TONY ROBBINS: I AM NOT YOUR GURU

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Welcome!

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

Netflix audiences may bring a slew of casually-acquired preconceptions to Joe Berlinger’s Kool-Aid-consumed documentary about “life performance coach” extraordinaire Tony Robbins.

The film covers Robbins’s six-day “Date With Destiny” self-help seminar in Boca Raton, Florida. Though this doc initially comes across like a puff piece by the usually more rigorous Berlinger (see “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger"), the film effectively reveals what goes on at Robbins’s retreats.

You probably won’t pick up any shocking life-hack secrets you didn’t already know from listening to your favorite podcast series, but you will get a charge from the infectious energy on display. Tony Robbins is a monster ball of vim and vigor.

Paul Verhoeven and Werner Herzog look out. 

Famous (or infamous) for his ubiquitous self-help infomercials and celebrity status (for coaching celebs like Oprah, Princess Diana and Nelson Mandela), Tony Robbins puts his outsized personality to use with a 2,500-large crowd of attendees.

Years of delivering such impassioned talks has blown out Robbins’s voice to a rasp. With his giant 6’4” frame, the square-jawed Robins delivers his hyper-caring brand of pop psychology. He wants to end suffering for any human being he can. He considers his subjects’ biggest problem to be that they “think they shouldn’t have them [problems].”  

A handful of the anxious searchers in the packed audience get to enjoy a one-on-one session with the master in front of the whole group. Staff team leaders perform emotional triage to advance [possibly suicidal] attendees for top priority attention during the sessions.

Robbins’s impressive interactions with such audience members prompt some dramatic results. Still, you can’t help but feel like you’re witnessing a parlor trick. The format is clear; by tackling especially difficult cases Robbins rescues people in dire need of a strategy to get through whatever landmine-loaded reality they endure on an immediate basis. Urgency is a factor.

This town hall setting allows Robbins to infuse a new-agey rock ’n’ roll atmosphere (with the help of a high-tech production design and music).

Everyone here paid the seminar’s $5,000 fee. While that's a lot of bread, it’s still a fraction of what you would spend on a drug rehab program.

Tony Robbins appears to be a well-intentioned and effective force of nature. Early into the film we witness a conversation between Robbins and a twentysomething Euro kid with suicidal thoughts. Robbins uses dialectic jujitsu to disarm the young man by insulting the kid’s red tennis shoes.

His methods and career, based on lessons Robbins learned from the late motivational speaker Jim Rohn and from his involvement in John Grinder’s NLP (neurolinguistic programming) are that of a self-made-man whose force of will takes no prisoners. The culty aspects of the retreat are mitigated by the openness that Robbins exhibits throughout the week. Tony Robbins isn’t a guru; he just plays one in your mind.

Not Rated.  115 mins.

JFK — CLASSIC FILM PICK

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Welcome!

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

SMART NEW MEDIA PRESENTS

ColeSmithey.com

Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (1992) is a milestone filmic achievement based on New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Garrison’s tireless inquiry resulted in the indictment and 1969 trial of Clay Shaw — known as “Clem Bertrand” in the New Orleans gay underground where he held court with the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald during the summer of 1963.

With the aid of co-screenwriter Zachary Sklar, Oliver Stone builds the fact-based drama toward Bertrand’s trial to complete this film’s appropriately tempered thematic arc.  

In the best performance of his career, Kevin Costner expresses Jim Garrison’s keen sense of personal integrity to shed essential light on a carefully orchestrated murder whose executioners will likely only be discovered long after the last one has died.

Jim Garrison’s book “On the Trail of the Assassins,” and Jim Marrs’s “Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy,” provides the source material that Oliver Stone deftly manipulates with cinematic finesse.

A clip from Eisenhower’s famous 1961 farewell address, during which he warns of the military-industrial complex, sets the tone. The unknown distances between conspiracy theories and conspiracy facts create a wormhole that would have easily have swallowed a lesser filmmaker.

Stone shores up a veritable sea of conspiratorial facts (linked to the C.I.A., the F.B.I. the Secret Service, the U.S. military, and the Dallas Police Department) with a condensed cinematic rendering that does much more than just put names to faces.

The filmmaker contextualizes a “coup d'état” that was as devastating to American foreign policy as the murder of their 35^th President was to its citizens.

Gary Oldman’s spot-on portrayal of Lee Harvey Oswald shows the nimble CIA operative to have fit the bill of a patsy, the word that Oswald used to describe his detention to television cameras.

Systematic mishandling of evidence by the CIA, the Secret Service, the F.B.I., and by Dallas Police recur at a staggering rate. The CIA’s rerouting of Kennedy’s procession path at 11pm on the night before, to go past the crow’s nest-ready book depository reeks like week-old tuna.

Having served in battle in Viet Nam, the veteran soldier Stone has explained from his own experience in the military, it would take four cells of eight “mechanics” (a total of 32 agents) charged to carry out a mission they don’t comprehend until the last possible second. As with firing squads where all but one are firing blanks, none of the could-be assassins would even know if he fired the kill shot.

As more facts become known about the Kennedy assassination — through investigations such as the one performed in the documentary “JFK: The Smoking Gun” Oliver Stone’s “JFK” remains an important touchstone. Stone pulls out every trick in his arsenal of cinema vocabulary. The result is a fitting cinematic tribute to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and to Jim Garrison, two men cut from the same cloth of personal accountability.

Rated R. 189 mins.

SICARIO — CANNES 2015

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. Punk heart still beating.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

A disappointment from start to finish, Denis Villeneuve’s attempting-to-be-edifying international drug thriller fails miserably by the social realist parameters it portends to fulfill with macho quasi-military bombast and blood-splattered spectacle.

That most of the violence occurs in and around the notoriously deadly drug cartel-run city of Juarez, Mexico, serves as a surprisingly dull Third World window dressing.

The action picture, written by first-time screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, works better if you go into it looking for plenty of exploitation with your political propaganda du jour. The inherent racism comes gratis.

This is not Casta-Gavras’s 1969 leftist agitprop masterpiece “Z.” Nor is it Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers.” “Sicario” comes nowhere near the shrewd directness of those political thriller milestones.

SMART NEW MEDIA PRESENTS

ColeSmithey.com

Villeneuve has spoken on how “America believes it can solve problems outside of its borders with violence.” It’s a valid point, but Villeneuve celebrates the violence he abhors during explosive scenes of mass murder that arrive with a stupid post-9/11 message of “Don’t Fuck With Us” that echoes around the movie. That life is cheap to both sides of the drug wars is clear.

What isn’t is why we should care. Our collective subconscious understands that every “War” the US Government wages against anything it can get its bloody hands on is merely a money grab for the contractors who get the jobs and an ego boost for military officers out for promotions and who believe they are untouchable. America’s War on Drugs operates as a wholesale black market on an epic scale. Killing is written into the budget.

Considering that America is currently suffering more than one mass murder every single day of the year, I question what effect a film like “Sicario” will have on an American society that already fetishizes violence and guns on an obsessive level. Do we need more movies where an audience is made to watch dozens of human beings brutally shot or bombed to death for money or just a love of killing? Not so much.

Although handsomely filmed by renowned cinematographer Roger Deakins, “Sicario” is too thematically ambiguous for its own good or to be taken seriously as a meaningful piece of editorial commentary on America’s 40-plus-year corporate-branded War on Drugs. The film is content to posit that everyone on both sides of the American/Mexican Drug War is corrupt, save for one innocent but sturdy woman of ethics whose values change over the course of the story.

The movie tilts a sloppy glimpse of the rampant venality that permeates elite (FBI) anti-drug squads, like the one overseen by Defense Department contractor Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a dirty autonomous agent with a mean streak on a hair trigger.

Graver’s partner-in-crime is Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), the hitman (sicario) of the film’s title. Greed and revenge are the factors driving these cartoon creations of testosterone-and-steroid-laden characters.

Regardless of which government office is writing checks to these mercenaries, they act as free agents looking to line their pockets and kill men they stupidly believe are worse than they are. You have two well-armed gangs, but one is just a pinch more ferocious than the other. You can guess which side gets that honor.

The super-action dream team adopts newbie agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), although it’s never clear why such a group would recruit a new member in such a trial-by-fire fashion. Kate gets a crash course in the FBI’s secret methods of continuing their endless battle against Mexico’s brutal drug cartels. Nerve-wracking missions back and forth between Texas and Juarez allow for bullet-riddled scenes of ultra-violence and emotional and ethical crises for Kate.

When Kate asks Matt about their objective, he responds, “to dramatically overreact.” The line serves as an explicit theme line for the movie. Which doesn’t leave much room for a meaningful story.

Rated R. 121 mins.