Overlooked Films: Foxcatcher

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FOXCATCHER (2014)

Directed by Bennett Miller

Sony Pictures Classics, 134 minutes, R (Language, violence)

* * *

Do you recall any of the four medals won by US wrestlers at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul (1 gold, 1 silver, 2 bronze)? Of course you don't! You can, however, go to the head of the mat if you've ever heard of Dave and Mark Schultz (who won gold medals in 1984), and–unless you've seen Foxcatcher–you get a golden kneepad if you remember that a du Pont heir murdered Dave in 1996. I mean no disrespect to the athletes, but the reality is that in the United States wrestling is only marginally more in the public eye than polo or biathlon. In many ways, that's a major point of the movie Foxcatcher.

It opens in 1986, just after Mark (Channing Tatum) won a gold at wrestling's world championship in Budapest in the 82 kg division. Back home, fame such as that got you a $20 speaker's fee for high school motivation speeches! Enter John Eleuthère du Pont (Steve Carrell), an addle-brained billionaire living on a sprawling horse farm with his domineering mother, Jean (Vanessa Redgrave) and harboring dreams (delusions?) of reinventing himself as an über patriot and wrestling guru. He's willing to sink some of his considerable resources into making the US wrestling team a symbol of national pride and proceeds to open a state-of-the-art training facility on the manor lands, which he dubs "Foxcatcher." Recruiting Mark to train there is his first coup, but the big fish is Dave (Mark Ruffalo), considered the nation's best coach. Soon Foxcatcher is the de facto Olympic training center for wrestlers. After all, what obscure sportsman could resist the patronage of a sugar daddy, or the lure of living on a sylvan estate?

Foxcatcher is, at heart, about young athletes caught up in a rich sociopath's visions, whims, coke-fueled fantasies, psychotic storms, and barely repressed homosexual yearnings. Du Pont was that special breed of monster that only obscene wealth can produce. As we quickly see, he is a bully, an egoist, and an idiot who pontificates upon things about which he knows nothing–and that's especially the case with wrestling. Even he eventually sees this–especially after Mark leaves the facility and the US wrestling team fails to capture public attention or win a lot of star-spangled glory. When he ultimately murders Dave Schultz, it's because Dave's very competence, popularity, and kindness remind him of what a waste his life has been.  (John du Pont died in prison.)

Director Bennett Miller has probed offbeat characters before, most notably in Capote (2005) and Moneyball (2011). The film's greatest revelation, however, is Steve Carell's acting. Though known as a comic, he gives Chevy Chase a run for the money in the Least Funny Comedian category. If Foxcatcher is any indication, Carell should shift to drama. He rightly garnered a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. His is a nuanced performance that makes us alternatively pity and loathe du Pont. Carell also displays a potpourri of emotions, each convincing within their contexts. Ruffalo is solid as Dave, and gets special kudos for displaying a blue-collar ethos that combines the right balance between being respectful, tough, protective, prodding, and likable. Tatum is less successful as Mark. He does naivety well, but overall is wooden and flat.

Tatum's performance is a weak link, though Foxcatcher has other flaws. Liberties are taken with sequencing, especially in the last 20 minutes, which confusingly elide about 7 years of time. The yes men around du Pont are largely cardboard cutouts and there's too much testosterone on screen. Redgrave seems to have been hired to add gravitas to the cast, as her role is little more than a cameo. It is, however, positively robust compared to the shallow presence of Sienna Miller as Dave's wife, Nancy, who mostly remind us what a great family man Dave is. Miller is an enormously underrated actress, so we must give Golden Piggy Hooves to screenwriters E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman for giving her so little to do.  

The film won a Palme d'Or in 2014, but grossed just $15 million against a budget of $24 million. This is odd, as Foxcatcher is an excellent look at how an unhinged individual finally tumbles. Foxcatcher is certainly worth a rental. You might not change your mind about wrestling, but you'll walk away with newfound respect for Steve Carell.

Rob Weir

The Dead Will Tell a Non-Taxing Beach Thriller

THE DEAD WILL TELL (2014)

Linda Castillo

Minotaur Books, 320 pages, ISBN 978-1250029577

* * *

Call this one a classic beach read novel. This is book six of Linda Castillo’s Kate Burkholder series. For those, like me, who came in late, Burkholder is chief of police in Painters Mill, an Ohio town analogous to Lancaster, Pennsylvania in that it’s in the middle of Amish country. Kate is perfect for the job in that she grew up Amish and speaks their special Deutsch tongue. Tag line: She gave up her bonnet for a badge!

Kate is an intuitive crime solver, not a hard-broiled detective; in fact, I imagined her as a bit like Marge Gunderson from the movie Fargo, except Kate has a damaged lover, former state agent John Tomasetti, whose family was murdered by vengeful mobsters. Family murder is at the heart of The Dead Will Tell, whose mysteries begin when an elderly businessman is found hanging in a barn. It looks like a suicide, except that the corpse also has a slug in him and an Amish peg doll rammed into his throat. Other pillars of Painters Mill begin to receive notes bearing messages such as “I know what you did” and “You were there.” As the body count and peg doll counts rise, Kate begins to think these events may be linked to a thirty-year-old unsolved crime: the murder of Amish woodworker Willis Hochstetler, the abduction/presumed assassination of his wife Wanetta, and a subsequent fire that killed four of his five children. Even more unsettling are reports that Wanetta’s ghost has been spotted. That eliminates the logical suspect, surviving Hochstetler son, William.

Burkholder’s search takes her deep into old archives and the present-day Amish community, not to mention that it unclosets a few local skeletons. It also keeps her busy at exactly the time that she fears Tomasetti will seek victim’s revenge on a rich punk implicated in his family’s murder, but freed on a legal technicality. Okay, so none of this rises to the level of the 1985 film Witness. And, yes, the overlapping family murders are more contrived than convincing. As mysteries go, this one isn’t hard to figure out; unless you believe in ghosts, there’s only one logical explanation. Nor can I praise the book’s literary merits. (Let’s just say the prose wouldn’t tax a teen.) It is exactly as I categorized it: a page-turner thriller to consume under a beach umbrella. Like that ice cream cone in the other hand, The Dead Will Tell is a guilty pleasure. You can repent by reading a Dickens novel on the treadmill when you get home.

Rob Weir

The Rosie Project a Charmer from Start to Finish

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THE ROSIE PROJECT (2014)           

Graeme Simsion

Simon & Schuster, 305 pages. ISBN: 978-1476729091

* * * * *

Imagine someone who's as handsome as Gregory Peck, as logical as Star Trek's Mr. Data, as numbers-driven as Raymond Babbitt (Rain Man), as practical as Thomas Gradgrind (Hard Times), as quirky as Ignatius Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces), and as prone to Asperger's meltdowns as Christopher Boone (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime). Do this and you're still a buck and some change short of Don Tillman, the protagonist of Graeme Simsion's runaway best seller The Rosie Project. This book has wowed reviewers around the globe and was recently optioned to Sony Pictures. Believe the hype for a change—The Rosie Project is both a heart-warming and a guffaw-out-loud kind of book.

It's been said that academia is a place where possession of a major character disorder is not necessarily a disqualifying characteristic for job candidates. That's certainly true for Don Tillman, a University of Melbourne genetics professor. He's a brilliant researcher, but a person with the social graces of a schoolboy. Don is seldom in trouble, though, because he is a stickler for rules, routine, and procedure. Boy, is he ever! He eats the same meals each week because it's more efficient to do so and he schedules everything from his martial arts exercises to lab research time down to the second. Don never sees his routines as, well, routine; they are simply pragmatic ways of maximizing his time. Ask Don how long he has owned a shirt and he can tell you down to the day. It's just one of many ways in which he is blissfully unaware of himself. Nor does he think it's odd that he has but two friends, a womanizing colleague named Gene, and his psychologist wife, Claudia who doubles at Don's informal therapist. Don doesn't realize Claudia is also analyzing him, but no matter; he also doesn't realize that his guest lecture on Asperger's was better received by those who suffer from the syndrome than those who don't because he was speaking to his own tribe in the first instance.

About the only thing that troubles Don is that he's single, and that's an issue he approaches as he would any research conundrum. I defy you to read the chapters on designing a questionnaire for what Don dubs "the Wife Project" without snorting aloud. Or to remain stoic when he rejects one candidate as totally unsuitable because of a dispute over apricot ice cream! In an effort to get Don to loosen up a bit, his horn-dog friend Don tries to fix him up with Rosie Jaman in the sexist belief that getting Don laid will help him relax more around women. But Rosie flunks just about every category on Don's list–she's a smoker, vegetarian, slob, and non-exercising bon vivant. (She's also Goth gorgeous and whip smart.) Don doesn't see Rosie as a mate, but he is intrigued by her desire to discover her biological father. What better challenge for a geneticist than the "Rosie Project," a quest that will take the two of them across Australia, to New York City, and to some personal places neither of them anticipated?

This book is a charmer from start to finish–a wondrous balance between riotous humor, gasping embarrassment, and sweetness. You will snicker and laugh, but you will also find yourself yelling at the characters to see what's in front of their faces. Both Don and Rosie are unforgettable. The latter, in fact, might be the most seductively inappropriate mate since Alvy Singer fell hard for Annie Hall.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that you should read this book before the film comes out as there are nuances, exchanges, and internal thought processes within the text that I doubt will be as effective on the screen. Simsion has written a follow-up titled The Rosie Effect, which is set for North American release very shortly. I may delay reading that one–partly because of my distrust of sequels, but also because I'm still savoring act one.   Rob Weir

The Damnwells are Damn Good!

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THE DAMNWELLS  (2015            )

The Damnwells

Rock Ridge Music

* * * *

"Money and Shiny Things," the opening track of the new album by The Damnwells, is ostensibly about a down-on-his-luck man trying to win the heart of a woman who is probably out of his class. It's tempting, though, to see it as the band's theme song. Just a few years back The Brooklyn-sired Damnwells were on the music industry fast track: four LPs, a lurking major label deal, TV and film soundtrack work, and stages shared with everyone from Dylan to Cheap Trick and The Dixie Chicks. A few personnel shakeups and shifting industry winds and it all fell apart.  The band's latest is an indie rock return to its roots, including a reunion with original percussionist Steven Terry. I have no idea what the majors might have been looking for, because The Damnwells are more talented than anything I've heard recently on MTV or the radio.

Among the things that's special about The Damnwells is that they simultaneously remind you of other people yet are uniquely themselves. "Kentexas" opens with an anthem-like swell reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen, but pulls back into a softer confessional of a man trying to walk the line between desire and faithfulness. By contrast, "Kill Me" feels like something from the mid-80s New Wave—a thick aural soup of cascading guitar runs, vocals, and electronic sounds puncturing a theme that's held together by Terry's rock-steady drumming. If that's not enough, "She Goes Down" has a sweet pop sheen; "Too Old to Die" has the feel and some of the vocal signatures of The Beatles in their late Abbey Road journey; and the album finishes off with "None of These Things," a song of loss and leaving that would be at home on CMT. The later is one of several change-of-pace songs on an album that pays attention to musical contexts. "Kill Me" is actually more typical of the band's approach in that there aren't many silences or spaces in their high-energy songs. The Damnwells prefer to rock out in shimmery, fulsome arrangements in which notes blend and meld, but they are wary of exhausting listeners and savvy enough to ratchet down with some recovery time. Moreover, Alex Denizen's vocals are the counterpoint to whatever roof-raising the instruments produce. His is a voice that's simultaneously strong but smooth–like hard rock with a butterscotch chaser.

This amazing album raises anew the question of whether those running the industry have an ounce of commonsense. At a time in which hip-hop has run out of creative steam, jazz is in the doldrums, and pop music is dire, the time seems ripe for a rock revival. Expect The Damnwells to be in the midst of that fray if it happens. Put simply, The Damnwells are damn good!

Rob Weir

A Little Chaos is a Big Mess!

 A LITTLE CHAOS  (2014)

Directed by Alan Rickman

BBC Films, 117 minutes, R (Brief nudity, suggestive banter, anachronisms, atrocious dancing)

*

More than a hundred films have been made on the grounds of Versailles, but you can count on the fingers of a mitten the good ones. There must be something about all that Baroque excess that challenges directors to see if they can trump it. I'd personally rate Sofia Coppolla's Marie Antoinette (2006) as among the worst movies ever made. A Little Chaos is better than that, but that's no endorsement. It was directed and co-written by one of my favorites British actors: Alan Rickman, who also cast himself as the Sun King, King Louis XIV. Here's hoping he goes back to performing scripts instead of writing them or trying to direct.

Rickman puckishly signals from the start that about the only thing that's actually true in his story is that the symmetry of Versailles Palace and gardens is broken by an unorthodox outdoor ballroom whose design departs radically from the rest of the grounds. If only Rickman had the courage to lampoon the foppery of the Sun King's court straight on instead of through nudges and winks, A Little Chaos might at least have camp value. Instead, like Coppolla, he tries to do it through anachronisms. To that end, he imagines that royal gardener André Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts) has put out the rock garden ballroom to a competitive bid that he reluctantly awards to widowed garden designer/botanist/proto-feminist Sabine De Barra (Kate Winslet). This pseudo-feminism is the first of numerous contrivances crow-barred into the script. De Barra never existed: she's a complete fabrication, as is Le Notre's open marriage, his unfaithful wife (Helen McCrory), and his own dalliances. In truth, Le Notre was nearly 70 at the time the ballroom was built, he designed it himself, and his wife was an elderly sack of woe whose three children died in infancy.

Oh wow, man. Where can I score some acid?

Rickman gets the excesses and sycophancy of Versailles correct in spirit, though the externals are laughingly wrong. Historians agree that the reign of King Louis XIV (1638-1715) was the apex of classical France, but that Louis' wars and excessive spending–especially on Versailles–ultimately set the table for the French Revolution. As anyone who has been to Versailles can attest, the place oozes lavishness, exorbitance, and wastefulness. Courtly life upon the grounds was even more over the top. (Part of its purpose was to divert the attention of potentially meddlesome nobles.) In other words, there's a plethora of source material, so it's even more mysterious why Rickman felt the need to break the historical frame in such ludicrous fashion. Winslet is part feminist, part bohemian, and part hippie. There's even a ridiculous scene in which she's seen cavorting in a forest of ribbons, strings, and trippy objets d'art that looks like it might hang in Shakedown Street outside a Grateful Dead concert. Of course, Winslet also has to be a tortured soul–she's haunted by her six-year-old daughter's death in a carriage accident–so she can have the requisite on-the-verge-of-collapse scene and be comforted by Schoenaerts. The less said about her near-drowning experience, the better. Yet it cannot be said that her role is the most embarrassing in the film. That dishonor goes to Stanley Tucci playing the bisexual Duke d' Orleans. His real-life counterpart probably was bisexual, but Tucci in a wig, fussy shoes, silk stockings, and waistcoat looks just about as bad as you can imagine he might. His expression is often one of bemusement, as if he's wondering what the hell he's doing in this train wreck. I asked myself the same question. But wait! It gets worse! If you can sit through the ballroom's inaugural limp-wristed, kerchief-waving dance scene without reaching for an airsickness bag, you're made of sterner stuff than I. 

I could go on, but you get the point–this is simply an awful movie. If movie technology had been available in the 1680s, an airing of this film would have prompted bored Frenchmen to jump from their seats and launch the revolution a hundred years earlier. A Little Chaos is falsely advertised–it's a mess of gargantuan proportions.

Rob Weir      

The Suitcase Junket: Songs from Another Dimension

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THE SUITCASE JUNKET

Make Time

Whistlepig Records

* * *

Every now and then something comes across my desk that defies categorization. Anything label you want to slap on projects by The Suitcase Junket likely only exists in some other dimension. The Suitcase Junket is Matt Lorenz, who also plays with Rusty Belle, a band that stretches a few genres of its own. As The Suitcase Junket, Lorenz is a solo act who is never alone. Did you ever see a one-man-band? Lorenz does that—sort of. He is an odd man, and I mean that with respect and affection. He sports a wax mustache that Salvador Dali would have envied, an untamed head of curly hair, plays a guitar he found in a dumpster, and carries a literal suitcase full of stuff that doubles as makeshift percussion kit once emptied of content that includes a cymbal, a circular saw blade, a cooking pot, bones, and a sort of limberjack fashioned from baby shoes. Most of these are played simultaneously, courtesy of strings, pulleys, and wires attached to various parts of his body.

The music is weird stuff—again meant with affection. On "New Old Friend" he sings falsetto directly into the soundhole of his acoustic guitar; "Twisted Fate" puts one in mind of a Delta ditty—except for the throat singing*. At other moments, Lorenz's singing is more of a wild keening, and most of the rest of the time it's rough and razor-edged in the way that Tom Waits sings, though Lorenz is at the higher range of the scales. One hears elements of folk music, but also blues, rock, and grunge in the instrumentals. He takes full advantage of his distressed guitar, twisting notes on songs such as "Made of Rain" or playing some gritty slide augmented by chunky bass on "Hot Rod God." As the latter title suggests, the songs also list to the offbeat side of things. They make enough sense that they are not entirely surreal, but they are enigmatic enough that you might want to keep that adjective handy. A sample: "If I were to sound like you, whom would I then be/And if you were to sound like me, who would you then be/Oh. Here comes everybody else/If I were to have your mind, would I still be my kind? " I've seen Lorenz perform on several occasions and the crowd reaction is usually the same: either unbridled enthusiasm, or that special kind of head-scratching that comes when someone asks, "What the hell was that?" I like him a lot—in occasional doses. Maybe the album should come with a warning: Not for everyday use. Play only when a weird wind blows. –Rob Weir

* For the uninitiated, throat singing, also called overtone singing, is a way of modulating one's voice to produce one or more tones that resonate simultaneously above the dominant pitch. It is most associated with Mongolia, the Tuvan section of Russia, and Iceland. 

Hohka: Ecclectic Finnish Music

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HOHKA

Mailla/Halmeilla

Hohka 002

* * *

The sophomore release from the Finnish quartet Hohka is just eight tracks long, but that’s because of deliberate pacing, not an attempt to shortchange listeners. The English adjectives ‘enigmatic’ and ‘eclectic’ best describe this band. The album title translates Countries/Nowhere to Be Seen and the cover sports a giant longhaired rabbit looming above a miniaturized band member. What do these infer? (I am unaware of Scandinavian legends involving ominous rabbits!) Nor does a Finnish-to-English translator return meaning for five of the track listings, so one is left with impressions for most of the titles. Hohka is Finnish for pumice, that porous remain of a volcanic flow and that’s a good starting point for evaluating this release.

Like many artists who trained at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, Hohka treat musical boundaries as pervious. You will hear original tunes, but ones inspired by a variety of sources: Celtic music, classical, grunge, Finnish tradition, and folk dances. If I infer correctly from what I could translate, Hohka has worked with three dancers and (at least some of) the pieces accompanied their footwork. One could easily imagine the opening track, “October Flowers,” as a set piece for a lively Riverdance-like production. The tune is drenched in Irish and Scottish influences strung together with a jazzy interludes. Dance is most obviously invoked in “Loumalan Joonaksen,” a ¾ polska common in Finland. It is dynamic in construction–one that uses guest percussion to suggest clogging feet. It slows to a kantele (a Finnish zither) bridge from Valtteri Lehto before gathering to a fast pace driven by Meriheini Louto’s nyckelharpa (a keyed fiddle akin to a hurdy-gurdy). Those two instruments are also on display on “Suurin Pudottaja,” which translates “The Biggest Loser,” but evokes images of a steam train gathering speed. Enne Purovaara lays down double time bass, and other instruments punch through a quirky frenetic tune reminiscent of a back catalog offering from the Penguin Café Orchestra. Also on the accelerated side of things is “Kertalaaki,” an industrial strength piece featuring muscular accordion from Veikko Muikko, forays into dissonance, and a wild ending featuring Lehto’s electric guitar. Yet the rest of the album is as subdued as the aforementioned tunes are energetic. “Laavikkovalssi” begins Zen-like and even its anthemic finish evokes mid-winter melancholy. “Le Secret de La Licorne” uses several French horn blasts to signal a hunt, but its contemplative ambience and measured aspect feels more like stalking than hunting–as if the pursuer finds the unicorn’s lair and the “secret” is that it has fled. The album’s final two pieces are a 9:16 composition in several movements that is orchestral and classical in temperament, and a 3:12 kantele solo, of which the last 20 seconds are nearly silent. It is possible (likely?) that I lost some of Hohka’s intent in (non) translation, so let’s just say that this an album that takes its time to get at what the musicians wish to do and that like the giant rabbit on the cover, it’s intriguing to muse over the intent. But there’s one thing over which there is no misunderstanding: the four young musicians in Hohka are thoughtful and skillful.

Rob Weir