Ecstatic Text

2016 Top Ten List - Not For Everyone

2017-07-13T20:23:00.001-04:00

More than half-way through 2017, I finally reveal my top films of 2016...

Many films on this list are admittedly not for everyone. That's okay. We are all beautiful snowflakes.

Honorable mentions: The Eagle Huntress, Hidden Figures, Fences, The BFG, Café Society, Voyage of Time, Command and Control, Arabian Nights, No Home Movie

25. A Monster Calls (J.A. Bayona) - The kind of children's movie I would actually want to make. Sorry, kid - life is tough.

24. The Neon Demon (Nicholas Winding-Refn) - A seductive dive into the superficial. Cliff Martinez knocks it out of the park once again with his gorgeous score.

23. Almost Holy (Steve Hoover) - The moral messiness of life under broken institutions.

22. Jackie (Pablo Larraín) - A plot that keeps circling around its story in order to explore how political leadership and personal tragedy intersect. The common theme is how you present to the world.

21. Maggie's Plan (Rebecca Miller) - A rom-com that is genuinely funny and genuinely un-romantic. Actors not afraid to embarrass themselves (intentionally, you know, for playing flawed human beings) is always a welcome sight.

Elle Fanning in The Neon Demon.

20. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins) - A beautiful film wherein the last act outshines the previous two.

19. The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook) - It rewards your patience with a devilish pitch black sense of humor and a crucial sense of not-taking-itself-too-seriously.

18. Hail, Caesar! (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen) - Don't let the candy colors and musical numbers fool you - this movie has a lot on its mind. Or, it has nothing on it's mind. But nothing is something, isn't it? Is it?

17/16. By Sidney Lumet (Nancy Buirski)/De Palma (Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow) - Hard to separate these films either from their content or from each other (I watched them back-to-back). All I know is one Saturday afternoon I had a profound experience about great, personal movie-making.

15. The Nice Guys (Shane Black) - I know it is more than just this, but: Ryan Gosling doing Lou Costello!

14. Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World (Werner Herzog) - Herzog investigates the modern digital age, and is largely interested in the human side of the story.

13. Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke) - The Australia chapter didn't ring as true to me as the rest of it, but maybe, in a way, that's the point? A plaintive cry in the wilderness of globalism.

12. Yourself and Yours (Hong Sang-soo) - One of the more ponderous and abstract of Sang-soo's films. At times sidesplittingly funny, but mostly kind of disturbing. People are strange.

11. American Honey (Andrea Arnold) - An indulgent handheld cinema-realist take on youthful rootlessness, group power dynamics, capital and class in America. The photography throughout is luminous, but I wasn't sure if Arnold knew what this was all amounting to. But the last half hour, and the final shot especially, won me over.

Willem Dafoe in Dog Eat Dog.

10. Into the Inferno (Werner Herzog) - Why are volcanoes interesting? Not just because of the hypnotic glowing red lava Herzog meditates on for extended stretches in this sprawling documentary. Volcanoes become a narrative device around which Herzog can explore how geography and the shifting of tectonic plates has shaped human civilization. It's also about the universal culture of science. And the mystery of North Korean isolationism. And cannibal tribes of Vanuatu. And...

9. The Anthropologist (Daniel A. Miller, Jeremy Newberger, and Seth Kramer) - A low-budget doc unusually adept at a lot of things simultaneously - the science of anthropology, the awkwardness of cross-cultural immersions, how global warming is affecting various cultures, and, most unexpectedly, the generational tensions of a mother-daughter relationship. A breezy 81 minutes that is both intellectually stimulating and touching on a human scale.

8. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade) - An extended comic riff on an absurd dad who just wants to know that he and his daughter are still a family in more than name, against a realistic backdrop of global economic forces and the lonely life of a corporate cog. The scenes play long, allowing the situational comedy to reverberate.

7. Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve) - A story of abandonment, Things to Come features a performance from Isabel Huppert wherein the actress (as is her natural instinct) plays the role against the grain of the script. Hansen-Løve wisely observes the difference between how one thinks of oneself and how one actually is in the world.

6. Dog Eat Dog (Paul Schrader) - A big fuck you to Hollywood, and all sense of taste or proportionality. If you can make it past the first 15 minutes, you'll get to see Schrader continue his career long exploration of man's failure to live up to the moral ideal (not for lack of trying). Featuring two of my very favorite performances of the year (Dafoe and Cage).

5. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan) - This story of a man dealing with tragedy fills its rich universe with human relationships of all kinds (not just the sad kinds), and a sense of townie-ism that feels authentic to Massachusetts. Not quite the towering achievement of his Margaret from a few years ago, but nonetheless a worthy introduction into the Lonerganian cinematic universe - where characters endlessly struggle to deal with the world's stubborn indifference to their needs.

4. Elle (Paul Verhoeven) - A farce of bourgeois moral values, Elle is shocking and chaotic, and like it's protagonist refuses to be put into a box.

3. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch) - A beautiful meditation on the imperfect respite of regularity and order.

2. Green Room (Jeremy Saulnier) - A tense bottle thriller wherein characters reveal their motivations through their un-telegraphed actions. By the time the film breaks out into the wilderness and everyone is walking slowly toward their own demise, it felt truly profound. I still don't know exactly how to articulate that feeling I got in words. Something about compromised, or maybe even absent, heroism.

1. Silence (Martin Scorsese) - A penetrating cinematic exploration of the roots of morality. Spoiler alert - Scorsese never hits bedrock on the question at hand, which I found absolutely thrilling.

Patrick Stewart and Macon Blair in Green Room.

Platinum Platypus Awards 2017

2017-03-04T13:00:00.002-05:00

I watched 90 films released in US theatres in 2016. I actually tried to take all that into account when coming up with these awards. My only acting nomination for Manchester by the Sea went to Gretchen Mol - am I crazy? I thought she was great.

Best Actor - Denzel Washington, Fences
over nominees:

Ryan Gosling, The Nice Guys

Tom Hanks, Sully

Nicolas Cage, Dog Eat Dog
Ralph Fiennes, A Bigger Splash

Best Actress - Isabelle Huppert, Elle and Things to Come

over nominees:

Tao Zhao, Mountains May Depart

Natalie Portman, Jackie
Viola Davis, Fences

Annette Bening, 20th Century Women

Best Supporting Actor - Willem Dafoe, Dog Eat Dog

over nominees:

Patrick Stewart, Green Room

Issey Ogata, Silence
Tracy Letts, Indignation

John Goodman, 10 Cloverfield Lane

Best Supporting Actress - Gretchen Mol, Manchester by the Sea

over nominees:

Felicity Jones, A Monster Calls

Lily Gladstone, Certain Women
Rachel Weisz, The Lobster

Gillian Jacobs, Don't Think Twice

Best Director - Martin Scorsese, Silence

over nominees:

Jeremy Saulnier, Green Room

Paul Verhoeven, Elle
Paul Schrader, Dog Eat Dog

Park Chan-wook, The Handmaiden

Best Cinematography - Rodrigo Prieto, Silence

over nominees:

James Laxton, Moonlight

Sean Porter, Green Room
Robbie Ryan, American Honey

Natasha Braier, The Neon Demon

Best Editing - Thelma Schoonmaker, Silence

over nominees:

Marco Capalbo, Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World

Julia Bloch, Green Room
Affonso Gonçalves, Paterson

Seth Kramer, The Anthropologist

Best Production Design / Art Direction - Jean Rabasse & Halina Gebarowicz, Mathieu Junot, and Emmanuel Prévot, Jackie
over nominees:

David Wasco & Austin Gorg, La La Land

Santo Loquasto & Michael E. Goldman and Doug Huszti, Café Society
Elliott Hostetter & Austin Gorg, The Neon Demon

Barry Robison & Jacinta Leong, Hacksaw Ridge

Best Screenplay - Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea

over nominees:

Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese, Silence
Shane Black, The Nice Guys

Noah Oppenheim, Jackie

Mia Hansen-Løve, Things to Come

Best Musical Score - Cliff Martinez, The Neon Demon
over nominees:

Mica Levi, Jackie
Roger Neill, 20th Century Women

Nicholas Britell, Moonlight

Yeong-wook Jo, The Handmaiden

Best Sound Design - Tom Fleischman, Silence
over nominees:

Joel Dougherty, Knight of Cups and Voyage of Time
Robert Hein, Paterson

Chris Foster, The Fits

Bernard Gariépy Strobl, Arrival

Best Film - Silence
over nominees:

Green Room
Paterson
Elle

Things to Come

Best Documentary - The Anthropologist
over nominees:

Into the Inferno
Lo and Behond: Reveries of a Connected World
De Palma
By Sidney Lumet

Best Comedy - Toni Erdmann
over nominees:
The Nice Guys

Maggie's Plan
Hail, Caesar!
Café Society

Worst Film - Train to Busan

over nominees:

Neighbors 2
Viktoria
Blue Jay

Nocturnal Animals

Beyond Me

2016-07-24T14:56:00.004-04:00

★½

Star Trek Beyond (Justin Lin, 2016) - The worst of the reboot series, Star Trek Beyond extends the story of Kirk, Spock and the gang in the most generic way possible. While most of it is one long loud dumb chase (where I can never tell what is going on or why things happen as they do), the little bits of rushed character interactions reveal how unseriously this film treats the premise of the series.

"To boldly go where no one has gone before."

Remember in the last movie, when Kirk excitedly told Spock about how they were going to finally get the five-year mission to deep space? It took two whole films of "origin story" to get to that point, and fans were excited to see the untold adventures that awaited the crew in the third film. Well, this movie demonstrates absolutely no interest in the idea at all. Less than three years later, Kirk is so bored making contact with strange new worlds and new civilizations, he is seriously considering taking a desk job. Uh, okay.

Apparently what Kirk needs to get his engine revved up is carnage and mayhem and a generic evil guy bent on the destruction of Starfleet. There is no rumination at all on the part of Kirk about the amount of people who had to die in order for him to feel like he had a purpose again. There is no self-reflection on the terrible command decisions Kirk made at the beginning of this movie that got half his crew killed. Everyone spends the rest of the movie cracking lighthearted jokes. When crew members died in the original series, it meant something. The stakes here are false. They are not felt by anybody on screen.

Instead of giving us political allegories that reflect our present time, or explorations of ethical dilemmas and concepts of human rights, instead of any interest in character development of any kind, we get a phony test of Kirk's heroism, magical macguffins that don't make sense, and an impossibly massive space station for some reason built on a border with uncharted space, a clearly vulnerable target. This is dumb. It's Star Trek only in the hollowest sense.

The warp bubble graphic looked cool, though:

via GIPHY

Elegy

2016-06-27T14:51:00.001-04:00

★★★★½

Elegy (Isabel Coixet, 2008) - It is early in Elegy when Ben Kingsley tells us that a novel becomes transformed by its reader. And when you read it again in ten years, it will be something different, because you are different. The same can be said for my experience rewatching this film, which I always admired, later in life. It drew unexpected depths of emotion from me. It is a Philip Roth concoction flipped on its head, told with great tenderness and respect for its obviously flawed characters. What makes you care is the tragedy of a man so used to not falling in love that when he actually does, head-over-heels, he is unable to recognize it, and can't help but ruin it. Roth presumably would have you believe he is ultimately unworthy of her, but Coixet and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer make us believe he is, which makes the self-sabotage all the more tragic. It's a beautiful film filled with marvelous performances and a rare maturity. I can't wait to see it again in ten years.

Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz.

Dennis Hopper

Patricia Clarkson

Sick movie marathon

2016-05-28T18:00:00.001-04:00

This week I was sick, and I saw three movies:

Captain America: Civil War (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2016)
★★½

Overstuffed with stuff, Captain America: Civil War takes everything wrong with Marvel universe films - their sacrificing of story at the alter of franchise-building synchronicity - and amplifies it. (Not one but two future Marvel movies - The Black Panther and Another Spiderman - are set up here). The story that is buried beneath all the extraneous stuff isn't bad at all, although it's more Iron Man 4 than Captain America 3 (Robert Downey, Jr.'s Tony Stark has the most deeply felt character arc.) I was surprisingly touched by the downbeat ending and the inversion of the trope of the bad guy at the end. But that's not what audiences will remember about the movie. Instead, they will remember the Avenger-on-Avenger fight scene where there are no real stakes (the cause of the intra-Avenger spat never makes sense to me - though I could imagine it done in a more convincing way) and where nobody is really trying to hurt each other. This is simple childish fantasy play. Once Ant-Man blows himself up to giant-size and starts playing with the other superheroes like they were toys, the metaphor becomes real. (Paul Rudd is always better than the films he appears in, and here manages to steal every scene he's in despite about 3 seconds of screen time. Quite the feat.)

Robert Downey, Jr., in Iron Man 4, er, I mean Captain America: Civil War. He was also in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. And Shane Black directed Iron Man 3. Just wanted to point those things out.

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (Nicholas Stoller, 2016)

★

As a fan of the original Neighbors (though a much bigger fan of This is the End), I was happy to read some positive reviews of the unexpected sequel, some critics saying it was "better than the original." Alas, it is not. Not at all. The film seems intent on proving how down it is with the feminist cause. It's not a natural source of humor for these particular filmmakers. The result at best can be described as "strained." Worse, while never Team Rogen's strong suit, the craft of filmmaking here really has taken a nosedive. The editing is so grossly quick-cut, it steps all over the punchlines, never letting scenes establish a back-and-forth rhythm that is so important for comedy to land in your gut.

The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016)

★★★½

Shane Black's biggest hit, Lethal Weapon, is the film of his I am least familiar with. The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight are the films I grew up with. They were guilty pleasures with unexpected smarts, films I wouldn't mention to my film school mates but secretly admired for their crafted cleverness. Then something changed. Time passed. Hollywood forgot how to make satisfying mainstream genre films for adults (granted, in this case, for adult men). After re-establishing himself with the epically entertaining self-reflexive comedy-noir Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Black became the elder statesman who represented a link to old-hollywood roots. (Perhaps that's why the prestigious Cannes screened his latest film this year?) Upon first viewing, The Nice Guys isn't quite the gem I had hoped for, but the thing practically begs for a second viewing. Black buries nuggets throughout the script - not just throwaway jokes or pop-culture references (the Lou Costello-meets-Frankenstein bit Ryan Gosling did killed me) - but sneaky character-development. The genre self-reflexivity and comedy is balanced by the seriousness and dimensionality with which Black treats these characters. Also, they have great film-names ("Jackson Healy" and "Holland March" sound made up, but they roll right off the tongue, don't they?). If only Tony Scott were still around to film it. Black's not as good a director as he is a screenwriter - but at least he gets to make his movies and we get to see them.

Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, and Angourie Rice in The Nice Guys.

2015 Top Ten (plus) List

2016-03-01T17:10:00.001-05:00

Overall, I found 2015 to be a bit disappointing. There were precious few standout documentaries, and mid-budget adult dramas were few and far between. Overall it really was the year of the big budget Hollywood blockbuster. Films I wouldn't normally expect to wind up on my end-of-year list are among the ones I think about the most: Straight Outta Compton, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Love & Mercy, Magic Mike XXL...

But Mad Max: Fury Road absolutely blew me away! My heart was still racing as I came out of the theatre. I went back a week later and was left slack-jawed once again. I adore Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria, but there was never really a question about what would end up as my number 1 at the end of the year. The sheer force of narrative momentum in Mad Max, told through a stunning sequence of visualizations, is not only breathtaking, but I honestly have no idea how the hell they filmed it.

Bit of a side note, George Miller's other masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City, is playing at the new Metrograph theatre in New York City on March 5th. Tickets haven't been released yet, but keep an eye out (http://www.metrograph.com/) and I will see you there on Saturday!

Honorable mentions: Learning to Drive, The Revenant, The Nightmare, Wild Tales, Joy, Mississippi Grind, Straight Outta Compton, Heaven Knows What, The Look of Silence, Results, Cartel Land

20. Brooklyn (John Crowley) - This crowd-pleasing immigrant love story is like The Immigrant's polar opposite - warm, innocent, and surprisingly funny. It helps to have Nick Hornby writing the dialogue and the great Yves Bélanger shooting, ensuring the protagonist's emotional life remains front and center.

19. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amselem (Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz) - A feminist shriek of frustration and a Kafka-esque indictment of conservative religious "justice," the absorbing narrative made the time fly by, despite nearly entirely taking place in the same small room for nearly two hours.

18. Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman) - "A disorienting puzzle of a movie with many exhilarating pieces, Anomalisa nevertheless maintains a straightforward trajectory involving Michael's internal strife." (from Eric Kohn's review)

17. The Big Short (Adam McKay) - "McKay approaches this adaptation of Michael Lewis's book with wit, energy, and a surprising degree of clarity. But if the movie is a crackerjack entertainment, it's one with a conscience." (from Stephanie Zacharek's review)

16. Time Out of Mind (Oren Moverman) - "In an extraordinarily inward and moving performance, Gere sheds every vestige of his silver-screen persona. Instead, Gere's George looks lost, broken, his eyes blinking warily, his body crouched and defensive, hesitant." (from Steven Rea's review)

15. The Humbling (Barry Levinson) - "The Humbling is a dark dazzler shot through with mirth and delicious malice. But be warned. It's not [Philip] Roth's novel." (from Peter Travers's review)

14. Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap) - "Kashyap excels at infusing his sets with period and cultural details. Often he will turn the volume up, turn the dialogue down, let the music whisper the plot in our ears, and dazzle us with the visual overload. And god bless his use of slo-motion!" (from my review)

13. Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs) - "Magic Mike XXL isn't as good a movie as its predecessor, but it's a way better party... The movie's sunny generosity of spirit serves as a sneak-attack on conventional movie masculinity..." (from Sean Burns's review)

12. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie) - Big, genre storytelling with an adult approach to good old-fashioned fun. Rebecca Ferguson holds her own with Tom Cruise like no other character in the series. The movie is dazzling. That Vienna Opera setpiece goes down in my book as one of the best scenes of the year.

11. Love & Mercy (Bill Pohlad) - "...the two performances [by Cusack and Dano] don't really match... Yet somehow this disconnect works, and Cusack's avoidance of mimicry suggests a man who has lost nearly all lingering ties to the young man he once was." (from Andrew Barker's review)

10. Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven) - "Mustang beautifully expresses the girls' unbridled energy, a force that refuses to be locked up, controlled, or repressed. It's a moving portrait of sisterhood, a celebration of fierce femininity and a damning indictment of patriarchal systems that seek to destroy and control this spirit." (from Katie Walsh's review)

9. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino) - "Shot in 70mm, but largely set in one room, this is the writer-director's take on the betrayed promise of America: a perverse vision of sadistic men comforted by false causes." (from Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's review)

8. Experimenter (Michael Almereyda) - "The writer-director, Michael Almereyda, clearly sees his protagonist as a master of stagecraft as well as psychology, and he gives the movie a whiff of the circus - a gorgeous, photorealist circus, often against tinted black-and-white backdrops that push its ringmaster into the foreground." (from David Edelstein's review)

7. Stray Dog (Debra Granik) - "Ms. Granik's tact and curiosity are remarkable. So is her subject's openness. We follow him in a grand convoy of gray-haired motorcyclists, on a pilgrimage to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. We eavesdrop on wrenching conversations he has with veterans of that war and later conflicts, and we overhear the advice he offers his friends and granddaughters. We are with him when he takes a friend to the dentist, and when he travels to Mexico to help his stepsons on their journey north to live with him... By concentrating its attention on the everyday concerns of specific individuals, [Stray Dog] quietly illuminates something much larger." (from A.O. Scott's review)

6. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-Hsien) - Long, immersive takes punctuated by quick cuts and darting action, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's take on the wuxia genre finds its characters moving through their lives as if guided by fate, sad and lonely. A gorgeous, if melancholy, movie.

5. The Mend (John Magary) - A film about extended adolescence and irresponsible behavior, Magary's impressive debut gets at something deeper than easy laughs or moralistic resolutions. The Mend takes two very different characters and allows them to crash into each other. The result is one big grey area of trepidation, a.k.a. real life.

4. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-Soo) - "The South Korean director Hong Sang-soo doubles the emotional stakes of this cinema-centric romance by doubling the drama itself. Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, quietly painful drama, set at the intersection of art and life... Together, the two parts make a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination in lived experience." (from Richard Brody's review)

3. Youth (Paolo Sorrentino) - "Paolo Sorrentino's second English-language feature stars Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as two aging artists... Youth is a voluptuary's feast, a full-body immersion in the sensory pleasures of the cinema." (from Todd McCarthy's review)

2. Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas) - After Summer Hours, Carlos, and Something in the Air, Assayas continues his hot streak with this supremely intelligent film about art, aging, technology and pop culture, featuring the always masterful Juliette Binoche. More than any other film this year or most years, Clouds of Sils Maria speaks to our present moment.

1. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller) - I've never seen action directed like this. What sets Mad Max: Fury Road well apart is not only the dynamic shots and utterly coherent yet fast cutting, but the story that grounds the chaos. It's an apocalyptic vision that reflects humanity's dark heart. And only women can save us.

Ron "Stray Dog" Hall holding his great grandson.

For the first time, the great Anne Yao has contributed her top ten (plus) list and has graciously let me publish it.

1. Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas)
2. Youth (Paolo Sorrentino)
3. The End of the Tour (James Ponsoldt)
4. Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven)
5. Love and Mercy (Bill Pohlad)
6. The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer)
7. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo)
8. Results (Andrew Bujalksi)
9. Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
10. Creed (Ryan Coogler)
11. Learning to Drive (Isabel Coixet)
12. Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs)
13. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie)
14. Straight Outta Compton (F. Gary Gray)
15. Mistress America (Noah Baumbach)
16. Counting (Jem Cohen)
17. Cartel Land (Matthew Heinemann)
18. Chi-raq (Spike Lee)
19. Tangerine (Sean Baker)
20. Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman)

Kevin Corrigan in Results.

Platinum Platypus Awards 2016

2016-02-28T04:18:00.001-05:00

For the movie year 2015...

Best Actor - Ben Mendelsohn, Mississippi Grind
over nominees:
Richard Gere, Time Out of Mind
Al Pacino, The Humbling
Harvey Keitel, Youth
John Cusack, Love & Mercy

Best Actress - Juliette Binoche, Clouds of Sils Maria
over nominees:
Patricia Clarkson, Learning to Drive
Elizabeth Moss, Queen of Earth
Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years
Charlize Theron, Mad Max: Fury Road

Best Supporting Actor - Harvey Keitel, Two Men in Town
over nominees:
Rick Springfield, Ricki and the Flash
Michael Stuhlbarg, Steve Jobs
Édgar Ramírez, Joy
Jesse Eisenberg, The End of the Tour

Best Supporting Actress - Rachel Weisz, Youth
over nominees:
Kristen Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria
Rebecca Ferguson, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight
Jada Pinkett Smith, Magic Mike XXL

Best Director - George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road
over nominees:
Olivier Assayas, Clouds of Sils Maria
Hong Sang-soo, Right Now, Wrong Then
Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight
Paolo Sorrentino, Youth

Best Cinematography - Stuart Dryburgh, Blackhat
over nominees:
Peter Andrews, Magic Mike XXL
Mark Lee Ping Bin, The Assassin
Luca Bigazzi, Youth
Maryse Alberti, Creed

Best Editing - Margaret Sixel, Mad Max: Fury Road
over nominees:
Marion Monnier, Clouds of Sils Maria
Aaron Yanes, The Humbling
Joseph Krings, The Mend
Cristiano Travaglioli, Youth

Best Production Design / Art Direction - Ludovica Ferrario and Daniel Newton & Marion Schramm, Youth
over nominees:
Wen-Ying Huang and Ding-Yang Weng, The Assassin
Colin Gibson and Richard Hobbs, Shira Hockman, Jacinta Leong, & Janni Van Staden, Mad Max: Fury Road
Fraçois Séguin and Irene O'Brien & Robert Parle, Brooklyn
Adam Stockhausen and Marco Bittner Rosser, Kim Jennings, Scott Dougan, & Anja Müller, Bridge of Spies

Best Original Screenplay - Olivier Assayas, Clouds of Sils Maria
over nominees:
John Magary, The Mend
Mark Charman and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, Bridge of Spies
Oren Moverman and Michael A. Lerner, Love & Mercy
Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, Mistress America

Best Adapted Screenplay - Charlie Kaufman, Anomalisa
over nominees:
Donald Margulies, The End of the Tour
Nick Hornby, Brooklyn
Charles Randolph and Adam McKay, The Big Short
Phyllis Nagy, Carol

Best Musical Score - Judd Greenstein and Michi Wiancko, The Mend
over nominees:
Carter Burwell, Carol
Ludwig Göransson, Creed
Ryan Adams and Theodore Shapiro, Danny Collins
David Lang, Youth

The Mend by Judd Greenstein & Michi Wiancko

Best Sound Design - Eugene Gearty, Love & Mercy
over nominees:
Dario Calvari, Youth
Shih Yi Chu, Duu-Chih Tu, and Shu-yao Wu, The Assassin
Zack Martin and Ryan M. Price, The Mend
Pam Demetruis-Thomas, Time Out of Mind

Best Film - Mad Max: Fury Road
over nominees:
Clouds of Sils Maria
Youth
Right Now, Wrong Then
The Hateful Eight

Best Documentary - Stray Dog
over nominees:
The Nightmare
The Look of Silence
Cartel Land
Lambert & Stamp

Best Comedy - The Mend
over nominees:
The Night Before
Wild Tales
Results
The Martian

Worst Film - American Ultra
over nominees:
Bluebird
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
Love Between The Covers
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

The 3rd Annual Maxwell Anderson Awards for Artistic Achievement in Film

2016-01-21T22:39:00.001-05:00

Obviously, I haven't been posting as much as I used to (to say the least). The blog is just too difficult to maintain on a regular basis the way I had envisioned it, with long-form review content. But fear not, my Platinum Platypus Awards will live on! I will also continue my comprehensive review of Films Noir, with the next review coming after this year's Oscars. As for new film reviews - you may see some in blurb form every now and then.

This year's awards include two new categories - musical score and sound design - because cinema includes sight and sound (at least it has since 1929). I don't have a full nominee list yet for Best Sound Design, but I have over 30 films left to see before I pick the winners, including some "heavy hitters" like The Revenant, Youth, and Son of Saul, so this list very well may change significantly. Best and Worst Picture award nominees will be withheld until I release my top ten list before the Oscars.

And the nominees are...

Best Actor
Ben Mendelsohn, Mississippi Grind
Jason Segel, The End of the Tour
Al Pacino, The Humbling and Danny Collins
Matt Damon, The Martian
Steve Carell, The Big Short

Best Actress
Juliette Binoche, Clouds of Sils Maria
Patricia Clarkson, Learning to Drive
Jennifer Lawrence, Joy
Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years
Charlize Theron, Mad Max: Fury Road

Best Supporting Actor
Rick Springfield, Ricki and the Flash
Michael Stuhlbarg, Steve Jobs
Édgar Ramírez, Joy
Jesse Eisenberg, The End of the Tour
Harvey Keitel, Two Men in Town

Best Supporting Actress
Kristen Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria
Diane Ladd, Joy
Brenda Blethyn, Two Men in Town
Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight and Anomalisa
Jada Pinkett Smith, Magic Mike XXL

Best Director
Olivier Assayas, Clouds of Sils Maria
George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road
Hong Sang-soo, Right Now, Wrong Then
Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight
Hou Hsiao-Hsien, The Assassin

Best Cinematography
Peter Andrews, Magic Mike XXL
Mark Lee Ping Bin, The Assassin
Stuart Dryburgh, Blackhat
Sean Price Williams, Heaven Knows What
Maryse Alberti, Creed

Best Editing
Marion Monnier, Clouds of Sils Maria
Aaron Yanes, The Humbling
Margaret Sixel, Mad Max: Fury Road
Joseph Krings, The Mend
Chih-Chia Huang and Ching-Song Liao, The Assassin

Best Production Design / Art Direction
Wen-Ying Huang and Ding-Yang Weng, The Assassin
Colin Gibson and Shira Hockman & Jacinta Leong, Mad Max: Fury Road
Judy Becker and Jesse Rosenthal, Carol
François Séguin and Irene O'Brien & Robert Parle, Brooklyn
Adam Stockhausen and Marco Bittner Rosser, Scott Dougan, Kim Jennings & Anja Müller, Bridge of Spies

Best Original Screenplay
Olivier Assayas, Clouds of Sils Maria
John Magary, The Mend
Matt Charman and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, Bridge of Spies
Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight
Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, Mistress America

Best Adapted Screenplay
Donald Margulies, The End of the Tour
Nick Hornby, Brooklyn
Charles Randolph and Adam McKay, The Big Short
Charlie Kaufman, Anomalisa
Phyllis Nagy, Carol

Best Musical Score
Carter Burwell, Carol
Ludwig Göransson, Creed
Ryan Adams and Theodore Shapiro, Danny Collins
Éric Neveux, Two Men in Town
Danny Elfman, The End of the Tour

Best Sound Design
Pam DeMetruis-Thomas, Time Out of Mind
Shih Yi Chu, Duu-Chih Tu and Shu-yao Wu, The Assassin
Zack Martin and Ryan M. Price, The Mend

2014 Top Ten List

2015-03-01T22:12:00.001-05:00

In my first year of actually keeping track of the total, I saw 122 films released commercially in the US in 2014. Frankly, I expected the number to be bigger. The deeper I get into this ranking business, the more difficult it is for me to know how to assign a value to an experience of watching a film. My self-doubt stems from an honest effort to try to see films from as many points of view as I can, appreciating what is good and unique about any given film, even if I did not respond positively during the experience of watching it. Any point of view on a film is just an attempt to account for one's emotional and/or intellectual responses to watching it, and no appraisal by any reviewer should be considered the final say in the matter. These are fluid conversations, and we are all better off when we hold ourselves accountable to the scrutiny of others. In that spirit, here are my favorite films of the year:

Honorable mentions: John Wick, The Strange Little Cat, Filth, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ida, The Double, Obvious Child, Gloria, A Summer's Tale

25. Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez) - "This is more than an intellectual exercise. Among the many remarkable qualities boasted by Manakamana, perhaps the most surprising is its humor. A dripping ice cream bar, a bobbing rooster, a kitten tangled in its owners hair: these are the details that make Manakamana a delight." (from Calum Marsh's review)

24. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch) - "In many respects, Adam and Eve are nocturnal cousins to the angels from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire: They're secret observers of history, living records of the past with little control over the future. But Jarmusch has no interest in the kind of guilt and grief Wenders wove through his movie; Only Lovers comes in a hipper, sexier shade of melancholy." (from A.A. Dowd's review)

23. Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu) - An experimental movie about artistry and fame that reaches ecstatic highs with its unique camera and blocking technique and a pair of great performances from Michael Keaton and Edward Norton. It's moody existentialism is given a necessary jolt by the filmmaking style on display.

22. American Sniper (Clint Eastwood) - A flashpoint of heated political discussion and a box office smash, American Sniper zeroes in on the consequences of combat on the psyches of our fighting men and women of the armed forces. Our political leaders would prefer we think of war in the most abstract of terms, but Eastwood's film would have none of it.

21. Wild (Jean-Marc Vallée) - "The hike works as a means of isolating Cheryl from the people in her life. She's out on her own and there's nothing but her and her thoughts. The editorial flourishes hint at psychologically defining moments from her past rearing up from a deep sleep, needing to be contended with." (from my review)

20. Rich Hill (Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos) - "A finely observed and mesmerizing portrait of three teenage boys in Rich Hill, Missouri, the film is a tough but tender journey into their lives, and a sort of state of the union address of Middle America in the twenty-teens." (from Katie Walsh's review)

19/18. Omar (Hany Abu-Assad)/Bethlehem (Yuval Adler) - I group these two films together because they complement each other so well. Each is a story of a Palestinian teen recruited as an informant by Israeli agents. Omar delves deeper into the corruption of the man's domestic life, while Bethlehem digs deeper into the operational entanglements of the spy game itself. These young men are tested beyond reason, their relationships threatened, their allegiances exploited, as part of the larger Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Each film is appropriately upsetting, and their sum casts a political struggle in the most personal of terms.

17. Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard) - "There is no place for Godard anymore, which is why the instinct for blowing things up is present. Godard wants to blow things up, but not really. He pretends to blow up the dog and then regrets it, so he brings the dog back. Instead of actual bombs, Goodbye to Language is Godard's bomb, an idea bomb." (from my review)

16. God's Pocket (John Slattery) - "Slattery and co-writer Alex Metcalf have written just enough of a plot to allow the characters to move through it without it feeling overdetermined or unconvincing, and also a clear through-line and vision that allows them to explore the deeper existential questions of life in a believable blue-collar neighborhood full of daily drinkers, high school dropouts, and a few career criminals who are the big scary fish in a little pond." (from my review)

15. The Dog (Allison Berg and François Keraudren) - Early in the bizarre true story of the man whom Al Pacino would portray in Dog Day Afternoon, the Dog (aka John Wojtowicz) let's you know something about himself: he sleeps with a lot of people and always has. How can he justify that, you may ask? The Dog leans in, and in his thick New York accent proclaims, "Because, idiot, you can love more than one person!" In the fascinating 90 minutes that follow, the filmmakers rigorously explore an extreme personality without diminishing the humanity behind it.

14. We are the Best! (Lukas Moodysson) - These are astonishing performances from the young leads, playing members of a nascent punk band who, as in most nascent punk bands, don't really know how to play their instruments. They're overflowing with energy, eager to make their mark on the world, but still figuring out what they want to say. It's a familiar story, but the naturalism and enthusiasm for life feels groundbreaking.

13. Calvary (John Michael McDonagh) - "Each 'character' is deliberately confrontational and always on message, contributing to the debate about morality, ethics, and the role of the church that he (representative of devout Catholicism) and the filmmaker (presumably also Catholic, or at the very least, ex-Catholic) want to have. The film's narrative consists of this debate, and as it builds, Calvary can be quite mesmerizing." (from my review)

12. Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller) - "Part of what works so wonderfully in Foxcatcher is that in every successive scene we see du Pont in a slightly different light, and each scene informs the next. Miller and screenwriters E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman have created such a fully complex and rich character in du Pont, and realized him so incisively, all Carrell has to do is stick the landing. And he nails it." (from my review)

11. Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho) - Bong Joon-ho adapts a graphic novel about a world where a failed attempt to deal with global warming accidentally causes everything to freeze over and everyone to die. The only survivors are aboard a train that never stops. It's a keep-you-guessing action movie with a lot on its mind, working as a political parable along the lines of, say, Orwell's Animal Farm.

10. Li'l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont) - A deadpan, dark-comedy version of a police procedural set in northwest coastal France, Bruno Dumont's mocking study of human weakness is like Haneke or Lynch with a sense of humor, in the way it hints at the more deep-seated ugliness covered up by ridiculous social ritual. The detectives are hopelessly, hilariously lost as victims pile up, and the unseen force of evil seems to emanate from the fabric of society itself.

9. Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy) - Jake Gyllenhaal Travis Bickles it up in this surprisingly f-ed up cautionary tale/social critique about a man who makes his living filming crime scenes, freelance, for the news, sometimes even before the crime has finished taking place (if he's lucky). The dinner scene between Gyllenhaal and Renee Russo's local news producer had me squirming and laughing out of shock and embarrassment, and later Russo, hooked on the gorey stuff, flashes her maniac co-conspirator a look of infatuation that absolutely pushes the movie over the edge.

8. Land Ho! (Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens) - A couple of old guys take a time out from their lives to go on vacation in Iceland, and lucky us, we get to tag along. There is much pleasure to be had in watching Land Ho!, not least of which in the freedom to watch the characters just "be," unburdened by plot machinations, prickly, lovable, hatable, human.

7. Whiplash (Damien Chazelle) - Featuring some of the most stylishly filmed music performance scenes ever, Whiplash is more than just surface pleasure. Ascending to the very top requires an obsession with improvement, and there is a dark side to that obsession. Whiplash explores this dark side, and admirably resists punishing its characters for their behavior. Winning is the bottom line. This is the way the world works.

6. The Overnighters (Jesse Moss) - A landmark documentary about a local pastor in a small North Dakota town in the midst of an oil drilling boom that has drawn thousands of men from around the country looking for work. A brilliant take on the intersection of private and public life, fear and frailty, The Overnighters taps into modern alienation, asking the question, "Do we even have a community?"

5. Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry) - Listen Up Philip deliberately apes literary modes, yet what sets it apart are its cinematic qualities. Thanks to the gifted high-wire direction of Mr. Perry, and the emotionally generous work of Elizabeth Moss, this tale of male self-sabotage (make that simply sabotage) transcends its lead character's myopia and delivers a riotous, uncomfortable story of post-modern identity crisis.

4. Happy Valley (Amir Bar-Lev) - "A thoroughly intelligent dissection and skeptical investigation of the sociology of a town rocked by scandal. It's about the unhelpful ideologies of hero worship and knee-jerk moralizing groupthink that has become our internet-fueled culture of shame spectacle. The film psychoanalyzes an entire country." (from my DOC NYC rundown)

3. A Field in England (Ben Wheatley) - A morality play about the amoral world, Ben Wheatley's visionary film takes place in a field in England during the English Civil War. One of the characters dies and returns to life several times, and at one point remarks, "I think I've figured out what God is punishing us for... everything."

2. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson) - An insane stoner noir that comes as close to actually being stoned as a film can. Audiences complained that they felt lost, which is exactly how they are supposed to feel. Along with perpetually high private eye Doc Sportello, we're playing catch-up the whole way through, but we're totally picking up on the vibes.

1. Mommy (Xavier Dolan) - Dolan's intelligent, gorgeous movie captures a mother's love for her troubled son with a rare emotional force. There is a scene toward the very end where Die (the mommy) says goodbye to her friend Kyla. Her behavior starts as a performance of social ritual, then becomes weighted with hesitation and self-doubt, finally giving way to a direct emotional plea. This moment crystalizes what Dolan is saying with the whole film. I could try and summarize it in words (something like, "Dolan wants us to feel the beauty in hopefulness even when the world forces itself on you") but I can't do justice with mere words to the feeling this film generates. Dolan's voice is informed by very old-school ideas of melodramatic storytelling, but also by a try-anything aesthetic freedom that is more in line with his age. The performances are perfect; the cinematography and editing are beautiful. Mommy is a total knockout. But don't take my word for it.

Land Ho!

And the Platy goes to...

2015-02-22T19:06:00.000-05:00

Best Actor - Bradley Cooper, American Sniper
over nominees:

James McAvoy, Filth

J.K. Simmons, Whiplash

Joaquin Phoenix, Inherent Vice
Guy Pearce, The Rover

Best Actress - Anne Dorval, Mommy

over nominees:
Mira Grosin, We are the Best!
Paulina García, Gloria
Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night
Mia Wasikowska, The Double

Best Supporting Actor - Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher
over nominees:

Waleed Zuaiter, Omar

Eddie Marsan, God's Pocket
John Turturro, God's Pocket
Edward Norton, Birdman

Best Supporting Actress - Laura Dern, Wild

over nominees:

Rene Russo, Nightcrawler
Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
Tilda Swinton, Snowpiercer
Elizabeth Moss, Listen Up Philip

Best Director - Xavier Dolan, Mommy

over nominees:
Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice

Ben Wheatley, A Field in England

Alejandro González Iñarritu, Birdman

Jean-Luc Godard, Goodbye to Language

Best Cinematography - Robert Elswit, Inherent Vice

over nominees:

Laurie Rose, A Field in England
André Turpin, Mommy

Yves Bélanger, Wild

Darius Khondji, The Immigrant

Best Editing - Xavier Dolan, Mommy
over nominees:

Martin Pensa and Jean-Marc Vallée, Wild
Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley, A Field in England
Tom Cross, Whiplash
Joel Cox and Gary Roach, American Sniper

Best Production Design / Art Direction - Suzie Davies and Dan Taylor, Mr. Turner
over nominees:

Marco Bittner Rosser and Anja Fromm, Only Lovers Left Alive
David Crank and Ruth De Jong, Inherent Vice
David Crank and Denis Schnegg, The Double

Donald Graham Burt and Sue Chan & Dawn Swiderski, Gone Girl

Best Original Screenplay - Dan Gilroy, Nightcrawler

over nominees:

John Michael McDonagh, Calvary

Alex Ross Perry, Listen Up Philip

Amy Jump, A Field in England

Bruno Dumont, Li'l Quinquin

Best Adapted Screenplay - Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice
over nominees:

Alex Metcalf and John Slattery, God's Pocket

Jon S. Baird, Filth
Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson, Snowpiercer

Best Film - Mommy

over nominees:

Inherent Vice

A Field in England

Happy Valley

Listen Up Philip

Best Documentary - Happy Valley

over nominees:

The Dog
Rich Hill
Manakamana
The Overnighters

Best Comedy - Inherent Vice

over nominees:

Listen Up Philip

Nightcrawler

Li'l Quinquin

God's Pocket

(non-award winners):

Worst Film (that I saw) - Joe

over nominees:

Expedition to the End of the World
Young and Beautiful
You and the Night
The One I Love

Gangs of Wasseypur

2015-02-16T02:04:00.001-05:00

"We might be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us." - Magnolia

"Even the biggest balls are subservient to the dick." - Gangs of Wasseypur

★★★★½

Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap, 2015) - Wow. Where to begin? Gangs of Wasseypur covers six decades and several generations of a blood feud between rival Sunni gangsters, beginning before Indian independence, as they compete over the right to rob the food train that passes through town, and taking us straight through to 2009. India grows up along the way. It isn't just about shootouts and double-crosses and shifting allegiances. It's really about India and its growing pains as a nation. The film depicts the corruption of industrialization, the eventual arrival of drugs and then guns, the abuse and mistreatment of women and the cultural and religious roots of these problems, the development of infrastructure and roads, the rise of overcrowded cities. For most of the movie, the police aren't corrupt - they're either absent or completely disempowered. The maturation of the police occurs when they get organized enough to join in on the corruption and violence. That's the end point, not the starting point, for the "character arc" of the police as an institution.

The film does all this in the background, so to speak, without making too obvious a point about it. The actual plot is an Indian mashup of The Godfather, Gangs of New York, and the original Scarface. A series of births and deaths mark the passage of time. The film has an episodic feel, and each episode is directed like it's the most important. Director Anurag Kashyap covers a lot of ground very quickly, but it never feels rushed or unconvincing. And don't let the runtime keep you away. Not a note of Gangs drags. It helps that it is packed to the gills with a killer soundtrack with lyrics that comment directly on the action, pumping the dramatics way past 10 on the dial.

Jaideep Ahlawat in Gangs of Wasseypur.

Like those three forebears I mentioned, the women of Wasseypur are knowing participants in the criminal nature of the family business. One of the only benefits to the women of the patriarchal society is that they are excused from having to participate directly in the violence, which gives them a level of protection, allowing them to survive longer and influence events domestically. And if the women were to be targeted by anyone in the ongoing feud, that would be viewed as crossing a line, and would bring shame from the society at large. Of course, the women are also the ones left to grieve.

Kashyap excels at infusing his sets with period and cultural details. Often he will turn the volume up, turn the dialogue down, let the music whisper the plot in our ears, and dazzle us with the visual overload. And god bless his use of slo-motion!

Manoj Bajpai and Reemma Sen in Gangs of Wasseypur.

Richa Chadda in Gangs of Wasseypur. She often screams "I will chop you!" at her male antagonists.

The plot details are sometimes hard to keep up with, but the details ultimately don't matter. The epic scale of the story encourages us to take the long view, and shows us that the repetition of vengeance leaves its own legacy, and affects everything that comes after. When one family member is beaten to death with a rock, it doesn't matter that the actual reason for the murder was over a relatively petty harassment dispute. In a subsequent scene, we hear this murder listed as one incident of many adding up to calls for a declaration of war. One of the characters in the scene tries to interject, "No, that was about something else," but is ignored entirely. It is a self-perpetuating system. We come to realize that each new child is not a chance for a new beginning, but rather doomed to continue the bloodshed, shackled by their past and family name.

Huma Qureshi and Nawazuddin Siddiqui in Gangs of Wasseypur.

After decades of murders upon murders, eventually the plot has to reach some sort of turning point. Enter Faizal. He is the one who has a chance to break the chain of violence. A pothead and youthful rebel, he loudly proclaims "I don't give a fuck!" But it is in his turn toward violence wherein the film articulates most clearly its conception of the weight of history on people's lives in the present. Faizal doesn't give a fuck, but that is when the past is at its most empowered. The pre-established truths of his life, the things he can't control, take over. It's resignation to fate. Faizal's Bollywood-influenced ideas of machismo as performance plus his marijuana-induced detachment from reality lead him to see his life and the role he plays in it as some sort of bizarre trip, a video game as ascendance to oblivion.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Faizal and Zeishan Quadri as Definite in Gangs of Wasseypur.

There are two scenes toward the end of the film - big epic shootouts both - where Kashyap, for whatever reason, didn't seem to get enough coverage of who was shooting at whom and from what angles. Each time I was unsure who our characters were firing at. These are huge set pieces and come as the story is finally reaching its zenith, when errors like these are least forgivable. The more egregious of the two problem scenes is the later one, the final shootout. It's hard to understand how Kashyap could have botched the shoot so badly that when he got back to the edit room and tried to put the pieces together, he had to cut between the same person in two different locations. It's inexplicable given the masterful work he did in the previous 4+ hours, with scene after scene feeling fully lived-in, overpopulated even, and loaded with detail. There is an argument that continuity doesn't matter, and I agree with that idea in philosophy, but this continuity error is so jarring at such a crucial moment in the film, it is impossible to ignore, and prevents Gangs of Wasseypur from being a masterpiece.

Wild

2015-01-31T23:59:00.002-05:00

"She was the love of my life. What else is there to say?"

- Cheryl Strayed, Wild

★★★★

Wild (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2014) - Determined but clearly inexperienced backpacker Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) sets off by herself on an ambitious hiking trip across the Pacific Coast Trail. For the first 30 minutes or so of Wild, adapted from the memoir by the real Strayed, we get a series of pratfalls and jokes about misperceived threats to her safety. It's charming, and very on-the-surface, which is a trap the director Jean-Marc Vallée has set deliberately, drawing out a sense of mystery as to the purpose of the hike, hinting at the deeper story with quick cuts and bits of audio that represent the thoughts and memories rattling around in Cheryl's head.

Vallée, who also co-edited the film, weaves the flashbacks in beautifully, and navigates the tonal complexity of the story with a deft hand. This is a more mature work than his previous film, Dallas Buys Club, in part because the world he creates feels much more filled in, but also because his choices seem much more closely hewed to the story. Cinematographer Yves Bélanger similarly shoots with very little ego, refusing to get distracted by the natural beauty of California, and keeping the focus squarely on Cheryl and her demons.

Some of the gestures in Wild strain for a universality and/or symbolism that it doesn't quite pull off. There are several scenes where Cheryl encounters animals, leaving me with the impression that Cheryl really isn't comfortable with animals, and kind of awkwardly treats them like people. It's refreshing to see a film from a woman's perspective where the good men fade a bit into the background and the many more ambiguous men Cheryl encounters are all acutely felt as potential threats, but Wild goes back to this well once or twice too often. And the central plot device of the hike is a clumsy and annoyingly persistent metaphor.

But the hike works as a means of isolating Cheryl from the people in her life. She's out on her own and there's nothing but her and her thoughts. The editorial flourishes hint at psychologically defining moments from her past rearing up from a deep sleep, needing to be contended with.

Laura Dern is Oscar-worthy in Wild.

Eventually the film shows its cards, the parallel-cutting reaches a crescendo, and all those sneaking hooks the film had been setting into you suddenly make their force felt. I didn't see it coming. It was a perfectly paced eruption of emotion. It was Laura Dern setting those hooks, doing a ton of the story work in the shortest little wisps of scenes.

From the moment of that crescendo on, I would return to tears every time Dern showed up on screen, and in the later stages of the film so would Cheryl. This is a story of learning to accept that the gaping hole left in your life by a great loss isn't going to go away. You will carry it with you everywhere and there is no way to fill it with something or someone else.

So its unfortunate that the concluding voiceover monologue attempts to cover up all the messy pain and feelings of guilt with a pretty bow and cliched platitudes that are jarringly out of sync with what was so good about everything that came before. The voiceover is a mistake, but its a short one, and it doesn't ruin the feeling of profound sadness that I carried with me as I left the theatre.

NOTE: Yves Bélanger won the very first Platinum Platypus Award for Cinematography for his work on Laurence Anyways.

Oscar nominations 2015

2015-01-17T14:35:00.002-05:00

Oh, Oscar. You're so good at being yourself. Does it get any safer than nominating Robert Duval for The Judge? It's so safe, it's frankly surprising even by Academy standards. Morten Tyldum for Best Director? Does the Academy know what directors do?

When making nomination picks - this year and every year - I'm often left frustrated that there are not enough strong lead female performances to fill five slots, while on the men's side the opposite is true. People are upset that Jennifer Aniston didn't get nominated this year for Cake. Cake? I've never heard of this movie! Julianne Moore is a shoe-in, apparently, for Still Alice, even though the film is very small and has lukewarm reviews. Where are the roles for women??? It's always been a problem, but it seems to be getting worse. We have wonderful actresses but no parts! C'mon, Hollywood! Get your act together! Exclamation point!

* indicates my preference. º indicates my prediction. (I'll fill these in as I see more of these films).

Best Picture

American Sniper

Birdman
Boyhood º
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
Selma
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash *

Lead Actress
Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night *

Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything
Julianne Moore, Still Alice º
Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl
Reese Witherspoon, Wild

Lead Actor

Steve Carell, Foxcatcher

Bradley Cooper, American Sniper *

Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game
Michael Keaton, Birdman
Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything º

Director

Alejandro G. Iñarritu, Birdman * º
Richard Linklater, Boyhood

Bennett Miller, Foxcatcher
Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Morten Tyldum, The Imitation Game

Best Supporting Actress

Patricia Arquette, Boyhood º
Laura Dern, Wild *

Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game
Emma Stone, Birdman
Meryl Streep, Into the Woods

Best Supporting Actor

Robert Duvall, The Judge

Ethan Hawke, Boyhood
Edward Norton, Birdman
Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher *

J.K. Simmons, Whiplash º

Animated Feature Film

Big Hero 6
The Boxtrolls
How to Train Your Dragon 2 º
Song of the Sea
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Documentary Feature
CitizenFour º
Finding Vivian Maier
Last Days in Vietnam
The Salt of the Earth
Virunga

Documentary Short Subject
Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 º
Joanna
Our Curse *
The Reaper (La Parka)
White Earth

Foreign Language Film
Ida
Leviathan º
Tangerines
Timbuktu
Wild Tales

Adapted Screenplay
Jason Hall, American Sniper
Graham Moore, The Imitation Game º
Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice *
Anthony McCarten, The Theory of Everything
Damien Chazelle, Whiplash

Original Screenplay

Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., and Armando Bo, Birdman
Richard Linklater, Boyhood
E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, Foxcatcher
Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness, The Grand Budapest Hotel º
Dan Gilroy, Nightcrawler *

Animated Short Film
The Bigger Picture
The Dam Keeper
Feast
Me and My Moulton
A Single Life

Live Action Short Film
Aya
Boogaloo and Graham
Butter Lamp (La Lamp au Beurre de Yak)
Parvaneh
The Phone Call

Makeup and Hairstyling
Bill Corso and Dennis Liniard, Foxcatcher
Frances Hannon and Mark Coulier, The Grand Budapest Hotel º
Elizabeth Yianni-Georgiou and David White, Guardians of the Galaxy *

Original Score
Andre Desplat, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Andre Desplat, The Imitation Game
Hans Zimmer, Interstellar *
Gary Yershon, Mr. Turner
Jóhann Jóhannsson, The Theory of Everything º

Original Song
"Everything is Awesome" in The Lego Movie
"Glory" in Selma º
"Grateful" in Beyond the Lights
"I'm Not Gonna Miss You" in Glen Campbell... I'll Be Me *
"Lost Stars" in Begin Again

Cinematography

Emmanuel Lubezki, Birdman º
Robert Yeoman, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski, Ida *
Dick Pope, Mr. Turner
Roger Deakins, Unbroken

Costume Design
Milena Canonero, The Grand Budapest Hotel º

Mark Bridges, Inherent Vice *

Colleen Atwood, Into the Woods
Anna B. Sheppard and Jane Clive, Maleficent
Jacqueline Durran, Mr. Turner

Film Editing

Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach, American Sniper
Sandra Adair, Boyhood
Barney Pilling, The Grand Budapest Hotel
William Goldenberg, The Imitation Game
Tom Cross, Whiplash * º

Sound Mixing
John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff, and Walt Martin, American Sniper
Jon Taylor, Frank A. Montaño, and Thomas Varga, Birdman
Gary A. Rizzo, Gregg Landaker, and Mark Weingarten, Interstellar
Jon Taylor, Frank A. Montaño, and David Lee, Unbroken
Craig Mann, Ben Wilkins, and Thomas Curley, Whiplash * º

Sound Editing
Alan Robert Murray and Bub Asman, American Sniper * º
Martín Hernández and Aaron Glascock, Birdman
Brent Burge and Jason Canovas, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Richard King, Interstellar
Becky Sullivan and Andrew DeCristofaro, Unbroken

Production Design
Adam Stockhausen and Anna Pinnock, The Grand Budapest Hotel º
Maria Djurkovic and Tatiana Macdonald, The Imitation Game
Nathan Crowley and Gary Fettis, Interstellar
Dennis Gassner and Anna Pinnock, Into the Woods
Suzie Davies and Charlotte Watts, Mr. Turner *

Visual Effects
Dan DeLeeuw, Russell Earl, Bryan Grill, and Dan Sudick, Captain America: The Winter Soldier *
Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, Daniel Barrett, and Erik Winquist, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Stephane Ceretti, Nicolas Aithadi, Jonathan Fawkner, and Paul Corbould, Guardians of the Galaxy º
Paul Franklin, Andrew Lockley, Ian Hunter, and Scott Fisher, Interstellar
Richard Stammers, Lou Pecora, Tim Crosbie, and Cameron Waldbauer, X-Men: Days of Future Past

The 2nd Annual Maxwell Anderson Awards for Artistic Achievement in Film

2015-01-15T14:03:00.000-05:00

Once again that time of year is upon us. The Golden Globes are behind us, the Oscar nominations are out, and the Platypus is back in town. Here are my vastly superior choices for 2014's best films and filmmakers. As always, the nominees may be supplemented as I watch more films from 2014. Winners will be announced the night before the Oscar telecast.

Best Actor

James McAvoy, Filth

J.K. Simmons, Whiplash

Joaquin Phoenix, Inherent Vice
Bradley Cooper, American Sniper
Guy Pearce, The Rover

Best Actress

Mira Grosin, We are the Best!
Paulina García, Gloria
Marion Cotillard, The Immigrant
Mia Wasikowska, The Double

Anne Dorval, Mommy

Best Supporting Actor

Waleed Zuaiter, Omar

Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher
Eddie Marsan, God's Pocket
John Turturro, God's Pocket
Edward Norton, Birdman

Best Supporting Actress

Laura Dern, Wild

Rene Russo, Nightcrawler
Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
Tilda Swinton, Snowpiercer
Elizabeth Moss, Listen Up Philip

Best Director

Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice

Xavier Dolan, Mommy
Ben Wheatley, A Field in England

Alejandro González Iñarritu, Birdman

Jean-Luc Godard, Goodbye to Language

Best Cinematography

Robert Elswit, Inherent Vice

Laurie Rose, A Field in England
André Turpin, Mommy

Yves Bélanger, Wild

Darius Khondji, The Immigrant

Best Editing

Martin Pensa and Jean-Marc Vallée, Wild
Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley, A Field in England
Xavier Dolan, Mommy
Tom Cross, Whiplash
Joel Cox and Gary Roach, American Sniper

Best Production Design / Art Direction

Happy Massee and Pete Zumba, The Immigrant
David Crank and Ruth De Jong, Inherent Vice
David Crank and Denis Schnegg, The Double

Suzie Davies and Dan Taylor, Mr. Turner

Donald Graham Burt and Sue Chan & Dawn Swiderski, Gone Girl

Best Original Screenplay

Dan Gilroy, Nightcrawler

John Michael McDonagh, Calvary

Alex Ross Perry, Listen Up Philip

Amy Jump, A Field in England

E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, Foxcatcher

Best Adapted Screenplay

Alex Metcalf and John Slattery, God's Pocket

Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice

Jon S. Baird, Filth
Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson, Snowpiercer

Blurbs: Cartoon Noir and Logocentrism

2015-01-07T16:06:00.000-05:00

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (Robert Rodriguez, 2014)
★★★

Powers Boothe in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

The Sin City stories are film noir congealed into adolescent freak show. But sometimes adolescent freak shows can be worth their while (see the original Sin City). The individual story lines show potential: I like how the characters' "superpowers" are curses that spell their fate rather than rescue them; Powers Boothe's eyes were always destined for this kind of color treatment. But Rodriguez seems lost when it comes to finding some sort of coherence to the overall narrative, which, by the way, comes before AND after the story from the original movie, though I only know this because of other reviews that have mentioned this. The story here is an afterthought, a hook on which to hang all the gothic noir tropes and eye-popping visual effects.

If the story isn't to be taken seriously, many have asked if we really need this second Sin City, which, apart from the added third dimension, doesn't break any new ground from the original. The movie was panned by critics, but I don't really see THAT big a difference between this and the original, which was widely praised. Maybe one film was enough, and I am not doubting that the original was the superior picture, but I can't get too worked up over this sequel. The fact is, I never really took the story of the original film very seriously either.

Calvary (John Michael McDonagh, 2014)
★★★★

Brendan Gleeson in Calvary.

None of the characters in Calvary, apart from the central priest, is a fully dimensional character - they play much better as projections of his, and the Catholic Church's, psyche. Each "character" is deliberately confrontational and always on message, contributing to the debate about morality, ethics, and the role of the church that he (representative of devout Catholicism) and the filmmaker (presumably also Catholic, or at the very least, ex-Catholic) want to have. The film's narrative consists of this debate, and as it builds, Calvary can be quite mesmerizing.

[SPOILER ALERT - skip to last paragraph]

As he visits the same townspeople over and over, who openly challenge him and his purpose as Church representative, the priest realizes he is inadequate to help anybody, and worse, that he is guilty and deserving of execution. Now, I don't mean this literally, but in a symbolic sense. (It's easy to read Christian symbology into this story, even if it weren't explicitly about a Catholic priest.) The Church has sinned, in reference to the repeated rapes of boys by clergy over decades, and our priest believes his sacrifice will purify it. He yearns for death, for the weight of the world to be lifted off his shoulders (an eschatological belief impulse that I personally find to be dangerous, and frighteningly commonplace among the devout).

As smart and compelling as the film is, I long for the day when these debates about the role of ancient religion in modern society is a thing of the past. The priest is asking the wrong questions. We must shed logocentric philosophy and embrace deconstruction. The priest here at every turn falls back on logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, and finds it grossly inadequate. A discussion which would interest me much more would eschew the lone male protagonist as source of identification and of morality, would stop clamoring and pining for a world that makes sense and fits a moral order, and would embrace the abyss. Ben Wheatley's A Field in England does all these things with dark humor and daring inventiveness, and its a smashing alternative to Calvary's grumpy old proselytizing. Perhaps see them as a double feature, and continue the debate for yourself.

Manifestation of the abyss in A Field in England.

NOTE: Neil deGrasse Tyson's response to this kid's question about the meaning of life is kind of a most-basic description of the logocentric assumption.

Film Noir History: Scarface (1932)

2015-01-04T14:44:00.000-05:00

Film Noir History, Vol. 1: The Precursors

Part 2: Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932)

The darkest and most surprising film in Hawks's long and varied career, Scarface was by most accounts the most violent film to slip past the censors before the Production Code came into full enforcement in 1934. Tightly scripted and brutally direct, Scarface bursts through the screen with searing potency. It established several archetypes for the gangster film which would come back around in the post-Code era, in Brian De Palma's remake, of course, but also in Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas.

Paul Muni and Anne Dvorak are dynamite as gangster Tony Camonte and his younger sister, each bringing a physicality and vitality to their characters that will burn in your memory. The siblings both have dreams of making it big in America. Outside their apartment is a travel agency with a sign reading "The World is Yours" which Tony frequently stares at through his window. He's the right-hand man for ascendant Chicago crime boss Johnny Lovo. The film follows Tony as he takes out Johnny's rivals, leaving their bodies strewn on the sidewalk as a warning to others. His zealous lust for violence and the power it brings visibly frightens even the gangster cohort he hangs around with, including Johnny, whose directives Tony increasingly ignores as his reputation grows.

Tony even muscles in on Johnny's girlfriend Poppy, who senses the shift in power, and plays her cards accordingly. Poppy is a woman seduced by Tony's violent nature and the power he wields with his gun. The film's portrayal of Poppy informs both the women of Scorsese's gangster films, but also the strong-willed women of noir. There is a coldness in the ease with which she drops Johnny, and his weakness in front of her shows us that, while proper society may not have a role for her, in the domestic lives of these gangsters, Poppy operates as an independent contractor. She knows full well what she is signing up for and why.

Tony is jealously protective of his sister, and doesn't want any men touching her. When she starts throwing herself at some of Tony's gangster friends, he threatens them and tries to bribe her sister into staying in the apartment and doing what he says. His jealousy borders on incestuous desire, and when combined with his itchy trigger finger, this highly charged relationship is destined to explode. I see Scarface as a crucial precursor to film noir because it can only have one conclusion. Tony is on a one-way train to hell, doomed to hurt the ones he loves. The center cannot hold. It can only end in an eruption of disaster.

Even with the looser pre-1934 standards, the producers had to include a couple scenes of the police lecturing the audience about how violence is bad, and we should all advocate for a just society. But these scenes are easily subsumed by the tone of the rest of the film, and dismissed as a historical artifact.

Film noir can be thought of as an expression of the same violent, self-destructive impulses found in Scarface. Because of the Production Code's strict standards, the violence had to be more muted. But noir moves the struggle against primal desire further into the psychological realm. Even though the violent themes are more coded and less explicit, the world has still gone mad. Scarface radiates a feeling of desperation which makes it stand out among 1930s gangster films, and prefigures the noir mentality.

Previous entries
Part 1: M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

Film Noir History, Vol. 1, Part 1

2014-12-24T15:17:00.001-05:00

In an effort to encourage greater knowledge and appreciation of classical film history, I am beginning an ongoing series on the history of the film noir. I will begin with this article on Fritz Lang's M, and wind up with a review of P.T. Anderson's Inherent Vice, a wonderful example of the neo-est of neo noir. Meaning can be illuminated when comparing films against others that came before, so by now Anderson is referencing a deep history when he adapts a noir plot (by way of Pynchon) into a vision that is uniquely his. It is my goal to trace this history in a way that makes sense as part of the same noir progression.

There will be five volumes: The Precursors, The Classical Noir Cycle, Late Noir, Foreign Noir, and Neo Noir. You will see a number of directors on the list more than once. I wanted to concentrate on only the best films, and if any of my readers has further suggestions, please feel free to chime in. I also encourage you to follow along with me by viewing these films in chronological order.

Film noir is traditionally considered a film movement, rather than a genre. 1941's The Maltese Falcon marks the beginning of the classical noir cycle, and while there is some debate, 1958's Touch of Evil is often considered the end point. There is also debate about what qualifies as film noir cannon and what is merely "noir-ish". I tend to think of it as a batch of films that are quintessential, and then a much larger array of films that are clearly influenced by the noir mentality or by the aesthetics of noir. Then, of course, there are the neo-noirs, the films that are late enough to reference film noir in a self-reflexive manner. These films are much more likely to alter the traditional framework of archetypal noir in order to make a new critique or meta-comment on modern society.

So what is a film noir? What separates film noir from the crime films they superficially resemble is that they represent a world in which moral order is fundamentally compromised. There is a crucial element of fatalism in film noir, though that doesn't mean our lead necessarily has to die. The identification with the male lead character is highly subjective, and we usually don't know what is really going on, or what is around the next corner. A femme fatale is not necessary, but certainly is a very strong through-line. Women often are outright duplicitous, but at the very least the promise of being with a woman portends great misfortune. While noir can certainly be shot on color film, shadow and the darkness of night, often accented by tall buildings and high angle photography all contribute to the feeling of a labyrinthian world. Also crucial to the movement is an irrational, almost primordial, impulse toward violence, tied to sexual desire, which society can barely contain or mask.

Film noir of course developed from a number of identifiable precursors. There is the hardboiled fiction from Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. There is the fatalism of the poetic realist film movement out of 1930's France. There are the incredibly violent and tough-minded pre-code American gangster films like Public Enemy and Scarface. And there is also a vein of proto-feminist films made in America in the 1930's, most notably the string of films made by Joseph von Sternberg with star Marlene Dietrich, often called the "original femme fatale". This influence on film noir, a highly masculine movement, is interesting. A strong, independent woman, to a man of noir, is an unknowable thing, uncontainable and dangerous. But ultimately the man is doomed by his own flaws and desires, while the woman, as duplicitous as she may be, is struggling to break free of the social constraints set upon her by society. The women in noir are tough, even admirable, in their will to fight by whatever means available. This kind of depiction is part of what makes film noir so excitingly complex, as these strong women confront us as we experience a narrative from the point of view of a weaker male character, one who has greater freedom of movement and access to power than the woman, but nevertheless runs into a cold, indifferent world where even he cannot get satisfaction.

Film Noir History, Vol. 1: The Precursors

Part 1: M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

Fritz Lang was one of the masters of cynical paranoia, and M is his early masterpiece. Consider the time and place: Germany on the brink of full blown Nazi fascism, which would soon force Lang to emigrate to the United States (where he would have a long and successful career working in the Hollywood system - you will see his name again in this series). Sound film had just been invented, and Lang would use this new thing called a soundtrack to establish a frightening character motif that doubled as a conjurer of nightmares.

Peter Lorre (who would also work for years in Hollywood - you'll see his name again here, too) plays a serial child murderer with such psychological clarity he would set the standard for portrayals of crazed insanity to be copied many times. The brilliance of the characterization is that he plays it as a first decent man driven mad by forces outside of his control, forces that originate within his psyche, but that nonetheless feel to him like external forces. So it's this wrenching struggle within him that can only be (temporarily) relieved through the murder of another child. To hear Lorre's character tell it, it sounds like an orgasmic cycle.

Lang expands the conversation to the entire society. This isn't just about a sick lunatic. Lang depicts politicians, police detectives, pickpockets, and crime ring leaders all scrambling to catch the murderer, each group motivated by their own particular self-interests. As a result of this lack of coordination, these groups often are working at cross-purposes despite the shared goal. It's a film about process more so than character (Lang would keep his lead character off screen for the first 20 minutes of the film). While re-watching it recently, I was more than once reminded of that other masterpiece of social process: The Wire.

Lang's intercutting of scenes depicting criminals and policemen in board meetings arguing over strategy, at one point even matching action across the cut, invites us to see the similarities between these groups. M highlights the sheer power of the crowd in a potentially frightening way. While the story of M isn't specifically one of justice miscarried, by making the monster and serial murderer the most emotionally available and sympathetic character in the film, the impression of the ruthless (and unstoppable) crowd is what stays with you in the end. (Nazism was right around the corner).

Lang's photography and use of camera is extremely inventive and feels thoroughly modern today. His use of shadow and high-angle shots, typical of the Expressionist film movement of which Lang was a major part, would directly influence later films from the classical noir cycle, as would Expressionism as a whole, as many filmmakers and cinematographers would end up in Hollywood after the war. But the influences of M on noir go beyond camera style. There's the cynical take on a society motivated by a confluence of corrupt parties unable to guarantee justice, an identification with the lower rungs on the ladder in the face of rich influence peddlers, the psychological realism and irrational compulsion to violence in the lead characterization. For all these reasons, and because it's just a great movie, M is a perfect place to start on this trek through film noir history.

Foxcatcher

2014-12-21T13:56:00.002-05:00

★★★★½

Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, 2014) - Director Miller (Capote) goes back to the well for another famous American true crime story. (If you don't know what happens, don't google it until after you see this film.) At the beginning of the film, Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) stands before an auditorium full of grade schoolers and gives a speech about will and determination - what it takes to win a gold medal in wresting, which he had just done at the '84 Olympics. Foxcatcher works as kind of a missing picture in the "hero" story America loves to tell its children. There's a dark side to such competitive drive, especially for those unable to effectuate such a "win."

Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo in Foxcatcher.

The film is about John du Pont, more so than it is about Mark and his brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), who also won a gold medal in the '84 Olympics. The wresting brothers' inherent goodness is believably established, and then they are used, by the film to make its points about capitalism and exploitation, and by du Pont as chess-pieces in his game of life, as defined by his raging-below-the-surface sense of inferiority. (Vanessa Redgrave plays his mother.)

Casting Steve Carrell in the role of du Pont was brilliant. Part of what works so wonderfully in the story is that in every successive scene we see du Pont in a slightly different light, and each scene informs the next. Carrell's performance is precisely tuned to these shifts. Miller and screenwriters E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman have created such a fully complex and rich character in du Pont, and realized him so incisively, all Carrell has to do is stick the landing. And he nails it. (Given the history of great comedians acting in dramas - Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, Bill Murray, John Candy, Steve Martin - or if you've ever seen The Office, this shouldn't come as great surprise.)

Steve Carrell in Foxcatcher.

Du Pont is a Du Pont, meaning he is a member of one of the richest families in the world, whose history is fundamentally intertwined with that of America as a nation (they manufactured gun powder throughout the 1800's). The family kept their accumulated sums close and their social circles small. John du Pont grew up in the shadow of his forebears, in a world of their own insulation. When he engages with the Schultzes, or with anybody, he can't relate to them. What could be a real working relationship, even friendship, instead becomes warped by du Pont's psychological weakness, helped along by the easy power that comes with ungodly sums of money. Foxcatcher is a hostage situation. Beware the rich man who doesn't get satisfaction.

The script is very efficient with its dialogue, without feeling forcibly so. The finest moments in the film are silent. The film's staid classicism, leisurely pace, and generic piano score do it no favors, and I can see how the makeup and prosthetics that Carrell and Tatum wear could interfere with some people's enjoyment of the proceedings. But I like that they were "uglied" up. The makeup and prosthetics work to establish character, relieving the dialogue of some of the responsibility.

Tatum gives a fine performance along with Carrell, but neither of them can match the naturalism of Mark Ruffalo, who reminds us that he is perhaps the greatest actor of his generation. There is a scene where Dave is being interviewed for a self-aggrandizing documentary that du Pont is producing: the internal war going on in his head is played out all over Ruffalo's face, and articulates the central themes of power and exploitation beautifully.

The right to make fun

2014-12-18T16:06:00.001-05:00

Poster for The Interview

Are you sickened by the actions of Sony and Paramount in the face of terrorist threats from North Korea? Were you planning on seeing The Interview for spite, but now are left with no recourse except to post comments on the internet? Some folks have suggested watching Team America: World Police at home over the holidays. I think that's a great way to support freedom of speech, and specifically freedom to make fun. Matt Stone and Trey Parker skewer Kim Jong Il in that film, but they also skewer America. This is why the film is righteous but not self-righteous. It can take a joke. Nobody takes a joke as well as we do.

Team America: World Police

In that vein, may I suggest you make your viewing of Team America as part of a holiday double-feature, and include This is the End, also from Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen. In it, Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and a bunch of other famous comedy stars absolutely rip apart... themselves. They reveal themselves to be selfish, vain, back-stabbing, unreliable pricks who may have accidentally summoned the devil to destroy earth as a result of their clusterfuck of depravity. I LOVE this movie. And there is nothing better to remind us of the value of our freedom to make fun.

This is the End

Alternatively, if you want to have a more Korean-centric, somber and educational response you could also watch Kimjongilia, a beautiful documentary meditation on the horrors of the North Korean Communist Regime. But it doesn't have any dick jokes.

Kimjongilia

How Much Documentary Can You Handle?

2014-12-01T23:47:00.001-05:00

DOC NYC is the largest documentary film festival in the country. This year, I went to see 12 films in 7 days! It's exciting to experience the next wave of documentaries before they get commercial releases, and such an immersion causes me to reflect deeper on the unique properties of the "documentary" mode of storytelling.

Friday, November 14th
7:00pm - Banksy Does New York (Chris Moukarbel, 2014)
★★★½

A thoughtful and entertaining overview of the Banksy residency in New York City in October, 2013, when the anonymous artist somehow pulled off a new public work every day for 31 days straight (for the most part). The film satisfyingly presents a discussion about the value of art, a complex subject made more so when the art is created in public spaces without the permission of the property owner, if there even is one. I appreciate Banksy as an artist more after watching the film. It's points about the role of social media and the internet are less interesting.

Sunday, November 16th

11:00am - Life Itself (Steve James, 2014)
★★★

A biography of the late, great film critic Roger Ebert, this film switches back and forth between Roger's battles with cancer in the last few months of his life, and a look back on his careers as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Chicagoan alcoholic, cultural raconteur, film curator and benefactor, and of course as film critic to the masses. I wish the film spent more time on his pitched battles with Gene Siskel, and investigated more thoroughly what he did for film criticism and film appreciation, rather than lean so heavily on his final days as he gets weaker and closer to death, scenes which are not as profound as director Steve James seems to think they are.

2:15pm - She's Beautiful When She's Angry (Mary Dore, 2014)
★★★½

A rockin' good time, intelligent, engaging, funny, and a vital history lesson for us all. The film isn't afraid of conflict within the feminist movement. The only blind spot is when the film attempts to connect to the current generation of young women and their complex relationship with the word "feminism."

4:45pm - Grazers (Lisa F. Jackson & Sarah Teale, 2014)

★★★

A small film about organic beef farming in upstate New York. It's charming, informative, and well told.

6:45pm - Penthouse North (Johanna St. Michaels, 2014)

★½

The story of a former model and actress breaking down in front of us as she confronts a number of turning points in her life. The subject should be compelling, but the film is an editorial disaster.

9:15pm - Rubble Kings (Shan Nicholson, 2014)

★★★

Tons of archival footage at the wrong aspect ratio and in-your-face smash-cut editing makes this a blunt instrument of a movie, but this makes sense for the character of story it is trying to tell. Have you ever seen The Warriors? This is the real-life version. And it is much more real. It's not just the story, but also who is telling us, how they are telling us, and what we're supposed to take from it. I am reminded of reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in high school, in that violence and violent rhetoric born out of suffering eventually give way to an embrace of peace. Such a story restores the humanity of otherwise unsympathetic characters, and mainstream (white) audiences are forced to look to the originary causes of the violence.

Monday, November 17th

9:45pm - Us, Naked: Trixie & Monkey (Kirsten D'Andrea Hollander, 2014)
★

The story of a couple who take their acrobatic burlesque show on the road, which is to say, mostly to New York. After a positive start, the film quickly loses its way, failing to drum up any dramatic tension. The lead characters seem to grow tired of the camera and don't reveal very much. Afterward, I felt the film was kind of like "So, this happened..."

Wednesday, November 19th

9:45pm - Happy Valley (Amir Bar-Lev, 2014)

★★★★½

A thoroughly intelligent dissection and skeptical investigation of the sociology of a college town rocked by scandal. It's about the unhelpful ideologies of hero worship and knee-jerk moralizing groupthink that has become our internet-fueled culture of shame spectacle. The film psychoanalyzes an entire country, and proves increasingly relevant as the NFL works through its current identity crisis.

Thursday, November 20th

11:30am - Last Days in Vietnam (Rory Kennedy, 2014)

★★

A great story, but the filmmaking is quite dull. It could be cut down to a solid 30 minutes of television.

2:45pm - The Return (Adam Zucker, 2014)

★★

The Return documents four Polish women as they turn toward Judaism. Adam Zucker's humanistic impulse means that he ignores the consequences of these people's endeavors to form identities they are comfortable with. Does Zucker not see the danger in validating the perpetuation of mythical identities steeped in sanctity and ritual humbling-oneself-before-God?

At one point we see a map of Israel and Palestine - but Palestine is never mentioned. In this film, Israel is the only place on earth where Jews can go and not feel like their Jewishness makes them outsiders. But this isn't an uncomplicated good thing, not by a long shot. The Palestinian is the unmentioned other, the remainder that is pushed out of the narrative.

I admit I have an inherent difficulty with this subject, as I find religion mind-numbing and inherently dangerous. Observing these people's life decisions elicits negative critical thoughts automatically for me.

But having said that, it's not a very compelling narrative. The premise is interesting, given the history of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in Poland, but the film adds little insight into the phenomenon of modern Polish Judaism, and its point of view is painfully uncritical and passive.

7:00pm - The Yes Men Are Revolting (Laura Nix and The Yes Men, 2014)

★★★

The Yes Men come out with their third film, and for the first time reveal a little truth about themselves. The film is not quite as funny as I hoped it would be, nevertheless the prankster duo's good will and enthusiasm for this most righteous of causes (the impending doom of global warming) wins you over.

9:15pm - Keep On Keepin' On (Alan Hicks, 2014)

★★★★

I don't know if the credit belongs to the editors or not, but its amazing that this is the first film from this director, a young Aussie who said he first decided to make a movie about jazz legend Clark Terry, and then picked up a book about how to make documentaries. It's beautifully shot and perfectly balanced, a caring portrait of the common cause of pursuing excellence in jazz, the passing of accumulated knowledge from one generation to the next (or, in this case, several generations younger), and how finding a sense of purpose sustains these people struggling against their own bodies.

Hearts and Minds (and Films)

2014-11-10T18:10:00.000-05:00

Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
★★★★

Jean-Luc Godard doesn't see a place in this Western world for himself. So he must create that space, a space where he can communicate to us without our turning it into something easily digestible, consumable. For this is the problem. Proliferation and popularization adds layer over layer of mediation on top of the original idea, eventually killing any valid power the original idea may have had, or at the very least removing it from its original context and therefore changing its meaning.

And so we have this movie, born out of the feminist/post-colonialist/broadly postmodern theoretical/experimental filmmaking that had its heyday in the '70's and lives on in Film Theory courses in universities across the globe.

A woman is there to say "No." (A feminist rebuke to what they usually say in media, "Come hither.") Godard, too, is here to say "No." He is saying no to us. We have disappointed him, with our relentless co-opting and mainstreaming and turning of truly revolutionary ideas into talking points for the A-block rundown. We're forgetting the stakes of the big social discussion by reducing them to consumable quantities.

There is no place for Godard anymore, which is why the instinct for blowing things up is present. Godard wants to blow things up, but not really. He pretends to blow up the dog, and then regrets it, so he brings the dog back. Instead of actual bombs, Goodbye to Language is Godard's bomb, an idea bomb.

Jean-Luc Godard

Godard first signaled this turn to radical leftist ideological filmmaking back in the '60's, with Weekend. By and large, we didn't go along that ride with him. In many ways "Godard" is stuck in the '60's. Not the man himself, but the idea of the man. We identify him through his first half dozen films or so, and forget about the much more politically and aesthetically challenging work. Ever since Weekend he has been working to shed the popularized, romanticized image of himself as the standard-bearer of a historical movement, a chapter in a Film Theory textbook, a title he never asked for and does not want. (I see it as similar to Bob Dylan and his idea bombs Bringing it All Back Home and Self-Portrait, or to Thom Yorke recently saying on stage: "Why do we play new songs? Because we're still alive.")

Godard's work is difficult, and he makes it incumbent upon us (the audience) to keep up with his narrative (not the narrative of one film, but the "Godard" narrative). Most of us aren't up to the task. "Godard" might call us lazy, or worse. But there is another side to this story. There is a limit to how far one can go down this path of actively fighting the social instincts of human animals, and Godard is constantly bumping up against this limit, only to push the boundaries (a tiny bit) further. But once you've gone through this process a few times along with him, the story starts repeating itself. Godard's willful naiveté about the economy of social ideas enables his boldness but it also has lead him down a rabbit hole, where he makes essentially the same movie over and over again. But this is not by accident. He wants to place himself outside of the bourgeoise mainstream. He does not want to be a viable "artist." The politics truly do matter the most.

In this way, Goodbye to Language is kind of a failure. The film has a rhythm and overall aesthetic that, if you keep yourself open to it, turns out to be beautiful (the cinematic simile to 12-tone music). He's been making this film over and over for so long that he's gotten quite good at it. It won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year (sharing with Xavier Dolan's Mommy), and is rated 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. It seems audiences are finally starting to catch up to him aesthetically, but I suspect not ideologically. Most reviews spend little time on the politics of it. This (presumably accidental) seductive quality may not be antithetical to Godard's ideas about language and communication, but certainly is beside the point.

3D camera technology is on Godard's mind (seeing it in 2D, if that's even possible, would miss a lot), not that he is particularly interested in developing a workable "3D" language (this project is already underway in the films of mainstream filmmakers). Rather, he is much more interested, as always, in laying bare the mechanism behind it, so that we do not become seduced by its recreation of reality to the point that we forget we are being told something by somebody, and to invite us back again to think critically about how we are fed information and how we are situated as viewers in an ideological landscape (three-dimensional or otherwise).

But what is most important to me about Goodbye to Language is its willingness to confront the consequences of the filmmaker's point of view, about him as an artist in the world. He answers the question, "Why are you speaking to me?", a question which I always hope filmmakers answer in their films. (I am often disappointed). He is such a practiced hand at manipulating and subverting film language, he is in a somewhat unique position to discard the traditional language altogether in order to invent a new one.

A contradiction inside the text is the male authorial presence (the idea of "Godard") that cannot be left out of any valuable interpretation of the film. The patriarchal relationship, that he is here to teach us how to see, does not undermine his project, but is a necessary contradiction. We are invited to think about it and to deconstruct it. (Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, is one of the dozens of authors who are cited in the film). We can determine for ourselves if his preoccupation with female nudity is exploitative or artistically/intellectually valid (and in turn deconstruct the underpinnings of ideas of validity, of high art vs. low art, a classic postmodern theme). We can determine for ourselves whether Godard's built-in explanation is sufficient ("The dog is not naked because the dog IS naked.") His filmic technique invites us into this process of scrutiny.

CitizenFour (Laura Poitras, 2014)
★★

I can't help but contrast Goodbye to Language with Laura Poitras's CitizenFour, for the things that I found to be so frustratingly lacking in Poitras's thriller-doc, I found prominently featured in Godard's essay film, and I finally had the language to articulate my critique. Poitras had some truly incredible (and historically and socially important) footage, but her political timidity and lack of mastery in film language results in a film that obscures a complete picture of events, and denies its own project in presenting said events. Even though she identifies herself explicitly as a major player in the plot, Poitras hides her personality and narrowly defines the terms which she asks us to consider, presenting well-established left-wing talking points, unconvincingly, as simple, uncontroversial fact; she gives just enough information to play an unacknowledged game of identity politics with us, her audience. She uses the feeling of the music (the spooky "the government is spying on you" music especially) to play around with our emotions without ever really engaging in the dialogue at the center of the narrative. Critics seem to mistake this technique as some sort of exciting mimicry of fiction film aesthetic. But Poitras's responsibility in making CitizenFour was much greater than such a technique respects. The power of that amazing footage is diluted, for she fails to convey the stakes, the proportion, of what is happening. For Godard, the stakes are monumental: he is engaging in a battle for the hearts and minds of the bourgeoise West. The discourse surrounding Edward Snowden's documents leak has the same stakes. But in CitizenFour, Poitras abstains from engagement, and there is little evidence that she was even aware that this is what her film is about.

Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, in that hotel room in Hong Kong.

God's Pocket

2014-11-07T22:35:00.001-05:00

★★★★

God's Pocket (John Slattery, 2014)

"We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."
-Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, 2005

In a career full of intelligent, unshowy performances in small roles (see these clips from Charlie Wilson's War and The Station Agent), John Slattery never quite got the recognition he deserved. Finally, he got a break: he was invited to audition for the leading role of Don Draper on Mad Men. But when he showed up, they told him the role was already cast, and instead they'd like him to read for the part of Roger Sterling. He got the part, and after dazzling us over the years with his wonderful performance playing Sterling as the artful dodger, Slattery has cashed in those chips to return to the big screen behind the camera, directing his first feature film God's Pocket, adapted from a novel of the same name by Pete Dexter. In ever so chivalrous style, Slattery didn't even bother to cast himself in the film, the lead going to the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman (co-star with Slattery in Charlie Wilson's War) in one of his final performances.

Slattery (right) directing Hoffman (left) and Turturro (center).

Often in films directed by actors, the acting becomes the primary focus. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. In God's Pocket, the casting choices and the performances across the board are all top-notch. (The cast includes Hoffman, Richard Jenkins, Christina Hendricks, John Turturro, Eddie Marsan, Peter Gerety, and a host of others giving fine turns in bit parts). The downside can be if characters are drawn overly broadly, perhaps in an effort to give the actors the chance to show their chops, which can lead to cliche'd storytelling. And in general, a director who makes the actors' performances the priority can potentially be distracted from his other duties, resulting in an overall inconsistency of tone, or a lack of nuance or of realism. I can see how critics could be primed to apply these critiques to God's Pocket (which many have, in droves). But I think this is a facile criticism, for Slattery and co-writer Alex Metcalf have written just enough of a plot to allow the characters to move through it without it feeling overdetermined or unconvincing, and also a clear through-line and vision that allows them to explore the deeper existential questions of life in a believable blue-collar neighborhood (the titular God's Pocket, based on Devil's Pocket, a real-life South Philadelphia neighborhood) full of daily drinkers, high school dropouts, and a few career criminals who are the big scary fish in a little pond. It is an intelligent, engaging take, and the film's light touch with dark humor keeps the more grandiose flourishes from feeling overly serious or pretentious.

The movie starts with a funeral, then flashes back to the events leading up to it. The circumstances of the death are made clear to us early on, so there is no mystery moving the plot forward. Instead, the premise is a catalyst for the other characters to chase after the things they want, beset by constant financial pressures and their own sense of unworthiness. We observe how their flaws as human beings ultimately keep them stuck where they are.

Slattery deliberately mocks a romanticized vision of God's Pocket and its inhabitants, a vision which might fail to appreciate the darker, more troubling aspects of the closed, hyper-local way of thinking in a town with an inferiority complex. And yet, despite this and all its decidedly unsentimental (and very funny) dark humor, Slattery's respect, even love, for these people shines through. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that "We are here on Earth to fart around." There is a simple beauty in this idea, one which comes close to what I imagine Slattery wants to whisper into the ears of his characters, so that they can find the inner peace, if not the social advancement, which so eludes them.

Fury

2014-11-05T18:09:00.002-05:00

★½

Fury (David Ayer, 2014) - A big step backward for American war films, Fury ignores the development of the genre into one most notable for scathing critiques of the purpose and method of war (think Full Metal Jacket) and spiritual or existential films whose implicit critique is no less penetrating (think The Thin Red Line). Fury harkens back to a time when war was something boys signed up for to become men. The soldiers here are scarred by their experiences, yes, but they are sustained by the brotherhood established with the brave men fighting beside them. The best case scenario, actually, is if they can find the courage to die a true hero, going out in a blaze of glory, killing as many Nazis as possible. (I found it curious that, while Brad Pitt and company have dirty faces throughout the film, the Nazis, who are supposedly badly losing the war, are all clean, energized, and strangely emotionless.) It's a film that in the end validates kamikaze jingoism, which is a shockingly inane way to think about war in this day and age, and a potentially dangerous idea to be disseminating to the American public.

The film is appropriately brutal, and earns a sense of awesome, grotesque nihilism in the early going, before the plot really gets underway. Writer-Director Ayer ruins the mood, however, when his characters start talking. Rather than let the images and the action do the work, he has these men unnecessarily and constantly remind us how sad and miserable they are. I use the term "characters" loosely here. They are essentially empty vessels through which Ayer can hit us over the head with pathos. Jon Bernthal's performance as Grady makes the only impact. His aggressive outbursts represent the closest this film gets to real chaos. But Ayer is very careful not to cross any lines even with this character, lest he invite us to complicate our idea of these men as "heroes."

After the bloody end, I felt I had seen a very simple, straightforward story told unsatisfyingly. Since none of the characters register as anything other than vague sketches (who nonetheless are oddly self-aware and articulate about their feelings), it makes it exceedingly difficult to know how to relate to the movie. I was left feeling this way because Fury just doesn't have very much on its mind. Good movies can use 2-dimensional characters effectively to articulate larger ideas, but this film doesn't have any ideas, except "war is hell", and a very uncomplicated notion of pride and heroism that seems out of step with modern sensibilities, and which I feel the film doesn't really mean to emphasize, but has done so seemingly by accident, in the absence of any intellectually interesting perspective.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Brad Pitt promoted Fury by appearing on Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis.

Netflix no longer for cinephiles (such as myself)

2014-09-19T20:54:00.001-04:00

See, I told you so!

X-Men: Past, Future, Whatever

2014-06-22T00:16:00.001-04:00

★½

X-Men: Days of Future Past (Bryan Singer, 2014) - Like a bad episode of classic Star Trek (which, by the way, this movie distractingly and needlessly features in one scene), X-Men: Days of Future Past spends nearly its entire run-time trying to explain what is happening to the audience, and, like dramatic quicksand, the more they explain, the less sense it all makes. I will spend some time pointing out the explanations that don't add up, but don't get me wrong, the movie is bad because it is dramatically inert, and it badly fumbles its articulation of why we should care in the first place.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

The premise is similar to The Terminator: locked in an apocalyptic war with nearly-indestructible man-made super-robots called Sentinels, our surviving X-Men, led by Patrick Stewart's Professor X (aka Charles Xavier), develop the ability to send someone back in time in the hopes of altering history so as to prevent the development of the Sentinels. They decide to target Mystique, whose 1973 assassination of the scientist responsible for the Sentinel program ironically accelerated the Sentinel program by convincing US Military officials of the need to better arm themselves against the threat of mutants. For some reason, Mystique assassinated the scientist in front of a room full of government officials, and did not hide who she was. She was captured, used for testing, and over the subsequent decades, other military scientists adapted her mutant abilities to the Sentinels, making them even more deadly and effective, and resulting in the war that the mutants seem destined to lose.

A mutant called Sunspot battles a Sentinel.

They can't actually send a person back in time. Rather, Kitty Pryde can project a person's consciousness backward in time, to a younger version of himself. So long as the procedure (for lack of a better word) is in effect, she can hold that consciousness in the Past. Only Wolverine can go because he can heal his brain cells as fast as the time-portal will destroy them. Anyone else would die.

Kitty Pryde projecting Wolverine's consciousness backward in time.

Kitty tells Wolverine that as soon as his consciousness is projected backward in time, their history would be wiped out, to be replaced, hopefully, by a much better reality. However, this is not what happens. During the procedure, the Past and Future timelines act as if in parallel, with no interaction between the two except for the portal that Kitty opens up, through which she projects Wolverine's consciousness. I am forced to assume that so long as the consciousness remains in the Past, the Future timeline exists in some sort of conditional, in-between state of quasi-existence. I also assume that once the procedure is terminated, the Future timeline would be replaced by a new reality, and everyone's consciousnesses would also make the leap to the alternate timeline? The movie provides no answers to these questions of the "laws" of time in this universe. But that's my best guess.

Okay, with all that established, here's where the problems start to arise. First, while maintaining the time-portal, Kitty gets badly injured and will probably die unless she gets medical attention. But Professor X insists that they risk her life in order to maintain projection of Wolverine's consciousness. Why, I wonder? Wolverine has already recruited Xavier, Beast, and Magneto in the Past to help stop Mystique. Why does Future Xavier need Wolverine's consciousness to continue to inhabit the Past body, especially now that Kitty Pryde's life is in danger? He should terminate the procedure and hope for the best. All their problems could instantly vanish! Perhaps the fear is that, once Wolverine's consciousness returns to the Future timeline, Wolverine in the Past would revert to his Past consciousness. But Past Xavier could have explained it all to him. Even if Past Wolverine were to skip out on them, surely the rest of them could alter the timeline. Wolverine doesn't seem to be helping much anyway. At one point, he puts his hand on Past Xavier's shoulder and tells him to believe in hope. The movie plays this as some sort of important moment for the down-but-not-out Xavier. Xavier starts believing in hope, I guess. So there is that, from Wolverine. But, even after this insipid little pep talk, Future Xavier continues to force Kitty Pryde to maintain the time-portal, while she bleeds to death. It is an unconvincing and illogical decision based on the premise they have established. It is apparently important for the writers to maintain the Future timeline and keep Wolverine's Future consciousness in the Past. Personally, I don't know why these things are so important. Wolverine becomes a non-factor in the events of the Past timeline, and the Future timeline leads to a battle with Sentinels that we already know doesn't mean anything, because everything hinges on the events in the Past timeline. So these battle scenes carry no dramatic weight whatsoever. Worse, they are intercut with scenes from 1973, diluting the impact of the Past storyline.

I mentioned Past Xavier was down in the dumps. Well, he misses his childhood friend Raven. Years ago, Raven made a self-possessed, independent decision to leave Xavier and follow Magneto (and change her name to Mystique), so naturally Xavier bitterly blames Magneto for stealing her away from him. He really hates his guts. That is some ugly chauvinism, combined with inferiority complex!

Also, Xavier's bummed about the Vietnam War, but for a pretty selfish reason. With all his students getting drafted, he has had to shut down the school. So, he and Beast have been living in the mansion, which over the years has lost its luster. Xavier regularly injects himself with serum concocted by Beast. The serum was originally designed to help Beast control his Beastly instinct. Inexplicably, it also cures Xavier's paralysis, allowing him to walk (huh?). And it also blocks his telepathic abilities. That's three different things it does. What's in this stuff? That can't be healthy.

"I don't care about any of you! Beast, get me a Scotch!"

Xavier's supposed depression is so overwrought and unspecific, it is hard to believe in. It's like a long, drawn-out, totally serious version of this scene from Wet Hot American Summer, which, by the way, is a parody.

After Wolverine's stupid pep talk, the Past X-Men get on with the business of stopping Mystique from assassinating that scientist. At first Xavier tries to stop Mystique by just telling her not to do it. This doesn't work. He's not very convincing.

(I don't understand why Xavier does not see the benefit of assassinating the scientist. The scientist is, after all, the chief architect and advocate of the Sentinel program. If they could arrange for Mystique to kill the scientist when they were alone together, and make it look like an accident, Mystique gets what she wants, and they avoid the problem of the public show of mutant force that might have the unwanted effect of convincing the US Military that the mutant threat is real and that they should go forward with the Sentinel program. Also, Mystique wouldn't get captured. How hard could this be? And why doesn't anyone think of this?)

The Past X-Men end up having to stop the assassination at the last possible moment. In the process, they get in a big fight with each other and destroy a whole lot of stuff in front of a bunch of 8mm cameras that somehow are able to capture 3D images. The US Military becomes convinced to accelerate the Sentinel program. Whoops!

And about those Sentinels. While the movie up until this point insisted that the program was in the early development stages, suddenly there is a whole factory line of fully functional flying robots with machine guns. They are not made of metal, but of a "space age polymer." This is 1973, keep in mind.

Good thing the Sentinels are not made of metal, because then Magneto would be able to manipulate them. Oh wait, Magneto just took railroad tracks and put them inside the robots, and that gives him total control of the robots, including power and weapons activation. How does this make any sense? And nobody notices the metal before the big public open air unveiling?

When Patrick Stewart speaks about hope and forgiveness, he does so with great gravitas and earnest vulnerability. When James McAvoy pontificates about peace and love and puppy dogs it comes across as whiney, self-righteous, and naive. And he does it over and over and over again in this movie. Understandably, Mystique and Magneto ignore him.

Until they don't anymore. (Perhaps because it's the end of the movie?) As in X-Men: First Class, Xavier's incessant nagging just wears everyone down. Magneto and Mystique slink off stage like children after a scolding from their mother. It is bizarre.

More bizarre is how, after much death and destruction from Magneto and Mystique, all of humanity suddenly starts listening to Xavier, and making nice with the mutants, and believing in "hope." What changed their minds? Well, Mystique could have shot Nixon, and chose not to. I guess all of humanity was grateful. For her not killing Nixon. In 1973.

Fassbender as Magneto with the Nixon cabinet. Everybody walks away feeling ashamed.

Good vs. Evil. Hope vs. Malice. It's a problem that Bryan Singer hasn't deepened the concept or found anything new to say. It's worse that the franchise has gotten much worse at articulating these already simplistic themes. The moral ground this movie walks is far too black and white. None of it is convincing.

The best scene in the movie, featuring a mutant called Quicksilver.

I should mention what I liked in the movie. The action scenes are generally interesting, especially the opening battle showcasing how different powers could be combined strategically to elude a more powerful enemy, and a hilarious scene from the point of view of one mutant who can move so fast that everything else seems to be moving in ultra-slow-motion. Singer handles the re-writing of American 20th century history with an enjoyable sense of playfulness. Michael Fassbender is of course fantastic despite the material. And Mystique kills people in the sexiest way possible.

Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique.