Short Take: "Senna", "Jane Eyre" and "Warrior".

Ayrton Senna was widely regarded as one of the best race car pilots in the history of sport and Asif Kapadia's masterful documentary proves why. The thrilling film closely follows Senna's trajectory beginning as an amateur and then going all the way to him being World Champion on three consecutive years. The film chronicles his rivalry with teammate Alain Prost, with whom he engaged in psychological warfare on and off the racing track. What remains so stunning about this film, is how it trespasses into narrative fiction while retaining elements of non-fiction cinema. Most documentaries make you aware that you are watching reality being bent and that for all you want to do about it, the events being related are unchangeable. What goes on with Senna is quite the opposite, the film is done entirely with archival and news footage (there are no modern day interviews or intrusive narration) all of this helps create a seamless chain of events that trick us into thinking we might be watching fiction. We know for a fact that we're not, but the narrative is so precise and flawless that we ask ourselves, why were that many cameras near Ayrton all the time? The entire film has an eerie prescience, as if the people involved knew one day these fragments of their lives would be used to tell a life story. With that said, the film avoids sensationalism, instead turning Ayrton into a mythical figure with a tainted human spirit. His love of god and country are as great as his ego (sometimes he sounded deluded, as if he was the Joan of Arc of racing) and for all the inevitability of its tragic finale, you always hope things will turn out different for him in the end. They don't of course, but Senna proves that truth can sometimes be much more harrowing than fiction. 

Out of all the English classic novels, it always results mystifying to ask ourselves how did the Brontë's oeuvre end up falling into the romance genre when their twisted stories of suffering among the English moors perhaps fit better in the category of horror. The greatest adaptation of any of their works is probably I Walked With a Zombie because it goes to the heart of its literary adaptation, Jane Eyre, removes all the romantic bullshit and sees it for what it is: a tale of sadomasochism disguised as love. With that said, most of the world chooses to see Jane Eyre as a tale of doomed romance and love conquering it all, which would make for an interesting essay on how messed up our conceptions of love are...but that's a whole different story. In this adaptation of the classic novel, the usually insipid Mia Wasikowska gives life to Jane Eyre, the suffering governess who goes through a Dickensian childhood only to end in an even more tortuous relationship with her employer, the damaged Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender). Director Cary Fukunaga goes the traditional way and turns the film into a showcase of classic studio filmmaking with gorgeous sets, a sweeping musical score and Judi Dench. Perhaps it's best to approach the movie as if you were watching a classic Hollywood production, given that Fukunaga injects little into it and like in his previous movie, some scenes offer themselves to be taken as parody (Rochester telling Jane how he's far from handsome comes to mind). It's great that Fassbender and Wasikowska put so much into their roles, because they make the film's artifice achieve a delightful balance.

Warrior is a movie that lingers dangerously between parody and serious filmmaking and can best be comprised by calling it: a greatest hits kind of movie. Taking elements that have worked before for similarly themed movies (although fans of it can argue that all films are versions of other films) director Gavin O'Connor brings us a tearjerker that combines Rocky, The Fighter, Karate Kid and a few biblical parables to create a movie aimed to please everyone. Tom Hardy stars as Tommy, a former marine who returns to the States and asks his ex-alcoholic dad (Nick Nolte) to train him for a mixed martial arts championship named Sparta (for 300 lovers). Meanwhile, Tommy's estranged brother Brendan (Joel Edgerton) is going through an economic crisis that forces him to sign up for the same championship in order to save his house from being foreclosed. Tommy, obviously, hides a dark secret about his days in Iraq and Brendan, who works as a high school teacher, must hide his new moneymaking scheme from his students (somehow mixed martial arts are the equivalent of prostitution to the film's Capra-esque characters) and of course the final showdown will be between the siblings, but which one should win? The real problem with Warrior is that it's so many different movies, that it ends up being none. The acting is quite good, Edgerton and Hardy are terrific and surprisingly sincere, but the plot feels forced and drags on for too long. If you've seen any of the movies it borrows from, you really don't need to bother with it...
However, here's a theory: the movie grabs a soldier and a schoolteacher - two of the most "heroic" and valued professions in the USA - takes away their "integrity" and pitches them against each other in a brutal fight for money. What is the film saying about the worth of morality in a world where the economy plummets constantly? Now, that would've made a much more interesting movie...

Grades:
Senna ***½
Jane Eyre ***
Warrior **

My Own Love Song *½

Director: Olivier Dahan
Cast: Renée Zellweger, Forest Whitaker
Madeline Zima, Elias Koteas, Nick Nolte

If there's something you can't accuse Olivier Dahan of is subtlety. More than a storyteller he's a pointer, someone who constructs entire universes just to point out a specifically dramatic trait or event in his characters' lives.
Remember how everything in La Vie en Rose for example, was a constant attempt at over dramatizing the already melodramatic life of chanteuse Edith Piaf?
The incoherent editing, the fantastical plot twists, the heightening of emotions through exaggerated visual aids, all with the purpose of exploiting sentiment.
It's not a coincidence that when we first meet Billie (Zima) in this film, she's desperately looking for her wedding band. Minutes later we learn that Billie's husband, like her ring, has disappeared without a trace.
This is the kind of thing Dahan does to point what will become obvious, it's as if he doesn't trust his audience and is constantly trying to tell everything twice.
When My Own Love Song begins we meet former country singer Jane (Zellweger) she's sitting alone in a bar waiting for people she can be mean to apparently.
A stranger approaches her in the way men approach lonely women in bars and Jane proceeds to kick and chew his balls in every way she can. Seconds later, we and the stranger learn that she's in a wheelchair.
Ah, seems to go Dahan's mind, Jane is a bitch because life has been a bitch to her!
After this display of self pity and contempt for humanity Jane wheels herself to her humble house. So far we know she's handicapped, bitter and likes to go to bars. Consequently we will learn she lost her husband in a car accident, had to give up her son to social services and most shocking of all, she has stopped singing! Jane is a Susan Hayward character without the camp.
Jane's best friend is Joey (Whitaker) who can just be described as a magical negro. Period.
He has a stutter, he delivers life changing advice in every line of dialogue and he also talks to angels.
We really can't see why he would even like being around Jane if it wasn't because we know he has a role to fulfill in transforming her hum-drum life. This chance comes in the shape of a trip to Baton Rouge where Joey expects to meet a famous author (who writes about angels) and he also intends to trick Jane into attending her son's first communion (how he finds out this is even occurring is as preposterous as anything you'll see in this film).
They take off towards their own figurative Emerald City where each plans to have their wishes granted. Along the way they meet quirky characters, like the aforementioned Billie and a strange singer (Nolte) who confuses urban legends with myth and has a penchant for magic brownies.
My Own Love Song perhaps would be a better movie if Dahan had concentrated on developing the characters as opposed to finding ways in which to symbolize their every thought in some exciting visual manner. When Jane writes a song about birds we are stuck with a cutesy sequence where the characters walk accompanied by animated birds straight out of a Wes Anderson after school special.
The movie however is mostly a very French take on what an American movie must be like. Get a couple Oscar winners, a soundtrack made out of Bob Dylan songs, squeeze the hell out of quirk and filter all this through the all-American genre by excellence that is the road movie.
It's a pity that the film represents a return to form for Zellweger who has been so intermittent on the big screen this decade. Her Jane might not be extraordinary but the actress does her best with the little she's given, both the actress and the character deserve a much better film.

Tropic Thunder **

Director: Ben Stiller
Cast: Ben Stiller,
Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr.
Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan
Jay Baruchel, Tom Cruise
Brandon T. Jackson
Matthew McCounaghey

There's only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, or so goes the adage which perfectly helps describe this film.
What begins as a satire of the most cynical, rarely seen, kind, slowly descends into a film you no longer laugh with, but at (or sometimes just cringe), as it proves that Hollywood has mastered the art of blockbusters, creating stars and draining a clever idea until its just left stale.
The plot centers around the shooting of a Vietnam war film called "Tropic Thunder" that has brought together three of the brightest male stars available.
Action superstar Tugg Speedman (Stiller), scatological comedian Jeff Portnoy (Black) and five time Academy Award winning, method actor, the Australian Kirk Lazarus (Downey Jr.) who is playing an African American by going blackface.
Their very different screen personas are established in the absolutely brilliant prologue (to which the rest of the movie sadly never lives up) in which things as seemingly inocuous as trailers deliver some hilarious, cleverly conceived critiques on the roles of actors, audience perception and studios in the ultimate concept of cinema.
Later we see director Damien Cockburn (Coogan) as he struggles to capture the action while the actors' egos are the only ones in full battle.
When he is threatened by a studio executive (Cruise in "look at me being funny and showy in a fatsuit" mode) he decides to follow the advice of the mysterious John Tayback (Nolte), who wrote the book the film is based upon, who suggests that the only way his cast will get the work done is if they go to real war.
They take the cast to the middle of a jungle infested with members of a drug gang who assume the actors are DEA agents, while the actors think of them as really good stuntmen.
When things start getting out of control Speedman decides this will be the role of his career and goes forward with the guerrilla shoot, while Lazarus tries to convince the others that they are no longer in a movie.
Stiller (who wrote the script with Etan Cohen and the amazing Justin Theroux) makes an intriguing first impression with his "war as a game" take on how the media has made us perceive violence.
When one of the actors spills his fake guts after being shot, the scene makes for an uncomfortable moment where some audience members will laugh out loud at the silliness of it all, while others will wonder when did it become normal to laugh at guts being spilled.
Perhaps Stiller was trying to point out how people react to different genre stimuli and go "this is a Ben Stiller film, so this is supposed to be funny", leading us to examine carefully the way in which we process information regarding the channel and medium.
But the problem is that most of the film suffers because of this, you wonder if it's trying to be bitter, morbid, smart or just going with the flow.
It offers some funny observations on various industry types (and the film is probably enjoyed more by those who know about the trade) but it never lets us forget the fact that these very people greenlit this and allowed it to be made.
The Academy Awards are a major source of gags in the film and while the writers honestly think they are one step ahead of the organization by revealing how it chooses to award people, truth is you can almost touch the fact that in this blasé take, they are also demanding the Academy takes notice of them and it is so with almost every other thing in it.
Except Downey Jr. who aptly owns the film with a performance that is always a step ahead of the others. Playing "a dude playing another dude who's playing a dude" he brings a certain dignity to something that could've resulted highly offensive and obscene.
Lazarus' love for the craft (he never leaves character even as the others endure personal hell) highlights what is both great and wrong about film, giving Downey the distinction of being the rare kind of figure who can be box office draw while preserving artistry.
That we never think of his "blackface" as his character or as Downey Jr. as Lazarus is a testimony to an actor at his very best.
"Tropic Thunder" is sometimes too clever for its own good, like the popular kid at school who hides his geekiness to preserve his coolness, it knows it can do better, but chooses to settle. It encompasses itself perfectly with Kevin Sandusky (a scene stealing Baruchel), a young actor who ends up becoming the leader in the background because he knows how to balance different parts of his personality. During a key scene he confesses to Lazarus that he became an actor because of him, while acknowledging to Speedman that he also watched his action movies repeated times. Sandusky, like the film, is both its attack and its salvation, its most fervent admirer and fiercest enemy and as war itself the results are rarely a laughing matter.