House of Lies Review: Can you find truth in the House of Lies?

Big business is a boogeyman in today's world. When the subject of corporations and wealth come up, things often turn to talking about lies, greed an grabbing power. So it's no surprise that these ideas are front and center in House of Lies. But where a lot of shows would explore the consequences of a life built on lies and deception, this show attempts to see the benefits. In a world of full of liars, the best liar is the one who succeeds. Enter Marty Kahn, played by the great Don Cheadle, a management consultant who is second to none at the game they play. He can sell anything to anyone on a bad day. On a good day he can talk them out of house and home and make them think it was their idea.

It's often said that with any new business or industry that there are bound to be spinoff industries looking to take advantage of the relatively uncertainty that comes along with establishing it. With the multi-million or billion dollar conglomerate it seems, management consultancy is that spinoff. A business built upon coming in and telling a massive organization how to be more efficient at high costs. And there in lies the fun of the show. Marty Kahn and his team of consultants are masters of manipulating businesses.

You might say that it is one of the best examples of shows which fight back for the anger and resentment towards corporate greed and power. In the same way that Arrow and other shows in recent years have been like rallying calls reflecting society's perspective, House of Lies shows that even within the system itself there are people who look for ways to screw the big boys out of their money.

Adding to this modern story is the phenominal talent of the previously mentioned Don Cheadle, the fantastic Kristen Bell as Jeannie Van Der Hooven, the incredible Dawn Olivieri as Marty's psychotic ex wife Monica Talbot ultimately rounded out by what can only be described as the comedy duo of Ben Schwartz and Josh Lawson as Clyde Oberholt and Doug Guggenheim. They are today's unsung heroes, the wish-fulfillment of the audience in a world where things just don't tend to go their way. And it's a joy to watch them work. Set from the personal perspective of Marty Kahn as he struggles to balance work, home and his relationships we still never lose sight of the lives of the people around him and their own struggles.

Can you find truth in the House of Lies? Absolutely, especially when a lot of those lies also happen to be the truth. If you haven't seen this show, then you're lying to yourself if you say you don't need to.

What's next for my blog?

So I started my blog about a year back now and I have done my best to have consistent content. Now it appears that I will be adding more content to the mix for the near future. I've been hired as an intern at Syndicado, which you can learn more about here, for my reviews and I am going to be uploading those reviews to my blog for them on a regular basis. I still plan on reviewing my own content from time to time and voicing my opinion on the film industry and other things whenever possible. The only major difference now is that I will have more content and links to where you can see it for yourself if you're interested.

My normal schedule for this has been to have content available every Wednesday, and that will remain the same for the time being, although I have been considering moving it to Friday and adding something else for Mondays recently. If there is a change, I will definitely be letting you all know. But for now, my blog will be on the same schedule with regular injections of content from Syndicado. Where things will seem to change is in the way I title my blogs. I am going to continue to title and close each review with a question for my own content, but the Syndicado reviews will be a little bit more straight forward.

I'm really looking forward to putting out this content for you guys to see and hearing your opinions.

What's next for my blog? At the moment, a lot of good things.

Machete Review: Would you like a Machete?

Discuss: Why not superhero movies for our up and coming filmmakers?

A short while ago, I posted an article someone wrote that talked about the idea of new and upcoming filmmakers taking on superhero films as a way of financing smaller projects and whether or not that’s a good thing. Many of the details of the article suggest that having filmmakers, up and coming or not, doing superhero movies is a problem. That they should use their success to fuel more independent projects then superhero films. One of the examples given is Darren Aronofsky going from the success of Black Swan into his ultimately canceled participation in The Wolverine, a loosely based sequel to the film X-men Origins: Wolverine.

But why should that matter? If Aronofsky or any other filmmaker who takes on a superhero project is doing so because they care about the material and want to use their independent success on a superhero film, then shouldn’t we let them? Of course, if the filmmakers are only taking on these projects because of the paycheck and don’t really care about the film then I can understand having a problem with it. But the Hollywood system which is creating all these films isn’t really at fault for letting someone take on a project of that magnitude if they believe the filmmaker can do the characters justice.

After all, a superhero project does have enormous potential for the filmmaker in question, and I am not just talking about the paycheck or the box office boom that comes with it if the filmmakers do it properly. In some of my recent blog posts I have spoken about the idea of superheroes as a modern mythology, the idea that there are all kinds of disparate elements to the superhero story that can cross genres and be relevant to even non superhero fans. This has never been more true than in what I am talking about now. Consider for a moment, the idea of Superman. Some look at a character like that and just see an alien with powers and outdated ideals, but I see the ultimate immigrant story.

Superman is the modern retelling of the story of Moses. A child set among the intergalactic river to live with a new family, who grows up and develops incredible powers to set people free from the pain and suffering they go through every day. Batman is the story of Hamlet, a man struck by tragedy that swears vengeance against the person or people who destroyed his father and ends up consumed by it. Spiderman in some ways is a combination of both. The stories of Moses and Hamlet are considered by many to be universal truths. Why not then their modern equivalents?

Many comic books have dealt with a story similar to that of Black Swan, yet Aronofsky should be praised for one and looked down upon for another? This goes back to the bias or stereotype which some filmmakers have about the potential for superheroes or comic books in modern storytelling, a problem which largely comes out of the fact that these films have to come from Hollywood because they are too big to be played out anywhere else. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. To point this out, I need only to paraphrase a quote from Joss Whedon, a man who not only created one of the biggest films of all time and a monster at the box office, but during his spare time in the filming of which he directed and self-financed a film in 12 days based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

“The film industry has become very much about the big budget blockbuster or the small indie film, there isn’t really an in between anymore. There is no real middle ground, and I’m cool with that. I love doing both.”

And so I say, why not superhero movies for our up and coming filmmakers?

Why did TIFF go younger this year?

Anyone who takes even a basic look at the schedule for TIFF this year will notice a bit of a difference in the type of films which were scheduled to play. In the past you would have seen a focus on independent films and Hollywood films which would focus on a more experienced, filmmaker focused audience. You had films like “The Ides of March”, “The Informant” and “Shame”. This year however you can see more of a skew towards a younger audience with films like “Spring Breakers”, “Dredd 3D”, “On The Road” and even “Much Ado About Nothing”. What’s the significance of such a move? Is there a reason for it? What can be done about it?

The answer to most of those questions is yes, all with the exception the last one. Mainly because I’m not sure they need to do anything about it. Long time patrons of the festival might look at the people involved in this year’s films and say why do we need to appeal to a younger audience? Why do we need films starring Kristen Stewart, Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens? Aren’t they all just attention grabbing Disney stars with no real talent? First and foremost I would say that anyone who insists upon saying such things probably hasn’t taken the time to actually watch any of the work of any such stars and I am a big believer in the idea that you can’t judge a person’s talent if you haven’t taken the time to give it a shot.

I’ve actually seen some of their work, including some of the films I mentioned earlier, and I would say that they have real talent. It’s a little on the rough side in some areas but they aren’t supposed to be seasoned veterans of the craft because they aren’t yet old enough to have put in the kind of time a seasoned veteran would need to appear as such. Plus in looking at some of these films, they may have actually done so. They’ve been given the opportunity in many of these films to stretch their acting muscles and turned in pretty good performances.

Some might say that TIFF has to be careful not to alienate its core audience of filmmakers. But who’s to say they did? “On The Road”, while starring Kristen Stewart, is based on a Jack Kerouac novel. Hardly the tween fluff she is often accused of doing. As I said in my review, Spring Breakers was a film by Harmony Korine maker of such films as “Kids”, not exactly someone known for creating films that teenagers are encouraged to see. In fact Selena Gomez actually encouraged her younger fans not to see it given its more adult content, even as hundreds of younger girls sat in the audience after the screening while she said it. These are not exactly films which betray many of the ideas that TIFF built its reputation on.

Even if it were, why is that so wrong? I’ve said it before and I will say it again, film is not a uniform media. It’s not required to conform to a particular idea of what a good film is or who should be in such films. Some filmmakers and their films may present themselves that way, but that’s only one of many narratives available to creators in the visual arts. The most prominent narrative is that film is a reflection of society, and if TIFF wishes to stay true to that above anything else, then it has to be willing to broaden its appeal to more than just its core audience.

TIFF has to stay relevant to the audiences of today and not all of them are 30+ filmmakers who remember Sylvester Stallone as Rocky instead of The Expendables. At a certain point you have to recognize the bigger audience and figure out if you can appeal to them as much as those you admire.

Why did TIFF go younger this year? I think that much is obvious.

Frost/Nixon, the new power couple?

Anyone who reads my blog has probably noticed that I’m a fan of politics. From real political situations like Kony2012 and gay rights, to the fictional kind like Boss, The Newsroom or The Daily Show/The Colbert Report (it is considered fake news after all), I love hearing other people’s views on controversial issues. Even if I don’t agree with everything they say, I usually find something in them worth learning from or at least considering. So when I sat down to watch the Ron Howard movie Frost/Nixon, I was really looking forward to it. The whole Watergate scandal is well before my time, but the effects of it has pretty much changed the face of politics ever since. Finding out the details brought a lot of context to how politics work in this day and age and the way in which people overuse the suffix “-Gate” every time some political scandal pops up these days.

Of course, Frost/Nixon isn’t really about Watergate as much as it was about the political fallout and aftermath of the scandal getting out, how people dealt with it and the part that the interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon played in the healing process. It’s interesting to realize that for all the controversial elements of the Watergate scandal, most of which remain somewhat unresolved, no one ever seems to talk about the fact that Gerald Ford pardoned the disgraced former president for wrong doing that he might have done. From a political perspective, I can understand why a president would do such a thing. The late Richard Nixon put a black mark on the presidency, and politics in general, and not doing something would have been so much worse than what he did.

The film begins with one of the biggest events in political history, watching the only American President to ever resign from the most powerful position in the free world. It shows the reaction of David Frost to the event and from there you watch almost voyeuristically as these two men take the journey towards their eventual clash. Now what’s interesting about the film is that while many historical or political films would strive for the actor who looks most like the figure they are playing, Ron Howard has gone for more of an interpretation of those involved then an imitation of the figures themselves. Part of the reason for that appears to be one of the historical messages of the film. Howard has made a point of saying that one of the reasons he wanted to make the film is because of the political climate of the day, post-Bush administration.

He wanted to draw parallels between the loss of political trust that occurred after both Watergate and the invasion of Iraq. That may be part of the reason that I didn’t really connect with the material as much as I would’ve hoped to. It tried to walk the line between a huge generational gap and it didn’t entirely keep its balance all the way through. While there are a fair amount of similarities between the two situations, Vietnam versus Iraq, wire tapping and clandestine investigations of citizens without their consent and invasion of a right to privacy, I don’t think we are far enough away from the Iraq war (we’re still fighting it in 2012 and the movie was released in 2008) to truly give it the historical context that it deserves.

Because of that, I’m not sure that the film has the emotional impact that it’s going for. Then again, it may simply be that I have too much emotional distance between both events that I simply can’t get as angry or invested in the tragic reality of the circumstances these two characters are living in. So is Frost/Nixon the new power couple? Unfortunately, I don’t think I care enough about them to say yes.

Who wants to get Buried?

I’ve had the opportunity to rent a few DVDs recently and catch up on quite a few films that slipped through my gaze in the past few years. So I thought I would take a moment and review them. The first film of the bunch that got buried in my sub-conscious is the aptly named “Buried”, a film that seems ambitious from the get-go.

For those that didn’t hear about it when it came out, the film stars Ryan Reynolds as a truck driver in Iraq whose convoy gets attacked and they bury him so that he can be used for ransom by his kidnappers. What’s most ambitious about the film is that it takes place entirely within the coffin that Paul Conroy (the obviously stressed Ryan Reynolds) was in. There are a lot of film directors who focus on creating the right shot and for the right emotion, with the right lighting and colors to create that shot. In most movies that’s a fundamental aspect for the storytelling process, and to some extent that’s true of this film too. More important though in Buried is the performance of Ryan Reynolds. Truly this is a film built for an actor’s study.

How else do you explain a film about a man in a 6 foot box fir over 90 minutes being such a riveting piece of film? It’s a terrifying thing, watching a man struggling to deal with the reality of his situation. He starts off bound and blind to what happened to him, much as we, the audience, are coming into this. Slowly but surely we watch as, even trapped in a coffin buried under mountains of dirt and rock, things keep getting worse for him. Watching the truth of the situation unfold is unlike most films out there today. Many films, particularly horror films, rely on what’s just around the corner or the unknown to tell a story, and to some extent so does this film. But the beauty of “Buried” is that in some ways they are both the same thing. The uncertainty and the danger of the situation Paul Conroy is in, exists entirely in your head and where it might go stays there on the edge of your seat with you.

It goes without saying that Ryan Reynolds can be viewed as an unusual choice for a role that relies so heavily on the acting chops of the main actor. His most well known roles tend to be the romantic comedy kind and people don’t really associate them with great acting. But in this film, he proves that he is up to any challenge that might come at him. Does that mean he will always choose the right film or that the script will be up to the standards necessary to bring out such a performance? No, but when that great script does come along that lets him punch above the weight of other actors, boy does he have it in him.

It’s unfortunate that a film such as this seems to have flown under the radar for as long as it did, there are a lot of great things about it. But I can kind of understand why because of how uninteresting a film like this can seem to most people. Single shot movies tend to have the same problem so I can see how a film shot in a single location could have trouble finding an audience, not to mention the huge blockbuster that is Green Lantern (in the sense of money spent, if not in box office returns) which Ryan Reynolds also starred in which was released around the same time.

Who wants to get “Buried”? You should, or at the very least you should go looking for the film and dig it up from wherever it might be hiding.

Is the film industry being purposely ironic?

Recently I have read my fair share of articles and blogs talking about story telling in the film industry. Many of the discussions focus on the fact that there are too many sequels, prequels and remakes coming out lately. They talk about how Hollywood is creatively bankrupt and only cares about money. One of the newest articles I read started by asking if the film industry and Hollywood was out of original ideas? The irony of the article being that writing an article about a lack of originality in Hollywood is becoming less and less original the more it happens.

People talk, at length, about how terrible the new dynamic of Hollywood is and how it destroys creativity in the industry. Now I’m not above recognizing some of the films out there have problems. There are some pretty terrible films out there. I have even been known to get critical of really popular films, and recognizing that films that I’ve previously loved don’t end up aging very well. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, even if many of the actors and actresses do. But I think it’s a mistake to think that this is a systemic thing that can’t be or doesn’t want to be fixed.

Film is not a uniform art. Heck, art is not a uniform art. There are many ways to go about it, many ways in which to tell a story. Independent or Hollywood, we in the arts all understand that, but if “new and original” ideas are the bench mark of good storytelling, then we pretty much bottomed out on original ideas three hundred years ago. And even then we were living on borrowed time. To use my previous review of The Amazing Spiderman as an example, just because a Spiderman has been done before doesn’t mean that the new film doesn’t have value, that there isn’t a story worth telling in the Spiderman character. Superheroes are the mythology of the modern age and there are so many different versions of them over the years, the films should be viewed the same.

Does that make them creatively bankrupt, or does it make the characters emotionally and creatively complex? There’s a prevailing belief within many storytellers that film peaked in the 1970s and things have been going downhill since then. But take a look at some of the films from that era and somewhat before. “West Side Story” is a musical version of “Romeo and Juliet”. ”It’s a Wonderful Life” is basically a retelling of “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. “Scarface” from 1983 is a more violent remake of a 1932 film of the same name. “The Wizard of Oz” is basically the same story as “Alice in Wonderland”. The films many people in the film industry view as original ideas aren’t original at all. Yet for some reason, this time it’s different.

Many people say that the reason it’s different is because the studio system has changed. That the big time corporations that now own film studios have turned them into money making monsters who only care about profit. But is that actually the case? From what I understand the popularity of “Casablanca” prompted the studios to talk about making a sequel for it. The availability of the actors involved made it hard to do but the thought still crossed the studios minds. It would seem the only major difference between 1942 and today is that studios actually plan ahead of time for sequels and find actors who are willing to consider doing them. That isn’t really much of a change in my opinion. If anything it just means that studios are becoming better planners.

And on the subject of sequels and prequels, one needs only to look at what is often referred to as film’s redheaded step child, television, to see examples of why there are so many these days. Some stories simply can’t be contained within a 90 minute time frame. Or even a 2-3 hour time frame. Television has been known to tell a story over up to 25 hours split into individual episodes. Yet people complain that stories are being told over several films? And if it’s such a problem, why are so many major Hollywood filmmakers and actors moving into television these days?

Now I will admit there are some films that don’t need sequels. There are some films that lose something because a sequel or prequel is made of the original film. I am not big on sequels like “The Matrix Reloaded”, “The Crow: City of Angels”, and the rather extensive amount of direct-to-DVD sequels to films like “Bring It On” or “American Pie”. Not to mention all the different horror films with less than decent films. But you also have films like “The Dark Knight”, “Back to the Future: Part 2” and “Superman II”, all of which have improved on the original and did great things.

For every bad sequel or prequel out there in the film industry, there are all sorts of examples of really great ones. So when I read a blog or hear someone talk about the endless parade of sequels, prequels and remakes I can’t help but wonder where all the hate is coming from. Originality is a state of mind, not a formula. It’s not the amount of money you can put into a production. It’s about emotional honesty. Any film can be great if the filmmakers care about the material and are on the same page creatively. But I continually hear about how independent film is better than Hollywood. About how creatively bankrupt and out of originality it can be. The influx of opinions that all sound the same is so much that I just have to ask...

Is the film industry being purposely ironic?