Movies I Watched in June, Part 1

Took me a while to finally see it, but I really enjoyed this tragicomic look at the great financial collapse of 2008. Some critics took it to task for combining some pretty serious drama (specifically, the scenes with Christian Bale’s financial guru and Steve Carell’s broken money manager) with fourth-wall-breaking explanations involving Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez. Me? I liked them. I’m a big fan of a movie that finds a different way to tell its story, and as someone who hasn’t read the Michael Lewis book this movie is based on, I was grateful for the way writer/director Adam McKay took my hand and led me through some of the trickier parts. It never disrupted the flow for me, and the performances (specifically Carell and Bale, though really everyone was good) constantly reminded you of the human beings at the center of this global mess. I played catch-up with a lot of Oscar-contenders this spring, but “The Big Short” was my favorite. It’s one I can see returning to just to examine how McKay and company put the whole thing together. By the way, according to Lewis, the studio only allowed McKay to make this movie if he also agreed to make a sequel to “Anchorman.” I wasn’t much of a fan of that film, but if it made this one possible, it’s OK by me.

I hadn’t seen this Merchant-Ivory drama since catching it in the theater in 1993, and I’m happy to say it holds up beautifully – maybe even more beautifully than it did originally, in fact, when most of the reviews seemed obligated to compare Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of a remarkably tightly wound butler to his Oscar-winning performance as a slightly more free-spirited serial killer a few years earlier. “Remains” is arguably an even better showcase for Hopkins than “Silence of the Lambs,” in fact, forcing him to keep everything buried deep inside with only subtle pauses and slight movements to hint at the turmoil within. There’s an amazingly strong cast for him to play against, too, with Emma Thompson as the woman he might have loved, Christopher Reeve (a few years before his paralyzing accident) as an American who hires Hopkins in his autumn years and even Cersei Lannister herself, Lena Headey, as the young maid whose romantic ways stand in stark contrast to the controlled relationship between Hopkins and Thompson. “The Remains of the Day” is such a perfectly balanced piece of drama, with both deeply personal moments and undercurrents of global conflict, anti-Semitism  and class struggle. It’s the sort of movie that would be very easy to screw-up with too much dramatic intrigue or a forced happy ending, but the folks at Merchant-Ivory handled it perfectly. One of the great forgotten films of the 1990s.

Maybe it’s not technically a “movie,” but “O.J.: Made in America” is definitely an epic, and what’s more, it’s one of the most compelling works I’ve seen in a long time. Director Ezra Edelman does more than just retell a fascinating story – he digs deep into both Simpson’s past and the world around him to make that story really mean something. By the time it’s over, you (a) are completely convinced he committed the murders and (b) can see why the jury found him not guilty. Doesn’t mean they were right, of course, but after watching hours of injustice toward black Americans (something O.J. was reluctant to identify as, ironically) and seeing in painful detail how the prosecution kept screwing up, the end result was virtually inevitable. And though the trial is the centerpiece of the five-part series (how could it not be?), there’s so much more in “O.J.: Made in America” that it’s almost impossible to absorb it in a single viewing. There’s the early revelation that Simpson’s father was gay – something that was kept a deep, deep secret in the 1960s. There’s fascinating footage that I can’t believe Edelman acquired of the post-trial celebration at O.J.’s house – I’d seen the helicopter video of the group entering his home many times, but who would imagine we’d see O.J. and his legal team popping the proverbial champagne after he beat a double murder rap? And, in the end, there’s seemingly endless footage of O.J. tumbling further and further down the low-rent celebrity ladder, his life filled with hangers-on, drugged-up escapades and increasingly sleazy female companions. You almost – almost – feel bad for the guy, especially when you think back to the truly glorious gridiron footage from earlier in the series. But then you remember the bodies of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman – and, to his credit, Edelman forces you to look at those crime scene photos and face what’s at the center of this story – and you realize, even though he’ll probably die in prison, O.J. Simpson got off easy.
Up next: The not-a-sequel to "Cloverfield," Pixar's latest and an inadvertantly hilarious look at technology and harassment circa 1994.