Review #1,448: 'Crimes and Misdemeanors' (1989)

Say what you will about the rapidly decreasing quality of Woody Allen's work of late, or about the writer/director/actor's character in the wake of the recent horrific allegations made against him, but look back at his filmography and there's a wealth of brilliance to be found. As he became a household name thanks to some of the most hilarious comedies of the 1970s, Allen moved away from playing the clown and into more serious territory. The comedy was still there, but as a fan of Ingmar Bergman and Marcel Ophuls, he was always eager to explore the darkness rooted in our souls. One of his most sobering works is also one of his best. Released in 1989, Crimes and Misdemeanors asked the question posed by many a philosopher: Can you live with yourself after committing a murder or will the shame gradually eat away your soul?

The man at the centre of the story, Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), seems to have it all. He's a respected doctor with a loving family and a group of adoring friends, and the film opens with a lavish dinner held in his honour. On the surface, Judah is a happily married man, but he holds a dark secret. Over the past few months, he has indulged in an affair with flight attendant Dolores Paley (Anjelica Huston), enjoying short breaks away and taking long walks on the beach. Only now Dolores is threatening to reveal his secret, sending a letter to Judah's wife which he manages to intercept at the last minute, and calling from the gas station down the road with ideas of turning up at the family's door. When she refuses to listen to Judah's pleas, the doctor turns to his brother Jack (Jerry Orbach), who has connections to the mob, for help. Jack has a simple answer: He will hire someone to murder Dolores and Judah won't have to lift a finger.

While all of this is going on, struggling documentary filmmaker Cliff Stern (Allen) is thrown a gig by his brother-in-law - the obnoxious, self-obsessed sitcom writer Lester (Alan Alda) - and meets cute associate producer Halley Reed (Mia Farrow) on the job. Unhappy in his own marriage, Cliff can't help but fall in love, but Lester has her in his sights also. It took me a while to figure out why these two seemingly unconnected stories were unravelling side-by-side, but it soon becomes clear that this is a film about the absurdity of guilt. Judah and Jack had it drilled into them from a young age by their rabbi father, but now they appear to be literally getting away with murder. Cliff may want to cheat on his berating wife, but he is ultimately a 'good' guy, yet life doesn't seem to want to throw him any luck. There's also a key character in Ben (Sam Waterston), a rabbi who still maintains a lust for life despite his deteriorating eyesight. It plays like a thriller, but it's also very funny. There's a depressing theme constantly at play, but Allen ensures that the story remains insightful, engrossing and occasionally heartbreaking. One of Allen's shrewdest and most humanistic pictures to date, assisted by a flawless ensemble.


Directed by: Woody Allen
Starring: Martin Landau, Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Alan Alda, Anjelica Huston, Sam Waterston, Joanna Gleason, Claire Bloom, Jerry Orbach
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #1,417: 'Choke' (2008)

If you've ever had the fortune of reading a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the novelist behind the likes of Fight Club and Invisible Monsters, you'll know that attempting to envision the writer's nihilistic style and sketchy characters for the cinema screen is a monumental task. It takes a master director like David Fincher to make something truly wonderful, as he did with 1999's Fight Club, and to understand that simply plucking the best scenes from the book, stringing them together, and hoping it'll somehow flow, simply won't work. Choke, based on Palahniuk's 2001 novel, is written and directed by Clark Gregg, the actor now best known as Agent Coulson in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and TV's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It's a commendable effort, and Gregg certainly gives it his all, but Choke is all over the place, and is ultimately forced to hack the complex novel into a collection of vignettes that don't really fit together.

Our protagonist is Victor Mancini, a sex addict and theme park employee whose ultimate goal seems to be to piss off anybody he comes across. His only friend is chronic masturbator Denny (Brad William Henke), a fellow underachiever who is almost saintly when compared to Victor. To his credit, Victor pays frequent visits to his hospitalised mother Ida (Anjelica Huston), although she doesn't recognise him, so Victor spends much of the time pretending to be somebody else or trying to bang any of the many nurses in the ward. If Victor wasn't already loathsome enough, he earns some extra cash on the side by pretending to choke on food at restaurants. The con is that a good Samaritan will perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on the blue-in-the-face stranger, and when the airwaves are clear and the food flies across the room, they will feel responsible for the person they have just saved. As a result, Victor frequently receives cheques from his saviours. In anybody else's hands, Victor would be too much of a scumbag to bear for 90 minutes, but he's played by Sam Rockwell, and the great underappreciated character actor somehow makes him sympathetic.

If Choke sounds like a mess, it's because that's precisely what it is. Along with everything else going on, Victor finds some comfort from the chaos in his life in the form of nurse Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald), who comes up with her own theory about Victor's birth when Ida reveals that there's something she hasn't told him. Despite the haphazard nature of the story, Gregg just about pulls it off by getting the very best out of his actors. Rockwell and Huston are fantastic, but that's to be expected. Henke, an actor I don't think I've seen in anything else before, gets a lot of laughs out of his loveable schlub, and is so good that it often feels like his character has the more interesting story to tell. Macdonald is charming as the nurse with her own unique approach to dealing with the strung-out relative of one of her patients, and Gregg himself, in a smaller role as Victor's brown-nosing colleague, is responsible for some of the film's funniest moments. But in the end, that's all that Choke is: a collection of funny moments. It certainly captures the idiosyncratic tone of the novel, but doesn't quite know how to fit it all the pieces together.


Directed by: Clark Gregg
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Brad William Henke, Paz de la Huerta, Clark Gregg, Bijou Phillips
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #280: '50/50' (2011)

Young radio writer Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is happily living his life when he is diagnosed with a rare form of spinal cancer. Frustrated and gob-smacked, Adam tries to carry on with his life living with a disease that has a 50/50 chance of killing him. He lives with his selfish, self-centred girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is more fond of partying than looking after Adam's interests. Always there for him is his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen), who is always on hand to provide medical marijuana, and his trainee psychologist Katherine (Anna Kendrick), while Adam's mother Diane (Anjelica Huston) has difficulty accepting it.

Seth Rogen and his writing team have already blended comedy-drama with disease in the brilliant and vastly underrated Funny People (2009), which brought out an award-worthy performance by Adam Sandler. Yet where Sandler's characters' disease was a prop that would propel his character in re-evaluating his life and choices, in 50/50 it is the focal point. We follow Adam though every stage of his illness, from the emotional torment and confusion after his diagnosis, through to his chemo, to the final operation that may ultimately kill him. Screenwriter Will Reiser, who wrote the film based on his own experiences, beautifully juxtaposes the sad and profoundly moving along with the funny. It is more heavy on the drama than the comedy, but the film is still hilarious, mainly thanks to the supporting actors.

Levitt is an extremely likeable and hugely talented actor, and after years in independent cinema (starring in the likes of the wonderful Mysterious Skin (2004) and Brick (2005)), seems to be finally getting his deserved big break after the recent (500) Days of Summer (2009) and Inception (2010). Here he uses his every-man charisma to create a wholly believable nice-guy character. Ultimately though, the film belongs to Seth Rogen. He is surprisingly touching as the reliable best friend who can only communicate his affection with cock jokes and trying to get Adam laid. He also hates Rachael, and when he finds out that she is not putting out for Adam, he has possibly the best line of the whole film - "if I was your girlfriend, I'd be sucking your cock right now!".

Anna Kendrick also does herself no harm, expertly playing cute and sweet, and one half of a potential romance that I was really rooting for. The fact that Adam may die before they have a chance adds to underlying sadness. With Levitt and Kendrick as the two players, 50/50's rom-com moments achieve far more in small doses than the majority of other rom-com's can only dream of reaching. Huston displays why she is still an acting powerhouse, with her concerned yet hard-as-nails mother stealing the few scenes she has.

It is a film full of great performances, but special mention must also go to director Jonathan Levine, who keeps  any technical flourishes to a bare minimum, allowing the actors to play out the fantastic script in front of a mainly hand-held camera. A wise decision, as the subject matter and the brilliance of the dialogue doesn't require flashy moments of quirkiness. He does, however, deliver an amusing and weirdly moving scene where Adam, stoned from his cancer-buddies 'special' macaroons, wanders down a hospital corridor in slow-motion, giggling at everything he sees, which includes people in various stages of their cancer and a dead body.

One of the best comedies of the decade, and one of the finest films of the year. 50/50 can sit alongside those other modern greats from Rogen and his gang - Superbad, Knocked Up (both 2007) and Funny People. Powerful, uplifting, hilarious, sad and extremely moving - it is not often that a film can achieve so much in such a subtle way.


Directed by: Jonathan Levine
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, Anjelica Huston, Philip Baker Hall, Matt Frewer
Country: USA

Rating: *****

Tom Gillespie