18. It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012, Don Hertzfeldt)
17. Zardoz (1974, John Boorman)
15. Show Boat (1936, James Whale)
Thursday, December 31, 2015
25 Favorite New-to-Me Movies of 2015
Puppet Show: ANOMALISA
Anomalisa is a
small movie set mostly in one hotel room over the course of one night, focused
claustrophobically on one man’s self-important feelings of loneliness and dejection.
It also manages to be a story that could only be told through animation. That’s
certainly not a pair of cinematic ideas you see every day. Call it stop-motion
mumblecore, I suppose, if you’re fumbling for a taxonomic foothold. It follows
intricately manipulated puppets, human figures at once totally obviously fake
and uncannily real, flickers of subtle emotion and natural gestures behind soft
textures and noticeable seams. The main character is a motivational speaker
(David Thewlis) who is deep inside an impenetrable fog of sadness and melancholy,
solipsistic narcissism mixed with downbeat misery. We watch as he stays in a
hotel, a perfect dollhouse recreation of humdrum quotidian details, trying to
avoid contemplating his unhappiness.
He has ceased engaging with the world outside his head in any
meaningful way. Part of his problem is seeing everyone else as an
undifferentiated sea of boring people hardly worth considering as individuals.
Driving the point home, every other puppet has the same face, and speaks with
the voice of Tom Noonan, sounding unusually soft and dull. The fog threatens to
lift when the speaker meets a shy woman who passes the time chatting with him,
first in the hotel bar, then in his room. She’s not like everyone else in his
eyes. Her face looks unlike the others’. And her voice is not the dry monotone
of strangers and family alike, but a hesitant and warm lilting Jennifer Jason
Leigh speaking. They stay up talking and drinking, drawing closer and more
intimate as the night goes on. They may be animated, but they connect on
something like a human level.
And so the movie proceeds as a tiny, contained talky
character piece with subtext laid out on the surface through consciously
artificial but fairly low energy style. Written and co-directed by Charlie
Kaufman (whose tangled, layered, high-concept screenplays looped so strangely
and pleasingly in Being John Malkovich,
Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) the film represents his most
restrained narrative ideas – a simple night of connection temporarily curing
loneliness before an ultimate relapse into disconnection – told through obvious
metaphor. Like his directorial debut, Synecdoche,
New York, a wild, sprawling, and odd contemplation of mortality and thwarted
ambition, Anomalisa has a precisely
calibrated feeling of tracing endlessly through a man’s troubled mind. However,
it’s much smaller, more contained, less strange – an unfolding emotional and
psychological breakdown, but one of quiet desperation.
Working with stop-motion director Duke Johnson (probably
best known for two claymation episodes of the unsustainable sitcom Community), Kaufman creates a film
that’s alive when the man and the woman have their alone time together in
conversation that’s tender and surprisingly real. The disjunction in seeing
puppet people share convincing and adult emotional terrain together is both
weirdly touching and a little funny, never more so than in a sweet a cappella
rendition of a Cyndi Lauper song. But as Kaufman backs away from a more
literal flavor into something more abstract – listen for Noonan’s voice
filtering through in a sad fading of individuality – the movie becomes both
more and less interesting.
Hermetically sealed and quietly felt, it’s a movie most true
in moments between two people talking, and most false when it’s all supposed to
match up with the overarching metaphor. Asking questions about what it means to
be human through the plastic visages of unreal people, it finds only
elaborately produced overfamiliarity. The whole thing is filled with awkward
silences and padded with tedious normal tasks laboriously realistically
portrayed. The imagery is so spare and normal it could be unusually detailed animatics
for a live action shoot. It’s strange, a lot of work to detail and animate a
world that’s basically like our own, for no reason other than to support the
elaborate metaphor for self-inflicted misanthropic isolation on display. Tom
Noonan playing all but two characters, every man, woman, and child, simply
wouldn’t fly in live action, but here erodes any sense of connection to emotional
reality anyway. It's mixture of real fake locations and fake real emotions left me cold.
It’s a movie concerned with a man’s sadness, and finds it
all very poignant how he can’t even selfishly use a woman’s company on a
business trip to break him away from his dull suburban family life, when really
he’s self-absorbed. I was sold on the dispiriting soul-crushing mood, but not
so much on why it’s supposed to be inherently interesting to find a man trapped
in his own sad circle of cold detachment. Sad sack misanthropic self-help
expert can’t help himself. Oh, the irony. There’s only so much sad puppet man
moping I could take. Ultimately, Anomalisa
is one of those movies that is exactly and completely the thing it wants to
be. That thing just isn’t for me. It drifted away from my interest as it
followed its hollow obsessions into emotional tedium.
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
The Deadly Companions: THE HATEFUL EIGHT
Quentin Tarantino’s films are unfailingly concerned with
using impeccable craft – sharp widescreen blocking, showy camera moves, nesting
doll narrative structure – to show off his video store savant chops. Each new
effort is an excuse to raid the cabinets of his genre knowledge: gangster
pictures, heist movies, blaxploitation films, kung fu cinema, spaghetti Westerns,
World War II epics, car chase actioners, and Grindhouse exploitation flicks. He
loves the idea of movies almost as much as actually having made a movie. His
latest is The Hateful Eight, a
blending of a Sergio Corbucci snow Western and an Agatha Christie locked-room
mystery. It’s also easily identifiable as a Tarantino picture, not just in its
predictable mixture of inspirations, but in concerning itself with secrets and
revenge, violence and profanity, chatty killers and Rubik’s Cube plotting tied
up in a bow made from faux-vintage 70’s tics. By now you should know exactly what
to expect out of his films.
A Tarantino film always features long talkative sequences of
deferred suspense slowly building to shocking outbursts of violence. It forms
the backbone of his best pictures. (Inglorious
Basterds, for example, is a
cascading collection of perfectly structured chatty setpieces.) With The Hateful Eight he makes an entire
picture out of one enclosed talkathon. Set in the years following the Civil
War, at a remote roadhouse in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, a bounty hunter
(Kurt Russell) and his captive (Jennifer Jason Leigh) are trapped in a blizzard.
Stuck waiting out the storm with an eclectic group of strangers – a rival
bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson), a stagecoach driver (James Parks), a hangman
(Tim Roth), a cowboy (Michael Madsen), an elderly Confederate veteran (Bruce
Dern), a Mexican proprietor (Demian Bichir), and an unpersuasive rookie sheriff
(Walton Goggins) – he’s convinced one of them is secretly scheming to spring
his prisoner. Each is an opposite of some sort to another, a tangle of
conflicts and grievances ready to boil over.
The ensemble is Tarantino’s most derivative, from Jackson as
essentially an older, chattier Django
Unchained to Roth in a role that sounds written for Christoph Waltz. They,
and the rest, are types and remain so, conduits for Tarantino’s words and pawns
in his plot. At least the cast is made up of dependable character actors who
are relishing the opportunity to speak elongated, dense, complicated paragraphs
of chewy dialogue. The performances are crackling, but it’s Tarantino’s shaggiest,
emptiest script, his thinnest idea stretched across three hours. Maybe that
part won’t feel quite so acute years from now, removed from the elaborate White
Elephantine presentation and promotion, conspicuously hyping connection to
canonical old school epics like Ben-Hur
through its 70mm format and reviving (sort of) the roadshow concept, from
overture and intermission to the commemorative booklet. It’s less and more than
all that, some of his sharpest direction married to his most hollow story.
Set almost entirely in a small indoor space with a raging
blizzard outside, there’s a great sense of claustrophobic paranoia (echoes of The Things, emphasized with an ominous Morricone score) as the tough men size each
other up, and the captured woman quietly looks for a way out of her chains. She
knows who’s there to help her, but she doesn’t let on, both to keep his cover
and to keep the audience’s guessing game going. It’s fun watching the other
characters try to figure it out for themselves, a neat little mystery primed to
explode. Cinematographer Robert Richardson (in his fifth collaboration with
Tarantino) executes tight and elegant formal control, staging varied and
interesting angles within the confined space, juxtaposing it with blindingly
white vistas of howling winds and galloping horses. It breathes with lengthy
takes and long looks, not exactly slow cinema, but of a relaxed pace that
recalls, say, Blake Edwards’s unusual 1971 film Wild Rovers in its easygoing Western danger. Nothing like a
Tarantino picture to make one want to scrape the back of the brain for obscure
genre comparison points.
My attention did not drift once during the extended runtime.
He’s too good a craftsman and has too good a cast trapped in a gripping hook
for that to happen. But I did find myself questioning why I had to be watching
it. All Tarantino films deal with “edgy” material, that is to say uncomfortable
subject matter (the holocaust, slavery, and so on) used for genre ends and political
points, loaded up with bloodshed and profanity in overtly movie-ish ways. But Hateful Eight is barely engaging in any
serious ideas beyond “people can be awful,” and isn’t using any of the inherent
subtextual tensions to meaningfully add to the suspense or the drama. It’s merely
cheap offense muddying an otherwise engaging and entertaining experience.
Despite a black bounty hunter and Confederate veterans
cooped up together, it has only fleeting serious thoughts about race, and
despite the one woman in the bunch being a villain (we’re told she’s bad, but
never why until late in the game) gender rarely overtly enters the question.
It’s a movie that’s just out to tell its simple, nihilistic little story
(everyone has their hateful moments) in a complicated, drawn-out way,
exploiting hot-button ideas with no intention of using them for more than
uncomfortable shocks. At least the plotting is reasonably compelling, and the mystery
engaging enough. It’s sometimes fun, and other times nasty, but the two were
mostly mutually exclusive here in my eyes. But being so long and so well
constructed it had plenty of time after nearly every instant that lost me to
win me back.
The film has a wicked mean streak, with slurs spat out for
comic effect, a woman repeatedly battered for punctuation and punchlines, and
an extended rape anecdote staged for queasy laughs. (That it probably didn’t
really happen, and is instead a story told to make another character mad,
doesn’t blunt the cackling glee with which the devastating act is visualized
for our benefit.) The movie is willing to toss aside any possible avenues of
empathy in order to go for a brutal moment. It’s an unserious lark with serious
violations and sadism on its mind, feinting at heavy ideas to fill the bitter
hollow pit in its core. The movie wraps up with Tarantino’s usual gnarly
violence, cartoonish and self-satisfied gobs of gore spraying out from the cast
members one by one. It’s a long-delayed payoff – half exciting, half disturbing
– for so much talky, sick tension.
A release of a sort, predictable but vivid and full of his
typical surprise kills, the climax also deflates suspense and danger,
especially as many fatal shots are played for cruel jokes (even when it happens
to characters we’re basically rooting for). It matches the amped up ugliness of
the subtext, and the relentlessness with which most of the gooiest gore effects
are inflicted upon women and people of color in the cast (most of them in a depressing
mass murder flashback). The Hateful Eight
is disturbingly easy, and often entertaining, to watch, but hard to indulge,
playing with painful cruelty for light distraction. Unlike his last few films,
where violence is modulated and contained within a moral and pointed context,
here it is unmoored, grotesque, deadening. The movie is compelling but
difficult, a pointed display of American bloodlust and prejudice that ends up
grooving on such nastiness.
Sunday, December 27, 2015
Smell of Success: JOY
Joy is an inventive young woman with her dreams on hold, a
real George Bailey with no angel coming to her rescue. She’s single-handedly
holding her family together at the expense of her own ambitions. She wants to
make useful things, objects that’ll be admired and owned by everyone, but in
reality she’s stuck in a dead-end minimum wage job, having skipped college to
help her parents. They’re all just barely getting by. But, when inspiration
strikes, she scrapes together her courage and resources to build a prototype of
a self-wringing mop. (It’s also machine washable, a nice feature.) This Miracle
Mop could be her ticket to success. A capitalist parable as feminist
empowerment, David O. Russell’s Joy, loosely
based on the real mop’s inventor, is
the sort of story we’re used to seeing men enact. Take Citizen Kane, or The
Godfather, or countless other canonical classics of business acumen and its
costs. But here the narrative is a woman’s, a perspective that’s long existed
in this area, but gone woefully underrepresented in movies like this.
We meet Joy through the eyes of her grandmother (Diane Ladd),
a kind and encouraging woman who tells her little granddaughter that she’ll do
great things with her life. Ladd narrates the film, giving it a slightly unreal
glow, like a heartfelt business biography picture book read with grandmotherly
warmth. By the time Joy is a young woman (played by Jennifer Lawrence), she’s
trying to run a sprawling, eccentric household with meager emotional and
financial support. Her mother (Virginia Madsen) is a soap opera addict who
stays in bed all day. Her father (Robert De Niro), a small-business owner long
divorced from her mom, was kicked out of his latest wife’s place and moved into
the family’s basement. That’s also where Joy’s ex-husband (Édgar Ramírez)
lives, unable to afford his own house on a mostly-unemployed lounge singer’s
income. They have two young kids who are caught up in this harried maelstrom of
chaotic family life, including a condescending step-aunt (Elisabeth Rohm) who
offers criticisms but little help.
Lawrence’s commanding performance – her best grown-up role
yet – is driven with determination. In the opening scenes of family drama she’s
harried, rushing around trying to fix everyone else’s problems – from cleaning
up spills and planning kids’ days to ripping up floorboards and working on the
plumbing – while trying to make ends meet. Once she decides to try to bring her
invention to market, she ignites her frazzled energy into swaggering
determination, albeit still cut through with self-doubt and ever-present
financial and familial pressures. She’s too motivated to quit, gambling on her
skills and talents. As a result, she’ll either end up wealthy or bankrupt.
There’s not much room for middle ground in this endeavor. The film is an
intimate American epic of domestic chambers and boardrooms, factory floors and
TV soundstages, as she tries to get her mop manufactured and selling. Failure
is definitely an option, and Lawrence brings a great energy, halfway between
self-confidence and nagging doubts, as she strides into difficult situations.
The entrepreneur’s dream is not an easy one. She’s just as
likely to be ground under by others who don’t share her vision, or who view her
as an easy target. Joy’s story may come from the Shark Tank business school, or Horatio Alger stories, but her lean
in isn’t uncomplicated. Russell, working from a script by Annie Mumolo (Bridesmaids), creates a film keenly
aware of the razor’s edge, the stomach-dropping plunges into debt as Joy struggles
to get taken seriously, gain recognition, avoid getting taken advantage of, and
realize her product’s potential. (That Russell fought Mumolo for writing credit
on such a story is a sad irony.) Joy finds her family a doubting chorus, and everyone
in the business world trying to be a bigger success, a more glamorous person,
thinking they can get there through hard work and delusion. A buyer (Bradley
Cooper) sees himself as a studio mogul. A wealthy widow (Isabella Rossellini)
thinks her inheritance is a measure of her business savvy. Money is essential,
but getting it is not a panacea.
Intermingling paperwork, finances, factories, and
salespeople with family squabbles and pains, Russell stages scenes with a
variety of moving plot parts and competing characters’ motivations in
close-quarters drama played at comedy speed. Russell specializes in ragged and
heightened amusing melodramas about squabbling families (Flirting with Disaster, Silver
Linings Playbook, The Fighter). Unlike
his last film, the pretty, but fundamentally phony American Hustle, he keeps Joy’s
comic and dramatic incidents spinning through a variety of tempos and film
stocks, making its inconsistency its consistency, animating Joy’s sense of
hard-charging ambition and precarious insecurities. Intensely felt with a
booming soundtrack of unexpected needle-drops and smooth, emphatic camera
movements (director of photography Linus Sandgren dancing amongst the lively
cast), the unusually unstructured story (a conventional three-act structure told
with a loose rambling quality) pushes forward with relentless momentum. I was
invested in its medley of tones and terrifically sympathetic hero from her
first frame.
Tidily untidy on the surface – with theatrical flourishes,
elaborate visual metaphors, dream sequences, flashbacks, cameos, and even a
musical number – Joy takes, well, joy
in broad characters and boisterous performances, showy filmmaking and layered
writing. I found it gripping and moving, an involving business story smashed up
against an affecting family drama, peppered with lovely touches – a warm voice
from beyond the grave, an exquisite Christmassy sales call montage, a low-key
mother/daughter bond over crayons and blueprints, and a dance of fake snow flurries
accompanying a strut towards victory intercut with a melancholy flash-forward. It
captures the real and unreal aspects of self-mythology, the inherent falseness
of singular up-from-bootstraps triumph, and the odd flukes that lead to both
setbacks and success.
Joy emerges as a great character, an exhausted woman always
with a stain on her blouse from helping others, who decides to become something
more, slowly coming alive and into her own in the spotlight. The movie
surrounds her with endlessly entertaining complications, and great actors (each
a total delight) wonderfully filling in their characters’ eccentricities and
peculiarities. Funny and moving, exciting and sad, it sees the promise and
artifice of the American dream, and the fortuitous incongruities (like a
shopping network in the middle of Amish country) that can lead to accomplishment.
It simultaneously celebrates her hard-working attempt to turn her great idea
into a big business, and also realizes money won’t fix her family’s problems.
Saturday, December 26, 2015
Head-On: CONCUSSION
Ironically, for a movie intending to raise awareness for the
dangers of football-related brain injuries, Concussion
proceeds to beat the audience over the head with the trauma. We see
montages of hard hits, often with jocular sportscasters’ commentary and ominous
medical slides and scans, thudding horrified score sawing away underneath.
There’s no doubt football is a dangerous sport, and the NFL, clinging to a
lucrative and popular business model that makes a lot of people very wealthy,
has done all it can to downplay, deny, and intimidate anyone who’d raise
serious questions about long-term health effects. The movie includes harrowing
scenes of several former football players succumbing to mental stresses of one
kind or another: rage, severe depression, self-harm, and suicide. It’s a
scandal and an outrage that the corporation minting money off of their physical
strain continues to ignore, obfuscate, and abdicate any responsibility for this
strenuous work.
It’s nothing you couldn’t read about in any number of places
– The New York Times, Sport’s
Illustrated, GQ, and so on – but Concussion does what only a Hollywood production
can to signal boost the important information. The resulting film has good
intentions, carrying a message with
moral outrage, but does so with a narrative muddled and grey. It tells the
story of Dr. Bennett Omalu, the man whose research led to the discovery and
diagnosis of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). It’s a rare brain disorder
disproportionately affecting professional football players, brought on by
long-term and repeated concussions which leave those afflicted with brain
damage causing all manner of psychological and mental problems, contributing to
untimely deaths. Omalu, an optimistic, hard-working Nigerian immigrant with
several medical degrees working as a coroner in Pittsburgh, is presented as a
man who simply did the right thing by reporting what he discovers. He can think
of no more American thing to do, and is sad to discover an organization out to
discredit him because of it.
Omalu, played by Will Smith with a gentle accent, is
presented as an outsider capable of seeing the game for the violence and strain
that it causes on the human body because he has no stake in the game itself. We
see a team doctor (Alec Baldwin), NFL officials (Luke Wilson, Adewale
Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Hill Harper), and even medical professionals who are simply
huge football fans (Mike O’Malley) who bristle at the idea that anything could
be wrong with these players, especially if that problem arises from their
sport. Evidence mounts, and it becomes harder to deny. Helpful supporters are
targeted for intimidation, like Omalu’s kind but tough boss (Albert Brooks),
while the good doctor is run out of town and then ignored. It’s all rather
downbeat, as it should be, slowly and sadly contemplating a self-interested
system of bureaucracy, capitalism, nostalgia, and politics conspiring to ignore
scientific evidence for the sake of keeping a sport going unchanged at the
expense of the health of its players.
For the passion and importance behind the film, it’s
lifeless in execution. As it hits its marks, while leaving strange
half-complete implications (why did an NFL chairman resign?) in its wake,
actors don’t have much to room to maneuver. Smith plays well off all the white
men in suits, projecting exhausted decency, while occasionally playing out a
malnourished romantic side-plot with Gugu Mbatha-Raw. She’s asked to be a
figure of warmth and compassion helping him onward, but is really just there so
he has someone not in his profession to talk to between scenes of autopsies and
intimidations. Somehow they both left their charisma behind the camera,
deciding to play scenes of light flirtation, deep compassion, and heavy
heartbreak with the bare minimum of energy.
Interesting without involving, writer-director Peter
Landesman crafts a movie that leaps through the investigations on display to
get to conclusions faster, shortens processes for the sake of staring at
outcomes. Little time for character nuance, the people speak in informational
exchanges. Omalu discovers CTE in a montage. Minds are changed, or not, in the
space of wonky expositional dialogue. Tragedies play out on the sides of the
frames, hinted at by the damage left in their wake – player’s deaths felt with
the grim march of news footage and mourners. This is no Spotlight, patient and methodical in portraying the steps by which
a cover-up was exposed. Instead, we get dribs and drabs of information, and are
left to fill in gaps. What, exactly, did the NFL do to dismantle Omalu’s
professional life in Pennsylvania? And what are we to think has been accomplished
by the end, with notes of victory and uncertainty placed side by side?
Landesman’s approach to the material lands it squarely
between impassioned op-ed and inspirational biopic, leaving it unsatisfying and
unfinished any way you look at it. He doesn’t juggle the jargon with any
precision, relying on rapid-fire montage and assumptions to power that plot of
professional discovery and moral urgency. Meanwhile, the characters don’t come
to life in any meaningful way, spouting facts and discussing right out in the
open what other filmmakers might leave as subtext. The subject matter is dispiriting enough without the movie
feeling so incomplete, heavy-handed and full of miss-matched synaptic
connections and half-finished thoughts. Maybe the movie itself has been
concussed one too many times. Omalu’s story is far more intriguing, and his
research far more vital, than the movie manages to portray.
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Married Life: 45 YEARS
45 Years accumulates
its power so slowly and quietly that it reaches an emotional crescendo in its
final seconds, the calm of the end credits broken by the trembling
reverberations of so much left unsaid, of powerful feelings just beginning to
flicker across a character’s face before the last cut to black. The film stars
Charlotte Rampling as Kate, a woman busily working on the final preparations
for an anniversary party. She’s been married to her husband Geoff (Tom
Courtenay) for nearly 45 years (hence the title) and we get the impression that
it’s been a largely happy life. Decades of pleasant matrimony are suddenly cast
in new light, however, when Geoff receives a letter from German authorities:
they’ve found his ex-girlfriend’s body, perfectly preserved in the glacier on
which she perished 50 years prior. Kate plunges forward into her daily routines
while keeping an eye on the approaching festivities. Geoff loses himself in the
past, haunted by the idea of a young woman he loved and lost frozen forever at
the point he loved her most.
In telling this story of an elderly couple in slow-motion
crisis, writer-director Andrew Haigh, whose previous feature, 2011’s Weekend, was a humbly observational
modern gay sort-of-Brief Encounter,
and who created the short-lived HBO series Looking,
a casually precise view of fumbling relationships among young city
dwellers, brings his hands-off compassionate eye to a very different
demographic. Adapting a short story by David Constantine (titled “In Another
Country”), Haigh allows rich interiority to be provided through subtle cues and
two tremendous performances of the sort older actors are rarely called upon to
deliver in mainstream movies that’d rather view them as talismanic wise elders
or cutesy anachronisms. Without a deluge of exposition about their long
marriage, Rampling (one of our finest performers for over five decades now) and
Courtenay (ditto) are able to suggest a relaxed ease and cautious sadness. They
know each other so well, and yet are still capable of surprise as they learn
new aspects of the other’s inner life.
What better time than an anniversary to reflect upon
mortality and the passing of time, especially when given such a shocking
report? The recovery of a literal long-lost love’s remains is the impetus for
both Kate and Geoff to contemplate their decisions. Would he have married this
other woman? Would she, then, have found a different path if she’d never had
the opportunity to meet him? Does the death of this other woman, the reminder
of which so vividly shakes Geoff up even now, mean she’d been haunting their
marriage all this time without Kate’s awareness? When they first broach the
topic, Geoff is sure he’d told his wife all this before. Kate thinks not. Haigh
ratchets up some of the sound design in the house, emphasizing, together with Lol
Crawley’s cinematography’s icy refinement, closed off corners and wide windows’
airless soundscapes, or the dull thudding footsteps of a husband rummaging in
the attic for old photographs of the young dead woman he loved, loves, and
can’t quite forget. It’s like four-plus happy decades have been greeted with
the ghosts of doubt. How happy were they? Are they?
All this is treated so delicately and tenderly, with great
compassion in its chilly, unshowy quiet. Haigh doesn’t ramp up the melodrama or
bring on the waterworks, steering deftly away from any overt explosions of
emotional conflict. Instead, 45 Years lingers
evocatively in its silences, in small gestures – a hand on a chest, an
impulsive viewing of old slides, a comfortable cuddle, a sudden flash of tears
on an unreadable face. It’s a deliberate movie, closely observed and yet
generously spacious, allowing its performers to conjure a whole relationship’s
ecosystem in the unspoken closeness and spaces between them. When Kate goes to
check on the hall they’re renting for the party, the proprietor tells her it’s
“full of history, like a good marriage.” But what makes a marriage
good? Is it merely longevity, or something else entirely?
This movie, circling big questions without finding easy
answers, becomes a restrained picture about the stories couples tell themselves
about their lives and the decisions that made them the people they now are, and
how one new piece of information can either create or revive old confusions and
doubts. Then, like a finely crafted short story, it snaps shut with ambiguous
finality, moving in its resistance of conventional closure. This is a
relationship movie, intelligent and reserved, painted not in optimism or
pessimism, but in a sort of Rorschach test naturalism, ripe for analysis and
conversation. Two fine-tuned performances – a subtle and brilliant acting duet
– are enough to send one out of the theater eager to interpret the feelings
within.
Monday, December 21, 2015
Doing It For Themselves: SISTERS
Two adult siblings learn their parents have sold the family
house when they’re told to show up and pack up all the junk left in their
childhood bedrooms. Sad to let the last vestiges of youth go, the pair
orchestrates one last party, a raucous blowout to remember the good old days.
If this plot – thinly developed and overfamiliar – was the engine for a movie
called Brothers and starred any two
generic bros it would be insufferable, one more man-child comedy indulging carousing
until reluctant maturity arrives. But it’s called Sisters (no relation to the DePalma of the same name), and stars
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, a great pairing for a fine gender swap of the usual potty-mouth
party movie. The result is an injection of fresh perspective into a tired
formula, a mix of sex talk and sentimentality that’s energized by its leads.
Only Fey and Poehler’s second film together in leading roles
(after 2008’s pleasant Baby Mama),
they’re a fine comedy duo. With a fizzy improvisatory approach to line
readings, turning every punchline and extended bit into agreeably off-the-cuff
coziness, they have sharp timing and a believable sisterly dynamic. Fey is the
older sister, louder and irresponsible, freshly fired from a salon job, kicked
out of the apartment where she’d been staying. Her careless approach to life
has led to her teen daughter (Madison Davenport) pushing her away. Poehler is
the little sister, an overeager perfectionist who has thrown herself into
micromanaged routines as a way of avoiding stewing over a divorce, and worrying
about their elderly parents (Dianne Wiest and James Brolin). Each sees a bit of
what they wish they could be in the other – Fey wants a smidge more structure;
Poehler wants to loosen up – but they cant say so. Instead, realistic levels of
sibling rivalry manifest as admiration and antagonism going both ways.
Reunited in their hometown, under the same roof, they hatch
their partying plan, to recapture good times they feel have slipped away. They
have to go backwards to go forwards. The script by Saturday Night Live and 30
Rock writer Paula Pell sees the women’s immaturity without condoning it,
allowing for a loose and agreeable non-judgmental atmosphere, especially as the
house fills up with their former high school classmates, the ones who never
left town and just settled down. They see right away these folks (Maya Rudolph,
John Leguizamo, Bobby Moynihan, Rachel Dratch, Samantha Bee, and more) have
gotten older, and are dealing with adult problems and aging concerns. It
doesn’t take long spending time at the house party for the guests to loosen way
up (the booze helps, no doubt), the gathering getting progressively rowdier and
more destructive as the night goes on.
Pitch Perfect director
Jason Moore throws a decent bash, keeping the festivities hopping with pounding
music and funny running gags. Fey tries not to drink and be the responsible one
for once, while Poehler downs the intoxicants and flirts half-successfully with
a sweet handyman (Ike Barinholtz). A desperately unfunny dope gets increasingly
deranged. A muscle-bound drug-dealer (John Cena) stands still in the middle of
the revelers, silently blinking. A sad woman zones out in front of a wall of
clocks, contemplating her mortality. A mom gets drunk, an overgrown mean girl
tries to sabotage, and a pedicurist (Greta Lee) takes advantage of an
overflowing washing machine to start a slippery bubble fight. These scenes are
shot for warm laughs and agreeable chuckles in simple bright sitcom staging,
and feel like they could be flipped around without much damage to the overall
arc.
It’s just one eventful collection of banter and silly
sights, driven forward only by the gradually more destroyed house. But the
result is a fine hangout with earnest good vibes. Fey and Poehler are fantastic
ringleaders, both egging on and reigning in the absurdity as it goes along. They’re
committed to looking pathetic, and as the party drags on it’s clear they’re
going to hit rock bottom. (The movie ends up taking this idea very literally.)
It ends with a pat moral conveniently tying up plot threads, but the trip there
is a loose amusing time, turning standard R-rated comedy fare into a breezy
sister act.
Friday, December 18, 2015
The Next Generation: STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS
The only way to properly enjoy Star Wars is to be in a mindset with a precisely proportioned
combination of deep engaged reverence and light distracted escapism. It's both
the greatest of all modern myths, and, per Todd Hanson’s affectionate but sharp
assessment, "a big dumb movie about space wizards." Consider its
sources: The Hero with a Thousand Faces
and Flash Gordon; Akira Kurosawa samurai films and B-movie WWII pictures; epic
fantasy and Poverty Row Westerns. More than the sum of its parts, the magic of Star Wars is in its cohesive
combination. But if its high-low synthesis is responsible for this space
opera's wide-ranging popularity, its staying power is in the details. Creator
George Lucas is a great fantasy filmmaker: a sharp visual storyteller and a
nonchalant conjurer of fantabulous jargon, densely packing these films with
robots, aliens, planets, cultures, vehicles, weapons, and gadgets, suggesting a
world far beyond the frame. Put him on the shortlist with the likes of Baum,
Tolkien, Roddenberry, and Rowling, creators of popular fantasy worlds with
their own internal logic, striking design, and unshakable pull. Their creations
are lasting for their narratives, but even more for the places they allow us to
visit.
The famous opening text tells us Star Wars takes place in a galaxy far far away, and the images that
follow live up to its promised scope and history. Through six films, Lucas used
dazzling special effects, energetic action, quasi-mystical spirituality, and
sweeping pseudo-historical fantasy worldbuilding to inhabit massive striking
artificial vistas with, in the classic original trilogy (1977-1983), a
triumphant hero's journey, and, in the unfairly maligned prequels (1999-2005),
a tragedy of political machination and curdled idealism. His saga contained an
entire ecosystem of the imagination, rich soil on which fans and writers – from
little kids playing with action figures to sci-fi writers tapped for tie-in
novels – grew new stories.
Now Star Wars: Episode
VII - The Force Awakens is the first real test of whether this galaxy can
survive on the big screen beyond its creator's eccentric and brilliant vision.
The answer is a resounding “mostly.” Director J.J. Abrams (with Mission: Impossible III and two Star Treks, no stranger to franchise
caretaking) takes over from Lucas and creates an energetic entertainment. He’s
not inspired by the series’ inspirations, but by the series itself. Thus it
lacks the velocity in and personality of Lucas’s imaginative imagery and ideas
(identifiably his all the way), but creates a piece of skilled imitation, sure
to please the crowds. Abrams is an expert blockbuster craftsman, and here
proves himself a talented mimic as well, recreating the feeling and sensations
of Star Wars past while finding new
characters on which to focus.
From the opening blasts of John Williams’s score to the slow
pan to a distant planet stalked by a massive Star Destroyer, it’s clear we’re
back in a recognizable space. For those of us whose Proustian madeleines are
the snap-hiss of lightsabers, and for whom the Doppler-effect howls of TIE
fighters and X-Wings are guaranteed to instantly activate inner 9-year-olds, the
familiarity will be instantly transporting. It feels and swells and sounds like
Star Wars, a factor of Abrams’s hard work,
and the continuity represented by several series’ staples (like concept artists
Iain McCaig and Doug Chiang, sound designers Ben Burtt and Gary Rydstrom) in
the crew. Full of echoes to previous installments, we’re on a desert planet
where a young person (this time a resourceful scavenger named Rey (Daisy Ridley,
a newcomer in a star-making turn)) is about to be drawn into galactic-wide
conflict with a dramatic call to adventure.
Working with screenwriters Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3) and Lawrence Kasdan (a
co-writer on Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi), Abrams has a story set
30 years after Episode VI that recombines
ideas, lines, images, and plot points from previous entries. They’ve cannily
(and maybe a smidge calculatingly) positioned the movie precisely between crowd-pleasing
fan fiction and a rousing new heroes’ journey, both a loose remake of the
original set-up and an introduction to (commendably diverse) new people. Wisely
starting fresh before getting derivative, the movie opens with Rey, and others
in a set of dramatic original characters: a conflicted soldier (John Boyega); a scheming masked villain of the Dark
Side (Adam Driver); a brave fighter pilot (Oscar Isaac); and an instantly loveable ball-droid named BB-8. They fit in
with the matinee adventure spirit, and the convincingly lived-in world,
projecting happiness simply to be in one of these movies. Their awe is
contagious.
It’s the galaxy far far away as we know it, but a generation
removed from those stories, full of new people living lives we can be excited
to discover as we don’t leave their perspective. While the plot blasts along,
it picks up welcome characters, like Han Solo (Harrison Ford), and ships, like
his Millennium Falcon, bringing old
and new together in a race to prevent new bad guys from blowing up the galaxy. Abrams
creates instantly compelling fresh characters with a talented cast – Ridley,
Boyega, and Isaac are great likable heroes; Driver is a terrifically
complicated villain – while leaning on nostalgia for sights and sounds and
faces from earlier movies. Each classic character gets to make an impressive
re-entrance, none better than Leia (Carrie Fisher), as tough and charming as
ever. It’s nice to see them, even if the movie is occasionally too much like what we’ve seen before.
Abrams is clearly energized by moments that thrill him as a
fan, playing with uniquely Star Wars images
and ideas borrowed (reunions of long-lost icons, rhymes with other episodes) and
invented (a tiny ancient pirate (Lupita Nyong'o), a shadowy villain (Andy
Serkis), a stormtrooper with a flamethrower). It doesn’t always pop, a few
sequences erring on the side of choppiness or overfamiliar beats, the action on
the whole merely proficient, and the entire thing moving so quickly it can’t
linger on unusual details like Lucas did. But cinematographer Dan Mindel (John Carter) brings filmic widescreen
framing, finding some of the original trilogy’s visual flavor as he photographs
displays of evocative lights, picturesque landscapes, and massive explosions in
granular reality, bringing an unreal place to something like convincing life.
When the film is showing us original contributions – mild redesigns, unfamiliar
beasts, new-fangled weapons – its far more interesting and involving than when remaking
previous plot in new packaging. Even its surprises aren’t too surprising as it goes.
In some ways a rather cautious extension of the brand,
leaning on plot points and emotional beats we’ve seen before in this series –
and a few too many times those connections are heavily underlined (a line about
a trash compactor will irritate me for days) – The Force Awakens is nonetheless alive with possibility of new
storytelling in this galaxy. Allowing the fresh faces center stage while giving
returning characters supporting roles without feeling too much like a passing
of the torch, it sets the groundwork for future success. Call it The Fandom
Awakens, especially since it’s almost scientifically calibrated to tickle
acolyte’s pleasure centers while remaining open enough for a younger generation
of fans to fit right in, like an exuberant greatest hits remix from the best
cover band in the world.
It’s nakedly manipulative and terrifically exciting Hollywood
filmmaking of incredible competence. Platoons of talented artisans, animators,
and puppeteers create remarkably tactile locations, dogfights, laser battles,
and lightsaber clashes, swooping and stirring in all their fantastical glory.
It’s big, energized, and enjoyable, making most of its competition look like
Padawans. Without Lucas it’s removed from the spark of novelty it once had, but,
as an attempt to find fresh characters through which to make old stories new
again, it’s a fun admirable effort. Made with more love than cynicism, it’s
happy to start another cycle of galactic history repeating itself, The Force
forever seeking its balance. There’s nothing quite like Star Wars. It’s enough to have space wizards, interplanetary dive
bars, and ginormous superweapons for a new generation. Even if it has to over-deliver
on what it thinks old fans want, it's plenty entertaining for everyone.
Saturday, December 12, 2015
Whale of a Tale: IN THE HEART OF THE SEA
Ron Howard’s In the
Heart of the Sea tells of a whaling ship sunk by an enormous whale, this
story nestled inside a framing device in which Herman Melville, many years
later, interviews the last surviving crewman as research for writing Moby-Dick. This structure gives the
movie a gloss of both history and literature, purporting to tell the real story
that inspired a Great American Novel, while engaging with some of the same
imagery and texture of the work itself. It’s a neat trick. The movie is slow
and steady, lurching out to sea with the Essex and her crew of whalers, then
watches patiently as rocky waves and clever whales go from a position of being
conquered to the engines of the men’s ruin. It’s a sturdy maritime movie, of rudders
and rigging, anchors and fish, hardtack and ambergris. The scenes of Melville
earnestly listening to the old seaman’s tale are a bit obvious and clumsy, but
the core of the picture is an admirably stripped-down survival story, vividly
recreated, handsomely staged with convincing effects.
The screenplay by Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond), based on a book by historian Nathaniel Philbrick,
introduces simple characters. The proud first mate (Chris Hemsworth), resentful
after being passed over for a promotion, is driven to do what’s best for the
ship. The captain (Benjamin Walker) is the son of the boat’s patron, and
therefore worried about proving his toughness on this, his first whaling
expedition. Meanwhile, the ship has a naïve newbie (Tom Holland), who has a lot
to learn, and is therefore our guide into the blood and muck of harpooning a
whale, butchering it on deck, and scooping out all the valuable goo inside it.
(He’ll grow up to be Brendan Gleeson, reluctantly telling the story to Ben
Whishaw’s Melville.) The rest of the crewmen blur together behind their tough
beards and mumbling accents, a mostly undifferentiated ensemble to take orders,
fill the frame, and get in harm’s way when the danger surfaces.
It’s not so much a narrative of character and incident as it
is interested in details of sailing and whaling, in the sensations of life at
sea, and in the specifics of the survivors’ endurance. Howard is always great
with directing reenactments, from the space shuttle mechanics of Apollo 13, his best film, to the
visceral car races of Rush and
impressive fires of Backdraft. With
his latest film, he has cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire) shooting from
interesting vantage points, with a seasick woozy feeling to the cameras’
movements. Perhaps they were inspired by Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab’s
experimental fishing documentary Leviathan,
because they make liberal use of canted or otherwise unusual angles to show off
details of labor at sea. A repeated shot will hold extreme close-ups of a rope
or knife, an oar or bucket, the man manipulating any given tool in the extreme
background as we focus on the work being done. In less stylized moments,
dialogue scenes, the camera bobs and sways, rocking with the waves. It wouldn’t
surprise me if people seeing this in IMAX get seasick.
There’s a certain element of spectacle in this film that’s
big, satisfying, and striking. I’m thinking of a side shot of a rowboat, the
camera just underneath the water, pulling downwards as a whale’s tail slaps,
shattering the boat and plunging silhouetted figures into the depths. Elsewhere,
wide-angle shots show tiny boats against vast expanses of sun-dappled water.
And one late moment finds blurry fish-eyed angles on sea gulls chattering
above, while a sun-dried groggy man (so starved he looks scarily skeletal)
spies land. Howard directs with an interesting eye, perhaps the most visually
experimental he’s ever been. You never know who’ll surprise you, I suppose. But
where In the Heart of the Sea, which is otherwise often curiously unengaging, most
resonates is in connections it draws between images that catch one by surprise
and man’s hopelessness in the face of nature.
No wonder the characters are thinly drawn, and their journey
simple. It’s not about individuals who are in conflict against the storm of
unpredictable weather and wildlife. It’s more elemental, about a Herzog-ian
conflict between the inherent dangers of the wild, and the struggle for men to
make meaning out of it. The climax is not a moment of terror or violence, but a
moment of grace, a man and a whale making eye contact, and finding some silent
understanding. (From a whale’s perspective, Moby-Dick must be not only metaphor,
but also a superhero.) The film is wrapped in a conclusion that tidies up the
plot in comforting middlebrow ways on the surface, but underneath lingers the
pain and struggle of the men’s survival, and the violence that we do to the
creatures that share our planet. It’s a cycle: the power of storytelling to communicate
the darkness we’re capable of committing to live to tell the tale.
Friday, December 11, 2015
High Buffoon: THE RIDICULOUS 6
I can’t imagine The
Ridiculous 6 will exist in the public imagination as much more than the response
to a slew of trivia questions. It’s the answer to: What was Adam Sandler’s
first direct-to-Netflix feature? What 2015 comedy had some of its Native
American extras walk off the set in protest? What movie featured David Spade as
General Custer, Vanilla Ice as Mark Twain, Blake Shelton as Wyatt Earp, and Dan
Patrick as Abraham Lincoln? As you can see, the bar isn’t set too high for this
Western riff starring and co-written by Adam Sandler, who continues his
attempts to make comedies with as few jokes as possible. It’s part of a
peculiar pattern in which a passable Adam Sandler comedy (like the nasty,
gross, and more funny than not That’s My
Boy) does worse at the box office than his movies that are lazy (Grown Ups 2) or lethargically offensive
(Blended). At least with Netflix
keeping a tight lid on their viewing numbers, it’ll be hard to say how much audiences
respond to an irritatingly insensitive movie that’s mostly lukewarm Western
tropes pushed a few inches further into silliness.
The plot is awfully simple. (If you think, “the better to
hang a bunch of jokes on,” you’ll be sadly mistaken.) Sandler plays White
Knife, a white boy raised by an Apache tribe after his mother died. He discovers
his long lost father (Nick Nolte) only to find that the old man has run afoul
of a mean band of bandits (led by Danny Trejo). In order to save his dad, he
wanders around rounding up a Ridiculous posse of his six freshly-discovered
half-brothers, the joke being that pop slept with such a variety of women in
the Wild West that he’s the biological father of a diverse group of men
including Terry Crews, Taylor Lautner, Rob Schneider, Jorge Garcia, and Luke
Wilson. They get into arguments and confrontations in all manner of typical
Western locales involving a whole bunch of actors (Harvey Keitel, Steve Zahn,
Will Forte, John Turturro, and more) who must’ve decided they’d
like a Netflix paycheck. No one on screen seems to care, projecting a low-energy void of interest in every direction.
Stretching out to two hours in length, the movie putters
around saloons and High Noons, prairies and campfires, hangings and shootouts.
Once in a while there’s a funny joke – an Apache chief says, “Sometimes the
white man speaks the truth. Like one in 20, 25 times” – but mostly there’s dead
air, or attempts to wring humor out of mental disabilities, musty racial
stereotypes, and anatomical references (and fluids of every kind). It’s the sort of movie where Sandler’s
attractive Native fiancé (Julia Jones) is named “Smokin’ Fox,” a tone-deaf,
cringe-worthy hat-trick of objectification, appropriation, and ignorance. Sandler
with co-writer Tim Herlihy (in their eleventh collaboration) could’ve
straight-up parodied Westerns (the title clearly looks back to The Magnificent Seven and forward to The Hateful Eight) loading the frame
with ZAZ-like anything-goes goofs Airplane!
style. (Somehow I doubt Blazing Saddles
social satire was ever within their reach.) Instead they often play things relatively
straight, hoping peculiar casting, oddball characters with prominent physical traits (buck teeth,
false eyes, etcetera), and disgusting gags (like decapitation or defecation) will elevate a subpar script into something funny.
It’s not actively repulsive, but the jokes aren’t there and
the pace is beyond belabored. At least director Frank Coraci (who previously
directed the star in Blended, Click, The
Waterboy, and The Wedding Singer)
provides filmmaking of a marginally less lazy type than usual Sandler fare,
though not as smooth and fast as Chris Columbus did last summer with the better,
but still mediocre, Pixels. More
interested in looking like a Western than having good jokes, Ridiculous 6 hired cinematographer Dean
Semler, whose work on the likes of Dances
with Wolves and Young Guns
certainly informs his widescreen landscapes here. It looks and moves like a
real movie, which is faint praise, but when you’re comparing it to the inert
overlit blandness of something like Grown
Ups 2, it’s worth pointing out.
But reasonably pleasant framing doesn’t alleviate the desert of humor so dry
and slow tumbleweeds roll through with greater regularity than laughter. It's depressing and endless.
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