Editor’s Note: Freeline Media critic Mike Fried is back with a grab bag of some favorite movies that he thinks audiences should be watching, several of them underrated and not getting the love they deserve. Read on!
By MIKE FRIED
THE INTERVIEW
4/5
This movie gets better with every viewing.
An entertainment TV show host and his “I’d rather be doing serious stuff” producer are in a rut. The producer, Aaron, wants to do serious news; so the host discovers that the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-Un, is a big fan of the show. On a lark, they try to get an interview with him. Quite surprisingly, they do — although North Korea is going to write all the questions. Then the CIA gets into the mix, asking Dave, the host, to help assassinate the Supreme Leader. Hilarity ensues.
This movie is not for everyone. It is Sophomoric. It is Juvenile. It is Stupid. It relies on Fart and Ass jokes. And it’s very freaking funny. If this were a serious movie, it would not have worked.
James Franco and Seth Rogen are a modern day Hope and Crosby, knuckleheading their way through a series of misadventures. Their performances are par for the course, Rogen playing the nervous, neurotic Hope role and Franco the stupidly overconfident not too smart Crosby-ish TV host. But they are funny, especially Rogen in the “You like it? You like it? It’s yours!” scene.
But this movie is absolutely stolen by Randall Park and Diana Bang. Park’s Kim Jong-Un is one of the funniest comedic supporting roles in years. His Jong-Un is funny smart and suave and a killer. His interactions with Franco are priceless, playing the naive TV host like a fiddle to suit his own ends. Park, who put on weight for the role, exudes Jong-Un.
And Bang, as Kim’s Communications Minister, is all funny and sexy. She is, at first, all business. But she and Aaron fall for each other. She brings a sly comedic wit to the movie.
The movie became notorious because North Korea didn’t want this movie released and hacked Sony Pictures. And seeing the final North Korean scene, yeah, I can see why they were pissed.
Filmed in British Columbia, this film is notable for transforming a lot of Vancouver’s buildings into North Korean structures. I felt I was watching a movie filmed in …… well, not necessarily North Korea, but in some Eastern bloc country from the 1960s.
I like to revisit this movie every once in a while because it just makes me laugh. It will make you laugh too if you like sophomoric humor.
WATCH IT!
SEPTEMBER 5
5/5
WOW!
Just WOW!
Taking us to a flashpoint of media history, the movie follows the ABC Sports team covering the Olympics as they are confronted with a nightmare that no one could have foreseen. Fighting to get as much information as they can to present the story of the 5 September 1972 Terrorist incident at the Munich Olympics but also focusing on the internal politics that reigned behind the scenes, this is one of the most fascinating looks at journalistic endeavors, especially broadcast news, ever made.
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, I hate to say it but having seen all of the films nominated in this category, this is the movie to beat. A pulse pounding film, I felt that I didn’t breathe during the entire movie at all. While the actual events took place over the space of 22 hours, the timeline was condensed to just under 90 minutes and, in doing so, the breathlessness of the film never let up.
Adding to the enjoyment of this film is a cast beyond compare and they have won at least one Best Ensemble award as of this writing. Peter Sarsgaard is compelling as Roone Arledge who bucks the system by not giving the story to the News division several thousand miles away. An unrecognizable Ben Chaplin as Marvin Bader, ABC’s head of Operations, is superb as the moral voice asking for reason between the producers who want to get the story on the air. And Leonie Benesch shines as the fictional – but based on several people — Marianne Gebhardt, the translator who is recruited for a much more important role during the crisis.
But the true center of the film is Geoffrey Mason, played by the always great John Magaro, who was award-worthy in last year’s Past Lives. Mason becomes the focal point of the movie because he is directing the Olympics when the crisis begins. Magaro’s Mason comes across as unsure but steadily more confident directing all of the people around him, so that he can get the news out to the 900,000,000 people around the world who watched as the Crisis unfolded. He is a standout in a cast of standouts. Coincidentally, his first onscreen role was as a background extra in Steven Spielberg’s Munich.
The film’s look is meticulous. The picture has a grainy feel and almost seems like it was shot on 16mm film stock to give it more of a documentary feel. Writer/Director Tim Fehlbaum meticulously researched the setup of the ABC Studios, and had it recreated for the film, and it gives such a tight, claustrophobic realism. One of the touches of humanity in the film is as events unfolded, the IOC allowed events in progress to continue until they were finished and there is a scene in which technicians in the control room are watching a boxing match and reacting positively to it. And I think that a lot of what was encompassed in this scene is emblematic of what we need to do to ourselves nowadays in moments of great stress – that is to sometimes disassociate ourselves from external events so that we can survive emotionally.
There are a couple of Best Picture Nominees I would have knocked off the list of nominated films to make room for this movie – it is just that good.
WATCH IT!
THE INSIDER
4.5/5
Jeff Wigand was the head of research and development for one of the big tobacco companies. When he writes a memo to the CEO that he could not in good conscience add a known carcinogenic ingredient, he is terminated. He is given a severance package and continuing medical coverage. And then in comes Lowell Bergman, a producer for 60 Minutes, who wants to tell his story. What follows is an extraordinarily disconcerting effort by Big Tobacco to silence him. What is more disconcerting is the fact that CBS throws Wigand and Bergman to the wolves.
If I could describe this movie in one word it would be “paranoia.” Enemy Of The State brought into focus the surveillance capacities of our government and we’ve all heard stories about how Facebook manipulates our personal data. But this movie plays out more like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.
Wigand is threatened by unknown people. A bullet is placed in his mailbox. His family is threatened, all anonymously. When the police come to his house they treat him as the bad guy, seizing his computer which has all of his personal documents on it. There are little snippets that director Michael Mann throws in to increase this paranoia. There are suspicious looking men in an airport, eyeballing Wigand. When Wigand goes to the driving range there is a man in a suit and tie (!?!) driving golf balls and keeping an eye on Wigand. After Wigand testifies, he is being taken home and a cop car pulls along side and the cop looks long at him. All of these scenes plus cinematographer Dante Spinotti filming many scenes in Mann’s trademark darkness enhances the angst presented by the film. And in that lies the film’s greatness. You, as the viewer, are in it with Wigand and Bergman.
According to Mike Wallace, two-thirds of the movie is true and the rest took dramatic license. But that’s not that important — it’s a movie and there needs to be drama. If the story is dry, it’s the filmmaker’s obligation to give the story some flavor. And Mann and Eric Roth, both scripting this, have done just that.
The dynamic in this film is the relationship between Al Pacino as Bergman and the mesmerizing Russell Crowe as Wigand. Their scenes of trust and then distrust are Shakespearean in tone. Crowe rightly deserved his academy award nomination and he was better in this than he was in both Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind. He plays a man who put his life on the line and who has been betrayed. And while Pacino has been sending the volume needle up to 11 for the longest time, he really makes it work when he partners up with Mann. He is in pain because CBS is screwing Wigand and he needs to make amends. I don’t want to give short shrift to Christopher Plummer who plays Mike Wallace but his is a small, though vital, role and he carries it off with aplomb. And Mann gets his entire supporting cast to give some of their best performances. I particularly liked Bruce McGill as Ron Motley, the Mississippi attorney going after Big Tobacco.
This is a tremendous film.
I don’t say that because I worked in corporations for close to 40 years and know how soulless they can be. I say that because the movie sits with you long after it’s over. It’s intense and thought provoking.
It’s about doing the right thing.
Something — in this day and age — that is in very short supply.
CIVIL WAR
4/5
This was not the movie I thought it would be — I was expecting an action movie about a civil war but this movie was about journalists and war photographers and what they have to do to carry out their jobs.
And on that level it succeeds being reminiscent of Salvador or The Killing Fields (although not in their class).
Kirsten Dunst , Wagner Moura,Stephen McKinley Henderson and Cailee Spaeny play three world weary journalists and one newbie — bright eyed and bushy tailed — on a road trip from NYC to Washington DC via Pittsburgh during a national civil war. Unlikely bedfellows, Texas and California, have seceded from the country and their army — dubbed the western forces — is on the move trying to get to the White House to capture or kill the three-term president. And the journalists are also on the way there to interview the President (nicely played in an extraordinarily small role by Ron Swanson).
Amazingly, the film is devoid of politics. There is a secession, like I said, but the underlying causes are not known — and, quite frankly, unimportant.
What is important are the encounters that they have along the way. Those encounters are unnerving from men with guns showing off “traitors” hanging by their thumbs to a shootout in which experienced war photographer Dunst and newbie Spaeny shoot pictures in battle with bullets flying by, the pictures shown in black and white as taken by the photographers.
But it is a thoroughly scary encounter with two guys with machine guns tending to a mass grave that is the hallmark of the film. When one guy asks “What kind of American are you?” it is a gut punch — and not because the actor playing the lunatic with the AR-15 is perfectly portrayed by Jesse Plemons (Mr. Dunst) — but because this could happen now. And if you doubt me, just google shootings on YouTube. This scene was most reminiscent of two guys in Texas that had a dispute with a neighbor which ended up with the neighbor being shotgunned. If there’s any politicizing in the film, it’s the guns in the hands of civilians angle. But it’s minimal. Mostly it’s fighting between the two armed forces.
It’s amazing to me to how this movie got review bombed — on google it had a 2.5 rating last time I checked and very few of the 1 star ratings had accompanying written reviews. People just assumed it was anti-whomever and bombed it without seeing it much like people did to The Last Temptation of Christ, The Passion of the Christ and many others without Christ’s name in it — oh yeah, Ishtar.
Is the acting magnificent? Not really. Aside from Plemons, who has been a shining star since Breaking Bad, Wagner Moura was good in his outrage and Stephen McKinley Henderson as the wizened old veteran were outstanding. Dunst wasn’t bad but it seemed that she went through the movie with sort of a bland expression on her face.
I saw it on Regal’s RPX large screen format and it was impactful. I think the reviews that knock the film were looking for more of an action film and I understand where they were coming from. The trailer for this movie gives the impression that the movie is something else entirely.
WATCH IT!
Trailer – 1/5
Movie – 4/5
SCOOP
3/5
Interesting story of the women at the BBC who managed to scoop the interview with Prince Andrew, the interview being described as “a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion.”
But All The President’s Men this is not. Nor is it Frost/Nixon
It drags and what keeps it alive are the performances by Billie Piper as Sam McAllister (whose book upon which this film is based), Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis – the BBC interviewer – and, last but not least, Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew. It might not be his movie but he owned it during the interview scene. Piper and Anderson excel when doing their planning and strategizing. It’s always interesting to hear Anderson’s British accent – I thought her raspiness as Margaret Thatcher in the Crown was because of that role but it carries forth hear.
It’s not that this isn’t a compelling story – it is. But the way it moves along, it plods – but when its focus is on single mom Sam, trying to make a name for herself at the stolid BBC with a Daily Mail attitude, it shines. Because, after all, it is more her story that about anything else.
It’s definitely worth a watch.
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@gmail.com
