J. Edgar (2011)

Sometimes I sit down to write these things and have no idea where to take them.  I know how I feel about the movie, at least in a ranking sense, but I don’t know really how to equate that to words.  Well, maybe fully formed interesting sentences would be a better descriptor.  Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar is a biopic of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio), Director of the FBI and the man most instrumental in turning the FBI into a world class crime fighting organization.  As well as Big Brother.

The acting is fairly good to great all around, although there is a tendency by DiCaprio to sort of devolve into tics to either remind himself or the audience that HE IS J. EDGAR HOOVER.  However, the storyline of the movie plays out in a somewhat flashback format, allowing us to see the major players at various crossroads in their lives.  Hoover and his co-worker/possible life partner Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) are shown as bright young men, and then doddering old men, in various levels of plastic make-up.  It’s disconcerting at best, laughable at worst.

There are numerous name actors throughout the picture, and despite what IMDb says, I swear that’s Gerald McRaney as the judge in the Charles Lindbergh’s (Josh Lucas) baby kidnapping trial.  Stephen Root gives probably his most serious performance ever, and hell, I didn’t even know it was Naomi Watts as Hoover’s personal secretary, Helen Gandy, until I saw the cast list.  I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or a damning indictment of the make-up.

Ultimately, J. Edgar feels like it wants to be one of those prestigious biopics that garner numerous awards and accolades.  It rings a bit hollow, which is unusual for an Eastwood picture.  I liked it, and though I’ll probably never watch it again, it is a historically significant portrayal of a man that really did change the world, and should be watched by many.

4 / 5

The Lincoln Lawyer (2011)

Sometimes I watch movies knowing nothing about them other than the fact that they exist.  This is one of them, and so it was with disbelief that I watched the cast list at the beginning and saw that both Matthew McConaughey AND Josh Lucas were in it.  Finally, I would have definitive proof against my own theory that they are in fact the same person.  Yes I know, they don’t look very much alike or sound exactly the same or anything, but I had never seen them together in the same room and they are so similar that it was disconcerting to me.

The joke was on me though, since every scene they were in together (and there weren’t that many, Lucas shows up about halfway through the movie or later) seemed orchestrated to not provide concrete evidence that they were different people.  It was like someone made a movie with them both in it but then set up scenes so it was like the original Parent Trap where the characters were on opposite sides of the screen and you could almost see a seam down the middle of the screen.  It made me think that most of the $40 million dollar budget was used for effects to continue to carry on the illusion that these were, in fact, two different people.  They never really physically interacted when both of their faces were onscreen at the same time, either!  I know, you don’t care about my lunatic theories, but I remain unconvinced.

The movie?  Oh yeah, it was surprisingly decent in my estimation.  Again, I knew nothing about it going in, and had thought for a minute that it might be a genre picture about Abraham Lincoln after he passed the bar and the alternate American history that would create.  McConaughey is a dashing leading man, even though at times his character definitely seemed greasy.  Loads of name actors in this too, most of them just doing some good character acting.  It’s almost a crime that “Breaking Bad” actor Bryan Cranston was in the movie for about five minutes, but again, that’s the part.

Ryan Phillipe used my genuine dislike of him to great advantage, pulling off his role of being the accused criminal quite well.  Everyone else I’ve tagged for this movie had decent bit parts, some bigger than other, but this film – aside from McConaughey – is essentially an ensemble courtroom thriller.  Well-made too.

4 / 5