Film Review: I Smile Back (2015)

Broad Green Pictures

There�s plenty of terrible mental and emotional spaces in the I Smile Back movie. As an exploration of a well-meaning but critically damaged woman, who is played by Sarah Silverman, it goes deep into territory that will make people feel uncomfortable, even though 

I doubt this was the intended purpose of its makers. Its director, Adam Salky, decided to place its plot in a perfect household, where Laney and Bruce, a young and successful couple have two perfect children and live in a beautiful house.

In that environment, however, the main character of Laney feels an endless torrent of negative emotions and thoughts which push her into alcoholism, drug use, and promiscuity. At one point, the situation begins to deteriorate and she starts to lose control, which triggers an onset of fear about the prospect of losing her family. 

Salky boldly dissects the suburban world that Laney inhabits, but does not try to present it as a nicely decorated emotional hell, like Sam Mendes did in the American Beauty. Instead, it is Laney herself who constructs the hell on her own, knowing that her behavior leads to a dark place, but still has no way to stop it. From a psychology perspective, the film is a stellar success and builds up Laney as a very coherent character when all of their past and present is gradually revealed. To do this, Salky uses her own actions, but also subtle hints, stories told by other characters and many more inventive storytelling techniques. All of them combine in a collage that presents a person who has all but still feels as if she has nothing. 

With its short runtime of 85 minutes, Salky does all that he intended to do and does not waste even a minute. But, it is Sarah Silverman who makes Laney into a real person. Her character is reliable and somehow right there, living in it all without any false dramatization or overacting. It�s obvious that Silverman�s talent for dramatic roles has been perfectly hidden until now.

Finally, it is the decision of Salky not to provide any possible solution to Laney�s conundrum which makes the film a great work of art. It would have been easier to wrap up I Smile Back in some predictable fashion, but instead, Salky does something a lot more visceral and powerful.

Film Review: Point Break (2015)

Copyright: Warner Bros. Pictures

Having an intellectually-lighter script can, in the right hands, be a huge advantage. It could be argued that the script�s and the director�s cognitive potentials add up to make a single IQ � if the script is low on its intellect, a high-IQ director can mend it by lending her or his potential to the equation.

That is why Kathryn Bigelow made the original Point Break in 1991 into such a memorable film, in spite of a paper-thin plot and so many dumb looks on the faces of the actors that some might think they�re solving mathematical equations.

The Point Break remake once again has a weak script, but I�m not saying that it�s director Ericson Core is unintelligent. However, Point Break 2015 is a bland endeavor that leaves the viewer in a state of nothingness, emotionally and especially intellectually. The story once again features a young, dashing daredevil (which is a horrible movie from 2003 which Core also directed) called Utah who also works as an FBI agent.

He embarks on a case he cracked himself thanks to his knowledge of extreme sports which propels him into an undercover role.As he tries to infiltrate a gang of similarly extreme-minded individuals with exotic accents (a new must for the edgier Hollywood action films), they go diving, surfing, snowboards and some other thrilling stuff.

But, the merger of all of these sequences is utterly boring as Luke Bracey, who plays Utah and constantly looks pissed off right before he begins surfing/snowboarding/underground MMA fighting. There is a lack of manpower in Point Break 2015 and it is seen in front and behind the camera. Bracey fails to provide the charm and charisma of the young Keanu Reeves, while Core is definitely not on par with Bigelow in any shape or form.

For example, a fantastic thriller like Sicario creates tension and suspense by only hinting at danger before it erupts. In Point Break, the characters might be snowboarding on the most dangerous mountain, but the emotions of the viewer�s remain indifferent to the things that the characters are going through.

There is also a lack of luck for this movies that I have to mention in this Point Break 2015 review � its timing is wrong. In 1991, extreme sports stuff was nowhere to be seen for the wider audience. It was new, fresh and exciting, interesting and stupid, all at the same time, like the name �Johnny Utah� itself. Now, Red Bull gave us a man who went skydiving from space and the planet watched it live. The new Point Break would have to be a lot more clever to make this collage of stunt reels work as an exciting movie. In its current form, it is just a pale reminder of an old and really great intellectually-light film.

Film Review: Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Copyright: Universal Pictures

However you look at it, Hail, Caesar! is a densely layered film which is immensely enjoyable on its surface. Designed as a weird comedy about the golden age of Hollywood and one man�s mission to keep it that way, the film�s plot quickly branches out into numerous other domains, including religion, workers� rights and the role of musical interludes.

In it, Coen brothers do what they do best and mix strangeness with latent meaning, but in a way that makes them look more like baboons and not David Lynch disciples. Their best films use this formula to a degree and even though this film is not one of those, it still provides a celebration of some of the most recognizable cinematography in the last 30 years.

For most of the film, the perspective of the plot is split between characters that are somehow connected to a disappearance of a big movie star from the set of a historical epic film. 

The star, played by George Clooney, and its disappearance quickly became a problem for Eddie Mannix, a jack of all trades employed by the studio to make sure that all goes according to the plan.

Eddie is played by Josh Brolin and he does a marvelous job presenting a type of hard-boiled, violent and devoted man that apparently died out with the digital age, which I don�t lament in any shape or form. As he pushes through many cultural regions of 1950�s Hollywood, Eddie allows the audience to soak in the atmosphere of this time naturally enforced through overstatements and sometimes bizarre levels of sarcasm that still keep true to the original intent.

But, the only problem of this fun and enjoyable film is the second part, where a small fraction of direction kind of gets lost in the metaphors and multiple plot perspectives. Here, Coen brothers wanted to make a point whichever that point might have been, most likely including Jesus, faith, communism and righteous distribution of wealth, all in a comedy form, but I failed to properly notice or/and decipher these ideas. That is why, for me, the second half of the film loses some energy.

Thankfully, it was nowhere near enough to make me lose my interest. I�m glad that films like Trumbo can come out together with films like Hail, Caesar! and show a similar era in a manner that is both bold and hard to interpret. Maybe I didn�t get it, but I sure did like it, which is great compared to Trumbo which I did get but did not really enjoy in any way.

Film Review: Irrational Man (2015)

Copyright: Sony Pictures Classics

The talent of Woody Allen knows no limits. His film called Irrational Man is one of the best examples of his current creative period in which he apparently fell in love with simple and basic thrillers. Like Match Point, this film provides an uneasy, self-mocking feel that is rare and precious in Hollywood these days.

Here, Allen puts Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone to work, using them to create a plot where a distraught philosophy professor played by Phoenix arrives at a new college and begins to reevaluate his life through talks, sexual encounters and epiphanies about the nature of humanity. Along the way, murder also becomes involved.

The plot, like Allen�s direction, builds up an environment of intellectualism and an (undeserved) high quality of life, but also a vast and placid emptiness about the purpose of it all.

In Irrational Man, all the characters are looking for that something, completely oblivious to their incredible self-indulgence and a need to see themselves as someone who is living a righteous life according to the latest cultural norms.

While these traits block them in their attempts, they still ask for it, actually, demand it, no matter what or who might get hurt along the way. Internal monologues coming from the main actors go great justice to this concept and further enforce it.
But, because of their social class, eloquent rationalization and unapologetic and unconscious selfishness, others definitely get hurt in a range of ways. Allen shows how this need to put oneself in the center of the known universe is something corrosive and dangerous. In fact, the emotional weirdness combined with valid internal cognitive processes of the characters transform the film into a dark comedy about the toxic hunger of the modern western self-centered philosophy of life.

Towards the end, the audience gets entangled in the web of lies and explanation, settling into the position where it would not be that bad if everyone got punished for what they did and how they acted. This way, Woody Allen managed to create via a classic tale of crime and guilt, set in the modern world of convenience and ego-worshiping individual philosophies.