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.

Pixar Lets Audiences in on Its Secrets in Inside Out

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        Inside Out is vintage Pixar. After spending a few years mired in an adolescent funk, the studio has emerged with a take on the coming-of-age story that’s as clever as it is poignant and that suggests a newfound sense of maturity. For his follow-up to, well, Up, director Pete Docter, along with a pitch-perfect voice cast and Pixar’s usual team of genius animators, explores the uncertainties of growing up and the complex interplay between emotion and memory by delving into the mind of an 11-year-old girl. The result is a film of such piercing yet exquisite intimacy that writing this review seems like a fruitless endeavor, since no words could adequately convey that feeling. The sensation of watching Inside Out lingers long after details about the plot and particular jokes begin to fade.

        Pixar’s latest work is most reminiscent not of any Disney or animated movie, but of last year’s Boyhood. While Richard Linklater’s flick offers a more anxious and ambivalent outlook on life, an attitude concisely captured by Patricia Arquette’s wrenching final line, both movies are as much about parenting as they are about being a kid, in part because their makers are unavoidably coming from that perspective, and with their white, middle-class, presumed-to-be-heterosexual protagonists, they largely adhere to popular imaginings of childhood as happy, suburban havens of innocence. These romanticized depictions are so often reproduced by Hollywood they’ve taken on an almost mythic status, seemingly grounded more in a particular set of ideals than in reality.

        However, both Inside Out and Boyhood have more on their minds than nostalgia. By making the children at their centers distinctive and well-rounded enough to feel like individuals instead of archetypes, they sidestep many of the potential pitfalls and clichés that frequently doom coming-of-age tales. You don’t have to share Riley’s passion for hockey to relate to the meaningful role it plays in her life, just as you didn’t need to agree with Mason’s teenage existential musings to recognize that they are his way of making sense of the world around him and cementing his own increasingly independent identity. These movies succeed, in other words, because they understand that art taps into universal sentiments – namely, people’s capacity for empathy – most effectively when it portrays specific, not vague circumstances; they simply tell their own stories rather than attempting to cater to all possible audience members.

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.

Out of the Machine Comes a Thrilling Vision

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***SPOILER ALERT***

        Ex Machina, the directorial debut of 28 Days Later and Sunshine writer Alex Garland, operates around a series of binaries. There’s the obvious man vs. machine, but also man vs. woman, the mind vs. the heart, nature vs. technology, the past vs. the future, reality vs. the imaginary. These aren’t exactly unusual themes for a story about artificial intelligence or for science fiction in general, but rather than ultimately picking a side as many are wont to do, this movie seeks to unify these seemingly incompatible concepts. Like the android at its center, Ex Machina is a synthesis of different, carefully selected parts fused to create an elegant, more-than-functional whole, and its sleek, familiar surface gradually peels back to reveal something much cooler and more slyly intelligent underneath.

        Where many sci-fi films aim for the (sometimes literal) stars, looking to paint a dazzling, explosive picture on as large a canvas as possible, Ex Machina opts for a small-scale approach, featuring only four main characters and keeping nearly all of the action confined to isolated, clearly delineated spaces. As Oscar Isaac’s Nathan concedes early on, his house isn’t cozy; it’s claustrophobic, a modernist, technological prison surrounded by an almost overwhelmingly expansive natural oasis that whispers of freedom, the unknown and – most importantly to the two men who anchor this narrative – the uncontrollable. After all, the desire to control, the promise of power and supremacy is what draws Caleb (played by Domhnall Gleeson in a nicely restrained yet taut performance) to Nathan’s home, a decidedly artificial world that they seek to rule not just as men or kings, but as gods. Strikingly shot by cinematographer Rob Hardy and brought to life by production designer Mark Digby, art directors Katrina Mackay and Denis Schnegg, and set decorator Michelle Day, the house is an architect’s wet dream, as tastefully sophisticated as it is cold and hollow, seeming to exist in a limbo somewhere between the real world and a fantasy. The abundance of glass is hardly an accident; as Caleb slowly discovers over the course of the film, the control it offers is an illusion, one easily shattered despite the fancy security system that Nathan has installed.

Mission: Impossible – Conquering the Smurfette Principle

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        The full-length trailer for the fifth Mission: Impossible movie, now sporting the not-at-all-laughable subtitle of Rogue Nation (at least it’s not Dawn of Justice or Ragnarok?), popped up online Monday, and the world got yet another opportunity to gawk at Tom Cruise’s commitment to jaw-dropping and likely ill-advised stunts with a mixture of bemusement, exasperation and awe. While I have little doubt that the film’s action scenes will be thrilling, an ideal spectacle for blockbuster season, I would be infinitely more interested in it if 1) Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol helmer Brad Bird returned to the directing chair and 2) more importantly, if Paula Patton were not conspicuously absent from this sequel, while Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames will all reprise their roles.

        Even if it is for harmless scheduling reasons, this means we have yet another major movie boasting a single major female character (newcomer Rebecca Ferguson) in an ensemble otherwise consisting of all guys. Yes, we’re talking about an action franchise whose primary draw has always been its over-the-top gadgets and stunt work, so it’s obviously not surprising that Rogue Nation, at least based off the trailer, will be extremely dude-centric. However, this tokenism and the trailer’s heavy use of the male gaze suggest that the movie and, by extension, the franchise as a whole, isn’t especially interested in women – either in terms of portraying them as more than eye candy or in attracting us as an audience.

  

I couldn’t get a non-blurry screengrab, but in case you’re wondering, Rebecca Ferguson is about to snap this guy’s neck with her legs, and I’m so here for that.

  

 This, not so much.

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.

The Admirable ‘Selma’ Sings with Restrained Energy

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        The single most eye-opening moment of my college experience came during the first semester of my freshman year. Most of the students in my Honors 101: Research Methods class despised our teacher for reasons both justified (her clinical, DIY approach to teaching suggested she was more accustomed to dealing with grad students than fresh-faced undergrads) and not (somehow I don’t think they would’ve been so openly disdainful and disrespectful had she been a white man instead of a black woman). At one point, our class discussion turned to Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement, and my professor told a room full of primarily privileged white kids that Rosa Parks was not just an ordinary lady who one day got too tired to stand up from her seat on a bus, but an outspoken, trained and educated activist. As minor as it might have seemed at the time, this moment forever changed how I view history, especially as it is taught in the American education system, where reality is often simplified, distorted or outright ignored in order to create easily digestible, comforting narratives. For the first time, I truly grasped the full meaning of the truism “History is written by the victors”, though it might be more accurate to say “History is written by the powerful”.

        So, this was the challenge that faced director Ava DuVernay and the rest of her team when making Selma: how do you translate Martin Luther King Jr. and his work to the big screen while countering a dominant cultural narrative that has long reduced him to a docile saint? On top of that, the film must also compete with the feel-good white savior stories that have served for decades as Hollywood’s main framework for dealing with issues of race. It’s a formidable responsibility to tackle for the industry as a whole, let alone a single project. Yet, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the final film is how lightly it carries this weight, never bowing under pressure or coming across as either self-conscious or self-important. Selma may be closer to the glossy, polite dignity of Spielberg’s Lincoln than the ferocious rawness of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which still stands after 25 years as mainstream cinema’s sharpest, most honest commentary on American race relations, but it’s a piece of lean, effective, confident filmmaking that, along with the more unassuming yet equally poignant Middle of Nowhere, establishes DuVernay as one of the most exciting and vital voices in the contemporary movie world.

Why the Oscars Have Nothing to Do With Art

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        Now that the Golden Globes have passed (Tina Fey and Amy Poehler hosted the uneven ceremony Sunday night) and the Oscar nominations are set to be announced this Thursday, the 2015 movie awards season is officially reaching peak frenzy. As intense as this time of the year can be for film fans, I haven’t felt a great need to write about this year’s race, in part because the majority of my thoughts, hopes and gripes aren’t all that different from last time; the dynamics of each season are essentially the same, just with a new set of names in the spotlight. While the particular debates and controversies this time around haven’t piqued my interest, I have found myself lately thinking a lot about what it really means to be “Oscar-worthy”, or even what it means for art to be good in general, and what, if anything, that says about our interests and values as moviegoers and a society.

        The phrase “Oscar-worthy” gets tossed around a lot, but there’s rarely any explanation of what that actually means. Though it’s often said with some level of derision or irony, it seems to be used as a sincere marker of artistic quality just as often, even by those who turn their noses up at the Academy. It implies some kind of standard that movies must live up to in order to be deemed deserving of awards consideration, though no one ever articulates exactly what those standards should be. To what extent should a film’s technical/aesthetic prowess, cultural or popular impact, or political, social or moral significance be taken into account? Do Academy members have any greater responsibilities to the industry or the public when making their selections or should they simply choose what they legitimately liked the most based on their own personal preferences? For the most part, it’s agreed that the Academy has little actual credibility as a tastemaker, and the Internet has made it too easy to follow industry politics and the PR campaigns specifically designed to influence voters for even the most naïve person to believe they’re completely unbiased. I keep wondering why so much time, money and effort is invested not just by the industry itself, but by critics and moviegoers on awards that few treat with anything other than contempt. I’ve suggested before that the awards season is worthwhile because it provides an opportunity to celebrate filmmaking, even if the specific objects of celebration aren’t always the most laudable, but perhaps what really makes it worthwhile is that it forces us to consider and articulate why we think certain films deserve wider recognition and why others don’t. It pushes us to interrogate our own ideas of what makes some art great instead of just taking our gut instinct of “I liked/didn’t like this” at face value.

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.

A Fond and (Hopefully) Final Farewell to Middle Earth

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        In a way, writing a review of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the final installment in Peter Jackson’s epic, maddening trilogy, feels like a rather pointless undertaking. If you didn’t care for either of the previous two movies, chances are you won’t find this one any more enjoyable, and it’s hard to imagine the film appealing to anyone except the most fervent devotees of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth – or, more accurately, Middle Earth as recreated by Jackson and co. Indeed, even as a diehard fan of the franchise, I entered my screening of Battle with more than a little trepidation. Given that this was the last time Middle Earth will appear on the big screen (as of now, at least), I wanted a satisfying, emotionally cathartic conclusion, but considering that neither An Unexpected Journey nor The Desolation of Smaug were exactly great, my expectations for this one were low. Moreover, as much as I try not to let other people’s opinions affect my own (or seep into my reviews), I’d already heard more of the decidedly negative critical response to the film than I would’ve liked, and it stuck in the back of my mind even when the movie began. I say all this because I can’t pretend I was coming from a place of cool objectivity when watching it and to emphasize how genuinely surprised I was at how much I liked The Battle of the Five Armies.

        To be clear, Battle suffers from a lot of the same flaws as its predecessors. It thankfully skips the usual, seemingly obligatory prologue and jumps right into the action, picking up where the previous movie left off, with the dragon Smaug preparing to attack Laketown. However, this also results in an opening that feels more like a climax and likely should’ve been relegated to the second film. Despite having the shortest running time of the three, Battle still manages to somehow feel both too thin and overstuffed, thanks to a host of subplots, many of which are underdeveloped or wholly unnecessary. Scenes centered on the human characters especially drag, a notable change from The Desolation of Smaug, where Laketown served as one of the more interesting locations, if only for the passing exploration of politics. After essentially completing his arc within the first twenty minutes or so, Luke Evans’s Bard becomes extraneous, turning into more of a plot device than an actual character. It doesn’t help that his most prominent traits as established by Desolation – his resourcefulness, stemming from his profession as a fisherman and smuggler, and his status as a champion of the common people – no longer apply in this movie, since he gets elevated into a position of power after killing Smaug.

        More egregiously, Battle bizarrely decides to expand the role of Alfrid, the sniveling, cowardly former servant of the Master played by Ryan Gage. Not only could this time have been better used to flesh out the Bard, Evangeline Lilly’s Tauriel or some of the dwarves, most of whom still seem interchangeable, but Alfrid also is just flat-out obnoxious. He’s clearly meant to serve as comic relief, which I’ve always considered among The Hobbit’s weaker points, clashing too sharply with its overall foreboding tone. The toilet humor of the first movie and more absurd goofiness of the second, however, are infinitely preferable to the ill-advised, surprisingly offensive bit that concludes Alfrid’s storyline. I won’t go into any more detail, but honestly, you’re better than that, Peter Jackson.

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.

"Birdman" Takes Flight But Doesn’t Stick the Landing

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        A fine line separates ambition from hubris, passion projects from vanity projects. Though money and the personalities involved play a role, mostly, the difference lies in an individual’s subjective perception of quality: if you like a particular work of art, then it’s a testament to the maker’s willingness to take risks and refusal to compromise their creative vision, but if you don’t, it’s a self-indulgent, bloated, even laughable mess. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman suggests that there is, in fact, no line at all, that the very desire to create art, whether it’s a multimillion dollar blockbuster or an intensely personal, stripped-down play, is evidence of humanity’s overinflated sense of self-importance. After all, only someone who thinks very highly of themselves could be so delusional as to believe their opinions, ideas and experiences are so singular and vital that they need to be shared with the entire world. If the totality of human existence can be confined to the temporal equivalent of a single square of a toilet paper roll, not even the greatest, most innovative piece of art really matters, not in the grand scheme of things. Artistry stems from both egotism and insecurity, the confidence that you’re almighty and invincible and the fear – or is it the knowledge? – that you’re not. Birdman puts these conflicting impulses on display in a romp that’s by turns admirable and aggravating, energizing and meandering, extravagant and slight.

                                                                                                                                                    

        Like a self-deprecating actor who’s really looking for constant, external validation, Birdman simultaneously invites and inoculates itself from criticism. In one scene, our “hero” Riggin Thomson, played with “get off my lawn” gruffness by Michael Keaton, approaches a New York Times theater critic, whose review will determine the success of his play adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, and unleashes a stream of vitriol at her, accusing her and her entire profession of lazy cowardice. He argues that reviews are nothing but strung-together labels for people’s opinions that ignore structure and technique, the two elements that are notably Birdman’s strong suit. In presumably unintentional defiance of Riggin’s lamentation, much has been made of Iñárritu’s and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s attempt to make the film appear as though it had been shot in a single long take, a feat that is either an astounding display of technical mastery or mere showboating, depending on who you ask. Though the camerawork undeniably draws attention to itself, especially early on, this approach largely works because it meshes so well with the overall tone established by the movie. It evokes an impartial observer wandering through the St. James Theater’s narrow corridors and cluttered dressing rooms, catching snatches of conversations and backstage drama. Backed by Antonio Sánchez’s off-kilter, discordant, drum-heavy score, the Steadicam transforms the film into a fever dream with the feel of a jazz routine, propelled by hectic, improvisational riffs and detours. 

Hollywood Killed God and Why That’s a Problem

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        Exodus: Gods and Kings opened this past weekend, and as mean-spirited as it is, I have to admit I was disappointed to see it top the box office, beating Mockingjay: Part One and Chris Rock’s Top Five. I’d say I’m boycotting it because of the whitewashed cast, but that implies I would’ve had the slightest interest in seeing it otherwise. Racism and director Ridley Scott being a jerk about said racism aside, this movie contributes to a recent Hollywood trend that I find particularly frustrating: revisionist takes on myths that don’t have any actual mythology in them.

  

  You’re both so much better than this…

        Theoretically, Hollywood’s newfound obsession with reinventing myths – whether it’s fairy tales, Biblical or otherwise religious stories, historical legends or classical mythology – should be right up my alley. Though I enjoy real-world dramas as much as the next person, I have always found these kinds of stories fascinating not only for the way they blend recognizable archetypes with the fantastical, but also for how integral they are to storytelling as an art, revealing the values and deeper truths of historical moments, individual cultures and humanity as a whole. While fairy tales and such have often served a didactic function, teaching children and even adults how to lead a proper, moral life, they also speak to people and shape their understanding of the world around them on a fundamental, almost primal level. Where most stories benefit from specificity, myths feel universal. Just think of how many different ancient civilizations, ones that likely had little direct contact with each other, have similar legends about massive floods, or Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, as simplistic and patriarchal as that concept might be. My point is that these stories are designed to be reimagined and retold, boasting an inherent, abstract fluidity that has kept them alive for, in some cases, centuries on end.

        So, if myths are so open to reinterpretation, then why are Hollywood’s latest versions, with Exodus, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah and Maleficient being this year’s most prominent examples, so dull? In part, this could probably be attributed to the mainstream filmmaking industry’s general lack of inventiveness and risk-averse mindset. To an extent, that’s almost understandable in some of these cases. Considering how protective fans can be of something as comparatively trivial as Star Wars or the Marvel comics, commercial productions can only afford to be so radical when you’re dealing with material that’s literally gospel for millions of people. Judging by reviews, Exodus in particular seems to have been hampered by the creative team’s uncertainty over how faithful they should be to the original text, their attempts to mesh together a variety of approaches ultimately producing a final product that will likely satisfy no one.

Wrestling with Masculinity and Oscar Hype

WordMaster

             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.

Fighting the Unbearable Emptiness with Love

StarGazer

***BEWARE POSSIBLE SPOILERS***

        You’ll probably know whether or not you’re going to like Interstellar within the first half hour. The premise: a group of scientists led by Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper has been tasked with traveling into a wormhole near Saturn and finding a planet that could replace Earth, which has been so ruined it can no longer sustain human life. You either accept this – and, not to mention, all the quirks about bending space-time, hopping dimensions and corn – or you don’t. If you can’t suspend your disbelief, you’ll likely dismiss Christopher Nolan’s latest venture as maddening, self-absorbed drivel, but if you can embrace the plot as it is, you’ll be rewarded with an immersive spectacle that blends the grand scope of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the more personal sincerity of Contact, one that recalls innumerable sci-fi flicks of the past but never seems interested in trying to be anything other than itself.

        Like last year’s Gravity, Interstellar begs to be seen on as large a screen as possible, and its basic story is secondary to the mere experience of sitting and watching it. An IMAX theater viewing especially provides a sensory explosion so enveloping that it’s almost overwhelming. Boasting visual effects that, more than being just stunning to look at, actually feel real, the film serves as a sharp and more-than-welcome contrast to the blatant CGI of something like the Thor movies or the superficial, screensaver prettiness of The Tree of Life. Assisted by Hoyte van Hoytema’s elegant cinematography, the film doesn’t just present images of wormholes, distant planets and extra dimensions – it transports you to them. Jaw-dropping shots of a spaceship passing Saturn or approaching a black hole are matched by suffocating scenes set in the dust-blown fields that apparently cover future America and an almost disturbingly visceral sequence where a spacecraft gradually disintegrates into nothingness, the you-are-there sensation enhanced by some finely tuned sound editing. Composer Hans Zimmer contributes to the movie’s delicate tonal mix of grandeur and immediacy with a marvel of a score that alternates between an operatic, organ-played theme and more staccato, tense rhythms. Smartly executed on practically every technical level, Interstellar is a dizzying dream of a movie, inspiring the kind of pure awe that so many films aim for but rarely achieve.

        Yet, for all the visual fireworks, scientific jargon and Prometheus-esque philosophizing, there’s something very elemental, almost archetypal about Interstellar. The relationship between Cooper and Murph (played by both Jessica Chastain and Mackenzie Foy, who is perhaps the movie’s biggest surprise other than the Bill Irwin-voiced robot and secret MVP T.A.R.S.) anchors the narrative, even as it traverses planets, galaxies and dimensions, and resonates with an earnestness that comes off as sweet instead of sentimental. At its core, this is a story about love – not just the love between parents and children, though that’s a central focus, but the one between lovers, siblings, people and their home, humanity and itself. Helped by all-around solid performances from a recognizable cast and uncluttered by prolonged action set pieces, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay spends enough time with the characters to justify an emotional investment in their survival, even if some of the supporting roles could’ve been fleshed out more, a challenge for a film already approaching the three hour mark. Some of the movie’s best scenes are its simplest: a father tries in vain to comfort his distraught daughter; a heartbreaking montage of video messages; one character is so relieved to see another person, he collapses in tears. Human beings are a source of both doom and salvation in Interstellar, the latter of which proves possible only through a sense of shared community, devotion and empathy.

How to Get Away With Business

WordMaster

             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.

Perfection, Deconstructed in Gone Girl

StarGazer

***SPOILER ALERT!***

         This is what marriage is supposed to look like. A man and a woman in their late 20s/early 30s – whiteness and physical compatibility optional but definitely preferred – meet, fall in love, date for a couple of years and get hitched in an elegant, classy ceremony. They move into a nice, big house with a manicured, grassy lawn and quiet, pleasant neighbors and eventually a cute kid or two comes along to complete the picture. Aside from the children, this is what Nick and Amy Dunne have. Sure, they’ve run into some money problems, and a cancerous parent forced them out of their chic New York City life and into Middle-of-Nowhere, Missouri, but they’ve still got her trust fund and, more importantly, each other. Isn’t that all anyone needs, after all? They have what everyone wants, and it’s just about perfect – until it isn’t. With a script adapted by Gillian Flynn from her own gleefully twisted, blisteringly caustic novel, David Fincher’s Gone Girl methodically chips away at manufactured ideals of justice, happiness and love to reveal the toxic, inconvenient reality underneath all the everything’s great! smiles. This, the movie says, is what marriage really is.

        Though it tones down a lot of the more explicit and scathing gender politics of its source material, Fincher’s film nonetheless feeds off of the same desire to critique both the institution of heterosexual marriage and the ease with which the media shapes (and can be used to shape) the truth. In fact, here, there is no truth, at least not a singular one and certainly not one that really matters; as another recent movie that explored the materiality of fiction said, people believe what they want to believe. So, Nick continues to believe that he’s a decent person at heart, despite all evidence to the contrary, and Amy believes she’s justified in framing him for the wrongs he’s done to her and for all he represents – for his laziness, apathy, entitlement and overt and repressed misogyny. The police, media and public believe, first, in the infuriating but predictable story of a frustrated, temperamental, cheating man who killed his wife and, later, in the comforting but equally cliché story of a traumatized, victimized woman who just wants to live in peace and to repair her strained relationship with her husband.

A Guide to Doing Wonder Woman Justice

StarGazer

        For someone who has barely read any comic books, I’ve spent a lot of time discussing movies based off them. If anyone were to come up to me and say that I’m not qualified to talk about comics and should therefore just stop together, I wouldn’t even put up much of an argument, but the truth is that, for anyone who’s interested in pop culture nowadays, it’s pretty much impossible to avoid talking about Marvel, DC and the like. Geek culture, whether we’re talking about comic books or Star Trek or A Song of Ice and Fire, is no longer a niche; in fact, it’s now not only mainstream, but so dominant that it has redefined the entertainment industry, shifting perceptions of what projects are capable of finding an audience and lending greater weight to pure hype and fan anticipation in marketing. While some protectiveness is understandable, given that people always feel a bit of ownership over the things they love, this expansion and diversification of audience means “original” fans need to accept that not everyone is going to approach their favorite characters and stories in the same way and that they no longer get to be the sole authorities on what works and what doesn’t. Superheroes aren’t confined to comics anymore, so why should their fans be? Frankly, if someone can’t appreciate or understand a movie without reading the source material, then the movie probably wasn’t that good to begin with.

        All of this is to say that, despite having little interest in delving into the comics they’re based on, I feel oddly fascinated by and invested in superhero films. It’s a genre exploding with exciting potential, most of which Hollywood frustratingly has yet to explore, and with characters and narratives that can reach mythological proportions,  they tap into current societal anxieties and obsessions in a way that realistic/literary drama never could. However, as cliché as the mantra has become, with great power comes great responsibility. Now that these movies have gained widespread popularity and a level of respectability, they can’t be dismissed as escapist fluff anymore, even if that attitude remains prevalent amongst both fans and critics. The stories they tell, the people they portray and the issues they’re willing to confront – and, perhaps more importantly, how they do all these things – matter.

        And that’s why, even to a comic book n00b like me, the announcement that Wonder Woman was going to be included in the upcoming Man of Steel sequel and the more recent unveilings of her casting and costume were a really big deal. It’s not just that she’s somehow never been in a live-action feature film before, despite being one of the most iconic superheroes ever. As a well-known female superhero, that rarest of entities, she has the power to singlehandedly either transform the comic book movie industry by convincing studios and creators to finally take the women in the audience seriously or indefinitely shut down any chance we have of improving female representation in blockbusters. Fairly or not, Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice will essentially sink or swim based on its portrayal of Diana.

Wonder Woman preparing to stab whoever thought of that movie title

The Leftovers and Staring into the Abyss

WordMaster

            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