Screened Out: Five-Star Fantasies

Screened Out: Five-Star Fantasies

This month marks five years that I’ve been writing these reviews, and I’ve never been able to give all three of my films five-star ratings. I dreamt of this day. I also feared I would lose my critique cred.

SOTheSessions

I want filmsâ┚¬â€dramas and comediesâ┚¬â€that have the ability to change our lives, as Arthur Miller said of good theatre.

Hawkes’ character Mark O’Brienâ┚¬â€based on a real personâ┚¬â€dreams of having sex. He’s quadriplegic, struck by childhood polio and riddled with Catholic guilt. After a failed attempt at romance and a confab with his priest (the wonderfully understanding Macy), Hawkes hires sex surrogate Hunt to help him lose his virginity.

Hawkes is the same actor who was nominated for Winter’s Bone, but here he is a different being. Here he is ebullient and witty. He does all this with his face. He imbues his performance with magicâ┚¬â€words and expressionâ┚¬â€that make it clear how someone might be attracted to him, seeing beyond his limitations.

The Sessions is both funny and sensitive. It’s also blatantly sexual and deeply respectful. The energy and pace are phenomenal, buoyed by Hawkes, Macy, and Hunt. They make a potentially uncomfortable subject revelatory.

Sex is important, but love and romance become even more vital to every one of us. There is nothingâ┚¬â€neither physical nor mentalâ┚¬â€that will ever completely stop of us from dreaming and striving for that particular perfection.


SOSevenPsychopathsSeven Psychopaths: it’s a fantastic title for a film, and you definitely want to spend a couple hours in this super-dark comedy by mean Irish playwright/director Martin McDonagh. However, you would never want to spend a moment of real life with these nutjobs â┚¬Â¦unless you’re also crazy.

Farrell is a drunken Irish writer (a sly connection to director McDonagh?) trying to write the movie Seven Psychopaths. At the same time, some random loony is killing Los Angeles mobsters. Also, Farrell’s best friend Rockwell has teamed up with old mental case (Walken) to kidnap dogs for the reward money. These scam artists try to help Farrell past his writer’s block. They also nab the shih-tzu of sicko mob boss Harrelson.

McDonagh can write a mean, tight script (like his directorial debut In Bruges). In Seven Psychopaths, he breeds his violent humor to Quentin Tarantino’s aesthetic. Instead of imitation, McDonagh’s hybrid of character and dialogue are unique. More importantly, amidst the idiocy and bloodletting, the actors seem to have the times of their lives acting and reacting to the insanity around them. Across the board, the performances are wonderfully twisted and actually nuanced.

Movies like this are about plot and surprise, and McDonagh never lets us down. As debasing as this stuff could be, the self-referential Hollywood nature of Seven Psychopaths allows us to laugh. It’s demented and sadistic, a joy to watch, as long as we never have to experience it first-hand.


SOArgoSometimes our greatest heroes are so much quieterâ┚¬â€and more impressiveâ┚¬â€than we can ever imagine. As audiences, we love the wild and loud stories, the swashbucklers, the sci-fi Westerns, because they’re larger than life. Argo is a true storyâ┚¬â€so insane that it seems fictionalâ┚¬â€and it has silent heroes.

In 1979, 68 Americans were captured in Iran and held hostage for 444 days. Did you know six others got out? They escaped pretending to be part of a Canadian film crew. Argo purports to make a fictional fantasy filmâ┚¬â€a film like Star Warsâ┚¬â€in Iran during the crisis. It was a ruse.

Affleck directs and acts in a script by Chris Terrio. He plays Tony Mendez, the CIA operative who orchestrated everything. Mendez gathered Hollywood experts (Arkin and Goodman, both delightful) to provide a plausible cover story.

Being so involved in such a project could seem vainâ┚¬â€a recipe for disasterâ┚¬â€but Affleck seems to sense that Mendez never stood out. Affleck is intent to do the same. His camera work is studied, the tension palpable, his acting intricate, and Terrio’s script devoid of the big Oscar speeches that plagued Affleck-scripted Gone Baby Gone and The Town.

Who would’ve thought the man in Gigli and Armageddon would be a talented director? Here’s proof, though, that there are many stories out there so crazy, they have to be true.


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