UnBornAgain Yesterday

One of my favorite old films (I thought I had reviewed it here, but I can’t find it) is George Cukor’s 1951 remake of the Garson Kanin stage play Born Yesterday. It’s not that the film is so great, but Judy Holliday is worth watching again and again (she won an Oscar for the performance). She plays Billie Dawn, a New York chorus girl who gets lured into being the for-hire girlfriend of junk dealer and aspiring racketeer and all round shitheel Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford). Billie is loud and brash, a rough stone from a poor background who now finds herself with money via her millionaire boyfriend. Harry doesn’t really grasp how the adult world works, but he thinks he does and he imagines Billie’s ignorance is getting in the way of his success. So when a journalist shows up at his hotel suite to interview him—William Holden—Harry hires the guy to “smarten her up.” And they all learn that a rough stone might, when polished, turn out to be something very different.

It’s really a lovely little Pygmalion kind of story, buoyed as I said by Judy Holliday’s really fabulous performance—you really can’t take your eyes off her. Broderick Crawford plays his role splendidly well, but his character is frankly unattractive—boorish, loud, abusive to everyone, entitled yet out of his depths, critical of everything, over-rich yet not very competent.

It reminds me of someone, which fact kind of ties into today’s theme.

One of the elements of Billie’s awakening at the hands of her tutor involves his explaining the workings of American government. Harry and Billie are in DC so that Harry can buy some politicians, and Billie uses her lessons as an impetus to learn about how Washington works. And in the process—and via her tutor’s passions about the nation’s fundaments—she comes to see the glory of the system Harry is trying to break for personal riches.

Anyway, everything old is new again. History repeats again and again and again.

I thought of this film today as I spent a couple hours wandering the Capitol Mall in DC. I have a 36 hour layover in Baltimore, so I rode a local train an hour South to look around (I think it’s been more than 30 years since I was here last). I find myself hearing William Holden’s voice from the film, stirring words about the Capitol buildings as the cheesy patriotic music swells in the background.

At one point near the end of the film Harry runs into resistance from his much-abused lawyer who complains that Congresspeople cannot just be bought to suit Harry’s whims (though that’s exactly why they’re there). “Why not?” Harry asks. “Because these guys are honest,” the lawyer scolds.

Walking past these same buildings today I couldn’t help thinking what a sham the whole place is. The super-grandiose buildings (oddly mimicking architecture from 500 years before, as though the work done within won’t be taken seriously unless the buildings look MUCH older), the whole town trying like a theatre set to win us over by force of pretense; the armed guards everywhere; the black SUVs with smoked windows; the barricades and roadblocks. All of it, as it happens, protecting a failed exercise: one party bent on a malicious overthrow, the other unable to meet the challenge.

As I wandered the Capitol grounds the Senate had just failed to conduct a legitimate trial of the president for obstruction of justice and abuse of power—charges for which the House of Representatives impeached him a few weeks ago (only the third such impeachment in the country’s history). The Senate’s was a trial in name only. The Senate Majority Leader stated openly and in advance that he would scuttle the trial, and virtually every Republican lined up behind him: they voted almost to a person to refuse even to allow witnesses to be questioned. This despite the common knowledge that the president is absolutely guilty as charged—guilty of this and very much more.

The acquittal is an act of organized, pure partisanship—the latest chapter in an insurgency stretching back over 10 years now, with roots going back even before that, to Reagan. Partisanship is not necessarily bad; opposing Nazis, say, seems a thing that should be done without even-handedness. “Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” But this is partisanship without even the pretense of a social or civic purpose. This present act of partisanship is just a naked power grab, a nuclear-blast maneuver that will decimate representative self-government, maybe permanently. (I really don’t think that overstates it.) It fundamentally undermines our system of checks and balances such that the presidency becomes autocratic.

They know all this, but at this point they’ve stopped even trying to justify their actions. Journalists’ probing questions to officials are met with explosions of indignation and fury; press conferences have dried up entirely; journalists are being denied access unless they toe the propaganda line. The party’s goal at this point is to circle the wagons and keep the autocrat in power at any and all costs—even when the costs may well be catastrophic for the country. (At the very least they will have set the precedent that no president can be charged with any crime or removed from office for any reason. Hard to imagine this precedent would sit well with a rogue Democrat in the seat; the solution to that seems to be to just keep a Democrat from holding the office—by any means possible. There’s broad consensus that Russia—a foreign power decidedly hostile to American ideals—interfered maliciously with the the electoral process in 2016. And indeed, the president-elect invited the interference publicly, and then met repeatedly with the Russians before and after the election. Republicans, while admitting Russia’s hostile intent, refuse to acknowledge the interference or take steps to combat it, and the consensus is that Russia will try again in 2020–they’re at work already.)

So, the movie. It gives today’s events an unfortunate odor of deja vu: the boorish, ignorant, control-freak criminal trying to enrich himself no matter who or what is destroyed (indeed, the destruction and personal devastation are marketed as selling points to the propaganda-fed media consumer, who craves his Colosseum moment); the for-sale politician, the ignorant masses huddled behind the cartoon depictions of their noble government while donating to and voting for its destruction.

When I first saw Born Yesterday some years back I was shocked at how much the world had changed in 50 years—at least the Hollywood version. The Wikipedia article talks about the difficulties Cukor had in getting the film past the censors, having to skirt around their being lovers—they *certainly* could not share a bedroom!—or Judy Holliday having an actual woman’s body. But the real shock for me was Harry’s treatment of Billie which by any standard today is frankly abusive. It’s uncomfortable to watch. Judy Holliday is not allowed to show an inch of cleavage or tailbone or anything even remotely suggestive to the censors; but Harry’s violence toward Billie gets past with nary a protest.

But this is the world Republicans are striving to re-create, where white men run everything and everyone else’s citizenship is second-class—if that. Environmental regulation is scuttled to gleefully pander to the country’s most ignorant people, propaganda tells us what to think, profit takes precedence over virtually every other thing.

One wants to think that we actually have progressed, and on the surface we have made progress since 1951. I know the jagged edge of history trends broadly and inexorably toward progress and equality and fairness. But always there is a reminder that human nature contains much that is selfish and greedy and clannish and self-destructive.

You Hear Me, Baby? Hold Together!

How does one review a movie like this? (Is there even such thing as "a movie like this?")

The difficulty with Star Wars: The Force Awakens is not in the film itself, which is just fine, but in the galaxy of anticipation and expectation and baggage that many of us bring to the experience. We almost need two reviews: one for those with the baggage and one for those without.

And they'd be different reviews, if only slightly.

I was 14, soon to be 15, when the original Star Wars came out. This is right in the butter zone of the audience target, and I was duly smitten, seeing the film something like 15 times over the next several months. Sometime earlier I remember seeing a trailer for Stanley Kubrick's 1969 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey and being giddy to FINALLY see a great space movie, only to feel... underwhelmed when there were no starships or booming space battles or laser blasts or aliens or anything I expected. Apes. There were apes. I remember thinking "What the fuck IS this? Did somebody screw up the edit?"

In retrospect, there's no contest as to which is the better film. But at 14 I wanted Star Wars, and A New Hope was a thrilling experience for me. (As an aside, it's interesting to watch the film now and see how much has changed--when I was SURE my opinion of it could NEVER change!)

But this all raises the question of for whom the subsequent Star Wars movies were aimed. The original sequels (V and VI) were easy enough to swallow as continuations of the original story (well, yes, there were the Ewoks). But the prequels of the early 2000s missed their marks on a number of fronts, leaving us to wonder what approach any further films might take--or should take.

Well, wait no more. The Disney juggernaut purchased the rights to the Star Wars universe in 2012, and J.J. Abrams (a couple of Star Treks, a couple of Mission Impossibles, a bunch of other stuff) is the first director invited to continue the franchise and his effort, The Force Awakens, is here.

I decided there's little point in avoiding spoilers, since everyone will have seen it soon enough. So you are forewarned--SPOILER ALERT!--I just wade all over the story here.

It's 30 years after the close of Episode VI, Return of the Jedi. A few things are presumed (details scavenged from the otherwise-discarded Known Universe): Han and Leia became a couple and had children. Luke formed a Jedi school to rebuild the shattered order. All this has come and gone in the intervening years. The hated Empire has reorganized into the First Order, an entity indistinguishable (for our purposes) from the Empire.

The film opens with our being introduced to a couple new faces, junk scavenger and ace-pilot Rey (Daisy Ridley) and ambivalent Storm Trooper Finn (John Boyega). Oscar Isaac plays Poe Dameron, the Republic's best pilot, who with his feisty sidekick droid BB-8 has taken possession of a secret map that shows the location of the disappeared Luke Skywalker. The plot will bring these three into contact and collaboration. With Darth Vader and the Emperor gone, the First Order is overseen by a new Supreme Leader, Snoke, and the day-to-day operations are run by the very Vader-like Kylo Ren. Luke's disappearance appears to have something to do with the current malaise. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

First, the good stuff--and it's mostly good stuff all around. The film is beautiful to look at, and it has (in updated fashion) just the stuff to fire the young kids' imagination. Planets and starships and strange creatures and epic battles. Rey lives inside the hulk of a piece of Imperial war junk, and spends her days scavenging the immense ruins of starships crashed in the great battles of the previous films. Abrams keeps everything boiling along at a brisk, but not too-brisk, pace. The primary trio of new cast members could not be better-chosen. Daisy Ridley especially as the film's primary character is fantastic. She is young and has the naivety of her inexperience, but she is in no way helpless or weak. Indeed, she discovers her skills virtually without tutoring--something not Anakin nor Luke nor Leia ever achieved. As an actor, she has the innate ability to show the contents of her mind effortlessly on her face, which lets us follow her closely on her adventures. John Boyega's role is ambivalent by design, but he proves the perfect companion: chivalrous, capable, and essentially good. But he's in need of motivation and direction. Oscar Isaac plays a smaller and more archetypal role in this film--hotshot pilot--but the stage is primed for more substantial things to come, I suspect.

And the old characters make their appearances as well. Han Solo and Chewbacca are prominent characters, and Princess (now General) Leia Organa has a bit of screen time. We're treated to brief appearances from R2-D2 and C-3PO, and Luke does show himself at the end--for two wordless minutes. But it's really the young folks' film, and their franchise moving forward.

(I hesitate to mention it, but I found Carrie Fisher's appearance utterly distracting. I fear a double standard at work here where I can celebrate Han Solo's aging and grizzled appearance but not Leia's. But I insist it's not MY refusal to let her age gracefully; somebody--either her or the studio or whomever--clearly wanted her to look younger than her 59 years. She has been so extensively Botoxed that her face is virtually immobile throughout the film. Almost shockingly so--only a wired-shut jaw would have completed the job. Her upper lip is especially troublesome, looking like some kind of plastic surgery reconstruction in its refusal to move. At all. It's like she's had a clear plastic mask fused to her own face. Personally, I'd be very happy to celebrate the REAL 59-year-old Carrie Fisher, but perhaps that person doesn't exist anymore. Maybe in a twist of reality they could use CGI to restore mobility to her face?)

The John Williams score has its moments, but I'll typically need to spend more time around it before I can decide if I like it or not. A part of me wonders if they don't need to head in a completely different direction here.

And what of the not-so-good? I was kind of struck as the story went along how closely this film follows A New Hope. It's almost a remake. A relative nobody (Luke originally, Rey here) is faced with epic decisions and the trials help her (him) to find herself. The Old Guard seeks new kids to carry the torch. A feisty droid sidekick provides comedy relief. "Business" meetings happen in seedy bars with "hip" music and a menagerie of aliens. The bad guy is really a fallen good guy, and our heroes alone know it and make it their mission to turn him back to the light. These elements still work, but there's a slight lack of freshness to the story. And because of the tie-ins to the previous films, the story is necessarily more complicated and multi-stranded than the almost comic-book simplicity of the original. I understand that it has to be so, and that there's no way to write a story that hits everyone's bases; but THIS story doesn't improve for this complication.

But no matter. I was thrilled to go and am already plotting my next viewing (in Sydney, if it's open there.)

We know that the next two sequels are already in the works--the filming is already underway for the next film--and I'm already eager to see how Rey and Finn's story progresses, and what role Luke will play going forward.

And the grade? For those of us yearning, perhaps irrationally, for anything Star Wars I'd give it an A-. It's a very worthy fix, and a great start to a new franchise. Without this prime for the pump, it seems a B film.

Yearning To Breathe Free

Last night's film, John Crowley's Brooklyn (screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the novel Brooklyn by Colm Tóibin).

Saoirse Ronan plays Eilis Lacey, a young girl who leaves her sister and mother in Ireland to seek a better life in America. Her older sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) sees that Eilis is smart and has potential, and that life in 1950s Ireland will be a dead end for Eilis. She arranges with an Irish priest living in Brooklyn (played by Jim Broadbent) to find a department store job and a place at a boarding house for Eilis. Along the way she is introduced to a whole menagerie of characters, and we see her finding her feet in this new life and in life in general.

There's nothing like loss to help us focus on what is important. For a young person, the loss of family must rank among the most traumatic. Eilis and Rose have recently lost their father in Ireland, and now Eilis's departure puts her entire being at sea (literally and figuratively). I wonder how many of us would thrive in that setting?

I could not help thinking--as surely we are meant to think--about the millions of people in the last two + centuries who abandoned their homes for the limitless possibilities of America. How often we have been told of the magic of Ellis Island and of the very moving sight of the Statue of Liberty--I've see these places in New York Harbor a hundred times--but Brooklyn puts us in the shoes of a young woman who has left everything she knows for the chance that there's something better elsewhere.

It's a big nugget for a story to digest, a momentous happening on a personal scale, and an exciting one.

The real nub of the film--as the trailers make clear--is not Eilis's departure initially, but her return to Ireland a year or so later and the forces that seek to keep her there. This difficult decision here is her coming-of-age moment.

Brooklyn is a quiet film, made more so by Eilis's essentially quiet, taciturn nature. Ms. Ronan has to pack a whole range of emotional experiences into a pretty limited range of expression, and the whole movie rides on her performance. Saoirse Ronan has always struck me as a bit of a chameleon. Even watching her closely it's hard for me to get any kind of a read on her--indeed, I can't even quite picture what she looks like. It's not that she's generic or forgettable, exactly--she seems very normal and reasonably attractive--but hers seems the countenance of possibility. It also means that she seems able to play almost any character--from Eilis to teen assassin Hannah to Agatha in The Grand Budapest Hotel--with conviction. She is in every scene and the film sinks or swims with her.

I confess I'd never even heard of Irish director John Crowley. It seems he has worked primarily in theatre, and has done a few films and a bit of television. Brooklyn should certainly raise his profile another notch. Mirroring my comments on Spotlight (though a very different kind of film than Brooklyn), I love that Brooklyn underplays most of its elements. There's a cartoon villain or two, but most everyone is subtly played and the dilemmas which Eilis must navigate are not contrived. There's a quiet and contained realism about the story that played very well for me.

A lovely story well-told. It only misses the highest possible marks for its limited scope.  Grade: A-

...For I Have Sinned

Yesterday's film: Thomas McCarthy's Spotlight.

Very much in the vein of Alan Pakula's 1974 political thriller All The President's Men, Spotlight tells the essentially-true story of the Boston Globe's early 2000s exposé of the Catholic Church's systematic and widespread sexual abuse of children. The term Spotlight refers to the five-person investigative team from the Globe that researched and broke the story (which along with subsequent coverage earned the paper a Pulitzer Prize in 2003).

Thomas McCarthy is unfamiliar to me, but I found I was an instant fan. I see he has worked primarily as an actor in both film and television, and has a dozen directing credits on his resume. However he got his experience I cheered every one of his choices here, especially what he chose NOT to do. The drama is baked into the bones of the story itself, and no resort to film cliche or easy tension-ratcheting gimmickry were used--this must be hard to resist as this kind of restraint is very rare.

The paper received a tip-off in 2001 that priests were sexually molesting children. The story had been around before and had even gotten some minimal coverage. But a new editor-in-chief at the Globe, Marty Baron, felt there was more to the story than the paper was pursuing and he persuaded the Spotlight team to take a look. As it turned out, Spotlight's investigation was like turning over a log to find a whole ecosystem of rot and depravity throughout the church. The abuse was bad enough, of course, but the real story was the church's knowledge of the abuse and its complicity and cover-up. A number of private investigators and lawyers had been working for years on bits and pieces of the scandal, but those smaller efforts had been successfully fended off by the church through payouts and intimidation and the public labeling of accusers as quacks and liars.

But Boston is a very Catholic place, and the church is deeply entwined in the very fabric of Boston life. This meant that the sources needed to uncover the story and even the staff of the paper itself were at times reluctant to cooperate. It was only when the team amassed such a weight of evidence that it could not be ignored that the dominoes fell. (We see he chain of emotions from "How dare you say these things about the beloved church?!" to "Is it as bad as all that?" to "Oh god, what have we done / allowed to happen?" over and over again.)

Spotlight is what The DaVinci Code dreamed of being. Spotlight is everything that film is not, measured and methodical and grinding. The investigation has the ups and downs one would expect--the 9/11 attacks occur right in the middle of the investigation--but these are not dangled in front of us as The! Next! End! Of! The! World! They are things that must be ground through and overcome as the work plods on. McCarthy manages to keep this plodding from seeming at all, well, plodding, and I found I was at the edge of my seat for the whole two hours.

I especially love that Marty Baron, who would have been easy to portray as the outsider come to upset the order of things, was greeted with some natural skepticism but quickly proves his mettle; I love that Rachel McAdams is not sexualized and there are no muddling romantic subplots among the close-working reporters. Everyone is portrayed as incredibly hard working and good (but not infallible) at their jobs.

And of course Spotlight has the considerable advantage of being true in all its salient parts. The evil in the story is the actual, demonstrated evil of the organized church and of some of the men of that church. Marty Baron was savvy enough to recognize that the real story is not the individual abusers or even the victims but the institution itself. When it was discovered that Archbishop Bernard Law had known of the abuse and had helped engineer the cover-up, the Spotlight team was eager to post the story immediately--it was seemingly exactly what they had been looking for. But Baron alone insisted that the Spotlight team keep digging because the story was bigger than Law. (The team risked being scooped by another paper by these delays, but the risk got them a much bigger story.)

Bernard Law, of course, was simply moved to another jurisdiction. This time to a plum post within the Vatican itself. That says about everything we need to know.

This hasn't been a big movie year for me, but now at year's end this film rises to the top. Very highly recommended.

Grade: A

Citizen Screwed

Today's film, Laura Poitras's Citizenfour.

Citizenfour  is a documentary about Edward Snowden's release of classified information relating to massive electronic surveillance of foreign nationals and US citizens by the National Security Agency. Snowden's information was given to the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, who released the information in a series of articles in June of 2013. The initial articles talked about the NSA's illegal surveillance of American Citizens' cell phone data; subsequent articles revealed an almost unfathomably vast capturing of electronic data from phones and internet.

Snowden was a data analyst on contract for the Virginia-based defense intelligence company Booz Allen Hamilton, and he had top security clearances. His work revealed what he saw as a shocking and illegal overreach of US intelligence gathering, and he made the decision to leak the information to the press. Upon the release of his identity, the US Government quickly leveled three felony charges of espionage and theft of government property, and Snowden fled an extradition order in Hong Kong and is currently in temporary asylum in Russia.

As we might have expected, the government agencies involved first denied categorically that the intelligence was being collected and then, after Snowden's revelations, denied any wrongdoing and went after the messenger. Investigations were promptly launched not to see who authorized the illegal overreaches, but to apprehend who was responsible for the leak. President Obama himself, who campaigned in 2008 on returning the rule of law to government activity, criticized Snowden's actions and denied that there was an ongoing surveillance of American citizens (apparently tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone was OK), and the charges against Snowden still stand. The governments of several other nations--among them, Great Britain, Germany, and Sweden--were shown to have been complicit with the NSA in spying on their own citizens, and a couple have threatened harsh legal action to any news outlet that prints the information.

Not surprisingly, what one thinks of Edward Snowden depends on one's politics. Conservatives tend to see him as a traitor who is undermining our attempts to keep ourselves safe, and liberals see him as a whistleblower who is uncovering a pit of lawless rot in our government. My own views will be already clear, but I confess I was a little of two minds before seeing the film. Intelligence is always, it seems, a cat-and-mouse game, with increasing ingenuity in uncovering secrets being matched by ever-increasing secrecy. Neither side is likely to stand still--nor would it seem prudent to do so. It's easy to imagine how the internet and electronic communications can enable terrorists and those bent on malfeasance to coordinate in secret and to work up plans that traditional law enforcement may not be equipped to handle. And I also think that the ability to do harm is not tantamount to actually doing harm. The US government, for example, has had the ability to obliterate its own population with nuclear weapons for decades, but we trust that it will not do so. (Certainly, we don't seem to devote any energy to opposing this possibility.) Likewise--though perhaps it's not equivalent--the collecting of all available data about a person is not the same thing as using that data against them. It certainly opens up the possibility of using that data thus. Snowden argues that knowing your government is looking over your shoulder at every moment inhibits your ability to speak freely. But only, I might argue, if that collected personal data is ever used against citizens.

But on the contrary, I have to believe that the whole process needs to be unambiguously subject to the rule of law. Our legal system should be up to the task of regulating these processes--just as I believe that those accused of terrorism should be able to face our legal system and not be held and worked over outside the protections of the rule of law. Certainly, having the government do whatever it wants without telling anybody--or while lying baldly to its citizens--is not the solution.

What I was not really aware of before Citizenfour was the scope and scale of the NSA's intelligence-gathering activities. Most people can imagine a set of circumstances that they feel warrant increased governmental scrutiny of a person or a group, but I suspect most regular, law-abiding citizens also have an expectation of privacy. Citizenfour makes it pretty clear that there's no such thing in the modern world as privacy between a government and its citizens. Certainly not in the US. I did not expect this--which probably shows how cursory was my review of this story as it was breaking 18 months ago.

I believe Snowden's claim that he was motivated by patriotism and a sense of moral outrage. What could he possibly gain by his disclosures, especially when weighed against what he would almost certainly have to pay for them? He makes it very clear in these interviews that he's aware of how the US government will respond to his leaks, and he says he's quite willing to go to jail if that's how the story unfolds. He subsequently spent 40 days in the Moscow airport awaiting a more permanent disposition, and even now his status is temporary. My understanding is that no other governments are willing to anger the US by offering Snowden asylum (our relations with Russia already suck, so they're not risking much by putting him up).

In any case, Citizenfour does not take sides nor draw any conclusions for us. It really just documents the events as they unfold, with Snowden and Glenn Greenwald in a hotel room in Hong Kong discussing what is in Snowden's trove and how it should be released. It really comes off more as John Le Carré novel than a bland documentary. This despite there being almost no production niceties; we just move scene to scene with occasional text cards. It's a very lean offering, but compelling just the same.

Regardless of what one thinks of Edward Snowden--and if you're like me you maybe understand less than you think you do--I urge anyone to see Citizenfour. It chronicles an actual historical event, and it gives us a great deal to think about--and debate.

Grade: A

Westward The Wagons

I usually leave a theater with some kind of preliminary conclusion about a film, but as often as not my initial impressions age and morph and solidify with the passage of a little time. Not always, but certainly with ambitious or complex films. If Christopher Nolan’s latest effort, Interstellar, doesn’t qualify as ambitious or complex (or at least multi-stranded) then I don’t know what would. Certainly I feel well-justified for being unsettled; a couple days later I’m still chewing on what feels like several different films wrapped into one.

The Earth is dying. Set in the very near future, our ecosystem has passed a tipping point such that we are no longer able to grow the food we need to survive. Civilization crumbles as life itself wanes. Our path forward is apparently to find another place to live. Through a kind of convoluted pathway, we find ourselves a fly on the wall aboard one of the missions in search of a new home.

There are about a hundred gebrillion tales that might spring from such a setup. Humankind’s escape from Earth may be one of the easiest wellsprings for a good story, but there’s a lot in that story that seems waaay beyond us. I can’t tell if director Nolan has navigated the thicket wisely or not, but he certainly gets high marks for ambition. (I see from the Wikipedia article that Nolan consulted with physicist Kip Thorne about physical matters, so perhaps he deserves higher marks yet.) That aforementioned convoluted pathway that puts us on a spaceship is one of the several films-in-one; the mission itself and its science is another; what happens on the mission and afterward is another film or two, though these tie the others together. More or less.

Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a hotshot pilot from the now-defunct NASA space program who presently works the family farm with his late wife’s father (played by John Lithgow) and his two teen-aged children. Their dustbowl lives are consumed by trying to keep the farm alive as the very dirt turns against them, and trying to lead normal lives as normal life is becoming impossible. Cooper has a special bond with his daughter Murphy, a precocious and imaginative child with an interest in science—she is very like her father. When Cooper is called to pilot the Mission To Save Humanity, he leaves not knowing (as great space pioneer Lincoln said) when, or whether ever, he may return. His son is old enough, and far enough along his path of becoming a farmer, to accept this turn of events; but his daughter, who is coming into her own at just this moment and reliant on the guiding hand and love of her father—an extraordinary man who has a crucial role to play in the extraordinary woman who will emerge—cannot make peace with his decision.

That’s a great kickoff, I’d say. But the seeds planted here continue to sprout for the next three hours. A father having to leave his children behind is one of many elements to the story, but this thread has to serve as the emotional sinew between the disparate elements. At the time I wasn’t sure if it was enough, but I find after a night of stewing that there's maybe more sinew there than I thought.

As the trailers confirm, the film is unquestionably beautiful to look at. And it’s just such a huge story that you’re hardly given an idle moment in nearly three hours. So the film succeeds as an entertainment beyond question. But many of these plot elements and developments raise the hackles of my skepticism. There are several bald-faced dei ex machina pushing the story along—each with a freight train’s worth of questions in tow—but we scarcely have time to think on these things before we're carried off by the Next Thing. At times I fear we’re kind of baffled with the bullshit and self-important terminology of pseudo-science gobbledygook, but the flood carries us onward so quickly that we just have to let it go. A little voice in my head reminds me that it’s science-fiction and not an educational film. Enough of the story is essentially plausible for us to accept basic premises; the rest--including the solving of mysteries with bigger mysteries--must be accepted.

It took me about 12 hours to make peace with that precondition, though even the immediate aftertaste was more sweet than sour. And once I made my peace I found the film looming as a magnificent, epic event. It’s a near-future Star Trek movie with a quasi-realistic underpinning. The core cast—McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Mackenzie Foy / Jessica Chastain / Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck, Matt Damon—are all fabulous. McConaughey especially is great (which is fortunate, as there’s scarcely a scene without him). And because we have the smaller human interactions that give scale to the larger issue of the end of human life on our planet, there’s something for nearly anybody to relate to.

One other note. Throughout Interstellar, I felt the constant presence of Stanley Kubrick’s 1969 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. We sense it in the interactions between the human astronauts and their humanized computers (think HAL, but without the undertone of menace), and in some of the docking sequences and in the look and feel of the spacecraft. Kubrick kind of blazed the trail for these visual and stylistic things, and we’re still following suit almost 50 years later. But I especially noticed it in Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack, which has to have been deliberate. As I understand it, Kubrick specifically wanted a traditional, classical music soundtrack for 2001, and the dummy tracks that were plugged in during production—Johann Strauss and Shostakovich and Richard Strauss—worked so well that he stuck with existing music rather than pieces composed specifically for the film (György Ligeti’s choral works sound perfect, and perfectly futuristic and jarring, for a space opera). Nolan did not copy that exactly, yet much of the music in Interstellar is of a traditional orchestral nature. And there are moments that clearly tip their hat to Kubrick (I’m thinking of a sustained organ chord specifically that is very Also Sprach Zarathustra).

I wonder if I wouldn’t have much more to say after another viewing or two and the passage of a week. But for now I think Christopher Nolan has made up in ambition and scale and sheer beauty for whatever deficits and overreach his story requires. Unless you specifically don’t like science fiction, I urge you to see it.

(A small spoiler alert.) One of the nagging questions—more a curiosity, really—persisted despite my newfound roll-with-it zen. I don’t think I’m giving much away when I point out that one of our species’s survival strategies is to seed a new colony elsewhere. Indeed, this seems one of the less challenging technical aspects of this story. Embryos (or some proto-human form) are frozen and will be thawed and activated in our new home. And the idea of the loneliness inherent in space exploration is an ongoing theme in the film; a number of explorers have shipped off prior to our story’s unfolding, none of whom have reason to think they’ll ever see another human being again. But I find myself hung up on how a colony grown from seed would progress, on what it would look like. It starts very small--one or two people--and must grow slowly. What of children born in this setting, children who will never have known anything else? The technology and the expertise required to undertake the mission would come to the new colony along with the astronauts and the embryos. But that technology would be gone in, at most, a few hundred years. The factories that built the equipment are light years away; the materials to build new ones or repair the old ones are nowhere to be found. How will the new colonists learn higher mathematics? Robotics? Computer science? Medicine? Or would we start over again at the Stone Age? For the survival of the species, whether we retain all of humanity's collected knowledge is perhaps immaterial. But I can't get past the magnitude of the loss, or how it might be prevented. Alas, that's probably another film.

The Blaze of Glory

Yesterday's film was writer / director David Ayer's current effort, Fury.

Set in the waning days of the European chapter of World War 2, Fury follows a tank crew led by Staff Sergeant Don Collier (Brad Pitt) as they make their way across Germany. The film begins with an explanation that our Sherman tanks were known to be inferior to the German Tigers, making for hazardous duty for the crews of this equipment. The story does not concern itself with the larger war nor with any well-known epic battles; rather, we are shown what day-to-day life was like for a small band of men who must work together if they are to survive, and whose survival is the chip placed on the table again and again, day after day. This is their job. "Best job I ever had," they say, only half in jest (since it is a comment that always follows a successful emergence from another battle).

The story is really told through the eyes of new recruit Pvt. Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), who in a nightmarish turn has been plucked from his job as a typist and deposited in the Assistant Driver's seat of the Sherman. This is much to the rest of the crew's chagrin, as his inexperience and frank unsuitability for the job--he has never set foot in a tank before--makes for an increased hazard for a crew which is already well past its expiration date. He arrives in camp having no idea whatsoever to expect, and gets a very quick introduction when he is tasked with removing the splattered remains of his forbear from the seat he is shortly to occupy. Collier's crew have survived through a combination of dumb luck and the capability of the men--and through Collier's very adept leadership (we are left wondering at such talent and ability confined to the insular world of the six-man crew, this world being but one unit like a grain of sand in the desert of an immense undertaking where life and death become statistics around which the larger effort must be planned). Though we do not witness any of the great battles of history, dead is dead at every encounter if things don't come out right. I daresay it's easy for we civilian folks to forget that.

All the film's performances are excellent, with Pitt especially wearing the swagger and bravado and nonchalance his crew expects (and perhaps needs) while privately showing the immense strain of the choices with which he has been faced--and the decisions he has made. The men are distinctive personalities, and the actors do a great job of dragging their characters' baggage along, each character trying to play his role while having to conquer fear and to almost continually face death--theirs or someone else's.

I suspect Ayer's mission is to place the grim reality of war starkly before us: whatever a person's preferences and philosophies, a soldier's most basic job is to kill enemy soldiers. This simple calculus becomes inescapable for a soldier, especially if his opposite number is frantically aware of it. But the decisions facing a soldier are rarely cut-and-dried, and the deadly nature of the activity means there's little chance for deliberation and second chances. The razor's edge by which a long-standing crew such as Sgt. Collier's has managed to stay alive means that the men, if they live, come out the other side with very bloody hands and little opportunity to wonder luxuriously if they've made the right choices. Nasty, brutish, and short.

As a collection of characters, the film is excellent. The plot is linear and believable; the pictures are horrific and beautiful, and the tension runs like a piano string throughout. We are given a lot to think about. But I wasn't unreservedly enthusiastic. First, I always have a bad taste in my mouth when the "chaotic battle aftermath"--the opening scene of the film--is depicted by a field littered with debris and burning indiscriminately. Why would there be a bunch of little, uniform fires of basically equal size? Why would clumps of dirt be burning? A burning tank, sure. A demolished house on fire, you bet. A burning dead horse maybe? OK, sure. But just random chunks of metal? Metal don't burn, dude. And the music: There are a couple affecting themes presented to us, but overall I found the swelling patriotic music to be A Bridge Too Far. In general I hate soundtracks clumsily telling us what we're supposed to feel; it seems the most basic failure of storytelling.  But the Big Battle Scene suddenly slowing down to an artistic slow-mo and all sound dropping away while we are treated to swelling angst music--ugh. I know Fury is not trying to be a documentary, but if we're trying to understand what the soldiers experienced, I can guarantee that things didn't slow down beautifully and get accompanied by Musical Deepity.

Chalk that up to my quirks and don't let it stop you from going if you otherwise like war films. As a friend said, it's not Saving Private Ryan, but it's not bad.

Grade: B

Who You Gonna Call?

It's been a week of movies for me. Stuck in Louisville for work and twice-annual training, I've had a number of days free and a fella can study only so much (or, in my case, almost not at all). And after removing my FaceBook page from life support (a topic on which I'll have more to say later. Or maybe not) I've been busying myself reviewing recent films.

Today, Scott Frank's adaptation of the Lawrence Block novel, A Walk Among the Tombstones. Liam Neeson stars as an aging ex cop-cum unlicensed private detective Matthew Scudder. A guy living kind of under the radar and sidling from task to task, Scudder gets roped into helping track down a couple guys who are kidnapping and brutally murdering young women. A recovering alcoholic, Scudder is approached after an AA meeting by another member whose brother is having a problem. After some hoop-jumping, Scudder is brought into the job in his usual unofficial capacity.

Scudder's character is nothing new. Part standard detective fiction, part film noir, Matthew Scudder seems a compendium of Jack Reacher and Sam Spade and Mike Hammer. And Neeson does this kind of thing very well. He's old enough that he's not to be mistaken for a 20-something tough guy, but he sports a deadly skill set and a tired patina of having seen almost everything. He's neither a guy who is likely to be caught off guard nor one to be much put out by any unpleasantness that gets dropped in his lap. He's a man of few words and he engages in only as much action as the situation requires. But he's also a bit of a luddite, and when trying to research other kidnappings on microfilm at the local library he runs across a young homeless boy who seems to have exactly the talents Scudder lacks. Thus does he find a sidekick and eventual partner in TJ (Brian "Astro" Bradley).

If there's not much new in the character of Matthew Scudder, well there's not much new in Tombstone's plot either. But that doesn't keep it from being a rousing entertainment. A distinct and linear story, with good, strong characters; we find ourselves swept along stem-to-stern. We may not be finding anything new here, but if you're gonna play in an established genre, this is how it should be done.

The film is briskly shot, and has a great New York City location much like The Drop. But Tombstone feels like Episode One of a franchise, which is fine by me. I for one would be happy to watch more of Matthew Scudder.

So, a slight demerit for unoriginality. Grade: B+

High Noon In Paris

I’ve always had a thing for Paris. 

OK, there’s something really unimaginative in that, I know; it’s surely America’s favorite foreign destination (which kind of taints the place). And it was the first foreign place I ever visited as an adult under my own steam. So in my case maybe it’s just bland expectation with a dollop of nostalgia. But the Paris I’ve always loved is a place of music, the city of Chopin and Debussy and Ravel, and most especially it’s a place for organ music. This is where Duruflé lived and worked, and César Franck and Louis Vierne and Charles-Marie Widor and Camille Saint-Saëns and Marcel Dupre and Olivier Messiaen and Charles Tournemire. These composers are a huge part of what I love in music, and Paris is where they lived and worked and, not incidentally, where the incomparable Cavailé-Coll organs on which they played are located (as was his shop).

Anyway, this musical background—in addition to all the other things the draws the place to traveling Americans—means that any story set in the city gets a couple of free passes. And when you add in an all-star cast, as in Israel Horovitz’s new film My Old Lady, there seems every reason to expect success.

Kevin Kline plays Mathias Gold, a triple-divorcée from New York who learns upon his estranged father’s death that he has inherited an apartment in the City of Light. Mathias is a man to whom life has dealt a bum hand, it seems; he’s a rather embittered and tactless man staring down the barrel of old age armed with little more than an acerbic sense of humor. He arrives in Paris with everything he owns in life stuffed into a small duffel bag, guided by a letter in his jacket pocket that he scarcely understands and which in any case doesn’t begin to give him the real lay of the land.

He arrives to find the apartment occupied—for decades—by Mathilde Girard (Maggie Smith) and her daughter Chloé (Kristin Scott Thomas), and Mathias quickly discovers that he can’t, as he planned, simply evict the tenants and sell the apartment and live off the proceeds. Mathilde, who was Mathias’s father’s lover many decades ago, has what I can only regard as an utterly bizarre living situation: she (or her rental contract) is referred to as a “viager,” which means that she has a legal right to the apartment, whoever the owner, until she dies. Far worse for the penniless Mathias—this is the bizarre part—HE is under obligation from the viager contract to pay HER a whopping 2,400 Euros per month for the privilege of living in his apartment. Until she dies.

A day later I’m still trying to make sense of this. The film almost needs to stop the projectors at this point and subject us to a lesson in the arcane bits of Parisian real estate law if we are to have any hope of understanding the situation and sympathizing with the protagonists. It remains the case that Mathias has, as expected, inherited something of great value; but the mountain he must climb to attain his prize is quite unexpected and even surreal. He will have to outlive the Feisty Mathilde before he sees a penny of his inheritance, and the cost of outliving her could be staggering. Indeed, the requirement to pay her to live there is an impossibility for him and, worse still, it makes the apartment very nearly unsaleable as any buyer would be hamstrung by the same requirement.

Into this mix is thrown Mathilde’s daughter Chloé. Approaching Mathias’s age, she is similarly at sea, working a kind of nowhere job and tending to her aged mother in a huge apartment that someone is now trying to yank from under them.

It’s not a bad premise as stories go, and one could hardly have brought better resources to bear in terms of acting talent or setting. So why doesn’t it make for a better film? Partly because the only sympathetic character here is Mathilde (Maggie Smith is a national treasure). I don’t think the writer’s intention is for us to dislike Mathias—and lord knows we sympathize with the ludicrous and unfathomable yoke placed around his neck when he touches down in Paris—but there’s just nothing to cheer for in this character. Bitter and unhappy for reasons that remain remote to us, he’s just not a guy one senses the need to know. And Chloé even less so. Her distress at having the home in which she’s spend most of her life taken from her is quite understandable; but she spends most of her screen time being terse or snappy or hysterical, such that the inevitable rapprochement with Mathias makes almost zero emotional sense—and there’s not even a rational case made for it. It’s all very deus ex Mathilde, dispensed with a throw-away line or two.

I just didn’t buy it, and I had little desire to spend any more time with any of these people. I can get my fill of Paris by watching the opening five minutes of Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris over and over again. Or picking something almost at random from my iTunes.

Grade: C.

Nobody Knows Anybody, Not That Well

This is James Gandolfini’s last film, though he gets second billing here to the very versatile Tom Hardy. Based on the Dennis Lehane short story “Animal Rescue,” Hardy plays Bob Saginowski, a bartender in a gritty Brooklyn bar named after, and formerly owned by, Gandolfini’s character, Uncle Marv. Marv is under the thumb of a small band of Chechen mobsters who use his bar—well, their bar— (among other places) as a drop location for the loot collected around town by their myriad criminal enterprises.  As Uncle Marv is involved, so inevitably is Saganowski. But there’s other trouble brewing for Saganowski as well. A seemingly decent if reticent and low-profile fellow, he puts himself unwittingly on the wrong side of a different criminal element, the notorious bad boy Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts). Walking home one night after locking up the bar, Bob finds a put bull puppy in someone’s trash can. The puppy has been beaten up, and Bob adopts the dog and (with some help from the garbage can’s owner, Nadia, played by Noomi Rapace) nurses him back to health. Turns out Mr. Deeds is the dog’s original owner, and he decides he wants his dog—and his old girlfriend—back. Or maybe he just wants to make trouble.

The thing is, nobody is really exactly who they appear to be; that’s kind of the whole banana. It’s a lovely script, focusing on these rather inscrutable characters in between and during the pinch points that drive the story. Uncle Marv is a guy with a lot of miles on the clock and without much—or any—opportunity to set anything right again (watching the overweight and out-of-breath Gandolfini chain smoking his way through the film, one cannot help thinking of the fate that awaits him shortly after the production wrapped). How desperate is he, and what’s left to lose? Noomi Rapace’s Nadia seems a basically good person who has touched the hot stove too many times. But how much has she participated in her colorful past? Eric Deeds is a man with a frightful reputation—or is he? Bob Saganowski, having almost a touch of Forrest Gump or the Rain Man about him, is the film’s great mystery: is he a bit of a simpleton or not? He was a wild youth—how wild? How far from his wild youth is he? Is Bob just not much of a talker or is he rather smart enough to know when to keep his mouth shut?

The performances are magnetic. Hardy especially impresses, as he is given so few colors on his palette to work with, yet he’s in virtually every scene. Gandolfini plays a man who has lived hard and is now in over his head, and it’s a little hard to jettison the expectation that he will just summon Tony Soprano’s resourcefulness to get himself out of the hole he’s in. But Uncle Marv is not Tony Soprano. Noomi Rapace is lovely, though there’s perhaps a bit too much of the damsel in distress in her role (though that’s certainly not her fault). It’s really Tom Hardy’s story, and he gives a very restrained performance that feels exactly right for this story.

Lehane often sets his stories in his native Boston (Mystic River, Gone, Baby, Gone, The Given Day--I almost said The Town, which is the right place but another author), and this could as easily have been set there. The Drop has a very blue collar setting that feels to me more Boston than Brooklyn. But that’s probably just me not knowing either place very well, and it’s neither here nor there in any case; the filmmakers have channeled a hardscrabble urban world that feels authentic and makes the perfect setting for this story.

Afterward I find myself impressed at the mob movie that’s more Hitchcock than Scorsese. It steers clear of most of the mob violence one expects (though not all). The Drop is about tension and about the interaction of personalities in a life-and-death world. I’m reminded yet again that a great film often needs a great basic story at its core, and that’s the job of a writer. A high proportion of my favorites have started life as a great book (though there will always be exceptions, like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Chinatown). This one hits its marks in fine fashion.

Grade: A- / B+

(PS: Brownie points for identifying the source of this review's title.)

Find Me When You Wake Up

I've never been a gamer. But there was a while, a decade ago, where a group of us were stuck for days at a time in our little rat-hole crash pad in Louisville waiting for our phone to ring with a flight assignment. To while away this time we bought an X-Box and played a small number of games.  My favorite was Halo, a highly-regarded First Person Shooter game.

I'm probably not the person to describe these things, but for the uninitiated I'll take a stab. Your controls manipulate a character--the character you play, as it were--called the Master Chief, a half-human, half-machine (think RoboCop) soldier who is tasked with killing off a variety of alien scum threatening a ship or a planet or a people. Your controls manipulate the character's movement through space (to include walking or running and jumping, turning, etc.) and the selection and operation of weapons and vehicles. The setting for these battles is a collection of Earth-like planets, often with abandoned structures. There are often other soldiers who accompany you, and one of your tasks is to look after them and keep them safe (you'll often get further with other people helping you to kill the bad guys). You play against an array of computer-driven enemies--you against the game, as it were--or the game can be played in multi-player mode, either with up to four people playing on the same game console (with the TV split two or three or four ways) or with other players who connect online. We did very little two-person playing, and none of us ever tried the online version--not least because we did not have a phone line and could not connect our X-Box to the internet. But the game was addicting, and it occupied us for countless hours.

When playing a game like this, one of the things you get accustomed to is the notion that you can only make it so far before your character is killed and you are "reborn" back at a previous checkpoint. Thus you have to work your way through a given scenario again and again until you find the exact right way to get through to the next scenario. We used to refer to this process as developing a "pattern" (no idea what anyone not a thousand years old calls it today) which you would follow and tweak until you got it right.

So it's not much of a stretch to imagine what it would be like to actually BE the character you play, the guy or woman who gets to die again and again until they figure out exactly what is needed to survive for another day.

This is exactly what director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Jumper, Fair Game) has done with his latest film, Edge of Tomorrow. (I'll try to say no more than can be gleaned from the trailers.) Set in the not-terribly-far future, the Earth is being overrun by an alien invasion. Major William Cage (Tom Cruise), an Army PR guy, finds himself unexpectedly assigned to an invasion force in France, an unwelcome assignment and one for which he is unprepared in training or temperament. After resisting the assignment, he is brutally demoted back to Private and becomes basically a prisoner in the Army--one condemned to an almost certain death in combat (a fate of which he is reminded continually by the wonderful Bill Paxton playing a hard-assed Southern Sergeant).

The invasion goes, well, quite badly and Cage does not make it far. But at the instant of his death he finds he is transported back to a point in time just after his demotion to Private and he gets to live the whole scenario over again. And again and again, basically until he gets it right.

He meets another soldier during these Groundhog Day events, a Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), who is world-famous for her role in beating the alien force in a previous battle. It turns out that she achieved what she did in exactly the same way as he: she got to replay her scenario over and over again until she figured it out. After some discussion, they learn that what they have in common is that they each killed a certain kind of alien whose splattered blood conferred on them an ability to reset the time clock, as it were. This little insight also helps them to understand why they're being so badly beaten.

It's certainly no more absurd a scenario than many fantasy or sci-fi stories, and it all whips along at a dizzying pace. But unlike so many movies of this kind, the character development here is very satisfying. Both Cage and Vrataski are unexpectedly rich, flawed people caught in a nightmare, and we sympathize with them. We expect to see Tom Cruise playing an action hero, but we don't expect him to start as a sniveling coward and become a hero by being forced externally. Sergeant Vrataski has become a hero in exactly the same way--she did not start life this way--and Emily Blunt carries this along in her performance in lovely fashion.

The effects-rich setting requires its own kind of 21st-Century expertise, and too often the effects become the tail wagging the dog. But Doug Liman seems to have the situation well in hand here, as he did with the first Bourne movie (still the best, in my opinion). Everything looks great, and though the action is a bit thick and fast we are given moments to catch our breath. The invading aliens--a kind of super-creature that seems part spider and part fungus and which moves at lightning speed like millions of pairs of organic nunchaku or like a thousand-headed weed-whacker--are more imaginative (and fearsome!) than we might have expected. So it's doubly surprising to find character development in this setting. It's not world-beating, but it makes for a more watchable story than I anticipated.

So, unexpectedly satisfying. Grade: A-

Cristal's Balls

A couple of Woody Allen’s recent movies have migrated to near the top of my list of recent favorites: Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris seem to find their way into my rotation regularly. There is something in the former that probes the mysteries of relationships and friendship in a way that resonates with me; the latter touches on this a bit as well, though it’s more whimsy and, well, more Paris. For whatever reason I find myself compelled to revisit.

But his films are always a hit-or-miss proposition for me. Despite loving the aforementioned, neither 2012's To Rome With Love or 2013's Blue Jasmine especially hit their marks with me. Now I’ve recently watched his 2010 film You Will Meet A Tall, Dark Stranger and I find it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. 

Josh Brolin plays Roy Channing, a struggling middle-aged novelist who lives in London with his wife Sally (Naomi Watts), an art expert who yearns to open her own gallery. She works presently as an assistant at someone else’s gallery and doesn’t earn much money, and after one successful book years before her husband is basically unemployed (he trained to be a physician). To make ends meet, they rely on assistance from Sally’s mother Helena (Gemma Jones), a situation which pleases no one. Roy is determined to make his way as a writer, but Helena never believed in this course of action and Sally, while not wanting to be the unsupportive wife, thinks enough time has been spent in this endeavor. She has held off starting a family for years while he tries to find his way, and she’s had enough of this. When his latest book does not get picked up by his publisher she wants to throw in the towel—meanwhile, he hatches a hare-brained scheme. Sally’s parents are also going thru a crisis—after 40 years of marriage, Helena’s husband Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) has left her for a prostitute half his age (the quintessential Woody-Allen-style midlife crisis). Helena has taken to drinking too much and to spending a great deal of time and money with a psychic (Pauline Collins), a development that seems destined to have an unhappy outcome.

With their unhappiness at home, both Roy and Sally find themselves drawn to others, him to the beautiful young music PhD and classical guitarist, Dia (Frida Pinto)—this guitar thing is a recurring theme lately for Woody—and her to the art gallery owner with whom she works, Greg Clemente (Antonio Banderas). And of course Sally’s parents are seeking love elsewhere with varying degrees of success.

On paper these don’t seem like bad bones on which to hang a film, though it’s maybe more material than can be gone into with very much detail in the time allotted. Each of these characters is kind of given a single element to define them, which makes everybody a bit, well, one-dimensional. Still, the film makes me think about what is essential in telling a story, which is not a bad outcome so far as it goes. But he does something here that I was not at all expecting: he brings all these story lines to a crisis and then… walks away. Perhaps—my standard caveat—I need to watch the film again, but for the life of me I can’t figure how he felt this was the best ending, or even a satisfactory one. I do think it’s a valid strategy to leave an audience hanging at the end of a film—Anthony Minghella's 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley comes immediately to mind; my family members who watched it on my recommendation almost lynched me when the credits rolled—and there are times where the questions might be inherently more interesting than any of the answers. I get this. But with a Woody Allen film, a filmmaker whose entire approach rests in the intimate and interpersonal, this feels like exactly the wrong strategy. If personalities and personal stories are all that drive a story along, then to work to make us care about these people and their stories and then place them in crises and just walk away would be infuriating if it weren’t so unexpected. I find myself asking over and over, “Is this OK? Is it OK to end the film like this?” It feels wrong, and yet I don’t want to make a definitive pronouncement.

After a career spent filming in New York City, Allen’s last few films have been set in Europe. Stranger is set comfortably in London, though I think he lingers on the setting much less than Paris or Rome. Again, this is much more about these people than about their setting, which is what makes the ending so controversial.

I reserve my right to see the light when it goes on, but for now I remain unconvinced.

Grade: C

Lots Of Wiggle Room

Last night's film: Gavin Hood's Ender's Game.

The Earth has been attacked by an insect-like alien species, the Formics (which sounds like a new product promising to make your kitchen counters both more durable AND beautiful). Humanity was nearly wiped out, saved only at the 11th hour by the ingenuity and heroic self-sacrifice of the great military leader Mazer Rackham. But the victory only brought about a temporary reprieve; the Formics will be back, and they will have learned from their mistakes.

We join the story with humanity frantically preparing for the Formics' return; International Fleet Commander Colonel Hyram Graff is overseeing a vast recruiting and training operation. The colonel et al. realize that the flexibility and rapid-learning capability of the young is required, and the program recruits boys and girls of 10-20 years of age, looking for that exceedingly rare person who might be able to repel a Formic invasion and perhaps even to deal them a decisive blow.

The boy Ender Wiggin lies at the end of this great search, and the film spends most of its time on the difficulty of Ender's training--both the difficulty of the tasks for Ender, but also the challenge for the leaders to design training tasks that challenge and saturate the recruits without scaring them off or asking more of them than can be handled. The training regimen is, of course, based on the experiences of the forces that successfully repelled the previous Formic invasion. The leaders must incorporate everything that is known about the alien species but also keep enough flexibility to cope with the unexpected. There appears to be almost no margin for error with humanity's survival hanging in the balance.

The film is based on a 1985 novel of the same name by American author Orson Scott Card. I read the book (well, I listened to the audiobook during a couple of my marathon drives) two or three years ago. I remember it being a fairly long, dense book that told a fascinating story. Only later did I learn of Card's odious views on homosexuality and (probably not coincidentally) of his Mormon faith, and have not on that basis delved further into his writings. But this book was compelling despite his personal foibles. Enough time has elapsed between book and film that I honestly don't remember enough to critique how well this film adaptation tracks the original story. But there's much in the film to like.

Colonel Graff concedes that the existing leaders of the International Fleet (himself among them) are not equal to the task of facing the Formics; this in itself seems to indicate a degree of enlightenment. But can the colonel be taken at his word? We naturally find ourselves asking whether it is the capability or malleability of youth that is most indispensable. Youth by definition means inexperience and perhaps naivety, and yet everybody knows that things can be learned in youth that are much harder for adults.

The same genius that can see and do things that the leaders cannot might be expected to bring unforeseen talents and viewpoints to the task. A genius will see the world differently, and that very fact to some degree precludes a very thorough anticipation. Some unpredictability is inherent to the situation.

I loved that the military leadership engages in a tug-of-war about what Ender can accomplish for them versus what effects these demands will have on Ender's well-being. Concern for a young boy's health and happiness is the most natural response from any of us, and yet (as Colonel Graff says) what is the point of sparing children who will die anyway? There's a lot in this back-and-forth to chew on.

One of the key things in any science fiction film is, for me, the depiction of life in space. It's what the geeks among us dream about, and the best movies and stories of this genre have been able to place us in a situation that none of us will in reality live to see. "Movie magic" excels at making these things real for us. Textual descriptions of life and activity in a weightless environment never work as well as just seeing these things. The practice battle scenes in particular are really fun.

But they also bring up one of the expected issues with a film like this. You simply cannot condense a thousand-page book to a two-hour movie without throwing out a great deal of valuable material. The quintessential example of this is David Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's [h/t L.G.!] sci-fi masterpiece Dune. Those who read the book were thrilled to see this fantastic and richly detailed world come to life; but good luck to those of you who hadn't read the book first. For those people the film was probably, at best, incomprehensible and, at worst, ludicrous, bizarre, and infuriating. (I would direct you to the 2000 TV miniseries which broke the book into three 90-minute episodes. It's still a stretch, but there's much more time there than what a single film can afford). Ender's Game is not as bad as that, though again I read the book so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask. I went with a friend who was unfamiliar with the book, and while I think he liked it slightly less than I did I believe he still enjoyed the film.

But what to do about this? There is a very natural arc to this particular story that justifies telling it in a single setting. But as my friend suggested, one wonders if this story isn't a natural fit for the mini-series format; perhaps a Netflix original. The problem, I imagine, is one of budget. Hood's film is lavishly produced, and the sets and effects are state-of-the-art. Hard to think that Netflix (or anyone) could manage that production level without the kind of funding that a big studio makes possible--and tripling or quadrupling the footage only exacerbates the problem.

Hood's film is well-cast. The role of Ender is played by the then-15-year-old English boy Asa Butterfield (probably best known for playing the title role in the 2011 film Hugo). Harrison Ford, Viola Davis, Hailee Steinfeld, and Ben Kingsley round out the other big names in the cast, but Butterfield is in virtually every scene and acquits himself brilliantly. He must play an extraordinary person who is faced with a wide array of situations during all of which he is being intensely scrutinized. This is another of these films where if the lead fails to deliver fully they have zip. No worries here.

The film looks set up pretty clearly for a sequel, and indeed the book franchise stretches to more than a dozen novels and a similar number of stories, with another five or six novels in a related series. I have not heard positive things about the sequels, but they must have been good enough to keep the franchise afloat. I've heard no word as to whether succeeding films are in the works.

I find myself chewing on many things even a couple days after seeing the film. I liked it as I watched it, and I like it more and more with the passage of a little time. Apart from that more-or-less unavoidable problem with condensation, I'm stymied to suggest how they might have done better.

Grade: A-

The Pull Of Earth

Following the lead of a couple very enthusiastic friends, I went today to Alfonso Cuarón's new film Gravity.

Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, the film tells of a space shuttle mission that runs into difficulties. OK, that's a bit of an understatement. A Russian satellite (if I understand what I just spent two hours watching) explodes and the resulting debris takes a bunch of other satellites out as well, leaving an ever-expanding debris field speeding around the planet in the same orbital plane as our shuttle crew. The debris field is almost a supporting character, a growing blob of malice that passes thru every 90 minutes like a cosmic tornado, shredding everything in its wake and adding the new pieces of jagged shrapnel to itself.

Space stories are an odd lot: either the story has nothing to do with space and simply uses the hostile vastness as a backdrop (like Alien or Star Wars) or the story is space-specific (like Kubrick's 2001). Gravity is the latter. In a story like this, space becomes the starring character; utterly hostile, vast exponentially beyond our comprehension, absolutely cold: it's a realm of almost total nihilistic oblivion where traditional stories are hard to tell and where indigenous dramas are hard for the non-astronaut to understand. Trying to capture the reality of life in space requires educating one's audience about things they very likely do not grasp. Our intuitions do not really apply, and the setting is really foreign to us. How much detail is needed, and how much is too much? Any authentic technical bits are all rather arcane after the basic looming facts are accounted for: quick-freeze temperatures, absolute and instantaneous lack of oxygen, etc. I've read quite a bit about space exploration, and it's hard for we land-lubbers to grasp how difficult it is to do even the simplest physical tasks in a zero-gravity environment. Without gravity to hold us in place, and without the easy footholds that gravity makes possible, the equal-and-opposite reaction to every movement results in people or objects careening around on their tethers. Or just flying off into the impossible void, utterly helpless. We might relate to this difficulty, but we'd need to have it demonstrated for us first.

Cuarón does his level best to do this. And when the characters are literally hanging on by a thread (or not) we begin to see how menacing the yawning abyss is. Our alienation from this setting is absolute; and the vastness pays us no heed whatsoever. Cuarón has fashioned a survival story in this setting, and it's a doozy. There are quite a number of instances in the film where disaster is averted by the very narrowest of margins, literally by a fingerhold. We spend a lot of our time on the perilous edge of our seats. It's thrilling, but a little exhausting.

And yet despite all of this, it's still basically the story of two human beings and their responses to being faced with the most difficult problems imaginable. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney--they're really the only two people in the entire film--are both perfectly cast. I've never been especially a Sandra Bullock fan, but I could become one after this.

A few technical issues strike me. I appreciate the suspicions of Our Man Jeffy, Science Person, who fears the technical liberties would ruin the story for him. And part of the very conundrum of this kind of film is that many of us simply don't know enough to judge it intelligently. Cuarón's task is to tell a story that grabs people across a wide range of technical intuition. I find that some of the criticisms I've read of technical matters seem of no moment to me, and yet other things gnaw at me. But just a little. This is a Hollywood film, after all, and the suspension of at least a bit of reality is needed. But in principle Cuarón tries to keep more than the standard measure of realism in the action. Nonetheless, I did have some questions: why is the debris field moving relative to the position of the shuttle (and of the Hubble Space Telescope, which the mission intends to repair and re-release)? Wouldn't they all be mostly motionless relative to each other? And if not, wouldn't the Hubble be constantly at risk of a collision with those intact Russian satellites whizzing past? I grasp that in reality the Hubble orbit and the International Space Station orbit are likely not the same--and the devices are almost certainly nowhere near each other; and I suspect that these stations cannot simultaneously be in geosynchronous orbits and also at risk of being captured by Earth's atmosphere. That last bit seemed... a bit much. But taken separately, these facts--debris taking out a space ship; having severely limited resources in a space suit and using those resources to get to these tiny islands of safety; etc., etc.--are sound enough to support our story.

Lastly, the setting is absolutely magnetic. The vistas, as I said, are so inconceivably vast, and the Earth from above is impossible to take one's eyes off of. Space is so epically void seen from up there that it makes the Earth seem amazingly... there. It's a perspective that people have dreamt of for as long as there have been people. For many of us, this may be the closest we ever get to seeing our planet from orbit (and on a huge screen and in 3D it's really stunning).

If it's not a perfect film, Cuarón gets the highest marks for ambition. He has done about as well as I think a person could do in telling this story. The time in the theater flew past, and only my emotional exhaustion caused me to breathe a sigh of relief when it was over. The drama is accessible to anyone, but I still think it's a bit "tech-y" and not everyone will warm to the space-ness of it. But for most folks that will be no impediment, and I'm happy to recommend.

Grade: A

Bring In The Flappers

I finally got around to watching Baz Luhrmann's latest film, The Great Gatsby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel about a mysterious wealthy man is often cited as the quintessential American novel. Written in 1925, the story tells of the summer of 1922 when the novel's narrator, Nick Carraway, meets and befriends his obscenely wealthy next-door neighbor, one Jay Gatsby. As the summer plays out we get to know a small cast of characters--Gatsby and Carraway, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, the professional golfer Jordan Baker, Tom's mistress Myrtle Wilson. And the story of this small group of friends is told amid the teeming crush of the Roaring Twenties; Gatsby's immense parties and the explosions of jazz and Prohibition and Flapper culture.

Luhrmann's film, as Baz Luhrmann's films tend to be, is stylistically ambitious and in-your-face. Rather than a straight adaptation of the book to the screen, Luhrmann (who co-wrote the screenplay) opts to intersperse modern musical and performance elements into a setting otherwise fairly faithful to the period. The key performances are excellent: Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, Carey Mulligan as Daisy, Joel Edgerton as Tom; all these are fabulously played. And the film is a visual spectacle, feeling like a single, two-hour special effect.

My first impression of the film was not entirely positive. The jumbling of styles--loud hip-hop and rap sequences spliced into 1920s Jazz-Age settings--felt like a distraction to me, one that continually pulled us out of the moment and felt whimsical and self-indulgent. The rationale for this stylistic mashup was to try and find a way for modern audiences to experience something of the brash and energetic novelty of the times. The book was not a nostalgia tale when it was written; this was a glimpse into a white-hot cultural milieu. Society was changing rapidly in the 20s with (as mentioned) jazz and Prohibition and a booming stock market, and I imagine that Luhrmann felt that just doing the jazz well would take his audience backward rather than propel them into the thrilling unknown. The first time around it just didn't work for me.

But a repeat viewing leads me to doubt my earlier conclusion. It's not that I now think that the music is right for the events depicted (indeed I feel these sequences will feel really dated and perhaps even foolish 20 or 25 years hence), but without the jarring effect of the unexpected I was more drawn into the story.

And the story. Again I'm reminded that it's almost always the story that makes a film for me, and the best stories often come to us first as novels. Luhrmann's Gatsby is a much more moving story on repeated viewing than it seemed at first. There's just so much in it: the (to me) perennial allure of Prohibition and the Jazz Age, the spectacle of great wealth and extreme ostentation, a magical New York setting, an intense love story. And it all plays on the subconscious, the whole story serving as a metaphor for the emptiness of American popular culture, and the almost nihilistic destructive potential of a vast economy based on ugly market forces.

I wasn't sure at first about Tobey Maguire playing Nick Carraway, but he won me over by the end. He has an approachability, a "regular guy-ness" that lets us relate to him and that plays well against the almost mythical aloofness of Gatsby (who, it must be said, spends a lot of his time in the film being something less than mythically aloof. Like The Dude in The Big Lebowski, he spends a lot of his time being rather "un-Dude"). The arc of the story gets under one's skin. It's a melancholy tale told against the backdrop of epic celebration and limitless wealth.

So what struck me at first as a B- film has risen to a B+. I feel like I want to watch it again.

Blue Moon Pie

Tonight's film: Woody Allen's latest, Blue Jasmine.

I think I'm as attuned as the next person to the idea of subtle variations on a theme. Certainly with music--I have a zillion complete collections of Bach's organ music, and there's no limit to the recordings of Duruflé or César Franck that I'm willing to pony up for, never mind that I know the repertoire inside and out. But the tiny details of interpretation, the little variances from instrument to instrument and acoustic tidbits from room to room; these are the things a music collector digs into. Or with literature: do I really need to read another cat-and-mouse criminal fiction story? Apparently yes. But within a given genre, sometimes even a very specific genre, the tiniest details contain a whole universe. Any collector of things knows this.

So I don't know why I should expect it to be different with movies. Woody Allen, with a few exceptions, seems to have been making the same movie for decades now. Or, more accurately, he's been writing variations on the same central theme. Or maybe, like Monet and his haystacks, Allen is trying with subtle variations to achieve a singularly perfect thing by using a very limited palette.

Cate Blanchett plays Jasmine (a.k.a. Jeanette) Francis, a divorced / widowed woman who comes to San Francisco to live with her sister after the implosion of her jet-setting New York life. Jasmine has lived a billionaire's existence with her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin), a Bernie Madoff-style financier whose schemes finally catch up with him. Hal winds up in jail where, we are told, he hangs himself, leaving Jasmine with a few gaudy material possessions which she is forced to hock to pay her legal debts. Broken and broke, swilling vodka and popping pills, she shows up on the doorstep of her grocery-store-cashier sister (Sally Hawkins) looking for a place to crash while she tries to find a way to make the world slow down so she can get back on.

The arc of this story line isn't especially Allen-esque, but how the story is told makes it Another Variation on a Theme of Woody Allen. About half the movie involves people very carefully talking on top of each other, and the other half has Jasmine herself artfully stammering her way through her lines.

But instead of the usual funny-guy stammering, Jasmine is, well, not well. For a guy known for being funny--subtle chuckle to riotous belly laugh, you wait for the zingers in a Woody Allen film--this one is much more shades of sad and disturbing. There's not much funny in Jasmine's plight, and her clueless snobbery playing against the braying coarseness of her sister Ginger and her crowd is only good for a chuckle or two before we begin to feel mostly pity. For Jasmine. Her inability to learn anything from her past experience is heartbreaking to watch.

Maybe that's an unexpected twist: it's a film that, while not canonizing anyone, rather celebrates the honesty and decency of the regular working stiff--in the persons of Ginger and her ex-husband (played very effectively by Andrew Dice Clay) and her latest boyfriend (a lovely turn by Bobby Cannavale). These salt-of-the-earth types are held up against the almost monstrously materialistic Jasmine and her sleazy crook of a husband. From a filmmaker whom troglodytes might hold up as a perfect example of the effete intellectual, this perhaps plays to an unexpected side of the fairway.

But in the end I think Jasmine's issues are considerably more serious than just being a vain, shallow person. She pretty clearly--overtly, even--is suffering from mental illness, and the more we grasp this the more uncomfortable the story becomes. Or the more uncomfortable it becomes to laugh at anything you see in this setting. I find myself chewing on whether Allen's effort here is really a worthy take on such a potentially heavy topic. And in any case the director doesn't seem to know how to find his way back out of the thicket once he's worked his way in. The story begins at a logical enough point, but the ending seems quite arbitrary and unsatisfying to me. I always think of the howls of protest from my wife and her parents at the end of Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley, where there is no resolution, no reckoning, no ending; the film stops at a break in the action. But even in that film we at least felt on solid, if unsavory, ground; we have watched Ripley arrive at full-fledged psychopathy. But in Blue Jasmine we end in exactly the same place we started, much more aware of the facts than we were but no wiser for this--indeed, we're actually deeper in the woods than when we started. And there is essentially no resolution to any of the situations we spent the last two hours living through.

So: well-crafted, beautifully-cast and -acted, engagingly-written; but ambivalent and irresolute.

Grade: B-