99 Homes (2015)

[Corvus]

Movie about foreclosures and very to the core, recommend it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh0piQN1_LY



Spoiler:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/05/25/99-homes-a-timely-terrifically-acted-moral-nail-biter---review/



The actor Michael Shannon is known for playing serial killers, holy fools and intergalactic warlords, but in 99 Homes, the new film from Ramin Bahrani, he plays an estate agent – which has really allowed him to ratchet the sociopathy up a notch.

Rick Carver (Shannon) works in the suburbs of Orlando, Florida, and specialises in foreclosures. When a homeowner can’t pay their mortgage, Carver swoops in to handle the eviction on the bank’s behalf: an ugly business for which he’s handsomely rewarded. His company then sells on the empty houses to investors, where even greater profits are at stake.

The U.S., to Carver, is a country nourished by self-cannibalisation. The only dependable way to provide for you and yours is to take from them and theirs; what’s more, the system was designed for it. “America doesn’t bail out losers,” he says. “It’s a nation that was built on bailing out winners. The country is rigged.”


The film is set in 2010, at the height of the foreclosure crisis: for Carver, this is boom time, a new Gold Rush and a chance to set himself up for life. When we first get a sustained look at him in action, his victim is Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), a construction worker who’s labouring under the belief that progress involves building things up.

Carver arrives on the doorstep, confronts Dennis, his mother (Laura Dern) and son (Noah Lomax) and within minutes, they’re standing on the pavement, watching the front lawn being slowly covered over by a drift of their belongings. The scene is fast and gut-twistingly tense; and over before anyone’s had time to think.

The Nashes decamp to a motel, but Dennis won’t let the matter lie, and drives to Carver’s office to confront his goons: the estate agent is quietly impressed by his nerve, and offers him work. At first it’s odd-jobs around seized homes being prepared for sale, but soon enough he’s also carrying out evictions, and the wages allow him to provide once more for his mother and son.

What makes this so thrilling as drama isn’t simply the fact of Dennis’s corruption but the speed with which it happens. In a deeply plausible, surprisingly un-filmic way, he only gets around to wrestling with his conscience when it’s too late for the result to make any odds.

Perhaps Bahrani is invoking Brian De Palma’s Scarface in the Florida setting: certainly, Carver’s nihilistic state-of-the-nation rants recall Tony Montana in his self-actualising pomp, and Shannon delivers them with Tyrannosaur charisma. He and Garfield are an ideal double-act, and the possibility of a late Damascene conversion for either man seems unlikely, but never out of the question.

Bahrani has long been intrigued by the way an economic downturn can send ethics and empathy into freefall, although his last feature, At Any Price, felt like something of a creative slump. This is a ripe and vigorous return to form: a timely, terrifically acted moral nail-biter.

America was built on bailing out winners, by rigging a nation of the winners, for the winners, by the winners

Not just America, whole world as a matter of fact.

 

[Mark]

I saw this movie several weeks ago, it was disturbing how ruthless the main guy was. And I'd bet it's the same in reality for many of those types of people.

 

[Corvus]

I saw this movie several weeks ago, it was disturbing how ruthless the main guy was. And I'd bet it's the same in reality for many of those types of people.

Carver guy was a sociopath, which is seen in his behavior and when he tells about his father working on a construction site, hurting himself, so from that maybe came some kind of childhood trauma and fear of that kind of life of suffering to put meat on the table and seeing there is no justice so what is the point which comes from pure materialistic view of life as result of ignorance or lack of knowledge or being although there was clearly intelligence present. And the more deeper and longer it constructs itself through life it s harder to deconstruct later, as he said the first time is the hardest later you become numb, desensitization like in the military. But it finds the most fertile ground with much less internal conflict among those who are emptier inside.

Other movies that I also recommend:

Stone(2010)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evhh3NE3fyw

Spoiler

Symbolic name but trailer does not really get to the point, it is about transformation and there is also mentioned deeper truth with narrative at one point "did you know you started out as a stone, your soul started as a mineral, then it was reincarnated as a plant, fish, bird, animal and so on, then here to be human, etc..." and there is a mysterious bee, another symbolism.

Enemy(2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJuaAWrgoUY

Spoiler

This is a movie that begins with the epigraph, “Chaos is order yet undeciphered” (a line from José Saramago’s The Double, the novel on which the movie is based). Though the movie may appear inexplicable at first, this epigraph suggests that we can make some sense of it, some order, if we just know how it can be deciphered. And Villeneuve has backed this up. In an interview with the Huffington Post, he said, “If you look at Enemy again, you can see that everything has an answer and a meaning.”

Major spoilers ahead, obviously.

I’ll offer a theory. While Enemy has been billed as an erotic thriller and a doppelganger movie—and it is both those things—I think ultimately it’s a parable about what it’s like to live under a totalitarian state without knowing it. It’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie in which you don’t even realize it’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie until the end—until it’s too late for our hero. In this case, the body snatchers just happen to be giant spiders.

When we meet our hero, Adam Bell, he is lecturing about the ways that totalitarian states keep the people down. The Romans used entertainment, he reminds us, “bread and circuses.” This recalls the opening scene of the movie, which takes place at a sex show. There we see our first spider. Anthony, Adam’s twin, goes to these shows (we can distinguish the two because Anthony wears a wedding ring), and we later learn from his doorman that men will do anything to see them. Anthony’s profession also allies him with the entertainment industry—he’s an actor.

Adam, on the other hand, doesn’t much like entertainment. He, a professor, represents education, which, as his lectures remind us, totalitarian governments try to keep down. “You don’t go to the movies, do you?” his coworker asks him, out of nowhere, and he answers, “I don’t really like movies.” Indeed, as we’ve seen in a series of recurring shots, his interests don’t seem to involve anything more than lecturing about totalitarian regimes, drinking wine, and having sex with his girlfriend.

But the coworker is leading him somewhere. Adam figures he must have asked because he must be thinking of a specific movie. “You brought it up, and I thought maybe you had a recommendation.” The movie the coworker recommends ultimately leads Adam to discover what’s actually going on around him.

There are subtle clues about what’s going on in the city from the very beginning. We see low-angle shots lingering on the streetcar wires that make them look like spider webs.

Bell passes a graffitied image of a businessman giving a fascist Roman salute.

Anthony gets into a fight in the car with Adam’s girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent)—“You don’t think I’m a man?” he says—which leads to a terrible crash, and the camera slowly zooms in on a crack in the windshield that resembles a spider web.

ess subtle, of course, is the shot of the giant spider hovering over the city.
 A version of this shot also appears on the poster, where, perhaps notably, the spider is superimposed over an image of Anthony. (We can tell it’s him from the leather jacket, something Adam never wears.) Between his appearance at the spiders-and-sex show at the beginning, Mary's accusations that he’s not a man, and the spider web Villeneuve shows us on his car window—not to mention that his wife turns out to be either a giant spider or perhaps a woman pregnant with one—Anthony clearly isn’t what he seems.



The central irony in all this is that even the main character, though he is an expert on the ways of totalitarian governments, doesn’t see the web that’s overtaken the city until he’s already stuck in it. As he says in the lecture, totalitarian states succeed because “they censor any means of individual expression” (my emphasis). When he finds out he has a double, that’s of course exactly what happens: He can never again be an individual.

While it’s surprising that Villeneuve and screenwriter Javier Gullón decided to turn an adaptation of The Double into a spider-infested parable about totalitarianism—at least according to my interpretation—it’s not completely random. Though the novel The Double doesn’t have any of this spider conspiracy, these themes were important to Saramago. When Saramago was 3 years old, a military coup overthrew the Portuguese government, and for the next 48 years, he lived under a fascist regime. His work frequently explores totalitarianism and his experiences under a fascist regime through metaphor and allegory. In 2007, he told the New York Times:



We live in a dark age, when freedoms are diminishing, when there is no space for criticism, when totalitarianism—the totalitarianism of multinational corporations, of the marketplace—no longer even needs an ideology, and religious intolerance is on the rise. Orwell’s ‘1984’ is already here.

Why spiders, specifically? It’s hard to say. There aren’t any eight-legged creatures in The Double. But there is this passage from Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which he weaves an elaborate metaphor comparing the fascist police and their allies to spiders:



There is no lack of spiders’ webs in the world, from some you escape, in others you die. The fugitive will find shelter in a boardinghouse under an assumed name, thinking he is safe, he has no idea that his spider will be the daughter of the landlady … a dedicated nationalist who will regenerate his heart and mind.

And where did the spiders come from? Why do fascist regimes arise again and again throughout history, in “a pattern,” as Adam reminds us? Enemy suggests that this tendency to create totalitarian regimes is part of human nature, that it comes from within us. After all, even Adam, the ostensible good twin, is an extremely flawed character—he sells out his girlfriend, cheats on her with another woman, and earlier he tries to rape her. As the movie goes on, he becomes more and more like Anthony. Villeneuve, who has otherwise been tight-lipped about his film, has said this about Enemy:
 “Sometimes you have compulsions that you can’t control coming from the subconscious … they are the dictator inside ourselves.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/03/14/enemy_movie_ending_explained_the_meaning_of_the_jake_gyllenhaal_and_denis.html

Maybe it is a more about dual nature, predator inside of us, spider being symbolism of matrix and control.

Knight of Cups (2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI2j1FHCjtM

Spoiler

Rick is a film screenwriter living in Los Angeles, California. While he's successful in his career, his life feels empty. Haunted by the death of one brother and the dire circumstances of the other, he finds temporary solace in the Hollywood excess that defines his existence. Women provide a distraction to the daily pain he must endure, and every encounter that comes his way brings him closer to finding his place in the world.

The film is divided into eight chapters (each named after a tarot card, except for the final chapter Freedom), plus a prologue, each loosely based around the central character's relationship with somebody in his life:

I. The Moon - Della (Imogen Poots), a rebellious young woman.

II. The Hanged Man - His brother Barry (Wes Bentley) and father Joseph (Brian Dennehy).

III. The Hermit - Tonio (Antonio Banderas), an amoral playboy.

IV. Judgement - His physician ex-wife Nancy (Cate Blanchett).

V. The Tower - Helen (Freida Pinto), a serene model.

VI. The High Priestess - Karen (Teresa Palmer), a spirited, playful stripper.

VII. Death - Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a woman he wronged in the past.

VIII. Freedom - Isabel (Isabel Lucas), an innocent who helps him see a way forward.