

A kid who’s obsessed with death is accidentally sent to the afterlife’s waiting room after stumbling across a radio station transmitted from the beyond.

Of the two beloved children’s horror shows of the 90’s, Are You Afraid of the Dark? maintains the best continuing reputation, and for good reason. A kids’ series that wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty in the Twilight Zone trenches, it didn’t talk down to its young audience. “Station 109.1” isn’t particularly gory or shocking, but it’s a reliably macabre tale that combines low-fi ghostly thrills with an ironically bureaucratic satirical tang provided by – of all people - Gilbert Gottfried.

Gosling isn’t the lead in this one, but he’s oddly convincing at playing a mechanically-inclined older brother in spite of his weedy-ass arms. There’s nothing that would indicate the stellar work he’d grow into, but we all have to start somewhere. “Station 109.1” is a delightful 90’s relic (a major plot point hinges on a slap bracelet), even if it’s utterly disposable TV entertainment. But wait, there’s more… 

Rating: 6/10

Skeleton in the Closet #2: Goosebumps S1E15 "Say Cheese and Die" (1996)

Director: Ron Oliver

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Akiva David, Renessa Blitz 

Run Time: 22 minutes

A kid discovers a cursed Polaroid camera that causes bad things to happen to whoever it takes a photo of.

Guess who has two Oscar nominations and was also in the other pre-eminent kids horror show of the 90’s? This Gosling! While I love the Goosebumps book series and “Say Cheese and Die” in particular, Goosebumps was the Bud Light to Are You Afraid of the Dark’s craft brew, A cheesy ramshackle affair with a toothless approach to Stine’s already light horror material, this one wears its low budget on its sleeve. Although the splashes of red, green, and blue light in an abandoned warehouse are lovely, the easiest prop in the world – a spooky camera – is a dreadful hunk of plastic that looks like it was fished out of a Burger King dumpster.

And I don’t know what happened in the intervening year, but Gosling is terrible here, mugging like the back shelf of a coffee shop. The only redeeming thing about his performance is that it’s not half as dreadful as his co-stars: excepting Richard McMillan (Cube Zero, The Day After Tomorrow) serving a delicious plate of ham as a sinister lurker in a bright silver fright wig. I suppose as a child actor, you learn on the job, and somewhere along the way Gosling sharpened his craft to the stiletto point it is today. Maybe it happened on the set of Young Hercules…

Rating: 3/10

Viggo Mortensen

Nominated for: Captain Fantastic

Viggo Mortensen is a happy surprise on this list. It's been a while since we've heard the Lord of the Rings star's name in casual conversation (especially considering nobody actually saw Captain Fantastic), but before he played a hermetic father who has raised his kids deep in the woods, he belonged to another, even less healthy family living in rural seclusion...

Skeleton in the Closet: Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

Director: Jeff Burr

Cast: Kate Hodge, Ken Foree, R.A. Mihailoff

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Well whaddya know, I've already reviewed this one. How convenient for me!

Rating: 4/10

Denzel Washington

Nominated for: Fences

Denzel Washington has had a long and storied career, so it's no surprise to see him gracing this list. But while that career has taken him to the role of washed-up lower class father Troy Maxson in the film adaptation of August Wilson's play, he had a chance to get down and dirty with a film that combined one of his most frequent roles - a homicide detective - with something a little more supernatural.

Skeleton in the Closet: Fallen (1998)

Director: Gregory Hoblit

Cast: Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland

Run Time: 2 hours 4 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

After a serial killer is executed, his crimes begin again. A local homicide detective quickly learns that he must hunt down a body-hopping, murderous demon who’s perpetrating the killings.

Fallen is a preternaturally weird movie. And I don’t just mean because it’s a theological police procedural with a literal demon as the villain. This is a film that pretty much incinerates the fourth wall with an in medias res “how did I wind up like this?” gag straight out of Emperor’s New Groove before diving into its vein-throbbingly serious rumination on God and the human experience. This tonal imbalance teeters through the entire film, which can’t seem to decide whether it’s Silence of the Lambs, Seven, or Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.

Whatever it is, it’s still pretty good. Denzel Washington is so charming he actually humanizes the role of “perfect, by-the-book cop,” and his partner is John Goodman so I can’t complain. And although the film doesn’t explore its body-switching concept to tis fullest extent (it’s much more content to wallow in philosophical soliloquies, because the 90’s were a rough time for everyone), it provides several memorably chilling moments where a cotillion of random passersby have their average facades splinter into expressions of pure malice.

Do I like the abortive Hannibal Lecter riddles that paint our hero to be such an unrestrained moron that he has to ask a nun to define the word “apocalypse” for him? Of course not. Do I want to watch the incessant shots that paint the world in the mottled yellow hue so popular in late 90’s urban dramas? Hell no. Do I enjoy seeing the sole major female character be treated like an anthropomorphic baby carriage? I’d rather gargle hot coals. But in spite of its excess of extremely dated detritus, it still manages to leave an impression.

Maybe it’s because I just watched Soul Survivors, but I had a good time with this one. It’s far more a Denzel Washington movie than it is a horror movie, but its villain is distinct enough to cast an eerie pall over the proceedings. And a certain reveal in the third act should be monumentally silly, but it’s so earnestly presented that you kind have to love it. I’d sooner watch Fallen than any other project on this list, though- full disclosure – my tragic viewing history predicts I’ll probably catch Leatherface way more times.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 2140

Here's To The Fools Who Dream

Year: 2016

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Rosemarie DeWitt 

Run Time: 2 hours 8 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG- 13

I liked Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash. It was a little dour for my tastes, but it had an excellent sense of rhythm in both the editing and the music itself, and it had probably the most gonzo, purely experiential ending of the whole year. So while I wasn’t in love with it, I had a good time. When I found out that his follow-up feature La La Land would go full-blown musical, paying homage to classic Hollywood and reuniting Emma Stone with Ryan Gosling, I was excited. If you’re a director I’m still iffy on, there’s hardly a better genre to choose to get me on your side.

All I can say is, it worked.

In La La Land, down-on-her-luck actress Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist who wants to prevent the style from becoming a lost art, keep crossing paths in the streets of Los Angeles. Although they don’t get along at first, their interactions blossom into a romance for the ages as they both set out to follow their dreams over the course of a hurdle-filled year.

Basically, the life story of any decent human being in 2016.

If you’re busy and don’t have time to sit through an entire review, just let me say this: La La Land is magical. It doesn’t take a genius to glance at Chazelle’s filmography and intuit that he loves jazz, but when you’re sitting in front of La La Land, there’s no question about it at all. His love for music leaps from every frame in a rhythm you feel, deep inside, your own heartbeat acting as a metronome.

Everything he learned from Whiplash he buffs to shining, shimmering perfection here. La La Land is an emotional, experiential film that grabs your hand and sweeps you up with it, depositing you back in your seat with yet another ending that slams you back against your cushion, barely able to manage a squeak of “oh, f**k.” Only this time it comes at the tail end of a movie that unequivocally earns that pure energy every step of the way. I find it embarrassing when people clap for movies in the theater as the credits roll, but I spontaneously burst into applause this time, not even realizing where I was. La La Land is less like a film and more like a human being performing directly to you, spilling its heart and soul all over the screen.

I don’t want to get hyperbolic, because overhype might shatter this delicate, tender film, but I’m working hard to convey the feeling of ineffable pure emotion that it creates. It’s not a perfect film. Some of the Hollywood satire is a little obvious. Some of the close-up shots looked weirdly flat. But it’s one of the best times I’ve had in a theater all year, and that’s even more important than being flawless.

Someone should have let Stanley Kubrick know about that.

La La Land is a musical the likes of which hasn’t graced American screens in, oh, a millennium or two. A throwback to classic movie musicals in its blend of smoky jazz and dizzy production numbers, it combines Old Hollywood glamour and glitz with a more modern realism in its approach to character and plot. Although the grand, choreographed numbers that open the film are fizzy delights, there’s a certain solemnity buried deep within them, about how those with unrecognized talent feel alienated by the peppy-happy gloss of it all. Honestly, it’s the best of both worlds. It handles the same themes of art vs. humanity that Whiplash tackled, but with less aggressive grimness.

Bringing reality into this musical is honestly the best thing for it, because it avoids being an empty, whimsical artifice while at the same time lending a degree of sparkle to the bitter streets of Los Angeles. In the film’s best number “A Lovely Night,” Stone and Gosling slip and slide on the gravel of a hilly road overlooking a vast purple sky, sneaking a bit of grandeur into a mundane urban setting. This is the level La La Land pretty much always operates on, converting real life locations into a  fairy tale of asphalt and concrete.

Chazelle pulls out all the stops here, draping his frame in bright primary colors both in the lighting and the fabulous costuming. Every frame bursts with life, so when the more dreamlike sequences arrive, they don’t jar with the augmented reality they emerged from.

This is what the world would look like if I was in charge.

It’s a relentlessly beautiful film and I could talk about that all night, but I regretfully must move on because we need to talk about the actual music. This is a musical, after all, and how often do we get a chance to talk about those anymore? I’m a huge fan of big production numbers, and even though La La Land quickly settles into a  more subtle register, it kicks off with two incredibly impressive setpieces, using swooping camera moves and infrequent cutting to let the dancers really inhabit the space.

Then, when the film reduces itself to just Gosling and Stone, they shine in their own way. Although neither of them ahs the best voice (Gosling has a “playing guitar at a bonfire” roughness and Stone’s smoky voice translates well enough to song, although she tentatively avoids leaving a very narrow range), they have charisma in spades, and they can dance much better than I ever thought could be possible. They nail a beautifully clever tap number and recognize that in musical theater, personality is what’s most important. 

They shine onscreen and then are generous enough to allow themselves to be swallowed up by bombastic design sequences with the stagebound, overflowing aesthetic of the fantasy sequence in Singin’ in the Rain. And although I’m not a huge fan of the repeated, droning motif of the song “City of Stars,” every other track is a perfect match for the film, even the instrumentals, which I normally don’t care for in a musical.

Their chemistry outside of the music is likewise unassailable. For the second time this year, Gosling brings humor in surprising and endearing little ways, and Stone is the perfect sharp but vulnerable foil for his brassy faux confidence. They push and pull one another in a timeless, frequently hilarious romance full of color, life, and light. Literally. Every chance he gets, Chazelle launches Stone and Gosling into literal spotlights, singling them out from the crowd in the most shamelessly cinematic way possible.

God, this was a pretty movie.

At one point, Sebastian is asked how it’s possible for a traditionalist to be revolutionary. Well, La La Land answers that question. It’s both a dazzling nostalgia trip and an exciting, electric update of a classic story that combines both old and new into a dazzling, truthful, utterly pure cinema experience, capturing the glories of life with buoyant energy, whether they be as grand as a dream coming true or as intimate as holding hands for the first time in the movie theater.

TL;DR: La La Land is a gorgeous exercise in Old Hollywood nostalgia.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1216

Cool To Be Kind

Year: 2016

Director: Shane Black

Cast: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

If you pretend that Shane Black was never courted by the Marvel universe, he’s the least prolific, most exciting genre-bending pastiche artist in Hollywood today. He’s obviously written classic action flicks like Lethal Weapon and Last Action Hero, but today I’m largely concerned with his directorial output: He burst onto the scene (which he then immediately burst off in a puff of smoke) in 2005 with the sharp neo-noir mystery comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a film I utterly adore. 

But he’s finally back after a frustratingly prolonged radio silence. I haven’t seen his Iron Man 3 all the way through (though I have seen the opening scene half a billion times while babysitting a toddler with a short attention span), so I have no opinion on it, but if his 2016 effort The Nice Guys indicates any sort of pattern, I look forward to a decade from now when he knocks out yet another crime-comedy masterpiece.

Although I certainly wouldn’t complain if he picked up the pace a smidge.

It’s the 1970’s. Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is a thug for hire, beating up people who have done bad things. One of said people is Holland March (Ryan Gosling), a widowed private detective who shoulders easy cases for batty old women in between (and sometimes during) getting sloshed. He has been searching for Amelia (Margaret Qualley), who may be the missing link in the case of a murdered porn star, Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio). Amelia pays Jackson to get Holland off her case then disappears, leaving them to join forces to find her before it’s too late. Tagging along is March’s plucky tween daughter Holly (Angourie Rice), who – in typical Hollywood fashion – is far more capable and clever than her ne’er-do-well dad.

Though she doesn’t have quite as magnificent a moustache. 

Playing on TV in the background of a certain scene is an episode of Get Smart, a show which certainly informed the comic ineptitude of our very own Mr. March. If it hasn’t been made clear already, let it be known now that – while The Nice Guys is a solid mystery pastiche, it is first and foremost a character-driven comedy, pitting two buddy cop archetypes against one another in a realm of sophomoric, clever, sometimes intimidatingly intricate humor.

If there’s one thing that Shane Black (co-writing with Anthony Bagarozzi) does best, it’s grafting comedy onto an utterly alien genre framework, and his two stars serve him well. Crowe is excellent as the surly straight man who powers the film’s emotional throughline, but Gosling outdoes himself here, undermining his typical ultrasuave pretty boy act. Holland march is a real loser, and Gosling isn’t afraid to embrace that, painting a weak-willed character with girlish shrieks, fumbling blocking, and a sorely misplaced confidence that unequivocally earns that comparison to Maxwell Smart. He just goes for it, and he’s a surefire success at being a failure.

But let’s not downplay Angourie Rice, who plays against the big boys with aplomb. The virtually unknown Australian actress (unless you’re a rabid fan of Walking with Dinosaurs 3D) gives a consummately professional, sharp performance that shows she actually is as clever and alive as her role, instead of just reciting a script. It takes real talent to purposely layer that kind of childlike naïveté over a naturally smart character, a talent that should have taken decades to develop. She’s frustratingly good, to the point that I’ve rethought every single decision that led me to being 21 years old and not yet a massive movie star. 

This chick is a lead in a major motion picture. At 13, I was still drinking Tang and leveling up my Ivysaur.

It’s a funny cast so it’s a funny movie, though the script is so solid that it would still be the most laugh-out-loud movie of the year so far if they had cast Dane Cook and Larry the Cable guy. There is an astonishing level of control apparent in this screenplay, hammering out joke after joke that are all funny in their own right, but turn out to be setups for third act surprise punchlines that explode your gut like land mines. This is a movie that manages to imbue comedy into both dialogue and action sequences, wave intricate layers of jokes in the moment and the long term, and on top of that have time for a fiddly little structural joke on the sidelines: recurring imagery of birds and bees, presumably meant to evoke the film’s salacious subject matter.

It’s a snappy, clever film that’s a relentlessly entertaining thrill ride, though there are certain jigsaw pieces that don’t quite fit. A couple of character details (especially between March and his daughter) don’t get any payoff, leaving some emotional loose ends. Their connective tissue is presumably slowly bleeding out on the cutting room floor. However, these infractions are very slight. The Nice Guys tells the story it wants to tell with verve and audacity, and if it’s not one hundred percent pristine, that’s not really its problem.

Plus, although Shane Black the director tends to stay out of the way of Shane Black the writer, there are some neat visual gags during action sequences that make great use of the frame’s background to paint a complete tapestry of carnage. The visual style isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it’s kinetic and knows how best to serve its comedy, which is the one true reason it exists.

Is The Nice Guys quite as perfect on the first viewing as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? No way. But I can’t stop thinking about it, making it easily one of the best movies of the year. If this flick doesn’t land in my December Top 10, then this might just be the best year Hollywood’s ever had.

TL;DR: The Nice Guys is an excellent crime comedy, and a worthy followup to the director’s terrific debut feature.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1007

Ain't It Funny In A Rich Man's World

Year: 2015

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt

Run Time: 2 hours 10 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Three of Michael Lewis’ books  have been made into movies. The Blind Side was a stultifying ordeal, and Moneyball was… OK, I’ve never seen Moneyball. But the fact remains that these are very serious, Oscar-nominated-type dramas. So, who would you get to direct the next one, about the people who bet against the housing market before its collapse in 2008? Someone prestigious, probably. Richard Linklater? Ridley Scott? The Academy’s class pet, Alenjandro G. Iñárritu? Those are all fine choices, but the director the producers attached has made all the difference: Adam McKay.

Yes, the man helming this economic Oscarbait is none other than the director of Anchorman, Stepbrothers, and The Other Guys, not to mention the co-creator of Funny or Die. We now live in a world where it actually would have made sense if Will Ferrell had cameoed in The Big Short. Even more incredible, McKay is probably the best decision they could have made.

The worst is dyeing Ryan Gosling’s hair, but let’s find it in our hearts to forgive them.

Let’s get into it, shall we? In The Big Short, hedge fund manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale) discovers that the housing market is an enormous bubble, ready to burst at any moment. He creates a system that allows him to short the market, betting against its success. The banks think he’s crazy and graciously accept his free money. However, others catch wind of his scheme and think he might be onto something, including Deutsche Bank bond salesman Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), mercurial hedge fund manager Mark Baum (Steve Carell), and Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), two young hedge funders who team up with their retired mentor Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt). They too decide to short the market and wait patiently for the whole thing to collapse.

It’s about as morally dubious as it sounds.

The Big Short has two major hurdles. First, people could give half a crap about economics. Second, this is entirely based on a true story, one which is as open-ended and multifaceted as that nasty reality thing tends to be. The first is handled with aplomb, utilizing a Brechtian approach to engage the audience with its less-than appealing content. By that, I mean the movie – via the supple mouthpiece of Ryan Gosling – speaks directly to the audience, explaining the necessary information with some truly great cutaway gags and first-person comments on how the story actually played out.

This could easily have become a played-out gimmick, but it stays fresh and light, transforming hard economic theory into light, playful banter. Unfortunately, this freshness doesn’t necessarily apply to the “realistic” faux-documentary shooting style, in which the handheld photography, rack focuses, and quick pans get old faster than a ripe pear. It’s not too pervasive an issue, and you do get familiar enough with the aesthetic to just ignore it. But the cinema verite approach doesn’t exactly mesh with the Brechtian meta humor, which utilizes the artifice of film in a surreal and enlightening way, something that’s harder to highlight when the images are straining so hard to be gritty and real. It’s kind of like if someone hired the cinematographer from Precious to shoot a Muppet movie. It just doesn’t gel.

So yes, I’ll knock off a point or two for that, but it’s where The Big Short overcomes its second hurdle that the film really blossoms. As a plot, the film is pretty straightforward. Men predict, investigate, and outsmart the housing crisis. There’s not a lot of humanity there. Obviously a cast almost exclusively composed of awards season heavy hitters helps out some (Carell is probably the biggest takeaway as a man hiding his shattered soul beneath a shell of sheer bravado, but Pitt is an excellent conduit for both comic relief and serious political themes, Gosling is sharp and snappy as our de facto narrator, relative newcomers Magaro and Wittrock hold their own, and Bale does his Bale thing politely in the corner), but where The Big Short really hits its mark is in depicting the culture AROUND the housing bubble.

You know, the one that doesn’t exactly hit the jackpot during the whole shebang.

The film builds its real story in the nooks and crannies around the A-plot, especially in the transitions between years leading to the collapse. Every single edit in these interstitial scenes is fixated on one thing, highlighting the vacant, shallow, consumerist pop culture that has distracted everybody from their impending doom. [MEDIUM SPOILERS Their construction blends perfectly with the celebrity cameos that are used to explain economic theories. They function both as fun gags and an indictment of a culture that needs this kind of thing to be able to notice the hard facts.] It’s a lacerating satire that brings a dry textbook to life in the middle of a doomed culture. The Big Short is nothing less than an economic horror film, and an extremely effective one at that.

It’s funny, it’s terrifying, and it’s utterly unique, a combination it never could have accomplished without a director like Adam McKay. He balances his tones with impressive acuity, imbuing even generic-sounding scenes with an idiosyncratic twist. Perhaps the single best moment in the film is a scene as simple as a set of people leaving a convention. Observing the differences in their appearance, demeanor, and the cars they drive provides an eerily stunning insight into their characters and their world. It’s a film littered with gems like these, and because of that it’s without a doubt the best based-on-a-true-story flick of the year.

TL;DR: The Big Short is a captivating, innovative exploration of a seemingly dry concept.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 968

Silent But Deadly

Year: 2011

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I'm a terrible film major. I spent so much of my time watching ancient VHS detritus like Sorority House Massacre II or Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! that I'm frequently out of the loop when it comes to truly "important" cinema, like Birdman, Kill Bill, Moonrise Kingdom, or anything that the medium-strength pretentious people around me like to talk about. As a TA, I've graded so many film essays about classics that I've never given proper attention to, so I decided to take a leap with a freshman favorite: Drive*.

Well, Sergio decided for me. But regardless, it happened.

*Other perennial classics with the youngsters include Fight Club, The Dark Knight, Star Wars, and - inexplicably - The Silver Linings Playbook.

I can't really complain, considering that the 80's, Ryan Gosling, and bright colors are three of my favorite things.

Drive tells the story of an unnamed man (Ryan Gosling) who works as a stunt driver in Hollywood and moonlights as a getaway driver. He's a laconic, stylish, mostly emotionless individual who begins to open up once he connects with his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benicio (Kaden Leos). After Benicio's father gets out of jail, the Driver finds himself drawn by his affection for Irene and his unsavory job into the seedy underbelly of LA. As he finds himself deeper and deeper in the criminal underworld, he works with his boss/confidant Shannon (Brian Cranston) to attempt to sever ties with Jewish mobster Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and his shady partner Nino (Ron Perlman).

As things go from bad to worse, the driver must steel himself for his story's inevitable violent conclusion.

It's like the crime-thriller version of whenever I write about Glee on The Backlot.

Everything about Drive is stripped-down and simple, but relentlessly cool and propulsive, like a race car engine. I think. Maybe. This isn't a car blog, alright? This concept, reflected in every aspect of the filmmaking, finds its greatest home in the soundtrack. The Driver's nighttime world of neon and glowing traffic lights is imbued with ambient mystery by sturdy 80's-inspired synth tracks.

Obviously that kind of thing appeals to me, considering that about 60 percent of my iTunes catalogue is composed of songs so synth-fueled, they would give Simon Le Bon a headache. But Drive's soundtrack choices are just plain cool. The tracks refrain from excess, merely providing a slick, evocative soundscape for the stylized world of the film.

Style. That's the word I keep coming back to and for good reason. Style is driving force of the film (so to speak), liberally applied by the guiding hand of director Nicolas Winding Refn. Though the Danish filmmaker may personally stray into hyperbolic pretention more often than not, his hold over the slippery craft of filmmaking remains firm and assured.

The style is so heightened and superb that, when the going gets gory (and it does, in spades), squeamish viewers will be able to stomach even the worst the film has to offer thanks to the film's carefully crafted division from reality. Though it takes care not to divorce itself so much from the real world that those moments aren't still brutal and repugnant. Thanks, Drive.

So. Style. Slow motion, symmetry, reflection, and color are Refn's tools, and Drive is his sandbox. He arranges and rearranges these elements until they form a perfect, smooth aesthetic that allows the story to course through its veins like a shot of nitro (Is that a car thing? My only experience with racing is Mario Kart.). 

My humblest apologies to Mssrs. Gosling and LoveBug.

On top of is pristine style, Drive has a screenplay that might just be the most mechanically precise work ever created from the human imagination. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that it wasn't written by a terrifying supercomputer. 

Every single aspect of the film's mise-en-scène supports its central throughline. Whether it's cheers from a radio sports game underscoring a successful getaway attempt, a red light stopping the car at precise emotional beats, an elevator door emphasizing a schism in a relationship, or a kid's cartoon perfectly summarizing the film's theme, Drive's screenplay works like Swiss clockwork. 

Drawing elements from Aesopian fable, Greek drama, and classic American thriller screenwriting, Drive is basically the perfect machine. This effect comes at the expense of some of the film's humanity, but on that front, the film has a secret weapon: Mr. Ryan Gosling.

Although his character practically has fewer lines of dialogue than Jason Voorhees, Gosling imbues him with a strong personality and moral structure, buried deep beneath his calm exterior, like whale song beneath the calm moonlit ocean.

He inspires the poetic side of me, what can I say?

The entire film is filtered through his character, to the point that many key events in scenes are kept largely offscreen, so we can watch his responses to things rather than the things themselves. That might sound counterintuitive, but the man's eyes are so damn expressive that you can feel every blow, every mote of drama that the world has to offer all through his microscopic reactions. The theater kid inside of me wants to knock his block off in a jealous tantrum.

What's even more impressive is that this performance could have been a total wash. In the hands of any other actor, the empty role would just have been filled with a pretty face and a broad shoulder and been completely efficient. But Gosling elevates the character above his material, even if he could have just coasted through on the fact that the first act is essentially just Ryan Gosling uniform porn. I swear, they put him in just about every single fetishized outfit that Tumblr bloggers can imagine. Check it:

Ryan Gosling as Vic Victor, the hard-nosed vigilante cop with a big appetite.

Ryan Gosling as Edge Streetly, the hunky yet humble mechanic.

Ryan Gosling as... OK, no theory is perfect.

It'd be so easy to let that perfectly symmetrical mug control his performance, but Gosling just goes ahead and owns the screen anyway. Something must be said for the other performers, of whom Carey Mulligan is a clear stand-out in a refreshingly un-idealized role, but Gosling's performance overpowers the ample talents of his co-stars, dulling them with his supernova brightness. His screen presence is so riveting that he sucks some of the emulsion right off the negative.

There's some film student humor for ya. Hey, at least I'm getting something out of my final semester in the academic sphere.

Anyway, my only real qualms with the film revolve around its central simplicity. Its aims and its means tend to be straightforward, but some second act wrinkles breach the straightforward nature of the film, introducing a few too many characters, motivations, and extraneous plot points into its Spartan storyline.

Beyond that? Nothing. Drive is a terrific watch, full of handsome men doing terrible things to terrible men and discovering what it means to be a real human being (or, if you listen to the film's most played song, a "real human bean."). And that's nothing to shake a stick shift at.

TL;DR: Drive is a Swiss watch mechanical thriller with a neon, 80's-infused aesthetic.

Rating: 8/10

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