Girls, "Good Man"

Any show fortunate to live a long life is going to have some episodes that feel pretty inconsequential.  It's inevitable: more than 20 hours into a show, particularly a relatively light one like "Girls," not everything is going to feel like compelling drama.

Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, the cowriters of "Good Man," come up with a pretty good solution to this problem: they throw a ton of stuff at the audience so that the energy never flags.  (Now we know why last week's episode felt like a cost-cutter, neglecting to show any of the non-principal wedding guests.  This week is bursting at the seams with characters.  All those actors didn't come cheap.)

Fran moves in with Hannah after his roommate experiences a psychotic break.  Hannah teaches Phillip Roth to eighth-graders, which is just a prelude to her helping her dad through the aftermath of an awkward sexual encounter.  Adam visits his niece, which is just a prelude to him continuing his courtship of Jessa.  Elijah gets a new suitor, who just happens to be a famous news anchor.

The strongest of these storylines is Hannah's time with her father.  Up until now, the "Hannah's dad is gay" subplot has mostly been used for jokes about how Hannah doesn't want to hear her parents talk about icky sex stuff.  But "Good Man" moves things into more dramatic territory.  Hannah meets her dad's new fling and learns that he's a pretty nice guy.  She takes a stormy phone call from her mother, who's demanding a divorce.  These developments are forcing Hannah to view her parents as the messy, flawed human beings they are.  It's a tough lesson that people tend to learn as they start treating their parents as peers rather than authority figures.

Unfortunately, the other material here just doesn't measure up.  Adam and Jessa's developing relationship continues to make no sense.  Wouldn't these two have hooked up already if they had such a strong connection?  Even leaving that aside, their day spent mooning over each other at a carnival didn't feel true to these characters.  Adam and Jessa are both impulsive people making a bad decision.  This feels like the kind of fling where two people suddenly collide and then instantly regret it, not something that would develop through puppy dog love.

Meanwhile, Ray faces stiff competition from a neighboring coffee shop.  This thread isn't completely devoid of worthwhile material.  Helvetica is a pretty great name for an annoying store.  And Ray's confrontation with a barista of ambiguous gender is a great illustration of a peril of living in New York.  But this feels like a rerun of Ray's storyline from last season, in which he got pissed off about something and found a way to take action.  Will Ray use his political muscle to force Helvetica to use lids?  I may need some coffee to stay awake for this storyline.

Girls, "Wedding Day"

There's a scene in the fifth season premiere of "Girls" which perfectly encapsulates the frustrations of this show.  Ray, who considers Hannah to be like a "little sister," is interrogating Fran on his intentions with her.  He soon begins a rant on how men mistreat women before landing on the real source of his discontentment: Marnie is about to marry the idiot Desi.  And Marnie is, according to Ray, "the love of my life."  Ray then learns from Desi's friend that Marnie is his eighth fiancee.

It's a nice little scene.  The camera placement is smart.  The acting is solid.  The writing is witty.  (Ray asks Fran if he just wants a "push in the bush.")  There's just one problem: the scene makes no sense.

Why does Ray care about Hannah?  We've never seen any reason for them to be particularly close.  (We haven't seen a reason for anyone to be close to Hannah, but that's another story.)  More importantly, how on earth is Marnie the love of Ray's life?  Ray's an angry wiseass.  Marnie's an empty-headed beauty queen stupid enough to marry Desi.  If Ray was 20, we'd forgive him for being fooled by Marnie's looks.  But Ray's pushing 40.  In any approximation of the real world, Ray would have realized that loving Marnie is a fool's errand.

This is par for the course on "Girls," a show that somehow manages to have good direction, writing, and acting while also being emotionally incoherent.  It's a gorgeous wedding cake with rotten eggs in the batter.

As always, the season premiere confounds in its characterization.  Why are Jessa and Adam hooking up, apart from the fact that the show needs more plot and it hasn't already happened?  Why is junkie Jessa suddenly the most responsible one of this group?  And the question hovering over this whole show: Why are these girls still together?  Someone like Marnie should have a flotilla of vapid but supportive girlfriends.  Instead, she's relying on Hannah, who she acknowledges hasn't connected with her in years, Shoshanna, who lives in Japan, and Jessa, who is her complete opposite.

Pondering these questions can lead to hyperventilation.  Better instead to focus on the great moments this show is somehow still capable of giving us.  Marnie, taking passive-aggressiveness to delicious new heights in ushering Fran out of the bridesmaids' area.  Ray, literally struggling to keep his head above water as he tries to impart life advice to Desi.  Hannah, in a pink parachute, awkwardly embracing Marnie, in horror movie makeup.  Marnie, putting her wedding dress on over her Spanx, using beauty on the outside to cover up the plain girl on the inside.

45 Years

It's a common assertion: there's no such thing as a soulmate.  How, in this world of billions of people, could there be only one for us?

And yet, even the most rational person wants to believe they're special.  That their partner chose them because they were unique in some way.  We don't want to think of love as some mechanical process, a chance meeting in which sparks fly because of aesthetic preferences shaped by nature and nurture, repeated copulation releasing hormones that engender goodwill, shared experiences building up fondness over the years.  You could do that with anyone.

Such is the disturbing realization hovering over "45 Years," a film about a couple celebrating their anniversary.  The body of an old lover of the husband's--she had died falling into a fissure in a glacier --is discovered, bringing back powerful memories.  Slowly the wife learns just how much the girl meant to him, culminating in a shocking revelation.  The film could be viewed as the most low-key horror movie ever made.  The sound editing mirrors the ominous buildup, as howling winds and tolling bells slowly invade the couple's previously idyllic life.

"45 Years" ends on a simple, heartbreaking moment that feels worthy of Old Hollywood.  The film doesn't offer much commentary on the situation, but I'll throw something out: the tragedy is, it's nobody's fault.

Hollywood's Real Race Problems

I'll be honest.  When I first heard the chorus of complaints over the lack of Oscar nominations for black actors this year, I thought it was a little overblown.  The Academy has awarded numerous black performances when it was less diverse than it is today.

But then I started thinking about those performances.  It's shockingly easy to put them into three categories:

• Saints: The Sidney Poitier model.  Reward a character who is basically perfect so you can pretend you're not holding black people to a higher standard.  More recent examples: Denzel in "Glory," Morgan Freeman in "Million Dollar Baby."
• Sinners: Do I even need to say why this is a category?  Denzel in "Training Day," Forest Whitaker in "The Last King of Scotland," Mo'Nique in "Precious."  Three of the most vile characters ever to net Oscars for their performers, all played by black actors.
• Sufferers: Nothing like a little suffering to invoke the white guilt!  Besides, it's a position we're used to seeing them in.  See Halle Berry in "Monster's Ball" and Lupita Nyong'o in "12 Years."  Hattie McDaniel and Octavia Spencer played maids to white people, which is its own form of suffering.

There's only five winning performances I haven't mentioned.  Two fit comfortably in the categories above.  The three exceptions:

• Whoopi Goldberg played a psychic, which opens up its own can of racial worms.
• Jamie Foxx won for playing beloved musical icon Ray Charles.
• Cuba Gooding Jr. won for yelling "Show me the money!"

In this environment, it's tough for many black performers to even be considered.  The studios for "Creed" and "Straight Outta Compton" didn't bother to mount serious Oscar campaigns for their black actors.  It didn't occur to them that they could win.

Michael B. Jordan's performance in "Creed" is exactly the kind of performance that needs to get more attention: one that could easily have been played by a white actor.  In fact, Jordan has publicly said that studios won't consider him for many roles.  They automatically assume they're going to cast a white guy.

And that's the bigger issue here: there aren't enough roles for black actors in the first place.  Only a handful of black performances could even have been in the Oscar conversation this year.  Black actors need jobs, roles, opportunities to share their gifts with the world.

One last note: let's not forget that this conversation needs to be extended beyond black actors.  Where's the love for Benicio Del Toro in "Sicario"?  Not to mention...actually...I can't think of any others...

The Big Short

One of the pleasures of "The Wolf of Wall Street" was its devil-may-care attitude towards the details of financial fraud.  Several times in the film, Leonardo DiCaprio turns to the camera and begins explaining some nefarious scheme of his character, stockbroker Jordan Belfort.  He quickly abandons his tutorials, though, and says something like "Who cares?  The point is it was illegal and it made me lots of money."  "Wolf" isn't concerned with the minutiae.  It's more interested in laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.  We let crooks like Belfort get away with it because we want to believe we really can get rich quick.

On the other hand, Adam McKay, writer-director of "The Big Short," believes that the devil is in the details.  He was furious enough to actually learn about what Wall Street was doing.  Not many have done so; after all, who wants to learn what a collateralized debt obligation is?  Let the bankers do the banking.  But it's this technical jargon, McKay believes, that allows the financial sector to get away with robbery in plain sight.

And so "The Big Short" is here to explain to us what a synthetic credit default swap is.  It sounds more like an NPR segment than a Hollywood film.  Not to worry, though; McKay has plenty of sugar to help the medicine go down.  He enlists celebrities such as Margot Robbie, floating in a bubble bath, to help explain these terms.  ("Wolf," of course, gave us Robbie in...nothing.)

Oh, and there's a story too, with a colorful cast of characters:

• Steve Carell plays an irate hedge fund manager betting against the market.  Michael Scott was excellent preparation for the role; Carell is just as boorish here, but you forgive him because he happens to be right.
• Christian Bale does his typical Method-y thing as Dr. Michael Burry, the savant who foresaw the mortgage market's collapse.  It isn't too gimmicky.
• Ryan Gosling plays a Deustche Bank trader who doesn't care that the market will tank, so long as he can make money off it.  Gosling barely tries, but he's so charismatic that it doesn't matter.  He can sleepwalk through the role and get away with it.
• Brad Pitt plays a mentor to two young investors who get wind of the coming storm.  As with "12 Years a Slave," Pitt has taken a small part in this film to help secure financing.  It's great that he helps get good movies made.  But is it too much to ask for him to put in a little effort for his 10 minutes of screen time?

The film threads a nice needle, showing how the crisis was both foreseeable and largely unanticipated.  The truth was out there.  But finding it took both hard work and a willingness to face the reality that every party has an end.  Most would prefer to keep dancing.

In the movie's most effective sequence, Carell and his staff travel to Florida to get the facts on the ground.  They talk to mortgage brokers who brag about seeking out the largest possible credit risks--bigger commissions, after all!  To Wall Street, mortgages had become nothing more than numbers concerning faraway people in flyover country.  McKay puts a human face on the crisis.

So what's the proper response to our immoral financial sector?  The amusement of "Wolf" or the indignation of "The Big Short"?  They say that comedy equals tragedy plus time.  I don't think it's a coincidence that the events depicted in "Wolf" occurred a decade earlier, or that Scorcese has a couple extra decades of perspective compared to McKay.  Perhaps one day we'll look back on all this and laugh.  It's about the only solace we can take from the rapaciousness of Wall Street.

Youth

There's a fine line between profundity and cliche.  Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino walks it like a pro.  He understands that the key is to strip things away to their essence.  He doesn't pretend to have any great key to the mysteries of life.  The honesty is refreshing.

"Youth" is "about" several people vacationing at a spa in the Swiss Alps: a retired composer (Michael Caine), his daughter (Rachel Weisz), an aging director (Harvey Keitel), and an actor (Paul Dano).  The daughter goes through a divorce with the director's son.  The director struggles to write his new movie.  The composer demures on offers for performances and memoirs.

But this all makes the movie seem far more conventional than it is.  Typically, Sorrentino presents a spare scene of dialogue, ending on a key line.  He then shows images from around the spa.  Frequently he blasts in music--his taste is terrific--to create an atmosphere, only to suddenly cut it out.  When all else fails, he's not afraid to lean on some gorgeous images of the Alps.

Sorrentino's an experimenter, and not everything works.  (A character based on Diego Maradona, with a giant tattoo of Marx on his back, comes to mind.)  Like Altman, Sorrentino discovers the movie as he goes.  But he's got a destination in mind.  For a while, it seems like this movie has no point, until suddenly it does: you either keep looking forward, or your die.

Steve Jobs

"Steve Jobs" is not a great movie.  But it is a great accomplishment.  In its own way, this film is as ridiculous as any of the "Lord of the Rings" movies.  Steve Jobs faces a series of personal and professional crises, all of which conveniently occur in the moments leading up to three of his biggest product launches.  It's an idea that only someone as megalomaniacal as Aaron Sorkin--or Steve Jobs--could come up with and pull off.

For a movie that's basically nothing but people talking, "Steve Jobs" has tremendous energy.  Sorkin piles scene on top of scene.  Sometimes he nests one scene within another.  Director Danny Boyle was an inspired to choice for the material.  Sometimes he can try too hard, but here his fussiness is essential to keep the movie from feeling too stagey.  He injects the film with adrenaline in a host of ways.  Some are obvious, as when he puts together zippy montages to introduce each of the three set pieces.  Some are minor, as when Jobs pauses before pounding on a door and marching in to confront an associate.  And some are subtle.  Boyle is constantly cutting across the axis--switching the side from which he's filming a two shot--in this film.  It's a technique that's become overused in the last few years, but the confrontational nature of many of the conversations here demands it.  In one sequence, Boyle cuts back across the axis for every line of dialogue to show the discordance between two characters.

Michael Fassbender deserves enormous credit for his unshowy performance as Jobs.  Fassbender understands that true confidence isn't demonstrative; you don't have to prove you're the smartest person in the room when you already know it.  He quietly helps carry this movie.

"Steve Jobs" is a complex juggling act between Sorkin, Boyle, and Fassbender.  It's impressive to behold.