Watching Mercy Road four times

The Australian film Mercy Road is the only film I was scheduled to see at MIFF but didn't actually see. One other film (Banel & Adama) got moved to a different night, but Mercy Road is the only one I had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict. (In fact, my Mercy Road ticket became my Banel & Adama ticket, before my Banel & Adama ticket became my Banel & Adama ticket on a different night.)

I've seen it now thanks to a screener link in advance of its theatrical release next Thursday. Ordinarily I would have watched it a little closer to that release date, but the link expires on Sunday and I'll be out of town for two of the four remaining nights before then. 

The early expiration isn't the only unusual thing about the Mercy Road link. The other unusual thing is that it's good for four views.

I know we critics are supposed to take our jobs seriously, but watching something four times is a bit much -- even if it is only 85 minutes.

There are likely explanations for this generosity in the quantity of views. For example, perhaps a single view is registered if you inadvertently press play on it and then stop and start over again. I don't know how a view is determined and they want to guard against the technical incompetence of especially the older critics.

But I do think there is at least the suggestion that you might watch this film, in part or in total, four times in order to analyze it perfectly before you write about it.

Some critics may have the time for that. I do not.

Because we certainly know the movie isn't for sharing with friends. In fact, this particular screener link is the only one I can remember ever having received that had my email address burned into the upper right hand corner of the screen, so that the lower half of a g just barely hung into the actual picture. If it gets pirated, they'll know exactly at whom to point the finger.

To the credit of John Curran's film, something did happen at the end of this movie -- which takes place almost entirely inside a single car, Locke-style -- that made me want to go back and watch it a second time. But then detracting a little of that credit, the urge to revisit what I'd seen stemmed not from missing clues they had cleverly dropped in the narrative, but rather, a potential incoherence to the storytelling. I can tell you that I googled "Mystery Road ending explained" after I finished, and because the movie isn't actually out yet, well, I didn't get my answer.

I probably won't watch it that second time, and just write my review based on what I did glean from the first viewing.

And viewings three and four will just disappear into the ether.

The perks of knowing a WGA member

Hello everyone, and welcome to my annual "What screener did Vance get from his WGA friend this year?" post. (For past installations in this "series," see here, here and here.)

As you know if you followed those links, every December I enter into an awkward phase of my existence in which I try to figure out a natural way to borrow a screener from my friend who's part of the Writers Guild of America, without seeming like I care too much about whether it happens. I don't want it to be viewed as one of those things where I'm just in it for the screener, even though Phil and I see each other regularly throughout the year, and even though Phil would never view it that way or care even if he did. (I've called him Phil in past posts, though I abandoned that tradition last year. Might as well resume this year.)

Usually my borrowing scenario arises when I'm over at his house for some other reason, but this year it was a little different. Phil messaged me on Facebook the other day to tease me, and ended up giving me an opening for the screener topic to come up organically.

But I need to give you the history, since this goes back to a poker game in October.

At this particular poker game at Phil's house, I put forward the argument that Maya Rudoph is sexy. I didn't even think I was saying anything particularly controversial, but everyone else present, including one woman, shouted me down and thought I was crazy. Well, I think they're the crazy ones. Rudolph is sexy -- for a good example, check her out in Idiocracy. It's not nearly the only example, and Paul Thomas Anderson certainly agrees with me.

So this week Phil sends me a Facebook message, joking that he should loan me his screener of Friends With Kids in order to feed my Maya Rudolph obsession.

Opening.

Even though his suggestion wasn't serious, I answered it seriously enough, telling him I'd already seen Friends, but asking what else he had. He listed them off, and the only one I hadn't seen was The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Which he quickly declared was his favorite of the bunch. He said I could borrow it as long as I came by one of the next two nights and returned it the next day, because he was sending a shipment of screeners off to his parents on Friday. This was Tuesday.

I was happy to oblige, but I did feel that little twinge of guilt about making trips to his house on consecutive days just so I could watch a movie that wasn't available on DVD yet. (Since you are reading a film blog right now, you know how intoxicating it is to watch a movie on your TV that isn't yet available on DVD, but the average person probably thinks it's much ado about nothing.) I initially told him to never mind, feeling that the transaction made me seem a little icky, but he insisted so I accepted the offer and told him I'd come by that afternoon after work.

I'm glad I've gotten the chance to see it, because I had only recently checked on the expected release date of the DVD on Netflix, which was accompanied only by the lonely word "Unknown." I figured that ruled out all of January, which meant I definitely wouldn't be able to rank it with my 2012 films.

I'd actually come close to seeing it in the theater -- as close as a person can come, really. After I watched Argo back in October, I knew I was taking in a second (free) movie and had hoped to make it Perks. But when I reached the door of the theater where it was playing, the opening credits were already rolling. Not knowing whether I'd missed an important nugget of action/dialogue before the credits, I opted for the masterpiece known as Alex Cross (please note the sarcasm), which had the benefit of starting five minutes later. As I discovered this week when watching it, I wouldn't have missed any action, but better safe than sorry.

I'd heard a number of praises of Perks that went from the low end to the high end of good: guarded praise from one friend who had been looking forward to it for months, and a woman on a Facebook discussion group who immediately crowned it her favorite film of the year. So I decided I definitely needed to see it to judge where my own opinion would fall.

And judge I have.

Wow.

Rarely have I seen a film involving teenagers -- ever -- that was so sensitive and humanistic in its approach to their lives, without ever becoming precious or maudlin. In fact, the sheer earnest optimism with which it presented them, while also acknowledging their numerous faults and bits of baggage, gave me chills on maybe a dozen occasions. Sometimes I felt like I was just tingling for whole ten-minute periods at a time.

One of the first things that struck me was that it took my wife and me 20 minutes to realize that the movie wasn't set in the present. That's a good thing. Many period pieces hit you over the head with exactly when they take place, wanting to establish that context so you can appreciate the movie exactly how it was intended. But The Perks of Being a Wallflower is not "about" taking place in 1991 (the exact year is never mentioned, but I saw that date listed in a synopsis). It's about the characters, and only after we'd heard enough songs from before 1990 did we realize that it was not just an aesthetic choice by the director that these older songs were playing. "I don't think this movie takes place in the present" I told my wife, somewhat absurdly, and it was clear she also thought it might have been a modern-day movie. It seems absurd in retrospect, because no one was carrying cell phones or ipads or laptops -- in fact, several characters make each other mix tapes. But a period production design can be undertaken for purely aesthetic reasons -- think Wes Anderson -- so we thought that might have been the case here. This is an embarrassingly protracted way of saying I'm glad the movie didn't confront me with its era so overtly.

Plot-wise, what you're seeing here is nothing new, and in fact, the title probably tells you a lot of what you might expect to see. There are teenage archetypes aplenty, but Perks doesn't get bogged down in them. Even the arty misfits you're supposed to identify with display extraordinary dimension within the realm of the character traits you're expecting. Again, it's nothing new for a movie to make its wallflower characters the viewer's surrogates, but by spending more time with these characters rather than having them in constant direct opposition to the jocks and other popular kids, it amply demonstrates their weaknesses and fickle ways, instead of simplistically rendering them as outsider saints.

It's probably worth saying a thing or two about the performances. The primary actor of note is of course Emma Watson, finally getting out from under the Harry Potter series that so wearied her. Those eight films may have exhausted her and changed her life forever in ways that are not all positive, but they also give us a 22-year-old actress who has the skills and emotional range of a veteran, which is precisely what she is. She is sheer magnetism in this movie.

However, even her performance is not nearly the strongest. The lead character is played by Logan Lerman, an actor two years Watson's junior who has actually been making movies a year longer than she has. You may know him from such films as (Troy McLure voice) Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lighting Thief and The Three Musketeers. But after this film, you will know him from this. He has the more difficult role and is simply astounding in the range of things he is asked to do. Last but not least among the performers worth singling out is Ezra Miller, also 20, whom you may not know from anything (unless you saw We Need to Talk About Kevin, which I did not). His role as Watson's gay stepbrother is very necessary comic relief that has a deceptive emotional depth all its own. It's hard to gauge exactly how important it is that these high school kids are played by actors who are under 22 -- these three actors, at least. But I'm betting it added significantly to the film's verisimilitude.

I also think it's worth devoting a word or two to Stephen Chbosky, who wrote the much-loved novel on which this movie was based. But that isn't all Chbosky did -- he also adapted his own book, and directed the film. I'm sure that's happened before, but no examples come to mind. And if it has happened, it seems an unlikely undertaking for a first-time director. There's no doubting that the decision to place executive, legislative and judicial power all in the hands of the same guy has worked out for this one. No external interpretation of his vision was necessary, since he controlled it from book page to script page to screen. That could be disastrous in some situations; here, it was wondrous.

Look, Perks isn't always entirely subtle (though it usually is), and sometimes you feel like every character is afflicted with some kind of problem from an after school special. And it does include two separate scenes where characters stand out of the sunroofs of cars going at high speeds, taking in the wind, Rose DeWitt Bukater style, while listening to David Bowie's "Heroes."

But the movies we love aren't always movies with crazy narrative structures or high-concept ideas we've never considered. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is one of those films that reminds us that familiar genres infused with a distinctive touch of originality and grace can tingle our spines just as much.

As it did mine for sometimes ten minutes at a time.

This screener will self destruct in 10 seconds

We got to watch Young Adult last night, but it was a close call. For a moment there I thought the screener had destroyed itself.

As I've written about several times in the past, I have a friend who's in the Writer's Guild, who tries to either loan me one of his screeners, or watch one with me, every Christmas season. I was over at his house the other night, and I thought it would happen then, but the topic never came up. Then a couple days later he texted me and asked me if I'd seen Young Adult yet. A strange question, because it was the very day the movie was opening, and not even all that late in the evening. He said that he'd loan it to me when he saw me at one of two parties we were both planning to attend this past weekend.

Since my wife and I were both eager to see it, the DVD made its way into our BluRay player the very next night.

And was quickly ejected. Forcibly ejected.

The BluRay player attempted to read it, then spat it out. The screen flashed "Disc Error."

Uh oh.

Now, this has never been a problem in the past with his screeners. In fact, I know for a fact that his screeners have the potential for multiple viewings, because I've watched several of his movies that he'd already watched. In fact, I've even come into possession of one from about five years ago, and have watched that particular copy twice myself.

But there are warnings all over the disc that talk about prosecuting the person if the disc is found to have been uploaded to the internet and traced to this copy, and there are explicit instructions given for returning the disc to the studio if the recipient cannot agree to the viewing terms. (So let's hope no one is reading this who would have the motivation to trace things back to my friend. And if you are, hey, I'm a film critic, which means I might see an advanced free screening of this movie anyway.)

Plus there's an actual request for the recipient to physically destroy the movie by February 26, 2012. Yeah, like anyone actually does that.

Since I can't ever remember our BluRay player rejecting a disc, we thought there was a pretty good chance the disc had been designed to compromise itself once the film had already been screened once. But we tried to play it in my laptop anyway.

At which point it played through without a problem. Whew.

Well, there was one problem: I couldn't seem to get the DVD control menu -- which includes the volume, pause button, etc. -- to exit the bottom of the screen. I even took the disc out and reinserted it. That menu came on after I paused to adjust the volume, then it just wouldn't leave. For a second there we thought we'd have to pay this smaller price -- a distraction at the bottom of the screen for the duration of the running time -- for the right to watch this movie.

Turns out I just needed to move the cursor to anywhere on the top 80% of the screen.

Shows you how many movies I watch on my laptop.

As for the movie itself? Well, I know some of my readers are excited about this movie and would not want me to either confirm their excitement with a positive appraisal or curdle it with a negative one. Besides, as I learned from watching Charlize Theron on Jay Leno last night, the movie is only in limited release right now -- it doesn't even open nationwide until Friday.

So if I'm not going to give Paramount the money to see Young Adult in the theater, at least I'll help them out by maintaining a self-imposed reviewing embargo. You've probably heard about reviewing embargoes recently with regards to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, where Columbia Pictures was furious with David Denby of The New Yorker for posting his (positive) review in the magazine too many days before the movie was set to release.

Where that ranks as an offense next to unauthorized viewings of awards screeners, I'm not so sure.

The dog ate my homework

My friend Phil was kind enough to have a couple of us over last night to watch one of his 2010 screeners. Phil (not his real name) is in the Writer's Guild, and each year he gets a dozen or so screeners that are likely to get award buzz for their scripts. Because he's a sharing guy, he shared one with us last night, as he does every year -- even though it's probably against the rules.

Of course, he shared one with his dog first, before we arrived.

I just had to get a picture of this. He'd told me in a phone call the previous day that their dog, a new arrival in their home within the past year, had gone through a stack of screeners that had been piled on their table, and literally left some of them in shreds. It's clear no one is going to be watching I Love You Phillip Morris anytime soon. They actually already watched it, meaning I might have been able to borrow it -- but the dog removed any question of that. The dog also ate one of the ones they hadn't seen, Get Low, but no physical evidence of this was offered.

We had been scheduled to watch True Grit, which Phil and his fiancee had also already watched just two nights earlier. The reason given for their immediate repeat viewing is that they liked it very much, but had not been able to understand half of what Jeff Bridges (whom my friend calls "Old Marble Mouth") was saying. Okay, got it -- good movie, need to pay close attention.

But it never got to that. Much to his dismay, Phil's Playstation would not fire up True Grit a second time. It just wasn't recognizing the disc. Which is strange, because it played successfully on Saturday, and would play in his laptop right now. And other discs would play in the Playstation. Just not True Grit. Jokes were immediately made about the disc having orders to self-destruct after its first viewing. They're serious about screeners being watched only by the Guild members, who are actually asked to destroy these discs after viewing. But they haven't figured out the self-destruction yet. Good thing Phil's dog is available to lend a helping hand. Or, a helping tooth.

Phil tried his damnedest, but eventually had to give up. To salvage something to watch, we watched The Fighter, even though it was probably against various better judgments to start watching a 116-minute movie at ten of 10. Shorter movies were discussed, for example, The Company Men (104 minutes) and Please Give (90 minutes, and I'd already seen Please Give). Somewhere was not discussed, as it did not receive a second after I firsted it. But The Fighter was ultimately chosen, just barely, despite the fact that the consensus seemed to be moving irrevocably toward not watching any screener at all. But we made it through, and it actually seemed to be shorter than 116 minutes. Good performances all around.

That's the screener report for 2010 ... I'm Vance Tastic.

A shortened screener season

On Monday, I bemoaned the fact that if you want to see movies released in December in time for your year-end list, you have to pay theatrical prices.

There's actually a second way: Go visit your friend who's in the Writers Guild, and cadge as many of his screeners as you can.

Last year was particularly fruitful in this regard, setting me up with some unrealistic hopes for this year. Not only did I watch Doubt with my friend Phil at his place, but I came away with The Wrestler, Burn After Reading and Changeling, all of which he'd already seen. I also took home Doubt so my wife could watch it, which meant I left the premises four screeners richer. Since sharing screeners is strictly prohibited -- you are actually supposed to destroy them after you watch them -- I have changed Phil's name to protect his identity, though they'll have to figure out my identity first if they want to get to him. (The Wrestler ended up being my favorite film of last year, making it only my second top-ranked film that I didn't see in the theater, the first since Run Lola Run in 1999.)

What happened last year, however, was a fortuitous set of circumstances made possible by the fact that I hung out with Phil a week before Christmas. It was soon enough after he started receiving his screeners that he wasn't yet ready to send them in bulk to his cinephile mother, but not so soon that he hadn't already gone through a good number of them, leaving some available to borrow.

But when you get together almost a month later on the calendar, and the cinematic care package to Phil's mother is just days away from being shipped, you have to adjust your expectations a bit. And so it was last night that I reverted to the conditions established in 2007, when I first watched one of Phil's screeners (The Savages) and then just went on my merry way. That's probably just as well, because I don't want my desire to see movies to outweigh my sense of propriety, and put Phil in a situation of stress. Loaning things to people is always a bit stressful -- not only do you have to worry about when you'll get them back, but you also have to worry about them coming back in one piece. (I should know -- he still has two favorite movies I loaned him, and he says they're packed away in boxes somewhere after their move.)

When it comes to screeners, "I'm just happy to be here," as ballplayers up from the minors are fond of saying. I'll take whatever I can get. And last night, whatever I can get was Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart, which has won kudos for Jeff Bridges' lead performance as a broken down country singer. Phil and his fiancee had not yet seen it, so my wife and I joined them on their couch for a viewing over Thai noodles.

And just let me say: I'm glad I didn't pay theatrical prices for this one. Especially since a theatrical viewing would have prevented the snide commentary we established upon realizing it wasn't working for any of us. You know, it's that moment when one person makes a snarky remark, and everyone else laughs a bit too heartily, relieved that the others are similarly displeased. Then you're home free.

Crazy Heart falls into a distinct category of films, of which we've seen quite a few over the last decade, in which a lead performance gets resoundingly praised, and either the performance or the praise itself dwarfs the rest of the movie. With many of these films, the actor in question ended up winning an Oscar. I'm thinking of films like Monster's Ball (Halle Berry), Monster (Charlize Theron) and Boys Don't Cry (Hilary Swank). Lest you think I can only think of examples involving actresses, The Wrestler might have been thought of as a movie like that if a) Mickey Rourke had won the Oscar like he should have, and b) the movie weren't half as good as it is.

Crazy Heart actually has a number of other surface similarities to The Wrestler -- past-his-prime performer tries to make an undignified buck or two while fighting health issues -- but there's no comparison between the two in terms of quality. Bridges' performance is not even all that good, or at least not compared to his own usually high standards. Whatever you think of Bridges -- a friend of mine alternately calls him "Old Mush Mouth" and "Old Marble Mouth" because of the way he tends to garble his dialogue -- there's no doubt that he usually presents as real, even when playing a fantastical character like his peace-loving military zen master in The Men Who Stare at Goats. So if you're using the standard of how good a performer is compared to that performer's usual work, then Bridges' work here is nothing special. In fact, he sometimes seems to be relying on some showy actorly crutches, one of which I described here in the specific context of smoking cigarettes. Not only does Bridges smoke ostentatiously in Crazy Heart, but he loves any opportunity to eat while speaking his lines, or leave his mouth agape, as both of these seem to him to penetrate to the core of his character. It's a pretty good performance, but any time you notice the tricks an actor is using to manipulate you, it's hard to un-notice them.

The biggest problem with Crazy Heart -- and this post was not meant to be an actual review of Crazy Heart, so I'll wrap up -- is that the narrative is surprisingly light on conflict. His supposed rival (played by Colin Farrel in an unusual casting choice) seems to be an eminently nice guy, and there are few consequences to the bad behavior by the aptly named Bad Blake. That was one of the primary sources of disbelief discussed during our running commentary, how things for this "sad sack" were not nearly as sad as they seemed like they were supposed to be. Add in a patently false performance from Maggie Gyllenhaal, in which she can't decide from scene to scene whether she loves or hates Blake (but without anything in the script dictating these emotional fluctuations), and you have a movie that left us laughing -- often at our own jokes and comments -- rather than feeling Blake's pain.

I say there was no cost to watching Crazy Heart, but I did pay for it slightly -- in personal guilt. I know Phil doesn't care if we watch his screeners with him, and probably would have let me borrow a couple of them had I gotten there a couple weeks earlier. And the four of us had been intending to get together for months, so it's not like this was an inorganic gathering that I'd forced on the schedule. However, I did make a joke in an email last week about this being the time of year I needed to "use him for his screeners," and the get-together did spring more or less directly out of that comment. We like them very much and wanted to see them anyway, but I didn't like my own motivations behind scheduling the gathering for when I did.

And so I did the noble thing, leaving on the table a chance to grab one additional screener. In discussing the titles they had seen and would soon be shipping to his mother -- some of which I'd seen, some of which struck me as golden opportunities sadly missed -- I noticed him mentioning the Coen brothers' A Serious Man. He said in this case his mother had actually recommended it to him, and later the screener arrived. I doubted he'd be sending it to her to watch again. So I probably could have left with it, had I asked.

But I let it go. My 2009 rankings will close without that particular title, and no one will be the wiser.

Besides, I have to keep hidden some of the inner workings of my film-obsessed mind, because there will be more screeners to watch at the end of 2010. (And I'm glad on a day like today that Phil never reads my blog.) I have to avoid suspicion when conveniently setting up a time to see Phil next December ...

... maybe a week or so before Christmas.