Category Archives: Paul Dano

Movie Review: 12 Years a Slave

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Image via Salon

WARNING: Spoilers for real life. According to the Internet, this is now something I have to say. 

Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” is about as intense and emotionally devastating as you might expect. Then again, a drama about slavery probably couldn’t go any other way.

“12 Years a Slave” is a great film that I don’t think I can ever watch again. And that’s a compliment. It plays like a series of terrible atrocities that you wish you had never witnessed, but you feel like a different person for having viewed history from a new perspective.


It seems that Hollywood has finally gotten comfortable telling stories about America’s past with slavery. “12 Years a Slave” is based on a book that is based on a true story of an odd occurrence that was unfortunately not uncommon during one of America’s darkest times. Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a free black man from Saratoga. He is a husband, father, and talented violinist. One day, two white men who probably shouldn’t be trusted (re: they have facial hair) trick Solomon and sell him into slavery. If it takes a movie to make you realize how cruel slavery was, then you’re probably an idiot. If it took a movie to make you realize that something this cruel could actually happen to another human, then you’re probably me.

Image via Daily Princetonian. 

When I think of Solomon Northrup, I’m reminded of something Red said about Andy Dufresne in “The Shawshank Redemption”: “Some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.” During these next 12 years, Solomon deals with a series of cruel masters who beat him, manipulate him, and try to extinguish whatever hope might be left inside of him. But as they say in movies, you can’t lose your hope as long as you’re good at playing a musical instrument.

Under the direction of Steve McQueen, “12 Years a Slave” is one of the darkest period dramas I’ve ever seen. At times, it is less about hope and optimism and more about the pure will to survive. There is little talk of morality, just desperate people who will do literally anything they can to be free. The nicest man to take Solomon in (Benedict Cumberbatch) must let him go, as he feels he cannot keep him safe from those who want to hurt him. While “12 Years a Slave” is an emotional film, it does distance itself as much as possible, so as not to alter history. “12 Years a Slave is about witnessing, not changing, history.

Image via Collider

Despite this, McQueen is neither tasteless nor sadistic: he truly knows how to capture tragedy in unimaginably horrifying ways. One scene which involves an attempted punishment for disobedience (you’ll know which one it is when you see it) seems to go on forever. I wish I brought a stopwatch in to time the length of the shot, which gets more and more unbearable and threatening the longer it goes on. McQueen takes the elements of film (image, sound, time, etc.) and uses them masterfully.

“12 Years a Slave” brings up a lot of obvious points (slavery was bad; slaveowners were assholes), while also shedding new light on a part of history that was thought to be so well documented. “12 Years a Slave” is accurate until whoever the history equivalent of Neil deGrasse Tyson says otherwise. Either way, movies should be primarily about capturing the emotions associated with living during a certain period in history. All it takes is a scene where a mother is separated from her two children for another person’s financial benefit in order to get a sense of the cruelties of slavery.

“12 Years a Slave” also focuses on the slaveowners as well. Michael Fassbender is riveting as Edwin Epps, the man who would own Solomon for most of his time as a slave. He’s unpredictable, and lets his power go to his head just a little too much. Paul Dano, meanwhile, lets his Eli Sunday side come back in full form. The most powerful performance, however, comes from Ejiofor, who does so much acting simply with his eyes, which hide so much pain and longing. It’s truly beautiful and moving, and it works perfectly with McQueen’s directing. I sense many future collaborations between McQueen and a majority of the actors from this film.

It might seem difficult to drag yourself to a theater to watch a movie that is this uncompromisingly brutal. Just know that you will be part of an experience that will be talked about for years to come. McQueen defies the norms to make a movie that shouldn’t be defined as “feel-bad,” but also doesn’t resort to a happy ending that ties everything together too perfectly. In the end, one slave is safe, but that was sadly just one man who was able to walk free at that time. In the end, the hope in “12 Years a Slave” lies in the hindsight.

Brain Farts From The Edge

  • Great to see that Brad Pitt walked right off the set of “Inglourious Basterds” for this role, but replaced the mustache with one of those weird chin beards.
  • Speaking of Pitt, it’s funny that the producer would cast himself as the guy who saves the main character. Just saying.
  • Speaking of funny accents, I don’t know what Benedict Cumberbatch was going for. Sure, he wanted to be Southern, but there was still a little bit of British left in there. My theory is that it was a compromise, as Hollywood believes that anyone born before the year 1950 had a British accent (I’m looking at you, “Hugo”). 
  • I should probably write a second post about this film. Soon.
  • I don’t want to Armond White this here, but there were tiny flaws here and there, but definitely not enough to ruin the experience. Mainly, the villains often bordered on cartoonish, but luckily nobody pushed it too far over the line. However, this is a true story, so maybe their actions speak more to the evils of slavery than to the possible flaws in the script. Just an interesting thought to ponder.
  • I don’t know if I am alone here, but there were several occasions throughout the film where I just wish Django would show up.
  • The South was an unjust place. However, McQueen finds time to focus on the beauty of the region. From fields of cotton to jungles of cane to swamps, “12 Years a Slave” had some of the best cinematography of the year.
  • Taran Killam is in this for some reason. You’re awesome Taran, but this casting decision will forever confuse me. 
  • Paul Giamatti. Man, calm down and drink some wine. 
  • Favorite note I took during the movie: “Slaveowners were weird.”
  • I finally figured out where Salvatore Romano has been hiding all of these years. For those of you who don’t watch “Mad Men,” Salvatore Romano is not Ray Romano’s cousin. 
  • The most important note I have ever taken: When he puts on a bandana, Michael Fassbender looks like Chris Meloni in “Wet Hot American Summer.”

Movie Review: Looper

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Director Rian Johnson is exactly what movies need. Perhaps the best way to break Hollywood out of cliche land is to play into the most typical of genre conventions and then turn them completely on their heads.

“Looper” must be the work of someone who doesn’t finish until every little detail is drawn out, and every possible subplot comes full circle. There’s a lot to get through and a lot to sort out, but the fact that the ending pulls it off in an unpredictable way makes it work all the better.


“Looper” might be the first rurban (rural and urban) futuristic dystopia I’ve seen on film. It is not set in New York, Los Angeles, or Washington, but rather an unnamed metropolis and its outskirts in Kansas. It also occupies many different times in the future. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a Looper. In the future, time travel is discovered and very illegal. The mob sends people from the future into the past and it is the job of the Looper to kill them and dispose of the body. Basically, the Looper stands in the field and waits for the body to be zapped to them.

However, there’s a twist to being a Looper: your job doesn’t last long. Because of how illegal time travel is in the future, a Looper must kill their own future self at some point. After doing this, they get a big payday and get to live happily off of it for 30 years until they are kidnapped and brought back into the past. This process is called “closing the loop.” I’m always a sucker for creative wordplay.

I like films which hinge their character’s personalities on their careers, and only a certain kind of person is fit to be a Looper. A Looper must act on the fly, never hesitate, and be prepared to die. You can see this in how Joe shoots every person that is zapped to him without even thinking. However, when his future self (Bruce Willis) is zapped to him, he hesitates. It doesn’t feel like one of those inexplicable movie moments when you wonder “why would he hesitate now?”. On the contrary, it feels very human, as if no one can know what death is like until they actually face it.

Yet, despite an expiration date, Loopers never lose their free will. One Looper (Paul Dano) lets his older self go. Meanwhile, young Joe has no control over the reckless and unruly older Joe; his future self escapes into Young Joe’s present.

While hunting down future Joe and attempting to close his own loop, many other loops are opened, and historical events are altered. “Looper” establishes from the very beginning that time travel is possible and because of that, it never tries to explain it. A story that tries to explain time travel can have difficulty working. Time travel involves many disciplines (philosophy, physics, etc.) that I have only limited knowledge of. Watching a film explain it is like being in a complicated lecture with a professor who won’t explain his notes. “Looper” is not about how time travel came about, but rather what potential consequences it can have.

Keep that in mind when you see “Looper.” Some of the time-altering sequences threw me off guard at first, but just keep in mind that the most accomplished part of the film is that it assumes that the audience is smart enough to at least try and figure it out on its own.

Now that you know that there’s more to “Looper” than untangling mysteries, you can appreciate the immense detail put into this world. I believe this is in part what will make it so memorable. Even the guns that the Loopers use (blunderbusses) are instrumental to the story. In this future, China is the new world leader. This splicing in of timeliness made some people in the audience chuckle, but it made me think of “Blade Runner” creating a future that was heavily influenced by Japan, which was world leader at the time. Like “Blade Runner,” “Looper” can be seen as a reflection not just of how we feel the future will be, but how we feel the present is.

Of course, much has been said about Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s physical transformation into a younger Bruce Willis. This is a great feat for the makeup department. However, Gordon-Levitt pulls it off by actually morphing himself into Willis. Apparently, he only watched recent movies that Willis starred in to prepare for the role. That way, he could understand what Willis would become, as opposed to only who he used to be.

It is kind of an amazing to see two actors play the exact same person sitting in a room together. Watching old and young Joe trying to piece memories together past and present over steak and eggs in a diner is hands-down one of my favorite scenes of any film this year. It is so well directed and written that it ends up being intriguing and even funny all at once.

Then, Johnson makes an unusual choice for a film like this. Instead of speeding it up and constantly raising the stakes and the action, he slows it down. Joe still needs to clear his name. He seeks the notorious gangster and boss of all Loopers, who is named The Rainmaker, as a young boy, and attempts to kill him. Joe leaves the city and heads out to the country, where he finds the young boy living on a farm with his very protective mother (a nearly unrecognizable Emily Blunt). This section of the film might not be the most breathlessly exciting, but it is where it gains its emotional weight. At its heart, “Looper” is the story of what kind of person it takes to make the world a better place.

Rian Johnson seems like one of those filmmakers who is so well versed in cinema. At times, the characters of “Looper” communicate as if they are in a film noir, a convention Johnson also used in “Brick.” Then, it even becomes supernatural (in a way that I will not spoil). The violence in it is not glorified, but it is certainly stylized. Part of the sick, twisted fun of being a filmmaker is discovering all of the different angles you can use to show someone getting shot in the chest.

The most gloriously cinematic part of “Looper” is that pretty much everything that is brought into play at one part of the story is brought back again later on. “Looper” is a meta story because just as Joe must close his own loop, the film must payoff all of its plants and in effect, close its own loops. “Looper” takes place in the year 2044 and shows a world of hovering cars, nearly microscopic cell phones, and drugs in the form of eye drops. “Looper” is not suggesting that time travel will necessarily be discovered by the year 2044, but what it does suggest is that greed and selfishness can lead to an endless cycle of misery. And eyedrops aren’t enough to cure it.

Time Travel Confusion Scale: More than “Back to the Future,” but less than “Lost”

Also, forgot to mention this in my review: Jeff Daniels gives a fantastic performance as the surprisingly zen crime boss. He is currently having the career comeback that I never knew he deserved. 

Movie Review: Ruby Sparks

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“Ruby Sparks” begins with the most terrifying moment in any writer’s life: the moment of staring down a blank page. It is also an exciting moment, because a story is about to be born. But, it is more terrifying because now you have to think of ideas, and a lot of them will end up being terrifying.

If this quirky (that’s a very good word to use here) film does anything right, it is capturing what it feels like to create a unique character, and then have the character and story engulf your own life, and become a part of it.


Once you write someone out on a piece of paper, it’s hard to erase them. That’s what Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano) will find out as he crafts his dream woman. Calvin is a novelist who peaks early and has trouble replicating his earlier success. He also has a troubled love life. As in, he doesn’t have one. Calvin’s brother Harry (Chris Messina), who’d have been put to much better use if he served a purpose other than exposition, is there to constantly remind him that he could have a good relationship if he just went to the gym more often.

But Calvin’s only company is a small dog he bought to make friends. With great responsibility comes great irony, and the timid dog runs away whenever people try to pet it. In his loneliness, Cal keeps dreaming up a woman. Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan), a red head with personality, inexplicably pops out of his dreams and into reality.

“Ruby Sparks” rightfully follows the Woody Allen principle, in that it doesn’t try to explain why something so crazy happened. All that matters is how people reacted to it. Imagine if they spent all of “The Purple Rose of Cairo” explaining how someone could leap out of a screen at a movie theater. Likewise, imagine if they spent all of “Ruby Sparks” trying to explain how Ruby came to life. An event like that almost defies all explanation. Luckily, we get none. Unfortunately, Calvin does have to spend a lot of time convincing people that Ruby came from his imagination. Understandable, I guess.

“Ruby Sparks” is a fantasy in every sense of the word. Not just because an imaginary person cannot simply come to life, but it is every male writer’s desire to write a plausible female character. But there is a catch to the creation of Ruby. Calvin must write down everything Ruby does, and every emotion that she feels. That might sound like every man’s dream, but it also means that one wrong word can send Ruby into a tailspin. That also happens to be another way that the film rightfully captures the writing process, as crafting a flawless sentence takes more thought than one would ever think.

I heard a discussion on a podcast once which postulated that anytime there is a story-within-a-story, the story within must be bad in order to bring out how good the actual story is. I always thought this was a good and logical rule, but “Ruby Sparks” breaks from it and mostly makes it work. Ruby is, by most standards, a good character: she is well developed, unique, and three dimensional. She has quirks and personality that go well beyond the surface. At one point, a certain character tells Calvin that all he really ever wanted was to have a relationship with himself. Calvin at first seems as blank as the Kubrickian white walls of his house. Yet, we find that Ruby is literally a chunk of him unleashed.

“Ruby Sparks” is the kind of risky story that Hollywood rarely takes its chances on anymore. Yet, it isn’t totally radical. The idea behind it is a nearly flawless movie concept. When someone asks what would happen if a writer’s creation came to life? my immediate response is what? instead of who cares. The idea feels a little bit like a throwback to the screwball comedies of yesteryear (in fact, it’s poster feels reminiscent to that of “Arsenic and Old Lace”). A throwback of this kind would include a light-hearted and funny spirit and a smart story. “Ruby Sparks” has the latter but oftentimes, it lacks the former.

The main flaw of “Ruby Sparks” is that it sometimes seems to forget that it is a comedy and leans towards too much self-seriousness. I appreciate that it tries to go for a darker twist, but it never prepares us for it. Calvin’s visit to his mother and step father goes on for a little too long, and doesn’t serve much for the rest of the film. However, it was really funny when Antonio Banderas put his glasses on the dog. Things get darkest and strangest towards the end. At that point, it almost lost me. There is a scene that should be there. It shows how Calvin tries too hard to control everything in his life down to his relationships. However, the way that it is presented feels more off-putting than it should.

Obligatory mention that Antonio Banderas is the Nasonex Bee.

“Ruby Sparks” is the first film that director duo Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have made since 2006′s “Little Miss Sunshine.” Here, they maintain that same attention to little details. Yet, “Ruby Sparks” lacks that same balance of dark humor which separated “Little Miss Sunshine” from every other indie road trip film. “Ruby Sparks” is about halfway to being a dark romantic comedy that comments on romantic comedies that is unlike any other romantic comedy.

Zoe Kazan, who plays the titular Ruby, wrote the script. When looking at it through that lens, the film becomes a little more meta, and I appreciate it more. Perhaps the fact that a woman wrote a well thought out male character who wrote a well thought out female character means that perhaps gender doesn’t (or shouldn’t) matter so much anymore in Hollywood. Maybe the whole Battle of the Sexes (another feature of screwball) has finally ended. However, movies would be a lot funnier if kept going on.