FILM REVIEW: A Most Wanted Man

The other half and I wanted to see a movie last weekend and so we went to see A Most Wanted Man which is getting excellent reviews (90% rating on rotten tomatoes) and extra attention as one of the last films starring the late Oscar-winning Philip Seymour Hoffman.

A Most Wanted Man is an adaptation of a book by John le Carré, a spy thriller by the same guy who wrote the source material for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Also starring in A Most Wanted Man is Rachel McAdams (Midnight in Paris), Robin Wright (House of Cards) and Willem Dafoe (The Grand Budapest Hotel). This is not as distinguished a cast as the other le Carré adaptation, which had the likes of Colin Firth, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch.

The later film has a similar "vibe" to the first, which I think is intentional, even if the directors are different. Both films are about the spy trade. While Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was about the hunt for a deep cover double (or triple?) agent in British Intelligence in the 1970s A Most Wanted Man is set in Hamburg, post-9/11. A title card as the movie starts reminds the audience that this is the city in which Mohammed Atta planned the attacks of September 11, 2001. Then we see a gaunt white guy with a very long beard and a large backpack drag himself out of a manhole and approach a series of parked cars.

We next see Hoffman as Gunther Bachmann, apparently part of some kind of German domestic secret intelligence service trying to find the next Mohammed Atta. Bachmann looks like a man who is married to his work, overweight, smoking and drinking but clearly dedicated. It turns out the white guy we saw earlier  draws the attention of Hoffman's group because he is a known Russian-Chechen extremist whose name is Issa. Issa apparently is the son of an infamous Russian general named Karpov and he is in Germany trying to claim his inheritance, which is in a secret numbered account held in a bank run by Dafoe's character, Tommy Brue. McAdam plays a naive asylum attorney named Annabel who brokers the connection between Brue and Issa. Bachmann's team knows all this is happening because they immediately have Issa, Annabel and Tommy all under surveillance.

The regular German domestic security service (equivalent to our FBI) and "the Americans" in the form of a raven-haired Robin Wright show up at this point, very interested in trying to capture Issa and stop whatever he's planning, especially when Brue discovers that Issa's inheritance is in millions of Euro. That could buy a lot of bang.

The interesting thing about the movie is that it raises a lot of questions about terrorism, surveillance, interrogation, loyalty and bureaucracy. It's not clear who the film wants the audience to root for, since even a very good man has a little piece of him that might be very bad, as one terrorist hunter says to another, as they dangle an opportunity for one character to take an action that could most definitely be seen to be supporting the movement of money which could support terrorists. But it is the terrorist hunters who create the opportunity and present it to the attention of the "good guy." Hoffman and his team are very willing to allow circumstances to go further and further along so they can get a better view of the bigger picture, perhaps snare a bigger fish, even though they aren't even sure who (or even if) that bigger fish would be.

There's a lot of nuance in A Most Wanted Man, and that makes it thought-provoking and more than a little unsettling as well. 

Title: A Most Wanted Man.
Director: Anton Corbijn.
Running Time: 2 hours, 1 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated R for language.
Release Date: July 25, 2014.
Viewing Date: July 27, 2014.

Writing: B+.
Acting: A-.
Visuals: B-.
Impact: B.

Overall Grade: B/B+ (3.16/4.0).

MOVIE REVIEW: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

The other half and I needed to waddle out of the house after gorging on Thanksgiving turkey and decided to see the second of the movie adaptations of The Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins. The books were the next young-adult publishing sensation after the Harry Potter books were published, although they are very different than those coming-of-age books about a powerful boy wizard using magic to defend the world against evil magic.

The films of The Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth as the key members of the love triangle at the center of the plot between Katniss Everdeen (the girl on fire who managed to win the Hunger Games after volunteering for the fight-to-the-death contest in place of her little sister), Gale Hawthorne (the boy next door who Katniss has known all her life and who everyone, including herself, sees her as marrying) and Peeta Mellark (the rich kid who has been in love with Katniss since they were kids and was happy when he was forced to compete in the Hunger Games with her).

The cast is full of other well-known actors who do well in their pretty choice roles.
It includes Woody Harrelson as the irascible Haymitch Abernathy (who was a previous winner of the Hunger Games who lives in the same impoverished area, known as District 12, as Katniss, Gale and Peeta), Donald Sutherland (as the evil President Seneca Snow), Lenny Kravitz (as Katniss' personal stylist Cinna who expresses his politicaly subversive views through fashion) and Stanley Tucci (as the over-the-top television host Caesar Flickerman). In The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the newest addition to the cast is Philip Seymour Hoffman who plays Plutarch Heavensbee, the new designer of the Hunger Games, a key role

The Hunger Games series is much more politically oriented than that other young-adult series (Twilight) to which it is often compared and this starts to become clearer as the second installment unfolds although it is in the third book, Mockinjay, where most of the real political action occurs. That book is apparently being adapted to be not one but two movies, to be released in 2014 and 2015.

The film adaptation of Catching Fire is pretty effective, because the Other Half, who has not read the books and only saw the first movie at home on Netflix quite enjoyed it. The second film has a definitely different feel than the first one, which I presume is due to the change in director and not just the source material, although the two books are also very different.

The first book (and movie) have to spend a lot of time getting the audience prepared for the context of the depraved society of Panem where an autocratic Capitol oppresses 12 other Districts and punishes them for a failed rebellion by forcing them to send two children each to fight to the death. There's really no getting around the fact that this is a sick situation. It's made even more unbearable that the children are called "Tributes" and the Capitol tries to convince people that it's a great honor for the children involved who are about to be slaughtered and forces everyone in all the districts to watch the games when they are on. The one small bright spark is that the winner of the Hunger Games gets to live for the rest of their lives with their family with their every need being supplied by the wealthy Capitol.

In some sense, the second book is even more depraved because the twist here is that because it is the 75th Hunger Games there is a special twist that can be added to the Games every twenty-five years, called a Quarter Quell. SPOILER ALERT! (DO NOT READ THE NEXT SECTION IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE BOOKS OR SEEN THE MOVIE YET!)

This 3rd Quarter Quell consists of the tributes being selected from previous winners of the Games! So after promising people that after killing 23 other kids that you would be safe from oppression you are being put back in the arena, most likely years after you are in your prime.
In the case of Katniss and Peeta, it is clear that President Snow and Plutarch Heavensbee just want another opportunity to be able to kill Katniss, who is becoming a symbol of resistance to the power and authority of the Capitol by the way she won the 74th Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire does an excellent job of again showing what a corrupt society the Capitol and also what an arbitrary and violent enterprise the Hunger Games is, although this time things are different because Katniss' notoriety has led people to want to be her ally in the games. In  the end, you know that only one person can survive the Hunger Games and the fact that she is in their with Peeta, who clearly loves her, is quite emotionally upsetting.

If you have not read the books the end of the movie will be quite an interesting surprise to you, and I suspect the next film may be the best move in the franchise because some very important events happen in it, but for reasons I can not go in to now there are no actual "Hunger Games" in the next two Hunger Games movie, so it should be interesting to see how that aspect is dealt with.

Overall, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is a surprisingly effective adaptation of the second book, Catching Fire, in The Hunger Games trilogy, especially buoyed by Jennifer Lawrence's star power and the emotional power of the underlying source material.

Title: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
Director: Francis Lawrence.
Running Time: 2 hours, 26 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some frightening images, thematic elements, a suggestive situation and language.
Release Date: November 22, 2012.
Viewing Date: November 29, 2013.

Writing: A-.
Acting: A.
Visuals: A-.
Impact: A.

Overall Grade: A-/A (3.83/4.0).

WATCH: Trailer for Catching Fire a.k.a. Hunger Games 2

The second movie in the The Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire, is being released on November 22, 2013. The first movie was pretty good (read my A- review) and the second book is about as good as the first one the first movie was based on. You can read my review of the entire Hunger Games trilogy here.

Apparently there is a plan to make four movie out of the three books, similar to what happened with the very lucrative (if much reviled) film adaptations of the Twilight books.

Interesting, now-Oscar winner Jennifer Kawrence is being joined by Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman in  Catching Fire, as you can see for yourself in the trailer for the film.

MOVIE REVIEW: Moneyball

The day before Thanksgiving, the Other Half and I finally got around to seeing the critically acclaimed (95% on rottentomatoes.com) Moneyball. It is based on the best-selling book of the same name by Michael Lewis, which tells the story of  how the Oakland Athletics baseball team applied the mathematical principles of Bill James "Sabermetrics" to the apparently non-mathematical arena of professional baseball.

Moneyball as a movie is basically your typical sports movie, but with a twist. There's no doubt that it is the best movie about baseball since the classic Bull Durham starring a then-cute Kevin Costner and not-yet-married (or divorced) Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. Interestingly, it is also a movie which features the classic sporting movie cliché of the redemption of the losing under dog. This time, however, the underdog is the hapless geek in the form of Jonah Hill, who plays Peter Brand, a recent Economics graduate from Yale who is also a baseball statistics geek and devotee of Sabermetrics. The movie is carried by Brad Pitt, who plays Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who at the beginning of the movie has just lost his marquee players to the deep pockets of the hated New York Yankees after losing the decisive 5th game in a playoff series.

The movie really revolves around the relationship between Beane and Brand as Beane quickly adopts Sabermetrics and he and Brand go about trying to convince the old fogeys in the Oakland management, exemplified by Philip Seymour Hoffman's Art Howe, that they can't compete with the teams which have budgets 50-100% greater than theirs. The old fogeys are not happy and initial results are not promising.

Of course, this being a traditional sports movie you know the Oakland A's are going to start winning eventually, and that does happen. For the casual sports fan who does not know the basic details of what actually happens the story unfolds in a compelling fashion (proving again that truth can be more interesting than fiction).

The movie is generally engaging but as a mathematician I was somewhat disappointed with the handwaving way in which the director chooses to communicate the computational implementation of Sabermetrics (lots of glowing equations floating in mid-air and quick-cut shots of spreadsheets). This is a minor quibble and I understand that this was a choice made to make the movie as enjoyable to the widest spectrum of movie-goers. The decision is generally successful since I can tell lots of people would find the movie a lot of fun.

Title: Moneyball.
Director: Bennett Miller.
Running Time: 2 hours, 13 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for some strong language.
Release Date: September 23, 2011.
Viewing Date: November 23, 2011.


Plot: A-.
Acting: A-.
Visuals: B+.
Impact: B+.


Overall Grade: (3.5/4.0).

MOVIE REVIEW: Doubt

Doubt is in the hunt for Oscar nominations, especially for its high-powered cast of Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis.

Doubt is written and directed by John Patrick Shanley (who won the 1988 Oscar for Moonstruck) and adapted the screenplay from his own play, Doubt: A Parable, which won the Pulitzer, Drama Desk and Tony awards in 2005.

However, I have doubts about Doubt the movie. As a film director, Shanley is an excellent screenwriter. It is true that Streep is amazing in the lead role of Sister Aloysius that won Cherry Jones the 2005 Tony award while fellow Oscar winner Hoffman matches her in scene after scene as Father Flynn. Many people are touting the chances of Davis to be nominated for (and possibly win) the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for the pivotal role of Mrs. Muller. To MadProfessah the most affecting non-lead role performance was delivered by Amy Adams who plays the young and innocent Sister James.


Davis is also affecting in her one extended scene but the animating force of the impact is from the plot twist that she reveals during her conversation with Sister Aloysius. The story is set in 1964 in a predominantly Irish and Italian section of the Bronx. It depicts the everyday lives of the Catholic nuns and priests and their congregants in a particular parish. The movie is centered around an incident which may or may not have occurred at a Catholic middle school whose principal is played by Streep's character and is in a parish headed by Hoffman's character. The incident involves the first black member of the school, who is an altar boy in Hoffman's church but also in Adams' 8th grade class.


The lasting impact of the movie with this viewer was of the immense tragedy Catholic education was and a disturbing sense of awe at the sheer immensity of the Catholic Church and its impact on America.

OVERALL GRADE: B+/A-.

ACTING: A.
IMAGERY: B.
PLOT: A-.
IMPACT: B+.