The Lead Ensemble Starring in The Sisters Brothers

Our story takes place in the American west in the year 1851. Charlie and Eli Sisters work as hitmen for a wealthy businessman called “The Commodore”. The Commodore tasks the brothers with following a scout working under his command called John Morris. Morris is supposed to track, find and keep an eye on Hermann Warm; a chemist who stole something from the commodore. Once they catch up to them, they are supposed to kill Warm and return to the commodore his property. The trip is long and all men in pursuit of Hermann Warm witness what affects their priorities and convictions.

In “The Sisters Brothers” we have 2 pairs of men separated by a few days of primitive traveling. Yet those days set all the difference in the way those men think. They set the difference between clinging to the past and aspiring for the future. It’s mesmerizing and, at times, extremely poetic. Poetic in events and in dialogue and still with great respect to the differences between the two groups of men. The sisters brothers are simple people, they kill for a living. Charlie is a drunk and a hot head, while Eli is more composed and in dire need for settling down. It’s easy to notice that Eli belongs in the civilized future though he hasn’t really seen one. You don’t expect the conversations between the two to be deep and sophisticated, and they are not. However, I couldn’t ignore just how beautiful they are, even when they are confrontational and even when they end in an ugly manner. While on the other hand Warm is a chemist and Morris is a writer of some sort. Their conversations are deep and expressive, yet filled with charm and true human emotions.

The film is definitely not all talking, it has more than a fair share of action and violence. Yet it’s also presented very artistically. Jacques Audiard, the director and co-writer, didn’t treat those sequences as breaks from a classy cinematic adventure. He rather used them to be effective dramatic vehicles. In every scene with an armed confrontation he always focuses on the perspective. Sometimes that of Eli, sometimes that of Charlie, the best of all was that of Morris and sometimes our own. It’s rarely clear or definite, but always fun to follow & very nutritious to the build up of the characters and where they stand from each other. In addition of course to how well they’re shot, lit and edited.

The film stars Joaquin Phoenix and John C Reilly with strong supporting roles from Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed. They are all in their finest form and without any special framing for their performance. They get the suitable screen time for their characters in the events and they make the best out of them. Very difficult to single out a scene and say that this particular actor was great in it, simply because they always acted in twos. Sometimes in threes and sometimes in fours. I can’t even say which pair was better. Whenever I spent time with Charlie and Eli, I always missed John and Herman. It’s a lead ensemble as it should be and I enjoyed the few moments we spent with Jake Gyllenhaal and Joaquin Phoenix together. I think this will be regarded as history in 10 years or so.

The Sisters Brothers is one of the hidden gems of 2018. It holds a great artistic value and it’s still a lot of fun to watch. It doesn’t have any obvious problems other than maybe being a bit longer than necessary. Don’t get me wrong, I would’ve loved this story to go on forever. It’s just that it felt like it ended several times before it actually did.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo Return for a Sharp Commentary on the World of Art

Events of “Velvet Buzzsaw” take place in the world of contemporary art in Los Angeles. Josephina who works for at a huge galleries chain called Haze, finds a dead neighbour in her building called Vetril Dease, and discovers a huge pile of artwork in his apartment that he requested to be destroyed once he dies. However, after her new boyfriend and respected art critic Morf Vandewalt confirms the significance of the paintings, she decides to steal the artwork and partner with her boss Rhodora Haze to exhibit it. Soon after, everybody involved with the work Dease start to witness weird and violent incidents.

In my opinion, Velvet Buzzsaw is a commentary on creative work. When does it become art and when does it become commodity? How does it gain value and who decides that value? What influences artistic integrity and how it can be manipulated? That’s what I think the film wants us to focus on, and I was never going to appreciate it that if it was presented in non coherent bulk of sophistication. Therefore I’m thankful that it was all displayed as inseparable components of a coherent and enjoyable story. What you should not wait for or expect is satisfying answers to the questions that makes the film a thriller. It is all there to open more doors for meditations and thinking, and it doesn’t offer answers. Which is the thing I love the most about a filmmaker offering us an honest piece of his mind. Because a mind that has answers should actually be a politician, not an artist .. Or at least that’s what I think.

It’s not easy to compare the work of Dan Gilroy as a screenwriter in Nightcrawler to that of Velvet Buzzsaw. One was a journey showcasing a character profile, and the other is a journey of several characters who walk into a world as innocent spirits and quickly get transformed into gears and bolts inside an industry. In Velvet Buzzsaw we don’t have a hero and we don’t have villains either. We see various profiles of artists. We see dealers and curators. We see critics and museum managers. And somehow we don’t only see a cartoon version of each. We see fully fleshed characters with multiple layers and many good sides, and many horrible ones. The development of their character arcs might’ve not been served as smoothly as that of Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler. At a certain stage I saw what some characters had been transformed into and I couldn’t make much sense of it in terms of time. Could’ve been a minor problem if the film leaned its whole narrative towards the artistic side, but it didn’t. A lot of effort was spent to justify characters decision, and I really appreciated that, but at the end of the day something will have to pay for wanting to do too much for too many characters in a regular movies run time, and in that case it was how the characters developed. Anyways, everything that was presented captured my attention and made total sense to me. Messages and meanings and pure impersonation of things that can’t really be explained, but completely relatable and applicable to any form of art or creative work in the economics of modern world.

On the directorial level however, the work of Dan Gilroy in Nightcrawler is very sensible in Velvet Buzzsaw despite the clear differences in color palettes, frame composition and camera movement. I felt very familiar with the pace, the amount of details and the mix of tones in every scene. You get tragedies mixed with sarcasm, you get honesty wrapped in lies .. brilliant and very familiar. Some sequences were overly staged to prepare the audience for what will happen. However this wasn’t a big problem for me personally since it completes the full circle for each character in a symbolic way that doesn’t contradict with the logic of events in the world of the film.

Velvet Buzzsaw is a very good film and one of the best I’ve ever seen on Netflix. It’s not Nightcrawler only because it’s not relatable to everybody, but it’s not by any means a lesser story or cinematic product. And even if you can’t relate to everything that happens in the film, don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy the visual experience and didn’t enjoy performances from every member of the cast. With special mentions to the Nightcrawler duo; Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo. Jake Gyllenhaal is in a whole different place guys I assure you.

Jake Gyllenhaal is Davis in Demolition

Davis starts sending those letters to a vending machines company, starting with a complaint that one of their machines didn’t function the way it was supposed to, but not stopping here. The widower goes on and on about his situation, the death of his wife and basically everything about his life. The letters land on the desk of Karen from customer support, who sympathizes with Davis and invite him into her, and her young son Chris’, life. At the same time, Davis start developing a passion for breaking things apart, and later on destroying them and .. that’s where I lost all possible abilities to put things together myself.

Demolition is a strange sophisticated movie. It’s not easy to make sense of its purpose or even to fully grasp its narrative, though perfectly linear from a storytelling point of view. I couldn’t really tell how I feel about it until the two other people who were in the theatre decided to leave, around 15 minutes before the break, and thought it’s a no brainer that I’ll be leaving with them. It’s important here to clarify that I wasn’t with them, they just wondered how on earth I’m going to continue watching .. THAT! .. That’s how they put it down really directing their words to me. My answer was spontaneous: “I’m staying, I’m enjoying my time”.

It’s true that I enjoyed watching “Demolition”. First things first, I can never say that an hour and forty minutes in the company of Mr. Gyllenhaal is time wasted. He is definitely one of the most talented actor of his generation. The generation that is currently the main supplier of actors to play leading male roles, and what Jake Gyllenhaal needs to understand is that the lifetime of any generation in this category, is not really that long. I have zero takes on his portrayal of Davis and how he’s struggling to define and make sense of his emotions, or even his performance duels with Chris Cooper, Naomi Watts or Judah Lewis, in his excellent portrayal of Chris. It’s only that, after “Southpaw”, I thought he should’ve gone with a safer bet.

What I also enjoyed a lot is the editing job on the sequences that the movie is made of. I’m usually not the kind of critic who can judge the quality of editing, but in this case you can sense a rhythm and a philosophy on how those scenes were orchestrated. I give it to Jean-Marc Vallée for being one the best working directors in using music and songs as key components in the editing work of a certain scene. He’s done it in “Wild” and mostly in “Dallas Buyers Club”. Here in “Demolition”, it can be his most plausible achievement and especially in the scene with the song “Crazy on You” playing.

I enjoyed “Demolition”, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t fill a few letters of complaints myself. The restless focus on keeping all messages and emotions indirect can be exhausting at times. Some script lines were deliberately removed, after being used in the trailer, to prevent our characters from reaching out to us with a clue or two. The direct result of this indirect approach is the absence of logical flow of cause and consequence. I personally enjoyed some scenes and sequences after finding myself in the middle of them, I couldn’t really tell why I’m here or where I will find myself in the next phase. After the repetitive occurrence of this confusion, I stopped caring.

For the best of my guesses, “Vallée” is once again exploring loss, sorrow and mourning, and how different people deal with it if they can really break free from pretending in order to meet expectations. He did it before in “Wild” and it worked because the flow, which had its share of artistic montages and indirect messages, made sense in the bigger picture. In “Demolition”, the script and the narrative did a thorough job hiding the essence of the story, that I don’t think a lot of people can find it.