True Grit (2010)

"The Dude", a man with true grit? Depends on who you ask.

Star Rating: ***½
It’s been eighteen years since "Unforgiven" (1992), which was considered by many to be the swansong of the classic western genre. Westerns seem to have rolled out of Hollywood with the tumbleweeds. Joel and Ethan Coen are masters of their craft, and have perfected thrillers, ("Blood Simple", "Fargo"), comedies, ("Raising Arizona", "The Big Lebowski"), and dramas, ("No Country for Old Men", "A Serious Man"). Being such masters, it was only a matter of time till they tried executing a western.

The Coens did right in making their western by adapting it from a novel, rather than using the elements of the common western to invent a potentially recycled plotline. "True Grit" has already been made for the screen in 1969 with John Wayne as the hero. However, the Coens’ take on the story isn’t necessarily a remake. It’s closer to the source material, Charles Portis’s novel, than to the 1969 version.

The main plot is rather easy to put on paper. 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) hires drunken, hardened Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Brides), a man with “true grit”, to help her find Tom Cheney (Josh Brolin), the man who killed her father. They are joined by Texas Ranger Le Bouf (Matt Damon). Together they go off on a set of adventures to find Cheney. This really feels like a Coen bros film. It runs on a rather simple story with quirky characters, punchy dialogue, sudden and overwhelming spouts of violence, and a great closing line to accompany a nonspecific almost non-ending.

A revenge odyssey mixed with suspense, character development and bittersweet scenarios really drives a good western. During one fight scene, I couldn’t help but cast my mind back to "Fargo" (1996), my personal favorite of the Coens films, in which one twitchy hood unsuccessfully attempts to talk his way out of a tight spot with a policeman, creating a suspenseful moment leading up to the violent murder of the policeman. That scene would look great in a western. The fight scene I referred to takes place after a long conversational interlude, when Cogburn whips out his gun and shoots someone in the head. It was sudden, brutal, messy, and made me exclaim to myself, “Wow, wow daddy,” just like the hood in "Fargo".

I really think that Jeff Bridges is the perfect man to play a guy like Rooster Cogburn. He has the gruff exterior and rough demeanor for the job. Its twelve years since Bridges starred in the Coens’ cult masterpiece "The Big Lebowski" (1998), in which he played a lazed slacker. Here, as you can imagine, he’s the complete opposite. He’s riding around on horses, guns in both fists, firing at charging opponents. Nobody can spin or fire a gun quite like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne, but I was in all of "True Grit"’s fight scenes, rooting for Cogburn to shoot his way on top. Back in ’69, John Wayne won an Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn. If history repeats itself, Bridges will win an Oscar for his “gritty” performance, a mere year after he won Best Actor for "Crazy Heart" (2009).

Also worth noting is newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. She plays Mattie and she sure does a fine job. Even though she’s serious in the movie, I could feel that she was having a lot of fun with her character. Compared with Kim Darby, who played Mattie in 1969, Steinfeld’s Mattie is a lot stronger willed. Darby’s interpretation, though tough and gritty, felt more intimidated and vulnerable. Not to say that Steinfeld is a pillar of strength and Darby is a wimp; they both demonstrate moments of grit and fear. Who wouldn’t in a story like this? It’s just that one side is more visible in one actress than the other.

I was pleased to see that the Matt Damon character, who leads us to believe he’s a real jerk in the beginning, proves his mettle in helping the quest. Part of the simplicity of this story lies in that the good guys are actually good and the bad guys are actually bad, at least poetically speaking. There’s really no moral ambiguity here. "True Grit" is pretty easy to mark on a graph, with one axis being good, the other being bad, and no ugly to speak of.

I had such faith that the Coen brothers would do great work, and you know what? I was right. Nothing gets them down, nothing holds them back—they create because that is what they were put on this earth to do. I’m waiting for them attempt a fairy tale or a Sci-Fi epic, and westerns? They can do it, no problem. They create an old west where “the Rooster abides. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that.”

Memento (2000)

Guy Pearce holding one of his "mementos"

Star Rating: ***½
"Memento"—a Latin word meaning “remember”. "Memento" follows the adventures of Leonard (Guy Pearce), a man with short term memory-loss trying to find his wife’s killer, but is hindered by his condition. He therefore had to take photographs and write himself notes and tattoo really important information on his body.

These are the obvious “mementos” in the film, but there are additional mementos too. "Memento" is that it is based on a story called "Memento Mori", written by Nolan’s brother Jonathan, a title which translates as “remember you will die.” From the start of the movie, we remember that somebody dies. In the beginning this isn’t such a bad thing, but in the end we wonder was it really poetic justice, and how many more people will die?

Leonard Shelby is an ex-insurance investigator who is trying to find the man who raped and murdered his wife. After he finished with his wife, he cracked Leonard’s head against a mirror, giving him Anterograde amnesia, or short term memory loss. This condition prevents Leonard from forming new memories—he can remember who he is and every that happened before “the incident”. “I have this condition,” he explains to the characters he meets, usually greeted by a “you told me already.”

Nevertheless, Leonard remains dedicated to finding and murdering the man who killed his wife and took his memory away. To remember things, Leonard takes photographs of people and places and he even tattoos information on his body. He is aided by a bartender named Natalie (Carrie Anne Moss) and a friendly guy named Teddy (Joe Pantoliano).

The plot is told in reverse chronological order. In between the chapters told backwards there is another story told in black and white, involving in a hotel room Leonard talking to some unknown person over the phone about Sammy Jankis, a man with short term memory loss who Leonard frequently compares himself to, that advances in chronological order. Sound confusing? It is, and it’s supposed to be.

Sammy is a very crucial subplot of Memento. During the days of Leonard’s career as an insurance investigator, he investigated the claim that Sammy had gotten Anetrograde amnesia due to an injury he received in a car accident and should be covered for physical disability. When Leonard is diagnosed with the same problem, he tattoos "Remember Sammy Jankis" on his hand. “Sammy Jankis had the same problem,” he reflects, “but he really had no system. He’d write himself a ridiculous amount of notes, but he’d get them all mixed up.”

By his use of a nonlinear plotline, Nolan effectively puts us inside Leonard’s mind and displays the intense confusion inside his head as he reads his memos and tattoos and tries to remember what he’s been doing and what he’s going to do. We encounter characters who we think are good, then a few chapters forward (or backwards) we discover that maybe they weren’t so good. Leonard doesn’t remember all this because of his condition, and we don’t remember because—well, we haven’t seen it yet.

Warning: Here be Spoilers:

Leonard is a classic Noir antagonist. He is, in a word, ambiguous. Nolan’s script makes the audience sympathize with him and want the best for him. Yet underneath that smiling exterior lurks some kind of homicidal monster. Personally the idea that he kills people to make himself happy, that he kills the man who gave him so much help just to give meaning to his life, makes me hate this man. Let’s see, smiling and likable, yet complicated and destructive. Could this be the new Norman Bates?

Spoilers Be Gone

Nolan’s second film after the dramatic Neo-Noir "Following" (1998), which was a bleak but nevertheless impressive directorial debut for Nolan, "Memento" reflects the ethic of a born filmmaker and storyteller. Much like Quentin Tarantino ("Reservoir Dogs", "Pulp Fiction"), Nolan has a gift for presenting an interesting plotline and giving it to life by cutting it up and serving it out of order.

The charisma and crisp quality that Nolan brings to the screen is most refreshing indeed. I wrote in my review for "Following" that the title as well as the quality of the film seems to suggest that more good films will follow from Christopher Nolan. That was just circumstantial evidence, but "Memento" proves that point. There is also one scene in the movie when Leonard passes a comic book store where the Batman logo in the window. Perhaps "Memento" can forget the past, but can Nolan’s movies tell the future?

Following (1998)

1998 never looked so much like 1949

Star Rating: **½
"Following" is not a big budget picture and must have been very cheaply shot, and has the feel of a homemade movie, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That gives it a touch of character. It is still a decent movie. It is very intriguing on two levels. 1. Because of its insight into human nature, i.e. curiosity and lust; and 2. Because it wraps the humanity of the story into the bitter cocoon of a traditional Film Noir held together in the form of a nonlinear narrative. This is not a happy story and it does not end on a happy note. To sum up, this film is good, but only on a really morbid level. To me the bad points outweigh the good ones this time.

“The following is my explanation of what happened,” a young unnamed man (Jeremy Theobald) begins, and he proceeds to tell his story to a police officer (John Nolan), a story of how he started following random people just for the heck of it. “You followed women?” asks the policeman. “No, I followed anyone,” the man insists. “I want to be a writer and I wanted material for my characters.” He adds, “When you see somebody’s behavior and it raises 100,000 questions. I wanted to ask those questions and find out what the answers were. The most important rule was never follow the same person twice. That was the rule I broke first.” Just take into account that this is a condensation of a fairly long monologue.

This speech puts a rather Hitchcockian spin on a modern city street creeper. It’s human curiosity that drives our young man forward into his adventures, for better or for worse. The trick is to not let the person see that you’re following them. That is the second rule that our hero breaks and it ends him up in some trouble.

He makes the acquaintance of Cobb (Alex Haw), a thief whom he had been shadowing periodically. Cobb shows him how to properly rob houses and soon the young, fascinated by this thrilling lifestyle, is hooked on it too. He meets a blonde woman (Lucy Russell), who also remains unnamed throughout the picture, in a bar. He offers to buy her a drink. She tells him he can, but that he cannot sleep with her. Over the next few sequences (mixed out of chronological order) the two fall in love, or at least in lust.

They are in love and kissing within twenty-five minutes, but this is a fairly short picture so I’ll let that slide this time. There is a certain chemical crackle between the two I will admit. It starts out happy, but is then extinguished by the series of plot twists that exist in any Film Noir. The slick thing about Following is that the twists are showed to us ahead of time, but since we haven’t seen the ending, we don’t know what it means.

In between the man-blonde love scenes are the man-Cobb burglary scenes. Cobb is a fairly mysterious individual. We’re never quite sure whether he’s a “good guy” or “bad guy” till the end. He seems to alternate sides. I personally could smell trouble in his appearance, somehow something about him spells “bad guy.” Could it have been the fact that he robs houses for a living? I wonder.

"Following", being the first from acclaimed writer-director Christopher Nolan, foreshadows that Nolan’s “following” pictures will be clever, dark, profound and occasionally disturbing, but above all, good and hopefully better. Not that Following isn’t good, I just hope to see better from this director.

Can I define better? Well, for one thing a little longer. Nolan, whose script impressed me more than anything else, writes lines that give a great deal of insight into his characters. This movie is very short, and while it has plenty of personality, it could have gone on longer and said a little more.

For another thing, I want something more uplifting. The ending of this film left me with a fairly depressed feeling. Perhaps this was due to the movie’s lack of justice—which I think is one of its central statements. Occasionally in the movies, you take a movie that is like black coffee—utterly bitter and no redemptive qualities. Add a little sugar and it’s a little better, but not much. This is how "Following" affected me.

Nolan has talent, and can present and interesting story with interesting characters in a short time span. But I’m pretty sure that he can do better. I’m sure greater films will “follow”. (Second time I’ve used this pun, see above).