It's been an eclectic and unusually fertile week of preview screenings at The Museum of the Moving Image. After showing Bad Words earlier in the week, there was an unusual double feature today of Muppet Most Wanted and The Raid 2, both quite enjoyable in their own different ways.
The best thing, and perhaps the only thing, that one needs to say about Muppet Most Wanted is that it's undoubtedly and undeniably a film Jim Henson could have made.
I'm not sure any Muppet movie will ever equal the consistent delight of the memorable tunes from the original Muppet movie, but there's no denying the quality of work that Bret McKenzie is doing for the current Muppet films. This movie starts with a production number where the Muppets celebrate the fact that they are getting to do a sequel (yes, Bunsen Honeydew does quite scientifically interrupt the song to point out that this is in fact the 7th Muppet movie), which features lots and lots of Muppets, happily breaks the third wall, goes big in the style of The Magic Store from the original Muppet movie or even big in the style of a big number from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life or Mel Brooks' History of the World Part One. There are other solid original numbers sprinkled throughout. And the movie's plot lends itself to paying tribute to the use of music in the original Muppet Show, so we get little gems like Miss Piggy doing her best Celine Dion with a number from The Muppet Movie. Of course, we later get Celine Dion herself. And the movie ends with a rendition of the song "Together Again" that seems like an homage to the Monty Python film Life of Brian. Yes, Jim Henson would have gotten this.
The movie is sprinkled with celebrity co-stars and celebrity cameos. I don't like Ricky Gervais, but I liked him here. He has a twinkle in his eye throughout and seems to clearly be enjoying playing second fiddle to The Muppets. And then there's Ray Liotta, and Tina Fey, and Usher, and Frank Langella, and many many more. I didn't recognize everyone; I'm getting to be an old man. But the cameos here should resonate with a mix of thirteen year olds and 53-year-olds, because the sheer abundance of them allows the film to cover all bases.
And the jokes cover all age bases. There's a lot of just plain silly for kids to enjoy. Then there's a quick reference to David Lean. Or to David Niven, while we're at it. Jim Henson would understand where the creators are coming from.
So three cheers to director James Bobin, who co-wrote with Nicholas Stoller. Almost 35 years after the release of the original Muppet Movie, they have the Muppets feeling fresh and new again.
The strange thing to me: Jason Segel, who did so much to help spearhead the return of the Muppets to movie theatres isn't here in any way, shape, or form, not even in the form of a no-show producer credit hiding somewhere.
A few years back there was a martial arts movie called The Raid which I didn't get around to seeing. It got some nice reviews, kind of wanted to, but it just never happened, I think in part because I have an informal quota on the number of martial arts movies I want to see and that might have been released in proximity to another one. But suffice to say when I saw that Moving Image was hosting a screening of The Raid 2, I wasn't going to miss out twice.
Glad I didn't. The Raid 2 is excellent.
Martial arts movies don't need a plot, necessarily, but this one has one Shakespeare would recognize, which centers around a father/son struggle over the future of an Indonesian crime family. The son thinks his dad has gone soft, and doesn't buy into the idea expressed to him at one point in the movie that the father now has enough respect that he doesn't still need to have fear going for him. Into the midst of this father/son struggle is thrown an undercover cop, the actual lead of the movie, played by Iko Uwais. He appeared at a Q&A afterwards along with writer/director/editor Gareth Evans, and Julie Estelle who is by default the female lead, because there aren't any females hanging around in this movie.
While it's nice to have a powerful primal central plot in the film, people don't go to martial arts movies for the plots. They go for the martial arts. And there are a number of incredible sequences using a variety or weapons and fighting styles. What's your favorite? The prison yard? The subway car? The hotel ballroom? The guy with the baseball bat? Kinetic fighting inside a four-seater?
Nothing's predictable. At the halfway point, after some great sequences in large rooms, I was thinking the director liked doing action on a big canvas. But that was until he started doing great fights in halls and alleys. By the time he gets to doing vibrant martial arts inside of a not-that-big moving car, you realize he'll do his action anywhere he can.
If I were one of those reviewers or critics who reviews multiple things and feels that requires finding some way to link them all together in the hook to that week's review colum, I guess I'd be talking about the shared love of film history that one sees in both this and Muppet Most Wanted. I saw lots of Kubrick in The Raid 2. The classical tune "Sarabande," which plays for an entire reel in Barry Lyndon gets a decent workout here. There's a hotel ballroom that could be considered the heir to the Gold Room at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, complete with a bathroom attendant, a decent facsimile of the bar itself, and a resplendent color scheme that goes well with the color of the blood that will be nicely spilled before the movie's 2.5 hours are over. Attached to the hotel ballroom is a nicely sized hotel kitchen that Dick Halloran would probably have enjoyed cooking in. At one point a car stops in the middle of a group of burnt-out buildings that would have done nicely for the major urban battle set piece in Full Metal Jacket. I was a little disappointed that we didn't get a full-on martial arts sequence in the space.
The movie's long at 2.5 hours, but it moves. If you see one martial arts movie in 2014, there's an excellent chance you'll wish it to be this one.
Showing posts with label stanley kubrick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stanley kubrick. Show all posts
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Monday, March 3, 2014
The Joshcars for 2013
So having completed the live blogging for the Oscars, this is my Baker's Dozen best of 2013, in no particular order:
World War Z:
This is grading on a curve. But basically, there are so many really shitty special effects spectaculars around these days that I feel an urge to give some recognition to a movie that's just a little bit different. Also, since I keep asking authors to revise their manuscripts, it's nice to see something in the popular culture where revision works. In particular, the ending of this major CGI-ridden summer spectacular release is quiet. One setting, one main character, a place where small little things count, where the tension is real. A place where the violence is earned, justified by the movie being what the movie is, and now entirely thrown in just because someone thinks it's fun to plow a starship into a building, or to destroy Manhattan for the 18th time and pretend like it isn't, like Superman didn't save Manhattan in Superman 2 over 30 years ago. This was a pleasant surprise, an over-achiever in a genre that keeps under-achieving. So I want to give it some credit.
The Spectacular Now:
Rumor has it that Miles Teller, the star of this spectacularly good adaptation of a YA novel, is going to be in a new Fantastic Four movie. What a shame. An actor as talented as Miles Teller shouldn't be wasting time in shitty SFX/CGI/superhero movies, please see my comments above on World War Z. See my comments on my live Oscar blog, and this is an example of where Roger Ebert can do something I can't, which is explain why a movie is good. This was one of the very last movies Ebert reviewed, and maybe I should just let his review speak for me. But I don't really want to. So let me try.
I always feel like one of the best achievements in the arts is to get me to like the kind of thing I don't ordinarily like. The New Yorker story that I can read must be a truly great story, or the generic slasher movie that I love can't be just a generic slasher movie, or the literary science fiction novel that grabs the Joshua Bilmes whose roots are in the Analog end of sf/f. And The Spectacular Now is a movie about a character I despise, a high school student really big into alcohol who is supposed to be lovable. And alcoholics aren't lovable. Behavior fueled by alcohol isn't lovable. There's nothing redeeming about a movie like Don's Party. Nothing pleasant about Leaving Las Vegas. Yet this movie walks the tightrope.
It has to be a team effort, here. Novel by Tim Tharp. Adapted by screenwriter Michael H. Weber, whose previous credits include the similarly successful (500) Days of Summer. Directed by James Ponsoldt, whose prior movie was Smashed, the kind of movie about alcoholism that I really don't need in my life, thank you.
But most importantly, a pitch-perfect performance by Miles Teller.
He's a likable alcoholic but never a lovable one. When he's given the chance to have more hours at work if only he would show up on time, he's self-aware enough to tell the boss that he knows it just won't work, he won't put the job before alcohol, and he won't be showing up on time. Capable of being the perfect boyfriend, except for all the times he's drunk and he isn't capable of being anyone's boyfriend.
You can understand a bit of why he likes his booze. He's from a broken home. Older sister he isn't on great terms. Struggling mother, who won't tell him where his father is. And when we finally meet the father, you know the apple didn't fall far from the tree, and you also see this glimmer of awareness that our lead character knows his father's a screw-up, that he's a screw-up, that one doesn't justify the other and he doesn't admire his father for being what he too often is, even though he can't stop himself from being it.
It's awfully damned good.
Short Term 12:
Another quiet little film that has probably gone under the radar for most of you. Brie Larson, who also has a supporting role in Spectacular Now, plays a counselor at a group home for troubled children. Jonathan Gallagher is another "veteran" at the home, which isn't saying much. It's a hard place to stay, the kind of place you burn out on real quick. But the two of them have somehow managed to keep at it for at least a little bit, and the film starts with a quiet scene of Gallagher giving some background on the place to a new employee. These characters have a lot more going on than we see at first, and the film peels back their layers slowly, carefully, way more so than any of us will ever be with an actual onion in our kitchen. While it's doing that, the film also slowly peels back some of the closely held secrets for the characters in the home, many of whom might want to be someplace else, all of whom are free to be someplace else if they can escape past the doors and the guards and get on to the street outside. It's a strange kind of thing, how the employees at the home can do just about anything to keep the kids from leaving but have no power to order them back should they leave.
So I'm not describing this like any film anyone is going to rush out to see. But the writing is really good. The acting is really good. The surprises along the way are never total surprises, yet we never quite see them coming way far ahead of time. Powerful stuff.
Rush:
Great performances. Great soundtrack. Great photography. Great racing sequences.
It's not like this film, one of Ron Howard's best, didn't get some good reviews. It's not like it didn't get some recognition on the awards scene, with some acting awards especially. But certainly, in the US, the film didn't do as well as hoped. It's a shame, that.
12 Years a Slave:
It's a hard film to love, and I want to keep pushing it away, but it doesn't deserve that.
I first caught up with director Steve McQueen with Shame, an impressive feature about an IRA prisoner who went on hunger strike. Searing visual images, excellent acting, powerful story. Often hard to sit through.
I got to see McQueen in person when the Museum of the Moving Image screened his Shame. Didn't impress me so much there. The movie had the same stunning visuals, I can still see some scenes of the main character racing down deserted Manhattan streets that shimmer and gleam. Like Shame, hard to sit through. We don't really need visually stunning movies about sex addicts. And to have to listen to the director talk about all of the wonderful artistic decisions in making a film that nobody should have bothered with. It's the risk of these Q&A things. This wasn't as bad as listening to Alan Parker spout on about his genius in making The Life of David Gale, but it was close.
Then we arrive at 12 Years a Slave. And we're starting to see some patterns here. There are stunning visuals, and the movie is hard to sit through.
But it's a worthy movie in better ways than a lot of other worthy movies. It isn't a movie that uses white people to tell the story of the black struggle. It isn't Richard Attenborough or Bernardo Bertolluci who choke on their own artifice half the time. See Gandhi for worthy and dull, or The Last Emperor. See Cry Freedom. No, this is told with passion, with emotion, with an abundance of good acting.
Captain Phillips:
Tom Hanks gives a great performance, and the film shows director Paul Greengrass at this best, with great photography and great editing in the service of some real-life drama.
Room 237:
A documentary about The Shining, kind of.
If you like The Shining -- and I like it very much -- it's hard to see it just once. You want to keep seeing it, over and over and over again. And when you see a movie over and over again, you notice things about it that you may not notice on the first viewing or the thirtieth. And it's a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, whom some consider to be technocratic and cold, so in control of every frame that he suffocates human emotion. So when you see one of his movies over and over again, and you notice things, you know that everything has to be there for a reason.
So this movie introduces us to people, whom we hear in voiceover over clips from the film but don't actually see on-screen, who have very clear ideas of what The Shining is all about. Notice how the carpet has things that look like little rockets, and this is a movie about the faking of the Apollo rocket launches. Or notice the food in the pantry and realize it's a movie about the treatment of the American Indian. Or realize that the window in the hotel GM's office couldn't really be there and go someplace else from there. All of these theories can't be right, and likely none of them are. According to Kubrick's right hand man on the film, even the control freak director sometimes has a particular thing appear on the screen because they happened to need something and that was at hand on the particular day they shot a particular scene where they needed this particular thing.
I have a confession to make. I never realized the window in the office couldn't have been a window. I have stared at the screen a gazillion times trying to figure out if the bathroom window that Danny has to climb out of can really be a window in that particular place. I've yearned to look at blueprints because I never quite believe the architecture of the hotel, and now I find out that I might be able to go on the internet and find the blueprints I'm looking for. But do I want to? I like my mysteries. I like my The Shining.
It's funny, sometimes funny-scary, it's insightful about the creative process, about our interaction with creativity, about obsession. .
Philomena:
The funny version of the not so funny story of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. Excellently acted by Judi Dench and Steve Coogan.
Before Midnight:
I saw Before Sunrise when it came out 18 years ago, at the UA Lynbrook on a day when I rode out there to visit the accountants for the Scott Meredith Agency, whom I used for a couple years when I struck out on my own. If memory serves, I've not seen the movie again, though the idea of it sticks around. And then Before Sunset came around, 9 years after, and it sticks around. You can't quite believe how much tension you can get out of wondering if a guy's going to leave to catch his flight or not, and this movie left me as rapt about that small little decision as if there were a red timer counting down for the bomb that might go off and destroy the world. And now, Before Midnight. Once again, Ethan Hawke, Juliet Delpy and director Richard Linklater collaborate on a little movie with a long aftertaste. Ethan Hawke didn't make his flight. Now, he's got a son from his prior marriage, the one that broke up in part because he didn't make that flight. And he's spending some tense time in Greece with his girlfriend, Delpy. And they ride around in a car after dropping their son off at the airport, and they talk while the beautiful Greek scenery glides by. And they talk over lunch with friends, while chopping the vegetables and eating the result. And they talk some more while they walk back to their hotel, an extended take tracking them through relics. And it all comes to a head when they get to the hotel, 18 years of history and resentment and love and bitterness and shared experiences and things they should've done together but didn't. Nominated for an Oscar in the screenplay categories. The movies seem like they're being made up on the spot, but as I read in one interview, you can't go filming across the Greek countryside, closing roads, doing multiple takes, and make it all up as you go along.
Her:
One of the best sf films in a long time. Winner of an Academy Award for Original Screenplay.
The Wolf of Wall Street:
Not quite up to the level of Goodfellas, but an amazingly good film by Martin Scorcese, with an exceptional lead performance by Leonardo DiCaprio and good supporting work by Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler and others. Leisurely, finding its own rhythms, and certain to be talked about for a very long time.
The Conjuring:
I realized as I was typing that I needed to add this to my list for reasons mentioned in what I say above about The Spectacular Now. I'm nearing 50. I don't do horror movies the way I used to. I hardly do them at all. But I went to see this one, I was on the edge of my seat the whole way, I was using my arms or my knees or my anything to keep myself from seeing what was happening on the screen because I was scared. The movie's of a type, but it's among the very best of it's type that you'll find.
Gravity:
New-fangled technology and old-fashioned great acting from Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Visually stunning to look at, suspenseful to sit through, one of the few films I wish I'd paid more to see.
There are several hundred films released each year, and I see only a small percentage of them, somewhere between 90-110 in a typical year. So ya know, my list isn't as valid as some critic who is paid to see movies and sees 400 of them, but it also isn't full of too many obscure films that only a critic would have or could have seen. Room 237, Short Term 12, Spectacular Now are the more "obscure" of the movies on my list, but hey, I just round a Room 237 DVD lurking in Costco, so how obscure can it be!
World War Z:
This is grading on a curve. But basically, there are so many really shitty special effects spectaculars around these days that I feel an urge to give some recognition to a movie that's just a little bit different. Also, since I keep asking authors to revise their manuscripts, it's nice to see something in the popular culture where revision works. In particular, the ending of this major CGI-ridden summer spectacular release is quiet. One setting, one main character, a place where small little things count, where the tension is real. A place where the violence is earned, justified by the movie being what the movie is, and now entirely thrown in just because someone thinks it's fun to plow a starship into a building, or to destroy Manhattan for the 18th time and pretend like it isn't, like Superman didn't save Manhattan in Superman 2 over 30 years ago. This was a pleasant surprise, an over-achiever in a genre that keeps under-achieving. So I want to give it some credit.
The Spectacular Now:
Rumor has it that Miles Teller, the star of this spectacularly good adaptation of a YA novel, is going to be in a new Fantastic Four movie. What a shame. An actor as talented as Miles Teller shouldn't be wasting time in shitty SFX/CGI/superhero movies, please see my comments above on World War Z. See my comments on my live Oscar blog, and this is an example of where Roger Ebert can do something I can't, which is explain why a movie is good. This was one of the very last movies Ebert reviewed, and maybe I should just let his review speak for me. But I don't really want to. So let me try.
I always feel like one of the best achievements in the arts is to get me to like the kind of thing I don't ordinarily like. The New Yorker story that I can read must be a truly great story, or the generic slasher movie that I love can't be just a generic slasher movie, or the literary science fiction novel that grabs the Joshua Bilmes whose roots are in the Analog end of sf/f. And The Spectacular Now is a movie about a character I despise, a high school student really big into alcohol who is supposed to be lovable. And alcoholics aren't lovable. Behavior fueled by alcohol isn't lovable. There's nothing redeeming about a movie like Don's Party. Nothing pleasant about Leaving Las Vegas. Yet this movie walks the tightrope.
It has to be a team effort, here. Novel by Tim Tharp. Adapted by screenwriter Michael H. Weber, whose previous credits include the similarly successful (500) Days of Summer. Directed by James Ponsoldt, whose prior movie was Smashed, the kind of movie about alcoholism that I really don't need in my life, thank you.
But most importantly, a pitch-perfect performance by Miles Teller.
He's a likable alcoholic but never a lovable one. When he's given the chance to have more hours at work if only he would show up on time, he's self-aware enough to tell the boss that he knows it just won't work, he won't put the job before alcohol, and he won't be showing up on time. Capable of being the perfect boyfriend, except for all the times he's drunk and he isn't capable of being anyone's boyfriend.
You can understand a bit of why he likes his booze. He's from a broken home. Older sister he isn't on great terms. Struggling mother, who won't tell him where his father is. And when we finally meet the father, you know the apple didn't fall far from the tree, and you also see this glimmer of awareness that our lead character knows his father's a screw-up, that he's a screw-up, that one doesn't justify the other and he doesn't admire his father for being what he too often is, even though he can't stop himself from being it.
It's awfully damned good.
Short Term 12:
Another quiet little film that has probably gone under the radar for most of you. Brie Larson, who also has a supporting role in Spectacular Now, plays a counselor at a group home for troubled children. Jonathan Gallagher is another "veteran" at the home, which isn't saying much. It's a hard place to stay, the kind of place you burn out on real quick. But the two of them have somehow managed to keep at it for at least a little bit, and the film starts with a quiet scene of Gallagher giving some background on the place to a new employee. These characters have a lot more going on than we see at first, and the film peels back their layers slowly, carefully, way more so than any of us will ever be with an actual onion in our kitchen. While it's doing that, the film also slowly peels back some of the closely held secrets for the characters in the home, many of whom might want to be someplace else, all of whom are free to be someplace else if they can escape past the doors and the guards and get on to the street outside. It's a strange kind of thing, how the employees at the home can do just about anything to keep the kids from leaving but have no power to order them back should they leave.
So I'm not describing this like any film anyone is going to rush out to see. But the writing is really good. The acting is really good. The surprises along the way are never total surprises, yet we never quite see them coming way far ahead of time. Powerful stuff.
Rush:
Great performances. Great soundtrack. Great photography. Great racing sequences.
It's not like this film, one of Ron Howard's best, didn't get some good reviews. It's not like it didn't get some recognition on the awards scene, with some acting awards especially. But certainly, in the US, the film didn't do as well as hoped. It's a shame, that.
12 Years a Slave:
It's a hard film to love, and I want to keep pushing it away, but it doesn't deserve that.
I first caught up with director Steve McQueen with Shame, an impressive feature about an IRA prisoner who went on hunger strike. Searing visual images, excellent acting, powerful story. Often hard to sit through.
I got to see McQueen in person when the Museum of the Moving Image screened his Shame. Didn't impress me so much there. The movie had the same stunning visuals, I can still see some scenes of the main character racing down deserted Manhattan streets that shimmer and gleam. Like Shame, hard to sit through. We don't really need visually stunning movies about sex addicts. And to have to listen to the director talk about all of the wonderful artistic decisions in making a film that nobody should have bothered with. It's the risk of these Q&A things. This wasn't as bad as listening to Alan Parker spout on about his genius in making The Life of David Gale, but it was close.
Then we arrive at 12 Years a Slave. And we're starting to see some patterns here. There are stunning visuals, and the movie is hard to sit through.
But it's a worthy movie in better ways than a lot of other worthy movies. It isn't a movie that uses white people to tell the story of the black struggle. It isn't Richard Attenborough or Bernardo Bertolluci who choke on their own artifice half the time. See Gandhi for worthy and dull, or The Last Emperor. See Cry Freedom. No, this is told with passion, with emotion, with an abundance of good acting.
Captain Phillips:
Tom Hanks gives a great performance, and the film shows director Paul Greengrass at this best, with great photography and great editing in the service of some real-life drama.
Room 237:
A documentary about The Shining, kind of.
If you like The Shining -- and I like it very much -- it's hard to see it just once. You want to keep seeing it, over and over and over again. And when you see a movie over and over again, you notice things about it that you may not notice on the first viewing or the thirtieth. And it's a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, whom some consider to be technocratic and cold, so in control of every frame that he suffocates human emotion. So when you see one of his movies over and over again, and you notice things, you know that everything has to be there for a reason.
So this movie introduces us to people, whom we hear in voiceover over clips from the film but don't actually see on-screen, who have very clear ideas of what The Shining is all about. Notice how the carpet has things that look like little rockets, and this is a movie about the faking of the Apollo rocket launches. Or notice the food in the pantry and realize it's a movie about the treatment of the American Indian. Or realize that the window in the hotel GM's office couldn't really be there and go someplace else from there. All of these theories can't be right, and likely none of them are. According to Kubrick's right hand man on the film, even the control freak director sometimes has a particular thing appear on the screen because they happened to need something and that was at hand on the particular day they shot a particular scene where they needed this particular thing.
I have a confession to make. I never realized the window in the office couldn't have been a window. I have stared at the screen a gazillion times trying to figure out if the bathroom window that Danny has to climb out of can really be a window in that particular place. I've yearned to look at blueprints because I never quite believe the architecture of the hotel, and now I find out that I might be able to go on the internet and find the blueprints I'm looking for. But do I want to? I like my mysteries. I like my The Shining.
It's funny, sometimes funny-scary, it's insightful about the creative process, about our interaction with creativity, about obsession. .
Philomena:
The funny version of the not so funny story of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. Excellently acted by Judi Dench and Steve Coogan.
Before Midnight:
I saw Before Sunrise when it came out 18 years ago, at the UA Lynbrook on a day when I rode out there to visit the accountants for the Scott Meredith Agency, whom I used for a couple years when I struck out on my own. If memory serves, I've not seen the movie again, though the idea of it sticks around. And then Before Sunset came around, 9 years after, and it sticks around. You can't quite believe how much tension you can get out of wondering if a guy's going to leave to catch his flight or not, and this movie left me as rapt about that small little decision as if there were a red timer counting down for the bomb that might go off and destroy the world. And now, Before Midnight. Once again, Ethan Hawke, Juliet Delpy and director Richard Linklater collaborate on a little movie with a long aftertaste. Ethan Hawke didn't make his flight. Now, he's got a son from his prior marriage, the one that broke up in part because he didn't make that flight. And he's spending some tense time in Greece with his girlfriend, Delpy. And they ride around in a car after dropping their son off at the airport, and they talk while the beautiful Greek scenery glides by. And they talk over lunch with friends, while chopping the vegetables and eating the result. And they talk some more while they walk back to their hotel, an extended take tracking them through relics. And it all comes to a head when they get to the hotel, 18 years of history and resentment and love and bitterness and shared experiences and things they should've done together but didn't. Nominated for an Oscar in the screenplay categories. The movies seem like they're being made up on the spot, but as I read in one interview, you can't go filming across the Greek countryside, closing roads, doing multiple takes, and make it all up as you go along.
Her:
One of the best sf films in a long time. Winner of an Academy Award for Original Screenplay.
The Wolf of Wall Street:
Not quite up to the level of Goodfellas, but an amazingly good film by Martin Scorcese, with an exceptional lead performance by Leonardo DiCaprio and good supporting work by Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler and others. Leisurely, finding its own rhythms, and certain to be talked about for a very long time.
The Conjuring:
I realized as I was typing that I needed to add this to my list for reasons mentioned in what I say above about The Spectacular Now. I'm nearing 50. I don't do horror movies the way I used to. I hardly do them at all. But I went to see this one, I was on the edge of my seat the whole way, I was using my arms or my knees or my anything to keep myself from seeing what was happening on the screen because I was scared. The movie's of a type, but it's among the very best of it's type that you'll find.
Gravity:
New-fangled technology and old-fashioned great acting from Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Visually stunning to look at, suspenseful to sit through, one of the few films I wish I'd paid more to see.
There are several hundred films released each year, and I see only a small percentage of them, somewhere between 90-110 in a typical year. So ya know, my list isn't as valid as some critic who is paid to see movies and sees 400 of them, but it also isn't full of too many obscure films that only a critic would have or could have seen. Room 237, Short Term 12, Spectacular Now are the more "obscure" of the movies on my list, but hey, I just round a Room 237 DVD lurking in Costco, so how obscure can it be!
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Three by Three
My big sit two weeks ago really can't compare to seeing Django Unchained, Les Miz and Zero Dark Thirty back-to-back-to-back. The good news, I guess, is that I saw all three in different theatres so I got some fresh air in-between.
Django Unchained was kind of frustrating to me. The writer/director Quentin Tarantino is an auteur, a student of cinema, a craftsman. He does films that won't be confused with anyone else's. This one is, as many of his often are, a bit wacko in the descriptions. A German bounty hunter in the pre-Civil War south decides to buy a slave, teach him to assist in his job, the slave proves to be a natural with a gun, and then agrees to go to buy the slave's wife. The slave is played by Jamie Foxx, the German by Christoph Waltz who was a deserving Oscar winner for Supporting Actor in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, the plantation owner who has Foxx's wife by Leonardo DiCaprio. Quite a cast. Kerry Washington is the wife, and a house slave on the plantation is played by Samuel L. Jackson. There are also a gazillion cameos from Jonah Hill, Don Johnson, Tarantino himself, and more. It's not only a good cast, but it's well taken care of by the director. Everyone is good or very good, except maybe Tarantino himself, but to me the stand-out is Samuel L. Jackson. There's no Samuel L. Jackson in him this time around, he's been doing films for ten or twenty years now by being Samuel L. Jackson, and here he's completely his character and not himself at all.
Technically, the film is brilliant, rich with allusion to cinematic history and yet entirely its own. Music couldn't be used more perfectly, Django has his own theme song that hearkens back to classic Western cinema, the kind of theme song parodies by the F Troop song but here done most subtly. There are spectacular individual shots, one of the family gathered under a large tree for a funeral leaps off the screen. There is rich choreographed pageantry, especially as Waltz and Foxx enter on to a plantation, the parade of their horses or the looks of the slaves. One moment you can be reminded of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, the next of Kubrick, maybe some John Ford or some Scorcese mixed in.
If you're going to see the film, do yourself a favor and see it now in theatres, it's the kind of movie that deserves that. And when you're at the theatre, if you have a choice of screens why not be sure to go to the auditorium with the biggest screen. This is a movie that fills the screen, it wants to grow and expand to fill every square meter the way sea monkeys want to grow when you've poured hot water on them. You could probably teach a film class using just this film and it's direct ancestors as the text.
But alas, all that is good about the film is ultimately being used toward one goal, which is to get us to another Quentin Tarantino gore-fest, it's like a tasting menu with lots of little violent morsels along the way as the odd-numbered courses and bits of cinematic brilliance for the even-numbered courses, and then the dessert is some massive thing, a molten chocolate cake that bleeds blood covered by blood-colored ice cream with bullet sprinkles and hot blood topping and pistol barrels taking the place of the bananas. I haven't even seen every movie written or directed by Tarantino, and I've already seen this in True Romance, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Grindhouse, here, Inglourious Basterds, Natural Born Killers, From Dusk till Dawn.
Other great directors like Kubrick and Scorcese have applied their skills to lots of different kinds of movies, some more successful than others, but they've gotten around. I could forgive Tarantino his complete disinterest in moving beyond the bloodbath if he had some niche he was amazingly good at, kind of like the way a James Burrows or a Jay Sandrich could direct a sitcom like nobody's business, but Tarantino is every bit as inconsistent as Scorcese without any compensating ambition.
It's possible to interpret this as Tarantino using his violent ends as a way of sugaring thematic medicine. Django Unchained is a great romance, or it's the first film in decades to look at slavery from the black point of view. Please. In Django Unchained, there's this question DiCaprio asks of why slaves haven't killed their masters, it's a good question wondering about the motivations of the Samuel L. Jackson character to care more for the plantation master than the slave. The film answers this question by having DiCaprio bring a skull out to the dinner table and launch into a discussion of phrenology that would fit right at home in DePalma's Untouchables. But it doesn't give a serious answer to the question, it doesn't for a moment think seriously about that question or any other question related to slavery.
And it is indulgent. Much as I admired the film, beats and scenes could often have been shortened, I didn't need to be sitting in a theatre for three hours (inclusive of coming attractions) for this movie.
Les Miz has gotten a lot of attention for stylistic reasons as well. Most musicals pre-record the songs then have the cast lip sync to their recordings while doing their actual performances. Here, director Tom Hooper (King's Speech, Oscar winner) uses small mikes to record performances actually being filmed, the mics then removed digitally in post-production. He also films most of the numbers in tight close-up. Charles Isherwood, a theatre critic for the NY Times, isn't kidding when he says he had the map of Eddie Redmayne's freckles memorized by the end of the move. Also, he isn't kidding when he says he had to go to the movie twice because he dozed off the first time. I'm just not that big into Les Miz, I saw the musical near the end of its can and can hardly remember a thing about it. The movie, in turn, isn't bad, it's probably a very good adaptation of the musical, but it doesn't elevate it from what it is/was on the stage. The drama's a bit of a mess, there are songs that are memorable for the duration of the show but that disappear very quickly once removed. I didn't care as much for Anne Hathaway's performance as the rest of the world does, in fact it was toward the end of her Dreamed a Dream big solo number that I started my brief slumber during the film. I was most taken in the case with Eddie Redmayne's performance, I was taken with him in Marilyn as well. And Broadway veteran Aaron Tveit is very good as a fellow revolutionary with Redmayne, overall I felt that the cast of young schoolboy revolutionaries was the highlight of the film, but I'm biased. Still and all, Russell Crowe can't sing that well, Hugh Jackman doesn't seem as engaging here as when hosting an award show or even in some of the X-Men movies. The stylistic choices by Tom Hooper work sometimes and not in others. Certainly better choices than the ones in Anna Karenina. The close-ups aren't vertiginous, which some reviews have suggested, they are held for a long time and the film is so consistently in close-up that I never felt like I was zooming in and out, in and out. In the last fifteen or twenty minutes the choice actually pays off quite nicely, and I ended the film much more effected by the closing moments than I would have expected. The main problem I have is that even the best stylistic choice sometimes needs to be used selectively. There are things that you can do on stage that you can't as easily do on film, as an example have multiple characters on stage singing a duet in tandem on different sets. The close-ups work really well when they need to, but in a climactic section when you've got everyone singing right before the barricades are going up and the final battle close to hand you don't get a real sense of that at all. There isn't a lot in the big production number category, which Les Miz should have more of. At least as long movies go, this one needed to be, you can't really take a three hour Broadway musical and make a two hour movie out of it.
Finally, Zero Dark Thirty. This is a film about the killing of Osama bin Laden, with threads that the film might date from early "enhanced interrogation" soon after 9/11 to the actual killing in 2011. I'm not going to use this as an entry point into the torture debate. I'll state quite flatly that I am opposed to torture, that we shouldn't have done it, and I would feel that way whether or not some piece of intel gained from a torture session was helpful to catching bin Laden. Simply put, turn the tables, ask how we would feel if our soldiers were being tortured. But my personal opinion about torture shouldn't cover the appropriateness of its inclusion in this film. It happened. It has to be part of this story, especially since we can't tease out whether or not we needed it to get bin Laden. Even if every last videotape of every last interrogation sentence, enhanced or not, were in the public record, I doubt we'd have crystal clarity. And aside from whether or not torture should be part of it, this just isn't a great film. It's a decent one, but not close to great. As virtues, you get a solid sense of some of the tradecraft, the bits and pieces of taking information and analyzing and inferring, the difficulty of finding bin Laden's courier. The musical score by Alexandre Deplat is one of the years best. But the acting is haphazard. The CIA execs don't have the personality that Bryan Cranston gives in his role in Argo, the only one who comes close is James Gandolfini and even he seems very constrained. A very good actor like Kyle Chandler seems neutered here. Jessica Chastaine as the CIA analyst whose eyes we look through for most of the movie is so single-handedly focused on this one thing that she's ultimately boring, she has that vacant-eyed look of the marine recruits getting haircuts in the early montage in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. The only person with any personality that comes thru in the script or direction (by the Hurt Locker team of Mark Boals and Kathryn Bigelow, Hurt Locker was a much better film than this) is the male CIA interrogator who reveals some sense of an internal life within a role that doesn't always allow it.
You don't want to have an Obama impersonator, but if someone wants to tell me that the film does play politics with torture by only choosing to show Obama in a clip decrying and ending the use of torture by the US, which the film strongly implies is a stupid decision, I can't argue. Obama had a role here. The role of invigorating the search for Al Qaeda activists to kill is handed off to some CIA guy who does a fly-by dress-down at the US embassy in Pakistan and Obama doesn't have a role there. The implication of the movie is clearly that the only proper and right decision was to go in and get Osama the way we went in to get him, but that isn't a decision that everyone would have made, and so the film again subtly denies Obama any credit for something that happened on his watch. So, OK, I'm avoiding the torture debate, but I'm arguing with the film's politics anyway.
Finally, this film is too long, and is too indulgent. The movie skips a lot of interesting stuff about the search for bin Laden, it doesn't delve much at all into the planning for the mission to get him, the decisions on what kind of mission to wage, on the training for the mission, we don't even really know that there was a training mock-up. Rather, it detours from its main mission to give us a Forrest Gump kind of history lesson. We see the attacks on the London transit system and other major attacks subsequent to 9-11, though in a bit of historical bias we don't get anything on the Madrid rail bombings. Our lead character is inserted into the bombing of the Pakistan Marriott, the bombing itself has a better argument to be referenced than some to the extent that some of the intelligence gathering might be HQed in the US embassy in Islamabad, but having our lead character in the hotel at the time is a dramatic invention since our lead is a composite, a Hollywood invention. And we spend several long minutes getting to know another character in the embassy just to add emotional resonance to a reenactment of the suicide bombing that took out several CIA agents, including some experts, who were so excited to have a powerful defector that they dropped security procedures at the meeting. This, again, has an argument for inclusion, it shows the foolhardiness of desperation. But coming at the end of a long string of unnecessary diversions into the terrorist timeline, I didn't have any patience for it.
Just as an idle note, I saw Les Miz at the Ziegfeld almost 30 years to the date after going there for the first time, to see Gandhi. A good crowd, half full or more, 30 years ago the place could routinely sell out for an epic movie, these days half full is impressive.
Django Unchained was kind of frustrating to me. The writer/director Quentin Tarantino is an auteur, a student of cinema, a craftsman. He does films that won't be confused with anyone else's. This one is, as many of his often are, a bit wacko in the descriptions. A German bounty hunter in the pre-Civil War south decides to buy a slave, teach him to assist in his job, the slave proves to be a natural with a gun, and then agrees to go to buy the slave's wife. The slave is played by Jamie Foxx, the German by Christoph Waltz who was a deserving Oscar winner for Supporting Actor in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, the plantation owner who has Foxx's wife by Leonardo DiCaprio. Quite a cast. Kerry Washington is the wife, and a house slave on the plantation is played by Samuel L. Jackson. There are also a gazillion cameos from Jonah Hill, Don Johnson, Tarantino himself, and more. It's not only a good cast, but it's well taken care of by the director. Everyone is good or very good, except maybe Tarantino himself, but to me the stand-out is Samuel L. Jackson. There's no Samuel L. Jackson in him this time around, he's been doing films for ten or twenty years now by being Samuel L. Jackson, and here he's completely his character and not himself at all.
Technically, the film is brilliant, rich with allusion to cinematic history and yet entirely its own. Music couldn't be used more perfectly, Django has his own theme song that hearkens back to classic Western cinema, the kind of theme song parodies by the F Troop song but here done most subtly. There are spectacular individual shots, one of the family gathered under a large tree for a funeral leaps off the screen. There is rich choreographed pageantry, especially as Waltz and Foxx enter on to a plantation, the parade of their horses or the looks of the slaves. One moment you can be reminded of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, the next of Kubrick, maybe some John Ford or some Scorcese mixed in.
If you're going to see the film, do yourself a favor and see it now in theatres, it's the kind of movie that deserves that. And when you're at the theatre, if you have a choice of screens why not be sure to go to the auditorium with the biggest screen. This is a movie that fills the screen, it wants to grow and expand to fill every square meter the way sea monkeys want to grow when you've poured hot water on them. You could probably teach a film class using just this film and it's direct ancestors as the text.
But alas, all that is good about the film is ultimately being used toward one goal, which is to get us to another Quentin Tarantino gore-fest, it's like a tasting menu with lots of little violent morsels along the way as the odd-numbered courses and bits of cinematic brilliance for the even-numbered courses, and then the dessert is some massive thing, a molten chocolate cake that bleeds blood covered by blood-colored ice cream with bullet sprinkles and hot blood topping and pistol barrels taking the place of the bananas. I haven't even seen every movie written or directed by Tarantino, and I've already seen this in True Romance, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Grindhouse, here, Inglourious Basterds, Natural Born Killers, From Dusk till Dawn.
Other great directors like Kubrick and Scorcese have applied their skills to lots of different kinds of movies, some more successful than others, but they've gotten around. I could forgive Tarantino his complete disinterest in moving beyond the bloodbath if he had some niche he was amazingly good at, kind of like the way a James Burrows or a Jay Sandrich could direct a sitcom like nobody's business, but Tarantino is every bit as inconsistent as Scorcese without any compensating ambition.
It's possible to interpret this as Tarantino using his violent ends as a way of sugaring thematic medicine. Django Unchained is a great romance, or it's the first film in decades to look at slavery from the black point of view. Please. In Django Unchained, there's this question DiCaprio asks of why slaves haven't killed their masters, it's a good question wondering about the motivations of the Samuel L. Jackson character to care more for the plantation master than the slave. The film answers this question by having DiCaprio bring a skull out to the dinner table and launch into a discussion of phrenology that would fit right at home in DePalma's Untouchables. But it doesn't give a serious answer to the question, it doesn't for a moment think seriously about that question or any other question related to slavery.
And it is indulgent. Much as I admired the film, beats and scenes could often have been shortened, I didn't need to be sitting in a theatre for three hours (inclusive of coming attractions) for this movie.
Les Miz has gotten a lot of attention for stylistic reasons as well. Most musicals pre-record the songs then have the cast lip sync to their recordings while doing their actual performances. Here, director Tom Hooper (King's Speech, Oscar winner) uses small mikes to record performances actually being filmed, the mics then removed digitally in post-production. He also films most of the numbers in tight close-up. Charles Isherwood, a theatre critic for the NY Times, isn't kidding when he says he had the map of Eddie Redmayne's freckles memorized by the end of the move. Also, he isn't kidding when he says he had to go to the movie twice because he dozed off the first time. I'm just not that big into Les Miz, I saw the musical near the end of its can and can hardly remember a thing about it. The movie, in turn, isn't bad, it's probably a very good adaptation of the musical, but it doesn't elevate it from what it is/was on the stage. The drama's a bit of a mess, there are songs that are memorable for the duration of the show but that disappear very quickly once removed. I didn't care as much for Anne Hathaway's performance as the rest of the world does, in fact it was toward the end of her Dreamed a Dream big solo number that I started my brief slumber during the film. I was most taken in the case with Eddie Redmayne's performance, I was taken with him in Marilyn as well. And Broadway veteran Aaron Tveit is very good as a fellow revolutionary with Redmayne, overall I felt that the cast of young schoolboy revolutionaries was the highlight of the film, but I'm biased. Still and all, Russell Crowe can't sing that well, Hugh Jackman doesn't seem as engaging here as when hosting an award show or even in some of the X-Men movies. The stylistic choices by Tom Hooper work sometimes and not in others. Certainly better choices than the ones in Anna Karenina. The close-ups aren't vertiginous, which some reviews have suggested, they are held for a long time and the film is so consistently in close-up that I never felt like I was zooming in and out, in and out. In the last fifteen or twenty minutes the choice actually pays off quite nicely, and I ended the film much more effected by the closing moments than I would have expected. The main problem I have is that even the best stylistic choice sometimes needs to be used selectively. There are things that you can do on stage that you can't as easily do on film, as an example have multiple characters on stage singing a duet in tandem on different sets. The close-ups work really well when they need to, but in a climactic section when you've got everyone singing right before the barricades are going up and the final battle close to hand you don't get a real sense of that at all. There isn't a lot in the big production number category, which Les Miz should have more of. At least as long movies go, this one needed to be, you can't really take a three hour Broadway musical and make a two hour movie out of it.
Finally, Zero Dark Thirty. This is a film about the killing of Osama bin Laden, with threads that the film might date from early "enhanced interrogation" soon after 9/11 to the actual killing in 2011. I'm not going to use this as an entry point into the torture debate. I'll state quite flatly that I am opposed to torture, that we shouldn't have done it, and I would feel that way whether or not some piece of intel gained from a torture session was helpful to catching bin Laden. Simply put, turn the tables, ask how we would feel if our soldiers were being tortured. But my personal opinion about torture shouldn't cover the appropriateness of its inclusion in this film. It happened. It has to be part of this story, especially since we can't tease out whether or not we needed it to get bin Laden. Even if every last videotape of every last interrogation sentence, enhanced or not, were in the public record, I doubt we'd have crystal clarity. And aside from whether or not torture should be part of it, this just isn't a great film. It's a decent one, but not close to great. As virtues, you get a solid sense of some of the tradecraft, the bits and pieces of taking information and analyzing and inferring, the difficulty of finding bin Laden's courier. The musical score by Alexandre Deplat is one of the years best. But the acting is haphazard. The CIA execs don't have the personality that Bryan Cranston gives in his role in Argo, the only one who comes close is James Gandolfini and even he seems very constrained. A very good actor like Kyle Chandler seems neutered here. Jessica Chastaine as the CIA analyst whose eyes we look through for most of the movie is so single-handedly focused on this one thing that she's ultimately boring, she has that vacant-eyed look of the marine recruits getting haircuts in the early montage in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. The only person with any personality that comes thru in the script or direction (by the Hurt Locker team of Mark Boals and Kathryn Bigelow, Hurt Locker was a much better film than this) is the male CIA interrogator who reveals some sense of an internal life within a role that doesn't always allow it.
You don't want to have an Obama impersonator, but if someone wants to tell me that the film does play politics with torture by only choosing to show Obama in a clip decrying and ending the use of torture by the US, which the film strongly implies is a stupid decision, I can't argue. Obama had a role here. The role of invigorating the search for Al Qaeda activists to kill is handed off to some CIA guy who does a fly-by dress-down at the US embassy in Pakistan and Obama doesn't have a role there. The implication of the movie is clearly that the only proper and right decision was to go in and get Osama the way we went in to get him, but that isn't a decision that everyone would have made, and so the film again subtly denies Obama any credit for something that happened on his watch. So, OK, I'm avoiding the torture debate, but I'm arguing with the film's politics anyway.
Finally, this film is too long, and is too indulgent. The movie skips a lot of interesting stuff about the search for bin Laden, it doesn't delve much at all into the planning for the mission to get him, the decisions on what kind of mission to wage, on the training for the mission, we don't even really know that there was a training mock-up. Rather, it detours from its main mission to give us a Forrest Gump kind of history lesson. We see the attacks on the London transit system and other major attacks subsequent to 9-11, though in a bit of historical bias we don't get anything on the Madrid rail bombings. Our lead character is inserted into the bombing of the Pakistan Marriott, the bombing itself has a better argument to be referenced than some to the extent that some of the intelligence gathering might be HQed in the US embassy in Islamabad, but having our lead character in the hotel at the time is a dramatic invention since our lead is a composite, a Hollywood invention. And we spend several long minutes getting to know another character in the embassy just to add emotional resonance to a reenactment of the suicide bombing that took out several CIA agents, including some experts, who were so excited to have a powerful defector that they dropped security procedures at the meeting. This, again, has an argument for inclusion, it shows the foolhardiness of desperation. But coming at the end of a long string of unnecessary diversions into the terrorist timeline, I didn't have any patience for it.
Just as an idle note, I saw Les Miz at the Ziegfeld almost 30 years to the date after going there for the first time, to see Gandhi. A good crowd, half full or more, 30 years ago the place could routinely sell out for an epic movie, these days half full is impressive.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Movie, Quietly
Once upon a time when I reviewed movies for the Michigan Daily, I sometimes speculated on the idea of becoming a movie reviewer or film critic as a career. These days, I wonder had I done so if I would've kept to some real-world sense were I doing so, or if I too would have drunk the critical Kool Aid that makes critics dump on movies that are not necessarily good but are nonetheless entertaining, jump on the bandwagon for books that no person who doesn't watch movies for a living would ever want to see, and pad a Ten Best list with at least four films that never saw a broader release than the Nuart and Film Forum and had they seen a wider release would still not have been of interest to anyone.
Would I have become a Manohla Dargis, whose first "essential movie" of 2010 is Sweetgrass, a documentary about bringing sheep up to their summer pasture?
Would I have become a J. Hoberman, whose top ten list includes all of three movies that were given a broad commercial release in 2009?
The film that inspires these thoughts is Police, Adjective (seen Wed. evening at the IFC Center, Aud. #3), which is the #3 movie of 2009 according to Hoberman, and which was the #7 film in the annual Village Voice critics poll.
Did anyone notice that the movie becomes over its course a kind of Mad Magazine version of what an art film is supposed to be, that they are reviewing a Mad Magazine version of an art film as if it were an art film?
The movie is set in Romania some time after the dictator was deposed but before entry into the European Union. A young policeman is doing stakeout work of three younger people who are smoking pot. The policeman comes to think it's not worth pursuing, his superior is set on doing a sting operation. That's pretty much what the plot is.
It's like watching an episode of Survivor that is 95% the shots coming out of the commercial breaks of the birds flying and the waves crashing against the shore, or of a sitcom where more time is spent on the establishing shots of the outside of Cheers than actually in Cheers. Because most of the "action" consists of watching the young policeman tail the three suspects. And in my opinion, not doing such a good job of it. How can they not notice him? So we get shots of two people walking down streets. Lots and lots of shots of this.
When we're not doing that, we might be watching scenes that watch like a bad novel, where the author hasn't learned that one of the things an author does is select which details are important. This is a movie where it's not enough to see a character asking for tea at a shop, but then to be asked if he wants the mint, fruit, or herb tea, complete with response. Where two characters walk down the hall at a police station, and one of them says he forgot his keys, he'll go back, and the other character that he doesn't need to, there's someone else in the office.
When we're not watching long shots of people walking down streets or being presented with trivial details, the movie includes discussions of language. The lead character and his wife discuss the meaning of song lyrics "what would the field be without the flower."
In the end, when the police officer is trying to escape the sting operation his boss asks for a dictionary, and the characters read aloud the definitions of conscience, law, morality, ultimately getting to the word police, and the movie gets its title because we then get a big blow-up of the dictionary page for police where we see "police, adjective" as one of the sub-heads.
And this is the movie that the Village Voice critics poll ranks as 7th best of 2009.
Yikes!
Well, I might've been less bored by this than I was by Sherlock Holmes, but it probably helped that I'd slept through most of a movie right before seeing this so I was well-rested.
There's a certain formalism to the movie, a level of craft, that can be said to elevate it beyond the norm. As an example, we can see the flickering old monitors in the police officers that tell us something about the time period or the police force at the time without it having to be told to us specifically. While the set design of the office of the superior in the police force doesn't have the symmetry of the hotel manager's officer in Kubrick's The Shining, there is an echo of Kubrick in the distance, the formality, the interest in holding a long shot on the superior in center of the frame and two officers sitting at either side. I don't want to say that the film is disposable cinema of no critical or artistic interest at all.
But yo, critic dudes, if you want to talk about morality in an army or a police force, if you want to think Kubrick, there's more going on in two minutes of Kirk Douglas confronting his superiors in Paths of Glory than there is in 20 minutes of Police, Adjective.
And is there anyone without a guild card or critics pass who can read my description of the movie and think "wow, this sounds great" or "oooh, that's something really important." For you, please remember that the first essential movie of 2010 is Sweetgrass.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Hunger and Sugar
Hunger, seen Saturday April 11 2009 at the IFC Center, Aud. #3. 3.5 slithy toads
Sugar, seen Saturday April 11, 2009 at the AMC Empire 25, Aud. #5. 3 slithy toads.
I saw these two films prior to heading off for London Book Fair, almost 2 months ago. Sugar is still hanging around here and there, such as at the Cinema Village in New York City. Hunger, you'll want to keep an eye out for on DVD. I'd certainly recommend renting both. Hunger is the better movie, but Sugar the more enjoyable. I've been meaning to blog about both, but as you can tell from the small # of posts in May, it's been a busy time in the weeks since I got back from London, and the blog often feels the brunt of my busy-ness.
Hunger is about a 1981 hunger strike in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland led by Bobby Sands. But while about Bobby Sands' hunger strike, the film makes an interesting and even courageous decision to NOT approach the story directly from Sands' point of view. Rather, the first chunk of the film takes us into Sands' story by way of a couple other prisoners participating in a "blanket" strike, where the prisoners refuse to wear prison issue and go into their cells with blankets instead. And more. Not for the squeamish, we get to see quite vividly how you can avoid using a bathroom by smearing your feces on the wall and building mashed potato culverts to put your urine out into the cellblock hall. Quite, quite vividly. The purpose of all of this is to attempt to get the Thatcher government to recognize the IRA prisoners as political prisoners instead of garden variety criminals. The authorities do not take well to this, and there are scenes of great brutality and power as the guards attempt to assert authority and give the prisoners haircuts or clean their cells.
Sands embarks on the hunger strike as a way of escalating the stakes, and the second half of the movie is devoted to that hunger strike. He sticks to it until the bitter and fatal end, and the movie has a Kubrickian chill in depicting how the hunger strike plays out. If you could imagine a wasting body inserted into the final scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the old man star child of that film being turned in bed and his bed sores treated with ointment, his parents looking on, that's about what you're getting in Hunger. And to me, there's no better praise for the movie than to say that it's one of the most Kubrickian pieces of cinema I've seen since Kubrick himself. Its structure as a play in three acts is reminiscent of 2001 and Full Metal Jacket. The art and set direction, the symmetry of things, the use of music through most of the film, it's all Kubrick. I think it very safe to say that your attitude toward Kubrick's work may well be indicative of your interest in Hunger.
There's only one flaw in the film which keeps it from getting the last half toad. The middle act of the movie is an extended sequence in which Bobby Sands discusses his plans for the hunger strike with a visiting priest at the prison. On the one hand it's a brilliant scene with rich, vivid and provocative dialogue. On the other hand, it's a godawful indulgent scene that drones on and on. And on and on. And almost set me into a deep and lasting slumber for what was to come.
This isn't a film to see again and again, either. Kubrick has a chill to a lot of his work but also a kind of brute genius that makes me want to see his major films once every five years. Hunger is a brilliant work with almost all the same ingredients, but once is both a must, and enough.
Sugar is a baseball movie that really isn't about baseball. It comes from the writing/directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck who attracted considerable attention a few years ago for a film called Half Nelson that I only half-liked. It was about a school teacher played by Ryan Gosling with a lot of problems and baggage besides his work, and it was worthy but flat. I was interested in Sugar from the first reviews of it I read coming out of Sundance in 2008, but also ambivalent.
Happily, this one wasn't flat at all. The central performance by Algenis Perez Soto as a Dominican baseball player who comes to the minor leagues in the US is totally winning. Soto is a charmer, totally engaging. There are some small scenes of big grace. My sister and I both liked one where Soto visits a diner in the US, is unable to order eggs because of his inability to know what kind of egg is which, and gets the assistance of a kindly waitress who brings him a plate full of eggs in different varieties with a quick English lesson to go along with it. I enjoyed some of the scenery. Soto's minor league team plays in a stadium in the shadow of a bridge across the Missisippi, and there' s something about the play of the big bridge and the minor leagues that I cottoned to.
This so-called sports movie takes an interesting turn when it leaves sports behind. Soto's Sugar decides that he isn't going to cut it and abandons his A-level minor league team to seek friend in New York City, and the last third or quarter of the movie turns from sports to immigration assimilation drama. Soto's absolute charmer of a performance takes the viewer along because we care about him more than the balls and strikes. However, the downgrade on the toad scale for me in this movie comes about because I didn't feel as if the lead character's pivot from lifelong pursuit to total abandonment of baseball was sufficiently justified by what was on the screen. This didn't bother my sister as much, because she feels from working with latino kids as a school teacher that there's a kind of macho that totally justifies what the character does without it needing to be spelled out, and she and I have agreed to disagree on that.
But we would both recommend Sugar. It's charming, approachable, likeable, and worth the ride.
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