Month: August 2016

Charley Varrick is a 1973 crime film directed by Don Siegel. Things don’t go according to plan when a small-time robber, Charley (Walter Matthau), and his wife Nadine (Jacqueline Scott) accidentally rob a bank that belongs to a mafia gang. While Nadine waits outside in the getaway car, the heavily disguised Charley enters the bank, where his two partners are waiting. Outside, when two police officers approach Nadine to question her, she fires on them, killing one instantly and seriously wounding the other, but the second officer returns fire as he falls, wounding Nadine.  She ends up dying later. Charley and his partner Harman (Andy Robinson) set up an explosive charge to destroy the stolen car with Nadine in it. Charley later realises that the money they stole is actually mob money and the bank was a drop spot. Harman doesn’t care, but Charley knows they’ll have to lay low and not spend any of the money for at least 2 or 3 years.  Things begin to get really messy when the mob sends an eccentric hitman named Molly (Joe Don Baker) to the area to find out who stole the money. 

The fun in Charley Varrick is not sadistic, though there are cruel moments in it, but in watching Charley attempt to outwit both the cops and the Mafia. The casting of Matthau in this key role helps tremendously. Though Charley is tough enough to walk away from his wife’s death without showing much emotion, the character is inhabited—maybe even transformed—by Matthau’s wit and sensitivity as an actor.  But the film’s real revelation comes from Joe Don Baker,whose racist, sexist, ass-kicking brute of a henchman oozes malicious magnetism. Charley Varrick is informed by a quiet professionalism that suits a film about feds and criminals doing their jobs, whether that means laundering money, making fake passports, or robbing banks. Siegel’s direction–most of it permeated with a great, gritty, early 1970s “feel”–is impeccable, and ranges from a series of beautiful shots of the countryside during the opening credits to elaborately staged, underhanded “clues” as to the “plot beneath the plot”–during most of the middle section.

 

Steve Jobs is a 2015 American biographical drama film directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin. The script, by Aaron Sorkin, an Oscar winner for The Social Network, is sheer brilliance. Sorkin divides the film into three time frames, each filmed in different formats and each involving the launch of a new Jobs product. The first part is set in 1984 in Cupertino, California, where Jobs, 29, debuts the Macintosh. The second part is set in 1988 when Jobs, axed by Apple, presents his Next cube to mass indifference. The final part, utilizing high-def digital, takes place in 1998 at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, where Jobs, back calling the shots at Apple, gives the iMac its famed send-off. Sorkin works wonders in this film revealing the man behind the machine rather than the machine behind the man. Without any scenes of failure or success, Sorkin forces his audience to understand the complex and often times revolting central Character. With extremely well written confrontations between Jobs and Wozniak ( Seth Rogen) or Jobs and his Daughter or even Jobs and his Boss (Jeff Daniels), Sorkin relentlessly demonstrates the true nature behind the tech giant. 

“Who are you? What do you do?”- Those questions, put to Steve Jobs by his partner Steve Wozniak in the middle of a heated argument, are both practical and rhetorical. Jobs is not a designer, an engineer or a coder — he relies on other people to do all of that, but he has somehow risen to the top of the computer business.  The sound scape is something that one should pay attention to. There’s no musical score at all only the voices the characters hear, the voices of an industrial town – ambiance. In the end the industrial voices just keep going on as the credits come on the screen. Polish-born marketing chief Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) is ready to give shit to her boss. She rebukes him for letting his former lover  Brennan (Katherine Waterston) live on welfare and for denying paternity of their five-year-old daughter, Lisa (Makenzie Moss). What we don’t see is the older, even richer Jobs who married Laurene Powell, had three children, created more Apple miracles. Kate Winslet portrayal of real life Johanna Hoffman was as beautiful as it was naive . She brought the character alive in full force and truly demonstrated she is one of the best actresses working.  Seth Rogan gives the single best dramatic performance of his career. As Steve Wozniak, the literal opposite of Jobs, Rogan played the role with elegance and brilliance. Filled to the brim with nuance Fassbender offers a cold, intelligent, manipulative, calculating, and over all disturbingly convincing portrayal of Steve Jobs.
As calm as he is devilish, Fassbender plays this egotistical narcissist with such precision its close to horrifying to watch. Though calm through most of the movie Fassbender understands when to unleash the monster which lays in Jobs and is absolutely hysterical while doing so. The best thing about “Steve Jobs,” the thing that makes it work as both tribute and critique, is how messy it is. “Steve Jobs” is a creation myth written by a skeptic.