Magic Mike XXL Does Its Thang

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             Magic Mike was essentially an art house movie. Endowed with a modest $7 million budget, the 2012 Channing Tatum vehicle was branded a “surprise hit” when it grossed $167 million worldwide and garnered warm critical reviews, including sincere (if ultimately futile) Oscar buzz for costar Matthew McConaughey. Interestingly, though, the reason Magic Mike gained legitimacy with critics also served as the basis for audiences’ most vocal complaint: for a film whose popular appeal stemmed almost entirely from the promise of hot, naked men, it’s a rather serious affair, dealing with the then-ongoing economic recession and drug addiction. Or, as Tatum succinctly put it, people wanted “less story. Less plot. Just dudes’ things.”

             On that front, the sequel delivers. Appropriately titled Magic Mike XXL, it costs twice as much as its predecessor ($14.8 million, still economical compared to most high-profile summer flicks these days) and throws restraint out the window. To say there’s a story here would be lenient. The first hour or so teases us with a flimsy narrative about coping with disappointment in life, but any semblance of genuine conflict dissipates by the time Mike and co. arrive at the exclusive club run by Jada Pinkett Smith’s suave emcee Rome. At this point, the film, helmed by frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator Gregory Jacobs, sheds its semi-respectable guise and reveals itself as a full-blown musical, a parade of exuberant dance and song numbers (the latter courtesy of Matt Bomer and Donald Glover) punctuated by snippets of dialogue. The soundtrack is seductively frothy, with tracks as varied as the Backstreet Boys’s “I Want It That Way” and Nine Inch Nails’s “Closer” competing to get lodged in your head.

Halt and Catch Fire and Humanizing the Void

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             You could be forgiven for dismissing Halt and Catch Fire as second-rate Mad Men. You might even be right. After all, the sophomore AMC drama created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers is hardly the masterpiece that Matthew Weiner’s acclaimed, seven-season meditation on the American Dream was even in its youth, and its resemblance to the latter borders on suspicious at times.

             To start with, it’s a period piece, though 1980s Texas doesn’t quite have the exotic, jewel-toned glamour of ‘60s Manhattan. Joe MacMillan, the central protagonist played by Lee Pace, is basically a mid-level Don Draper – a debonair, silver-tongued genius tormented by his enigmatic past; he even ends the first season by ditching his job and disappearing into the backcountry, a move not dissimilar to Don’s cross-country odyssey in the last act of Mad Men. At one point, Cameron sums Joe up with the barbed observation: “You’re just a thousand-dollar suit with nothing inside.” Sound familiar?

I mean, come on.

Speaking of Cameron, she’s the Peggy Olson of Halt and Catch Fire, an idealistic young prodigy who the hero takes under his wing; her alternately affectionate and resentful interactions with Joe recall Peggy and Don’s volatile relationship. Donna initially occupies the obligatory neglected wife role, though unlike with Betty Draper, the other characters soon learn to recognize and appreciate her value, and in a pleasantly surprising reversal, the second season has positioned Gordon as a bored house-husband while Donna gets absorbed in her work. Both shows even include amusing side-stories involving typically straitlaced women trying marijuana.

Yet, after a rather uninspired beginning, I found myself thoroughly enjoying Halt and Catch Fire as I binged the first season on Netflix (for me, “binging” means consuming 1-3 episodes a day, which I guess for some people is known as “watching TV”). I couldn’t help but succumb to Lee Pace’s haughty charisma; the dysfunctional, frequently hostile relationships; the pleasure of seeing Donna upend everybody’s expectations, including the audience’s; the coolly retro soundtrack and credits sequence. As much as I love Game of Thrones, there’s something to be said for a show that creates tension out of lost computer files.

In a way, it turned out to be the perfect rebound, filling, however incompletely, the gaping hole left in my TV-viewing heart by Mad Men. For all the aforementioned similarities, I would argue that Halt and Catch Fire is not, in fact, a cheap knockoff of the seminal ad agency drama but a rejoinder, approaching the same problems – how are people shaped by society? Is happiness possible? What is our purpose in life? – from a radically different angle.

How Mad Max: Fury Road Succeeds by Embracing Genre

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            Blessed is she or he who watches Mad Max: Fury Road and can write coherently about it. The latest entry in George Miller’s gasoline-fueled, apocalyptic series unfolds as a fever dream, an extended action sequence so relentlessly kinetic that the few periods of quiet and stillness feel downright unsettling. Even now, I’m not entirely convinced this is a real film that I experienced while conscious, let alone one that’s legitimately good.

            By all rights, a movie involving an electric guitar that literally spews fire should fall into the “guilty pleasure” category at best; to tell the truth, there were a couple times when I wasn’t quite sure if I was laughing with or at it. Yet this eagerness to revel in the ridiculous is ultimately why it works, along with the abundance of distinct female characters; the quietly riveting performances from lead actors Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult; and the mind-blowing commitment to practical effects over digital trickery.

If stuff like this doesn’t make you appreciate stuntmen and women, you’re hopeless.

I tend to be skeptical of the idea that there’s inherent value in deliberately over-the-top art. White House Down may be aware of its stupidity, but that doesn’t make it any less stupid or more fun to watch. Fury Road, however, is not over-the-top just for the sake of being over-the-top. As a friend of mine pointed out, it’s highly interested in exploring the concept of madness, on both an individual level (see: the main character’s name) and a societal level (the dystopian community led by villain, Immortan Joe, revolves around a manipulative cult). The first ten or so minutes put us directly in Mad Max’s head, using various aesthetic techniques, such as rapid edits and sped-up motion, to produce a sense of mania and disorientation. As a whole, the exquisitely grotesque production design effectively captures a world in disarray, where there are no rules and nothing makes sense.

            At a time when Hollywood churns out big-budget spectacles like assembly-line products, the passion of Fury Road feels not only refreshing but vital. Here is an action movie that unabashedly adores action, staging scenes of destruction and mayhem with the mischievous glee of a kid experimenting with fireworks. Explosions, shootouts and armored cars collide in a frenzied, hypnotic ballet, set to the grand, cacophonous score of Dutch instrumentalist Junkie XL. It’s light-years away from the self-conscious irony of such flicks as 21 Jump Street and Guardians of the Galaxy, which seem faintly embarrassed by their own existence, and the slick yet soulless tedium that plagues so many tent-poles, like The Amazing Spider-Man, whose novice director Marc Webb was clearly more interested in making a sweet romance than the flashy extravaganza he was obligated to deliver.

Looking for Goodbye

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             HBO confirmed Wednesday morning that it had canceled Looking, Michael Lannan’s dramedy series about three gay men searching for purpose and love in San Francisco. This news did not come as a surprise: the show had dismal ratings, even for premium cable, and there were ominous whispers long before the official announcement. Yet seeing this tweet from executive producer Andrew Haigh still sent a surge of despair and frustration through me:

I’m not alone. After a promising but somewhat forgettable freshman season, Looking emerged as a legitimate triumph this year, presenting ten confident, all-around sublime episodes that culminated in Sunday’s gut-punch of a finale. With the threat of cancellation looming, critics started to rally around the show, which had been more or less nonexistent in the cultural conversation aside from a smattering of controversy and contention that accompanied its debut; I’m pretty sure I’ve seen more people talk about it this week than I saw all last year. Needless to say, it was too little, too late.

             Don’t get me wrong: I’m hardly guilt-free in this regard; to be honest, I barely thought about, let alone talked about, Looking at all between the end of season one and the beginning of season two. It wasn’t until sometime around the middle of season two that I realized I didn’t just enjoy the show in the fleeting way I enjoy most comedies – I genuinely loved it. I spent a good deal of each week looking forward to the next episode. It may not have been the best show on TV, and it certainly wasn’t the most influential, but its absence leaves me feeling strangely empty.  I guess like so many of life’s greatest joys, I didn’t really appreciate it until it was gone.

             Here are just a few of the reasons Looking made the TV world a better place:

             It was about gay people. Crude, but true nonetheless. Even in our era of “too much of a good thing”, this is a rare phenomenon. Plenty of shows have LGBTQ characters, but few are about LGBTQ characters; even Transparent is as much about Maura’s mostly straight, cisgender children as it is about her. As AVClub’s Brandon Nowalk points out, Looking was the only current American TV show centered exclusively on the gay community, presenting them as a majority rather than a minority, insiders rather than outsiders. Although it stirred understandable discontent among some LGBTQ individuals due to its narrow focus on cisgender, predominantly white men and its normalization of homosexuality, the fact is that one show can’t be expected to represent all queer people and was never intended to. Also, the charges of homonormativity elide the nuanced, rigorous ways in which Looking examined self-acceptance, privilege, HIV and marriage as an institution, among other relevant issues; just this week, it featured a startlingly pointed conversation that challenged the legitimacy of monogamy. In a big sense, Looking was a show expressly concerned with the anxieties of progress and assimilation, subversive in its own right.

This Turing Feels More Machine Than Human

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While watching The Imitation Game, the new historical drama revolving around celebrated mathematician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing and the British intelligence effort to crack the German Enigma code during World War II, I could not stop imagining it as a TV show. It attempts to pack about four different stories into less than two hours of screen time and, as a result, fails to do justice to any of them. There’s the traditional biopic, which follows Turing from his teenage years in boarding school to his conviction for “gross indecency” not long before his mysterious death (the film presents it as an unambiguous suicide, though some dispute this); the quasi-romantic relationship between Turing and Joan Clark, who bond over their mutual status as outsiders; the workplace drama showing Turing’s sometimes prickly interactions with his fellow codebreakers; and the old-fashioned, John Le Carré-style spy thriller involving the hunt for a Soviet double-agent led by Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6 played here by formidable character actor Mark Strong. A full show or mini-series might have been able to flesh out the supporting players and thoroughly explore the inner workings of the Bletchley Park operation, but in a feature-length movie, these potentially fascinating elements are sidelined in favor of something cursory and generic.

In the Wild

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At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss Wild, Jean-Marc Vallée’s adaptation of the 2012 Cheryl Strayed memoir, as schmaltzy inspiration porn – Eat, Pray, Walk, someone on my Twitter timeline joked derisively. It is, after all, the true-life story of a not-destitute white woman who embarks on a journey of self-discovery, the kind of didactic, feel-good confection that awards bodies gobble up like chips, ostensibly serving little purpose other than to provide its star performer with an opportunity to do Real Acting and gain some positive PR along the way. Frankly, as someone who nurses a deep-seated, perhaps irrational bias against biopics (anything revolving around a specific historical or living figure, really), I approached Wild with a certain skepticism, the way many critics seem to regard superhero or Hobbit movies, steeling myself for a pandering, by-the-numbers crowd-pleaser that I would inevitably forget the instant I left the theater.

It did not take long, however, for me to see that my fears were unwarranted. The film opens in medias res, finding Strayed at an unstipulated point on her 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches all the way from the U.S.-Mexico border to Canada. Quiet reigns as she settles on a rock and removes her shoe to reveal a broken toenail coated in dried blood, a startlingly gruesome image to encounter at the very beginning of a movie whose marketing campaign focused predominantly on its uplifting tone and postcard-pretty scenery (several people at my screening audibly winced). Strayed then proceeds to accidentally drop the shoe (cue more gasps), watching in dismay as it tumbles down the mountainside before deciding to fling her other shoe after it with a fierce, piercing scream. It was that scream, that fleeting outburst of raw, tempestuous emotion, that assured me this was going to be different from your standard Oscar-bait, less hesitant to confront the messy ambiguities of reality.

The Apocalypse Is Now

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             From the epic floods and divine battles of ancient mythology to the nuclear holocausts and alien invasions of the Cold War, humanity has been imagining its own demise since the beginning of civilization. Freud would probably attribute this obsession to the death drive, a subconscious impulse toward destruction that all people supposedly have. Apocalyptic fantasies allow us to confront our fears of mortality, time, foreigners, etc., in a safe place, distanced from the real world yet so rich with metaphorical possibilities, and especially in a visual medium like film, they provide ample opportunity to indulge audiences’ appetite for lurid spectacle.

             Recently, though, catastrophe has dominated cinema on a scale virtually unprecedented, dwarfing the ‘50s sci-fi and horror B-movie craze. In 2011, we got the art house trinity, Melancholia, The Tree of Life and, my personal favorite, Take Shelter. 2012 gave us Prometheus, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Battleship and Cloud Atlas, among others (but curiously, not the actual movie 2012, which came out way back in 2009), and 2013 had not one but two action-comedies set during the apocalypse, not to mention an avalanche of weirdly glum, monochrome-hued tent-poles. This year, there was Noah, Edge of Tomorrow, Godzilla, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Snowpiercer, The Rover and Interstellar, as well as the usual procession of superhero flicks, which are apparently required by Hollywood Law to have Armageddon-sized stakes. You can barely go a week without seeing ads for yet another movie that threatens to destroy Earth – or at least a major metropolitan area.

             In general, blockbusters nowadays tend to revel in what Stephen Colbert once described as destruction porn, deploying wave upon wave of computer-generated explosions and wreckage in hopes of distracting viewers from their flimsy, senseless or flat-out nonexistent plots. Although the bigger-is-better brand of filmmaking isn’t necessarily anything new (Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich have been blowing shit up since the mid-1990s), only in the past few years has it felt truly, oppressively ubiquitous, soul-crushing rather than just mind-numbing. Long gone are the days when something like Back to the Future, a breezy coming-of-age tale whose biggest action set-piece consists of a skateboard chase, could be a legitimate box office hit; at some point, our definition of entertainment seems to have evolved into “watching hundreds of thousands of people get casually massacred”. Hell, even How to Train Your Dragon 2, the sequel to a PG-rated kid’s movie, is about a fascist warlord on some vague quest for world domination. 

 It’s also vaguely racist, though that’s nothing new for animation.

             At least 2014 offered a handful of movies that actually bothered to acknowledge the consequences of the havoc they wrecked, instead of using 9/11 imagery for easy shock value or, worse, ignoring the darkness altogether. Edge of Tomorrow, for example, is essentially a war movie in which “the enemy” happens to be aliens. Needless to say, it’s not exactly Saving Private Ryan in terms of exposing the horrors of combat and such, but Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt’s self-assured performances convey a sense of trauma rare in action movies of this magnitude (just compare Cruise here to his work in the Mission: Impossible series). Cage and Rita seem genuinely scarred by what they’ve experienced, their interactions tinged with weary desperation.  Similarly battle-hardened characters populate Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Snowpiercer. In the former, Malcolm, played by Jason Clarke, has formed a makeshift family with his son Anthony and Keri Russell’s Ellie, who lost her daughter in the chaos that erupted after the simian flu outbreak. Like its predecessor, Dawn gives its humans thin personalities, preferring to flesh out the titular apes, but you nonetheless get the sense that there’s history between them, that they’ve been through a lot together and grown accustomed to suffering in silence. In Snowpiercer, Chris Evans’s reluctant revolutionary Curtis Everett is tormented by what he has done to survive (spoiler alert: it’s cannibalism). These films all depict personal attachments as liabilities, hindering individuals from taking the measures necessary for self-preservation and the common good; in the apocalypse, you have to sacrifice either your life or your humanity.

Why Silver Linings Playbook Is the Perfect Christmas Movie

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For most people, the term “Christmas movie” brings to mind It’s a Wonderful Life, Elf, A Christmas Story – movies featuring Santa Claus and sentimental speeches about childhood. For me, though, nothing captures the holiday spirit more exquisitely than Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell’s quirky 2012 romance starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.

Silver Linings Playbook is about a man struggling to manage his bipolar disorder and make amends after a violent incident involving his estranged wife’s lover. His love interest is a young widow dealing with her own depression. Needless to say, that doesn’t exactly scream hilarity, much less holiday cheer or family entertainment (for the record, it’s rated-R, mostly thanks to a healthy dose of profanity). Yet with his sharp script and naturalistic direction, Russell manages to spin the material, which seems ripe for Lifetime-style melodrama, into something genuinely fresh, heartwarming and, above all, fun.

Like The Fighter and American Hustle, the director’s other efforts since his surprising return to the spotlight, Silver Linings Playbook simmers with spontaneous, almost manic energy. Characters talk loudly and constantly, their voices often competing with each other in a barrage of noise. It should be overwhelming, like a dinner party perpetually on the verge of going sour, but instead, it makes the movie feel thrillingly, uniquely alive. The actors, from supporting players Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver to Cooper and Lawrence, slip into this atmosphere of barely contained chaos with ease, and it’s a delight to watch them interact, whether exchanging rapid-fire banter or tearful confessions. They lend welcome restraint and authenticity to characters that could have easily been reduced to exasperating caricatures.

This nuance, this sensitivity, is what made me fall in love with Silver Linings Playbook and why it feels so special, despite its rather conventional premise. Even now, I’ve seen few movies explore mental illness with such honesty and compassion. After enduring so many portrayals of the mentally ill as disposable punchlines, tortured geniuses, childlike saints and violent psychopaths, it’s reassuring to see them treated simply as people, full of complexities, hopes and anxieties. Even at its most incisive (i.e. the hilariously awkward scene when Pat and Tiffany first meet), the humor never strays into mean-spirited territory; it pokes fun without judging. Here, mental illness isn’t something to be cured or overcome. It isn’t magically “fixed” by true love. It comes with challenges, but the characters aren’t constantly miserable or suffering. Rather, it’s something they learn to live with, a fundamental aspect of their identities. As Tiffany says, “There will always be a part of me that is dirty and sloppy, but I like that, just like I like all the other parts of myself.”

But they aren’t defined by their neuroses either. As in his previous work, Russell exhibits a keen awareness of human foibles and family dynamics, expertly conveying the mixture of love, bottled-up resentment and obligation that comes with being bound inextricably to a group of people for your entire life. For all their dysfunction, there’s never any doubt that the Solatanos belong together. At the end of the day, they, like everyone else, are just trying to do the best they can to get by.

In his review, Roger Ebert described “Silver Linings Playbook” as “a terrific old classic.” Indeed, the film has a kind of wit and carefree charm rarely seen nowadays, when the word “love” is generally accompanied by a scoff and eye-roll, and smug irony represents the height of comedy. I suppose that’s really why I associate it with the holiday season: the refreshing, even bold, lack of cynicism when it comes to romance and redemption; the tone of heartfelt exuberance tinged with just enough nostalgic melancholy; the soulful cadence of Frank Sinatra’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” my absolute favorite Christmas song; the image of an empty, snow-covered street bathed in colored light.

            It feels like home.

Wrestling with Masculinity and Oscar Hype

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             As several media commentators observed earlier this year, the blockbuster season, not too long ago confined to summer and Christmas time, has begun to swell like No-Face from Spirited Away, consuming May and April and threatening to spill over into March, November and perhaps even beyond. It’s a disconcerting trend for those of us who would like to go at least a couple months without having to hear the word “superhero”. Arguably, however, the same thing has already happened with Oscar season. Although the films themselves still usually come out sometime between October and December, thanks to festivals and a proliferating, rather dubious field of online pundits, you start seeing predictions for next year’s Oscars before this year’s ceremony even airs. This is also not a particularly good thing.

             Take Foxcatcher, Bennett Miller’s based-on-real-life story about Olympic-wrestler brothers Mark and Dave Schultz and their disturbingly wealthy benefactor, John du Pont. The movie debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May to mostly strong reviews, and ever since then, it’s been a mainstay on award prognosticators’ lists. On one hand, taking the festival circuit route allows Foxcatcher to build up hype; voters tend to go for sure bets (i.e. what they already know they’re supposed to like), so once something cements its status as an Oscar contender, it generally remains there. But at the same time, being labeled “Oscar-worthy” comes with certain expectations. Oscar-worthy movies have prestigious actors whose roles demand some amount of yelling and/or crying. They involve more dialogue than special effects but are large enough in scope that they don’t feel “slight”. They say Important Things about Important Stuff, like slavery or the film industry, striking a comfortable balance between serious and cathartic. The earlier you put yourself out in the open, the more time people have to realize that you fail to meet those expectations and the likelier it is that the initial goodwill will fade and you’ll experience a backlash.

             It’s probably unfair to review a movie by talking about its hype and awards potential, since that says nothing about its actual quality, but I can’t deny that I went into Foxcatcher with a specific vision in my head and left feeling somewhat let down, disoriented for reasons I couldn’t quite pinpoint. The truth is, this is not an Oscar movie. Sure, it’s based on a true story and has an Oscar-nominated director at the helm, two elements that never hurt your chances. Yet despite having guided both of his previous efforts to Best Picture nominations, Bennett Miller is hardly a household name; like J.C. Chandor, another rising talent who thrives on quiet adult dramas, his style is too understated to garner the kind of devotion inspired by David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson. The cast is more well-liked than prestigious (of the three main actors, only Mark Ruffalo has an Oscar nomination), and although it contains not-particularly-subtle messages about the danger of American exceptionalism, this isn’t exactly Selma as far as Important Stuff goes.

How to Get Away With Business

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             Lou Bloom is not your usual movie sociopath. With his mane of slightly too-long hair, wiry frame and large eyes, he lacks the subtle menace of Hannibal Lecter and the slick, shallow charisma of Patrick Bateman. If anything, his tendency to aggressively spout self-help aphorisms and hackneyed corporate jargon at a mile a minute makes him seem rather dense at first, almost childlike. He starts the film as an aimless petty thief, selling wire, watches and whatever random paraphernalia he can find for a meager income, and claims to have only a high school education. For all his go-getter gusto, he doesn’t come across as particularly magnetic, competent or intimidating – he’s more Pete Campbell than Don Draper.

             And yet, it’s impossible to take your eyes off him. Naturally, a large portion of the credit must go to star Jake Gyllenhaal, who has quietly spent the past couple years undergoing one of the weirdest, most unexpected career revivals this side of Matthew McConaughey, with turns in gritty, off-kilter indies like End of Watch and Prisoners.  Here, the transformation is complete: nearly 30 pounds lighter and affecting a deadpan, higher-pitched voice, he’s virtually unrecognizable as the fresh-faced kid of October Sky, Donnie Darko and Brokeback Mountain. Such dramatic changes in appearance tend to invite hyperbole from the media, words like “fearless” and “astonishing” tossed around with the nonchalance of a baseball between innings (or, on the flip side, they’re scorned as self-serving stunts that merit neither admiration nor awards). In this case, however, any and all praise is entirely deserved. The weight loss isn’t what makes Gyllenhaal’s performance a remarkable feat of physical acting; it’s the nuances, the way he can apparently go endless amounts of time without blinking, the smile so unnervingly wide it verges on cartoonish, the minute gestures and shifts in expression that seem simultaneously meaningful and utterly. It’s electrifying in its contradictions, by turns ostentatious and controlled, raw and aloof, and as hard to pin down as the film’s protagonist.

The Leftovers and Staring into the Abyss

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            The Leftovers is not feel-good television. Initial reviews described HBO’s new drama as “some of the most desolate, despairing television on air”, “like a French arthouse series, but sadder” and “a show that will make some of its viewers want to slit their wrists” – and those are the positive ones. Perhaps realizing that waxing poetic about a show’s potential to rouse thoughts of suicide isn’t the most effective strategy for convincing people to watch it, many of these critics go out of their way to point out that The Leftovers “isn’t for everyone,” a qualification that seems not only unnecessary (nothing is “for everyone”) but also counterintuitive. If you like a piece of art, why discourage others from giving it a shot? Since when were critics responsible for accommodating audience opinions rather than simply articulating and trusting their own?

            More to the point, though, framing the show’s sorrowful mood as a caveat is like saying, “Mad Men is good, but there’s so much talking”. You’re disowning something essential to the work in question, turning its greatest strength into a negative. Precisely what gives The Leftovers its power is its commitment to exploring human emotions in all their raw messiness, its refusal to settle for false uplift and easy answers. To be sure, some people may find it too unpleasant to watch, and that’s fair enough, but for me (and, judging by the reviews, many others), it’s not a ponderous, soul-crushing exercise in mental fortitude so much as a pitch-perfect falsetto, hitting that elusive sweet note with such exquisite precision it stings. In it, I found something I hadn’t known I was yearning for: a complex, heartfelt portrait of loss.

The moment I fell in love

It's Moments That Seize Us

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            When describing something like Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s attempt to capture the experience of growing up in something resembling real-time, it’s easy to toss around hyperbolic terms like “brilliant” and “tour de force” – and even easier to get swept up in them. With something this ambitious and experimental, you walk into the theater expecting your life to be altered, your mind opened to new, profound insights into the human condition, whatever that means. To tell the truth, though, Boyhood is nothing like that. Just as Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life didn’t reveal the meaning of the universe, Boyhood doesn’t shed light on any mind-blowing secrets about coming of age in contemporary America. It is, in fact, rather ordinary.

            The boy in question, named Mason Jr. and played by neophyte actor Ellar Coltrane, is no one special. He’s white and able-bodied, gradually evolving from a fresh-faced kid into a gangly teenager with a pierced ear, possessing few exceptional qualities except a penchant for photography and moody philosophizing. The 12 years of his life covered by the film (compressed into a nearly three-hour running time, which feels surprisingly like nothing at all) contain little that could be categorized as action and follow only the ghost of a narrative structure, not rising toward a climax so much as meandering around one. Even the most ostensibly sensational events, such as Mason’s strained interactions with his two alcoholic stepfathers, are conveyed through the dispassionate gaze of a documentarian. Although it offers an intimate look at the everyday existence of its protagonist, the movie never really allows us into his head; we merely observe, never experience.

            Deprived of the visceral immediacy I had been anticipating, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat let down at first. What I thought would be a joyful celebration of youth instead turned out to be a rather depressing reminder of how boring reality is, delivered from the perspective of someone I found neither relatable nor particularly interesting (especially as an adolescent, Mason is a quintessential Linklater character: wistful, talkative, laid-back and in love with his own thoughts). Once my initial reaction faded, however, it dawned on me that I was supposed to feel that way. Boyhood isn’t about catharsis; it’s about numbing, the sinking realization that this is it, this is life, and you have no idea what to do with it.

            If that sounds like a downer, it is. Yet it’s also strangely captivating, unfurling with a dreamy, leisurely serenity that mirrors its Texas backdrop, not bowling you over with emotions so much as letting them sink into you and creep beneath your skin. Bereft of shocking revelations, turning points and anything else resembling a major plot twist, Boyhood revels in details – gestures, pop culture references, objects, places rendered with such evocative specificity it feels like you’re wandering through a memory. For example, when Mason accompanies his mother (Patricia Arquette in a performance revelatory for its quiet poignancy) to her college psychology class, he sees the professor put his hand on her back, and we instantly understand the implications of this tiny, seemingly casual act. Linklater is predominantly known for his dialogue, and to be sure, there’s plenty of it here, but he also puts on a clinic in how to impart information by showing rather than telling.

            In the hands of almost any other director, Boyhood might have ended up as little more than a curiosity, its unconventional filming style elevating a fairly conventional teen movie plot (alcohol-soaked parties? Check. Short-lived romances? Check. Heart-to-heart conversations about the future? You’re damn right check). But with his naturalistic direction and subtle script, Linklater infuses the proceedings with a sense of sincerity that most coming-of-age films lack, eschewing shallow nostalgia and familiar clichés in favor of something messier and more honest. Furthermore, anyone who dismisses the premise as a mere gimmick would be mistaken. On the contrary, it’s the entire point. Life, according to Boyhood, is basically meaningless; there’s no grand master plan, no higher purpose to the series of arbitrary benchmarks we pass on our way to death (to paraphrase Arquette in the movie’s most haunting scene). What make it all worthwhile are the little things, the fragments of time between benchmarks when you forget about the inevitability of mortality and the impermanence of things. Life is about the clear sunset that greets you after a long hike, the song you hear on the car radio, the near-infinite number of seconds that tick by as you debate whether to kiss the girl sitting next to you. It’s about the moments that are there and then, before you know it, gone.

Links:

http://www.joblo.com/movies/database/2014/boyhood/images/309863

Death, Taxes and Community

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            Yesterday was not a particularly good day. First, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, essentially stating that corporations are allowed to refuse birth control coverage for female employees due to religious objections. Then, Noah Berlatsky, a writer I’d previously respected, published an article in The Atlantic arguing that Orange Is the New Black doesn’t pay enough attention to men, despite the fact that the show is set specifically in a women’s prison and therefore has no reason to represent male convicts (if anything, I wish it didn’t care so much about its male characters, but that’s another discussion entirely). And as if that wasn’t enough, Community got renewed by Yahoo! (yes, that Yahoo!) for a last-minute sixth season.

For many people, the revival of NBC’s beloved cult comedy, following its cancelation earlier this year, is a cause for celebration. But when I saw the news, I felt a jolt of irrational exasperation. Of all the acclaimed, prematurely axed shows, from Terriers to Enlightenment to this season’s Enlisted, why is this the one that gets a second chance?

            Once upon a time, I did genuinely like Community. Although many fans consider the first season the show’s weakest, I’ve always had a soft spot for its zany, idiosyncratic, relatively unassuming brand of humor interspersed with moments of surprising sweetness (I might or might not have cried during Abed’s family reconciliation video). Season two earned its hype with consistently hilarious episodes that delighted in subverting sitcom conventions, pop culture tropes and audience expectations without abandoning its characters (see: “Mixology Certification”, “Critical Film Studies”, etc.). I was as anxious as anybody waiting to see how long it would survive despite middling ratings.

            The third season started out uneven at best, though episodes like “Remedial Chaos Theory” and “Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism” were enough to keep me invested. It wasn’t until some vague point after the infamous 2012 hiatus that I realized I didn’t enjoy Community anymore; in fact, the show was actively getting on my nerves. Where the meta commentary and obscure references once felt fresh and clever, they now came across as smug, trite and self-indulgent, and where the madcap energy had once been balanced out by a commitment to emotional realism, it now veered into outright chaos, as if Greendale had been transported from a parallel dimension to a completely separate universe where the basic rules of narrative structure and logic no longer existed. I hated everything the show did with Britta, from pairing her with Troy to gradually dumbing her down. Most people approved of the change as far as I could tell, but personally, I’d rather have the intelligent, idealistic, if self-serious Britta of season one than the walking, talking blonde joke of season three. It bothered me how the other characters treated her, constantly making fun of her values and telling her to be quiet; the “fun vampire” quip was amusing until it occurred to me how closely it mirrored the way feminists and other social justice advocates are viewed in real life, dismissed as humorless extremists trying to ruin everyone else’s party.

 Don’t even get me started.

Let's Talk About the Children: War and the Loss of Innocence in Game of Thrones

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            When watching Game of Thrones, HBO’s contentious, wildly popular fantasy series, it’s easy to get caught up in the Big Moments, the ones that light up social media and generate a week’s worth of think pieces: Ned Stark’s beheading; the Battle of Blackwater; the Red Wedding; so many deaths. But the show isn’t all about shock and awe. In fact, some of the best, most memorable moments this season have been the quiet ones, often involving nothing more than characters talking. There’s the circuitous beetle-crushing anecdote that Tyrion tells Jaime in “The Mountain and the Viper,” delivered with tortured intensity by Peter Dinklage, just before the climactic, explosive duel scene. Daenerys’s flirtation with Daario in “Mockingbird.” Any scene between Missandei and Grey Worm, whose tender relationship is perhaps the show’s most welcome addition to George R.R. Martin’s novels.

            There’s a reason why, even in a season teeming with game-changing, water-cooler-ready incidents, “First of His Name” remains my favorite episode. Although relatively uneventful, it contains a wealth of perfect little moments that might seem inconsequential on the surface, but actually have profound implications for the characters and their world. Take, for instance, the scene where Podrick Payne confesses to Brienne, “I killed a man.” It’s a simple, four-word line, but for a character that had previously functioned as little more than comic relief, it constitutes a miniature, heartbreaking revelation. Pod may be hopelessly earnest and awkward, but he’s far from the naïve simpleton we and Brienne thought he was; despite his lack of formal training and experience, he’s just as capable of taking a person’s life as a knight of the Kingsguard.

            At its heart, season four is a narrative of disillusionment, watching as each character is deprived of his or her innocence. In the premiere, Arya Stark, not yet a teenager, sticks her newly reclaimed Needle into Polliver’s throat to avenge her friend, Lommy Greenhands. A contemptuous smirk lingers on her face even as her victim chokes to death on his own blood, yet whatever catharsis this death brings is only temporary. Arya doesn’t hesitate to revel in her victory; instead, she simply wipes her sword clean and continues on her journey with the Hound. In an interview, Maisie Williams says that Arya is “being eaten from the inside out… She's got a hole in her heart. She fills it with all these eyes that she's going to shut forever, and she's just turning black from the inside out.” Ultimately, killing Polliver is not the act of a girl obtaining justice for her fallen friend; it’s the act of a girl who has lost – or is in the process of losing – her soul. A deliberate, cold-blooded murder, devoid of feeling, performed with matter-of-fact calmness. With this, Arya has officially been indoctrinated into the culture of violence that reigns over Westeros.

In Which Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt Try to Save Hollywood

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             Unintended metaphors stick out from Edge of Tomorrow like machine guns from clunky metal exo-skeletons. On one hand, the movie mirrors the career of its aging lead, a once-formidable superstar struggling to cling to the last vestiges of his fame and hurtling through action extravaganzas as though he wasn’t now past 50 years old. One early scene shows our hero William Cage, a spokesman and officer in the United States Army Reserve, reacting with incredulity to the news that he will be sent into combat for the first time in his military career, and it’s hard not to see that moment as tongue-in-cheek, Tom Cruise poking fun at his own cushy celebrity status. After all, though tarnished, his image is still apparently enough for studios to keep shoving tent-poles at him. He still looks as handsome and bright-eyed as ever – damn near indestructible.

             The movie could also represent the precarious position of contemporary filmmaking. We’ve all read enough think-pieces lamenting the demise of cinema and rolled our eyes in jaded exasperation at the announcement of yet another superhero reboot. Yet as clichéd and overblown as the cynicism may be, going to the theater does sometimes feel like déjà vu, a never-ending cycle of carbon-copied battles and catastrophes. We’re like Cage, throwing ourselves into the turmoil again and again, hoping that this time, it will be different, only to be continually disappointed.

             On paper, Edge of Tomorrow seems like a continuation of the same pattern, just another disposable blockbuster that will be forgotten in a week. Even the title (once upon a time the endearingly ridiculous All You Need Is Kill) screams “generic”. Yet somehow, despite the name and the hackneyed premise, it works. Of course, this being a moderately budgeted science-fiction spectacle, a decent chunk of screen-time is consumed by elaborate set-pieces involving bright lights, loud noises and quick editing. But what the action lacks in ingenuity, it makes up for in efficiency; at the very least, it makes sense and helps to advance the narrative instead of stalling, overwhelming or distracting from it. Although the plot carries echoes of numerous other movies (it’s essentially Pacific Rim crossed with Source Code), director Doug Liman has such a blast playing with the central gimmick that it doesn’t feel like a simple retread; in fact, it surpasses both of the aforementioned films, buoyed with enough humor to eschew the pompous melodrama of the former and enough energy to ward off the staid repetitiveness of the latter. The whole thing is just enough cheeky, absurd fun that you can forgive its more familiar moments and logical failings, at least until the letdown of an ending.

The Fault with The Fault in Our Stars

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            When I set out to read John Green’s runaway bestselling YA novel The Fault in Our Stars last year, I fully expected to adore it. I wanted to adore it. Star-crossed romance? Female protagonist? Teen fiction that actually takes its audience seriously? Glowing critical reviews that included phrases like “heartbreaking”, “brutally honest” and “tough, touching valentine to the human spirit”? It sounded right up my alley, the kind of book I’d fall in love with in a heartbeat.

            For the first few pages, it seemed promising. I enjoyed narrator Hazel Grace Lancaster’s droll tone, her scathing indictment of the weekly support group she attends to appease her mother; it’s like something from J.D. Salinger or Chuck Palahnuik – wordy, clever and cynical, even malicious, but authentically so. As it turned out, though, that was the highlight of the novel. I first felt my spirits sink when Augustus Waters appeared on the scene and Hazel observed, without a hint of irony, that “He was hot.” Not “handsome” or even the slightly more-tolerable “cute”, but hot. What’s more, the description doesn’t go any more in-depth than that, so we have to just take for granted that Augustus is as breathtakingly attractive as Hazel claims. This was probably supposed to be endearing, a reminder that although she’s diagnosed with a terminal illness, Hazel is still a regular person just like you. But for me, it was off-putting and patronizing, a grown man’s lame attempt at impersonating a stereotypical teenage girl.

            Then came the cigarette “metaphor”, which I still can’t think about without rolling my eyes because it makes no freaking sense (a metaphor is a comparison; it’s basic English, dude). And Augustus’s habit of calling Hazel “Hazel Grace”. And Hazel’s favorite book, a made-up novel called An Imperial Affliction that ends in mid-sentence for vague, profound reasons. And the dialogue loaded with periodic all-caps and words like “existentially fraught free throws” that have no business being placed in consecutive order.  And the trip to Amsterdam that culminates with Hazel and Augustus kissing in the Anne Frank house to the applause of their fellow visitors, a moment that’s supposed to be romantic and triumphant but really just comes off as manipulative and insensitive. And the scene where Hazel helps vandalize the car of a girl she’s never talked to or even met because obviously, Monica must be a heartless bitch for dumping Isaac and it can’t possibly matter what her side of the story is. And the part when Peter Van Houten inexplicably shows up in Hazel’s car and we’re not supposed to find it creepy as hell because he reveals some tragic backstory that explains his asshole behavior, except it just makes him seem more pathetic than before and I don’t even care in the first place.

            All in all, it was a colossal disappointment. There were occasional moments that I found genuinely touching, like when Hazel cringes at the painfully insincere condolence messages left behind for a deceased cancer patient, or Augustus’s sweeping declaration of his love for Hazel (Titanic and Casablanca are two of my favorite movies ever, so I have nothing against grand romantic gestures), but those were far outnumbered by the times I had to resist shutting the book out of exasperation. Still, for a while, I put off writing about it. I’ve been trying my damnedest not to be one of those narrow-minded snobs who reflexively dismisses anything aimed at teenage girls, and it’s not like I consider myself superior or more discerning for defying popular opinion; if anything, I envy the novel’s fans, since there are few things as rewarding as literature that burrows into your soul and makes you feel like a somehow wiser, fuller person.

At Last, a Superhero We Recognize

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             For the sake of transparency, I’m not going to write this review under any pretense of objectivity. As I’ve made abundantly (and probably obnoxiously) evident on this blog, I have major issues with Marvel and superhero movies in general, and I had a lot of expectations riding on Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the second feature film centered on the star-spangled super-soldier. In a far-fetched way, I was in a similar position to the resurrected Steve Rogers: disillusioned and clinging to some delicate shred of hope that the future just might be brighter than the present gives us reason to believe. This movie would either restore my faith in Hollywood blockbusters or completely ruin my desire to ever pay for another superhero blockbuster.

             At first, it didn’t look promising. I could actually feel my heart sinking as Captain America and his fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, including the enigmatic ex-Soviet spy Black Widow, boarded a ship to rescue hostages from Algerian pirates for an extended action sequence with no immediate purpose in terms of the overarching narrative. It turned out that the scene wasn’t superfluous, but its function only became apparent much later in the movie; as an opening set-piece, it was less than enthralling, plunging viewers into a situation without allowing them to get thoroughly (re)acquainted with the characters beforehand or informing them of the stakes involved, of why they should care. Not helping was the awkward humor, which lacked the sardonic zip we’ve come to expect from even the more subpar entries in the Avengers mega-franchise.

             Just as I started to resign myself to yet another should’ve-been-better Marvel offering, something suddenly clicked. I can’t pinpoint the precise moment my mood shifted from disappointed to thrilled, but it must have been sometime around when Robert Redford entered the picture, sporting a stark gray suit and old-fashioned spectacles as menacing S.H.I.E.L.D. official Alexander Pierce. It’s widely agreed that villains are something of a weak point for Marvel, yet even as an outspoken critic of the studio, I think that shortcoming might be overstated. After all, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is by far the closest any other superhero antagonist has come to matching the intoxicating, compulsively watchable allure of Heath Ledger’s Joker, and even lesser baddies such as Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian have been elevated by forceful performances. Pierce belongs closer to the latter group. His motives and background are rather hazy, his diabolical scheme not quite holding up to close scrutiny, yet thanks to Redford, it hardly matters. With his weathered face and steely gaze, the veteran performer brings a welcome gravitas to the largely fanciful proceedings, unexpectedly resisting the impulse to chew scenery in favor of a restrained, almost world-weary iciness.

True Detective, Diversity and a Medium Coming of Age

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The Internet was abuzz yesterday after Huffington Post TV critic Maureen Ryan published a thorough – and thoroughly depressing, if unsurprising – assessment of behind-the-scenes diversity on cable dramas. Though the article focuses on HBO, home of critically-acclaimed shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Game of Thrones, Ryan also looks at AMC, FX, Showtime and Netflix, which all combine to form the forefront of modern-day so-called prestige television.

             Long story short, it’s not good. To summarize:

• Over the past 40 years, HBO has aired precisely one original, hour-long drama series created by a woman (Cynthia Mort’s Tell Me You Love Me).
• Since 2008, HBO has not aired a single one-hour drama or mini-series with a creator or “narrative architect” that is female or non-white.
• In the last 12 years at the five aforementioned outlets, only 12% of drama series creators and narrative architects have been women.

Essentially, we’re not experiencing the Golden Age of TV so much as the Golden Age of White Male TV. If you asked someone what the best shows of the past decade were, he or she would probably rattle off a list that includes The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and Mad Men, all of which not only revolve around central male protagonists but are also produced, written and directed predominantly by men. This is not to diminish the artistic quality and cultural significance of those shows in any way; even though I have my personal preferences (Mad Men forever!), few would deny that they have all, to some extent, altered the way we view, think about and discuss the medium, elevating it from “fun” escapism for mass audiences to something more refined and ambitious.

Another Great, Gone Too Soon

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            Today was unusual, since I didn’t turn on my computer until after two o’clock in the afternoon. I started to go through the usual motions, checking my e-mail and such, but when I went onto Facebook, I was startled to see at the top of my feed an IMDb headline that read: “Philip Seymour Hoffman Found Dead in New York”.

            My first thought was, Wait – that’s not the Philip Seymour Hoffman. Not the talented, electrifying thespian who I first witnessed in Bennett Miller’s feature-length film debut Capote and then in such diverse fare as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, last year’s Catching Fire and even Mike Nichols’s recent Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman. It couldn’t possibly be him. But a glance at the article’s blurb, which contained the words “Oscar-winning actor”, quickly confirmed what my brain couldn’t (or wouldn’t) register. Hoffman, who just yesterday I noticed was gearing up for his sophomore directorial effort with the Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams-starring Prohibition-era drama Ezekiel Moss, had died.

            I jumped over to Twitter, both because I needed to say something and because some part of me was still in denial, still hoping that this would turn out to be some cruel, elaborate hoax. Of course, it wasn’t. My timeline was overflowing with reactions that felt simultaneously predictable and heartfelt – expressions of disbelief and sorrow, condolences, links to obituaries and clips, praise for an actor who so consistently lit up the screen with memorable, dynamic performances that towards the end, it was almost easy to take him for granted. I thought about a line from 2012’s The Master, penned by director Paul Thomas Anderson and spoken by Hoffman with his signature gravitas: “If you figure out a way to live without a master, any master, be sure to let the rest of us know, for you would be the first in the history of the world.” And I cried.

Obligatory Oscar Post Part 2: The Real Meaning of Awards

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            Like any annual celebration, the Oscars come with a few traditions: the bitter, media-fueled rivalry between two Best Picture contenders, minor political controversies blown way out of proportion, Armond White insulting someone at the New York Film Critics Circle dinner, think pieces contemplating how the Academy has lost touch with the public and/or reality, and so on. But perhaps the most obnoxious of these rituals is the inevitable surfacing of awards misanthropes – you know, those people who proudly proclaim (usually via the Internet) that the Oscars are meaningless and self-congratulatory and they don’t care, so anyone who does is clearly an idiot. Isn’t it just another excuse for a bunch of rich celebrities to pat themselves on the back?

            Well, I guess if you boil it down to the fundamentals, yes. Despite the hullabaloo that surrounds the ceremony and the hundreds of millions of dollars thrown at campaigns each year, everyone is well aware that the Oscars are petty and arbitrary. They’re by no means an accurate, definitive barometer of quality, because that doesn’t exist; like all art, film is subjective, so no matter what wins Best Picture, someone’s always going to be unhappy, and the notion of comparing radically different works in the first place is kind of nonsensical. Parading around your disdain as if you expect a trophy or something doesn’t exactly make you original or clever. Besides, if you really didn’t care about the Oscars, you wouldn’t be commenting on them in the first place. As it is, you just seem like those people that show up every once in a while on pop culture message boards to ask why the writer of such-and-such article isn’t discussing [insert urgent political issue here] or, even worse, to simply say, “Slow news day, eh?”

It’s not like the Super Bowl is some earth-shattering event, yet you never hear football fans derided for their choice in entertainment.

            Personally, I have mixed feelings about the Oscars. On one hand, it can be frustrating and disillusioning to know that the whole thing basically amounts to an expensive, over-hyped P.R. stunt that stretches from one February to the next, and with all the speculation preceding the actual awards, the winners are rarely all that surprising. But every year, I still find myself getting genuinely excited to watch the tacky-glamorous ceremony, to see who gives the best speech, who accidentally lets loose an F-bomb on network TV, who wears the dress I most wish I could afford, etc.