→ October 20, 2022
→ By

Athena.

Athena is the newest feature from Romain Gavras, son of Oscar-winning writer and director Costa-Gavras, who has a great eye for action sequences and can put you right on the edge of your seat, starting out this film with a literal and figurative bang. The script has Shakespearean aspirations, but the story doesn’t work well enough to achieve its goals or to match the quality of the action sequences.

Athena is the name of a housing complex in an unnamed French city that is home to a large population of Algerian-French citizens, and as the film opens, we see one of them, a police officer named Abdel (Dali Benssalah, who was in No Time to Die), asking for peace in the wake of the death of his 13-year-old brother Idir. A video has gone viral showing Idir’s beating death at the hands of several men in police uniforms, which serves as the spark in the powder keg of Athena; Abdel has barely finished speaking when the camera spans to the crowd, where we see a young man, Karim (Sami Slimane), lighting a Molotov cocktail that he’ll throw into the police station. This leads to a daylong standoff between Athena residents, led by Karim, who is Idir’s and Abdel’s brother, demanding the police deliver Idir’s killers to them, and the French police, with Abdel caught in the middle, distrusting his superiors and trying to avoid any further harm to his family.

The action sequences in Athena are fantastic, starting with that Molotov cocktail and Karim’s followers invading the police station to try to loot it of weapons. It ends in one of several memorable shots, this one with Karim and company standing or sitting at the edge of one of the roofs in the complex, all steely-eyed and determined and also too young to be doing this. His side will end up taking a police officer hostage, something telegraphed from the very beginning of the film, further ratcheting up the tension amid the uncertainty whether he’s going to survive, or whether any of the brothers – there’s a third, a drug dealer with anger management problems named Moktar – are going to either. It’s a grim view of modern French society and the relationship between the police and the people, although it may be a realistic one.

The script seems more concerned with keeping the tension cranked up to 11 than with advancing the plot in a meaningful way, or saying anything beyond, hey, there’s a lot of anger out there, you know? The film isn’t making an actual statement on police violence, as the police in the film respond to Abdel by saying they believe Idir’s killers were in fact far-right agitators wearing police uniforms to try to light the match and usher in some kind of race war; the uncertainty around that is enough to muddle the narrative even as it also casts Abdel’s choices in a different light.

The brothers are all Muslims, as are most of the residents of Athena, but the film does next to nothing with this information. This feels like a huge omission – the rights of Muslims in France remains a contentious issue, on top of decades of discrimination against Algerians, and Athena just ignores it. The police shown in the film are at least somewhat diverse, with Black and white officers, and of course Abdel as a Muslim officer, which could be fodder for multiple subthemes, but the movie can barely handle Abdel’s dual role as a cop and an Algerian resident of the Athena complex, with no energy left for anything else.

Even as an action movie, with plenty to recommend it on that score, Athena feels a bit like empty calories because it can’t stick the landing at all, choosing a slam-bang finish over a meaningful or even a sensible one. It’s just my inference, but I certainly thought the way the film ends indicated pretensions towards Shakespearean tragedy, but in this case, the tragic deaths are just not earned, not one of them. It just ends up aggravating you because you can’t help but feel like all that buildup was for nothing. It’s 80 minutes of a sugar rush and 20 minutes of insulin shock. For a film that starts with a ton of promise, and features some incredible cinematography and memorable shots, it ends in a disappointing fizzle.

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→ March 4, 2022
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Escape from Mogadishu.

The South Korean film industry has produced some remarkable, world-class films in the last few years, highlighted by Parasite, of course, but with Burning, The Handmaiden, Train to Busan, and more all earning critical acclaim and often significant followings outside of the Korean-speaking audience. So even when South Korea’s submission to the Academy Awards doesn’t make the shortlist, I try to catch it if possible, as I did with this year’s Escape from Mogadishu, a very strong, exciting action film based on the true story of how diplomats from South and North Korea worked together to escape Somalia when the country collapsed in 1991. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play.)

The film opens with scenes of intrigue, as the South Korean delegation to Somalia tries to curry favor with the African country’s longtime dictator, Sian Barre, against a similar effort by the North Korean diplomats as both nations fought for UN recognition. This early bickering and gamesmanship quickly becomes trivial as Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, falls to rebels, turning the city into a war zone as competing rebel factions fought each other and the remnants of the Somali national army, a civil war that engulfed the country and still has not entirely abated thirty years later. The two Korean missions were both stranded without transportation out of the country or ways to communicate with their parent countries, and the two groups decide to mount a daring escape together to get to the Italian embassy, as the Italians have promised them space on a cargo plane out to Kenya that will allow them to get home.  (You can read one of the diplomats’ recollections of the escape and his criticism of the movie in this English-language article.)

Escape from Mogadishu bounces around between genres in the first third or so of the movie, with some outright comedy, inept spycraft, and a general air of disdain for the scheming of the Cold War era, which makes it more incongruous when the movie follows actual events and becomes a straight-up action film – although this may be a deliberate choice to try to recreate the feeling of shock the diplomats, staffers, and family members must have had when the country fell apart around them. The last two-thirds of the movie are an intense, often relentless rush of movement and peril, punctuated by moments of humanity that arise between the two sides. There’s never the over-the-top recognition that you might expect in an American-made movie, where someone says ‘why can’t we all just get along’ or ‘we’re all the same’ or some other cliché, but the point here is quite clear, and only further underscores the human tragedy when the two groups can’t even acknowledge each other on the runway in Nairobi for fear of getting the North Koreans killed.

It’s an ensemble film and very much a group performance, but there are three more or less central characters, including the North Korean ambassador to Somalia (Heo Joon-ho), the South Korean ambassador (Kim Yoon-seok), and the South Korean intelligence officer (Jo In-sung), the last of whom is younger and far more dapper than the two ambassadors. Heo has earned wide praise for his performance as the strict North Korean leader, dressed in officer’s clothing with a taut military bearing, but who is also the leader of his group, and thus when he softens his attitude towards the South Koreans, his comrades are willing to do the same. Jo is the more memorable character, and gets some of the film’s funnier moments in the first third, but I can see the plaudits for Heo given the tighter reins around the character’s display of emotions. It all looks incredible – the re-creation of the city and the subsequent destruction of it as the civil war hits its streets is remarkable, and the filming of the final action sequence, with the two delegations packed into four cars trying to navigate the streets to get to the Italian consulate, is white-knuckles stuff all the way. I’m not shocked it didn’t make the shortlist for the Oscars, since it feels so much more like a big-budget, popular movie than the sort of film that usually makes the cut, but it’s a well-made film that executes its action scenes well, a sort of On Wings of Eagles or Argo for an even less well-known escape.

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→ February 11, 2020
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Ford v. Ferrari.

Ford v. Ferrari is a love letter to testosterone, and to boys playing with cars and getting mad at other boys who don’t want to let them play with their cars the way they want to play with those cars. It gets lazy in key places, with an antagonist who could have been written by a 10-year-old, played in an uncomfortably simpering manner throughout the film. It’s also kind of fun, if you want to dial back your brain for a few hours without turning it off completely, thanks in large part to the outstanding camera work that puts you right on the track in each of the film’s racing scenes. It just became available to rent via amazon and iTunes this morning.

Based on the outline of a true story, Ford v. Ferrari tracks two men, Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who find themselves recruited by the Ford Motor Company to build a race car capable of beating Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race. Ford executive Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) pitches this idea to Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) as a way to change the company’s image, and sells the scion on the plan to go out and find the best people to build that car and race under the Ford name. They run into opposition from the ambitious sycophant Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), who tries repeatedly to take control of the project or stymie it any way he can, but ultimately the Shelby/Miles duo do make that car and race it at Le Mans in 1966.

There’s so much wrong with this movie on a fundamental level, but that really wasn’t enough to stop me from enjoying just about all of it. Ford v. Ferrari is just fun. We caught it in a theater, so the sound and visuals of the races were very effective at putting us right on the track with Miles, whether it’s on various test tracks as they try to build the car or the actual races at Daytona and Le Mans when they do get out there. The three screenwriters punch up the race scenes with drama on and off the tracks, including decisions on how far to push Ford’s new GT engines (7000 rpm is pitched from the opening scene as a critical threshold) and disagreements between Shelby and Beebe on how to handle each race. There’s a fair amount of time between races in the script, from more internal drama to conversations about how best to build the car or handle the heavy wear on the brakes during a 24-hour race, but the scenes are generally short to keep the nearly 150-minute movie from flagging. For a movie of its length, it hums along without too much interruption … and have I mentioned how thrilling the race scenes are? I don’t even like car racing of any sort, but the sounds during the race sequences are so well done, which I suppose explains why Donald Sylvester won the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing for this film.

However, there’s a lot wrong under the hood here, starting with the portrayal of Beebe, a real person who did make the controversial decision to have the three Ford cars cross the finish line very close to each other (not simultaneously, as shown in the film) in 1966, a decision he long defended as borne of safety concerns rather than a photo op. (A friend of Beebe’s defended his legacy in this 2016 post, which has some details relevant to this film as well.) Beebe is the most one-dimensional, disposable antagonist you could conceive for the good ol’ boy Shelby and the English rebel Miles, and Lucas plays Beebe with an over-the-top, effeminate manner that contrasts poorly with all of the very masculine men who are just trying to build a better race car, gosh dang it. When Beebe isn’t sucking up to Ford II – and the very talented Letts is rather wasted in that role – he’s scheming to overthrow the project, or trying to pull one over on Shelby, who responds with frat-boy trickery to win the day.

There’s also one named female character in the entire film, Miles’ wife Mollie, whose name I had to look up just now because she’s not that significant in the story itself. Played by Caitriona Balfe, Mollie is there to alternately support and argue with Ken, to worry a lot while he’s racing, to get mad over unpaid bills, and to wear sundresses. I’m not all about the Bechdel test, but whoa boy, does Ford v. Ferrari flunk that.

The film was nominated for Best Picture, which feels like a stretch to me – it’s an extremely enjoyable movie, but I’d have a hard time thinking of it as ‘great’ in the Best Picture sense. Its other nominations were all easier to understand – Sound Editing, for which It won; Sound Mixing, and Film Editing. It didn’t get a screenplay nod, and director James Mangold wasn’t nominated. Neither lead actor was nominated either, although Bale is excellent as Miles and would have been more deserving of a Supporting Actor nod than Anthony Hopkins. If it wasn’t good enough to get screenplay, directing, or acting nominations, what is the probability that it was one of the nine best movies of the year? Give that spot to The Farewell, or Knives Out, or any of several foreign films nominated, and let Ford v. Ferrari be what it is: a much smarter than normal action film/buddy movie with some truly thrilling car-racing scenes.

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→ October 16, 2017
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Baby Driver.

Baby Driver (available to rent now on amazon and iTunes) was among the most anticipated films of the summer, and was released to solid reviews and an enthusiastic box office, clearing $100 million domestically and over $200 million worldwide. It very much looks like a movie, with actors, dialogue, set pieces, and something like a story. But it’s really an extended series of music videos, loosely stitched together by some semblance of a plot, and if you took the music out you’d just have Bad Boys 6 featuring Jon Hamm.

The main character is a driver named Baby (Ansel Elgort), and he can really drive. When he was still little, he was in the back seat of his parents’ car when they were arguing and ended up slamming into the truck in front of them, killing his parents and somehow leading him to a life of boosting cars and driving them like a champion stunt driver – but he can only drive while listening to music, and he has an iPod and a playlist for each day of the week (or something like that). He stole the Wrong Guy’s car one day, and ended up driving for that guy, Doc (Kevin Spacey), to repay his debt. The movie lets us know after the first heist that Baby just has to do One More Job and he’s “square” with Doc, after which he intends to do something not illegal. He also meets a waitress, Debra (Lily James, looking adorable), and they improbably fall in love despite spending almost no time together, but of course Doc isn’t willing to just let his best driver go – and the next caper is the one that goes wrong.

The movie is bookended by three chase scenes – two at the start, one at the end – that, if you like a good car chase, are tremendously fun to watch. They’re well choreographed and well shot, and Elgort is more than up to the task of showing steel-faced resolve behind the wheel while everyone else in the car is generally freaking out. But everything else about this movie is some exponential power of dumb. Baby records conversations he has with others and remixes them into amateurish home electronica, a habit that is both inexplicable and incredibly stupid, since he’s recording conversations he has with known criminals. With the exception of Hamm’s Buddy, the criminals themselves are caricatures, none more so than Bats (Jamie Foxx), who seems to be going out of his way at all times to let us know how crazy and unpredictable he is (which, in its own way, makes him utterly predictable). The scene with the arms dealer called The Butcher – a welcome cameo by songwriter/actor Paul Williams, playing thoroughly against type – is a complete mess, hinging on Doc failing to tell his crew a rather pertinent detail about the transaction. And throughout the movie, people get shot without any apparent pain or difficulty getting back up and returning fire.

That’s not to say that Baby Driver isn’t fun, because at many points, it is a blast. The car chases are fantastic. The script has some great lines and sight gags, often silly but frequently funny. The visual style throughout the film is arresting, no pun intended, especially during the first heist when Buddy, his wife Darling (Eiza González, wearing skintight clothes and not doing much else), and Griff move in tandem as they exit the car and approach the bank they’re about to rob. The scene opens the film and gives that music-video vibe that director/writer Edgar Wright just can’t maintain through the rest of the movie.

And boy is the rest of the movie a mess. The story is a lot of nothing, with plot conveniences strewn everywhere to keep it moving. The characters are mostly nothing; only Buddy has a hint of an interesting back story, and Hamm manages to turn the character into a credible antagonist. Elgort is solid as Baby, but not given a ton to do; the only scenes where the character shows a little depth are with his deaf, wheelchair-bound foster father, who unfortunately is more prop than anything else in the film. Doc is a parody of a caricature of a crime boss; Spacey’s performance here is indistinguishable from his work in those e-Trade commercials. The film really sputters out at the end, as if Wright couldn’t figure out how to end the story without killing everyone off, giving us a closing sequence that feels tacked on, incongruent, and very much like the end of some epic music video. Wright can certainly put together a good driving playlist, but he might have done better to ask someone else to help him write the story.

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→ January 11, 2013
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Django Unchained.

I was busy yesterday, with a Klawchat and the Baseball Today podcast, the latter featuring my interview with Nate Silver, who denies being a witch. Those followed my ranking of the top 25 players under 25, which went up yesterday morning and requires an Insider membership.

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I went into Django Unchained with somewhat limited expectations: I’m not a Tarantino fanboy by any stretch, and the two most frequent comments I’d heard about this film were that it was too long and too violent. It is violent, although nearly all of it is of the cartoonish variety, with just one scene that I would have cropped or eliminated. It’s long at 165 minutes, but aside from that one scene there’s virtually no fat to trim. It’s also clever, funny, sentimental almost to sappiness, righteously angry, and borderline absurd – a glorious alternate-history revenge fantasy that lacks the broad scope of Inglorious Basterds‘ vengeance but gives us the titular character as a stronger protagonist to exact retribtution on behalf of his race.

Django (a perpetually seething Jamie Foxx) begins the movie in chains, one of a group of recently-purchased slaves who are being led through a dark, dare-I-say mysterious forest by two white brothers, when they are miraculously intercepted by Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, who scored a Best Supporting Actor nod for the role), a dentist-turned-bounty-hunter who, as it happens, is looking specifically for Django. His incredible fortune in finding this caravan without a GPS is never quite explained, nor is the fact that Django, who ends up joining Schultz in the bounty-hunting business, is a preternaturally accurate shot with virtually any sort of firearm.

The two hunt down a few targets before turning to the task of rescuing Django’s wife Brunhilda (Kerry Washington, who has two jobs, to look pretty and act scared, and does fairly well at both) from the unctuous plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, chewing scenery like it’s a cud). Candie likes to buy and train slaves for “Mandingo fighting,” a human equivalent to cockfighting with no historical basis in fact but which is named as an allusion to the 1975 blaxploitation film Mandingo, which Tarantino has cited as a favorite of his. (He also honors another blaxploitation film with Brunhilda’s white surname, Von Schaft.) Django and Schultz claim to be slavers interested in buying a slave for use in Mandingo fighting, all as a pretense for seeing and buying Brunhilda on the cheap. Only the head house-slave, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson, playing this traitor to his race to the hilt), has any inkling that something is amiss.

Tarantino has figured out the way to tell a good slavery joke: Make the white people involved the joke’s targets. The various slaveowners and white lackeys are all odious in various ways, but Tarantino infuses them with comic weaknesses that he proceeds to exploit, most successfully in the absurd scene where a Klan raid breaks down because the white bags they are using as masks have eyeholes that don’t allow the riders to see properly. Quick yet florid dialogue that is obviously absurd yet can sound real enough to work for the audience is a difficult trick to pull off, yet Django‘s dialogue never broke that suspension of disbelief for me, and Tarantino’s script concludes with a flurry of self-referential lines that build on the humor of the first times the lines were delivered.

That same suspension of disbelief didn’t quite hold as well for the violence, largely because Tarantino appears to believe that human bodies are 98% blood, with perhaps some sort of light exoskeleton that keeps us from turning into landlocked jellyfish. Aside from one murder near the film’s end that evoked raucous laughter in the theater – I’m including myself in that – the extent of the splattering was a distraction, and appeared to be Tarantino just exuding in the fact that, yeah, he can take a tense shootout and make it so gross that it breaks the tension because the splashes are louder than the gunshots. The non-gun violence in the film was more disturbing and generally more effective at ratcheting up our hatred for the white folk Django will eventually target, because of the degree to which this violence, from torture to murder, shows the extent to which these whites view blacks as something less than human.

Tarantino’s last film made Nazis its targets, because, of course, who doesn’t love watching a Nazi get what’s coming to him? With slavery and racism at the heart of Django, however, Tarantino wanders into more dangerous emotional territory with the film’s heavy use of the n-word and with the depiction of some blacks as complicit in their own subjugation. The use of what is today a nasty racial epithet but was, in 1858-59, a common term for African-Americans, didn’t bother me because it is grounded in historical accuracy; I don’t want to see the term removed from Huckleberry Finn or the wandering Jew scrubbed from The Scarlet Pimpernel either, because they are monuments to the racial or ethnic attitudes of their times. But I imagine the role of Stephen as a black slave who, in return for privileges he’s been granted by a serious of owners, takes on the role of overseer of the house slaves, betraying his race and contributing to institutionalized racism, will make many viewers uncomfortable, even as it becomes clear that Stephen is doing so not from ignorance but from a clear strategy of self-preservation. Candie even delivers a speech in the film that argues that blacks didn’t fight back because of neurological inferiority, but we can dismiss that as the outdated racialist thinking of one of the film’s most hateful characters. Stephen is much harder to hand-wave away.

Waltz’ performance as Dr. Schultz could very easily win him his second Oscar as Best Supporting Actor, and his character has the most difficult development in the film, with subtle changes in his attitudes toward slavery from academic detachment to emotional involvement that lead to the film’s slam-bang finish. Foxx’s barely-contained rage gains articulacy through the film, but as strong as his performance was, it had a hint of one-note to it that might explain why he was overlooked in the Best Actor category. DiCaprio, normally such a strong actor in any sort of role, brings a bizarre flamboyancy to the role, starting with the overplayed deep-south accent and continuing with the vaguely incestuous flirting with his widowed sister, herself a cipher of a character despite a fair amount of screen time. Jackson worked with the most difficult material as Stephen, the Uncle Tom of the Candie estate (unironically referred to as “Candieland”), and he dominates most of his scenes between his stentorian delivery, impossible to hide even behind his character’s duplicitous yes-massah stammerings, and a glare so searing that it at one point reduces Brunhilda to tears. His appearance in the film’s second half transforms the movie from straight revenge fantasy to a somewhat more complex study of slavery through a conflict between African-American characters, one that doesn’t delivery any answers but provides a thought-provoking component to the film that would have been absent had we just been following Django around on a justified killing spree.

Revenge fantasies themselves, given the proper targets, can be superficially satisfying but will lack any kind of staying power beyond the closing credits and can leave the viewer feeling slightly empty the way he might after, say, wiping out a package of Oreos. I have little interest in a straight exploitation film, which I feared Django might be based on some early word-of-mouth, especially regarding the copious quantities of blood involved, but the film was both far funnier and more incisive than I anticipated. Tarantino could have stuck with cartoon violence and avoided any hints at the barbarism of slavery, but he took the hard way, with various scenes of brutal treatment, all presented without the sensationalism of the shootouts and made more effective through that contrast. The camera lingers on bodies spurting a quart of blood for every bullet, but when a slave is branded, the scene is truncated, and when a slave is torn apart by dogs, it’s shown so obliquely that the violence is largely implied – and those latter scenes are the ones that matter. Only the fight scene between the two “Mandingos” broke this rule, and deserved a major edit, but otherwise Django makes excellent use of its running length to entertain its audience in a thoughtful way.

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→ October 8, 2012
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Looper.

I loved Rian Johnson’s debut film, the neo-noir detective story Brick, which starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a precocious student trying to solve a murder in his cliquey, drug-addled high school, a film driven by punctuated, subtle dialogue, riding instead on the film’s core mystery and the tremendous charisma Gordon-Levitt brought to the lead role. Johnson’s newest film, the time-travel action flick Looper, also stars Gordon-Levitt, and once again leans heavily on how much he can bring to a role in which his lines are limited and his character’s personality is understated. But where Brick aimed fairly small, an indie film paying homage to a genre by nearly parodying it, Looper aimes huge, tackling standard time-travel conundrums while also getting after some of the general moral questions that a time-travel storyline will inevitably pose.

Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a “looper” who, in the year 2044, serves as a hit man for a crime syndicate that sends targets back from the year 2074 – in which year time travel has been invented and made illegal, so it’s only used by organized crime groups. A looper stands at an isolated place, blunderbuss in hand, and the moment a bound and gagged victim winks into their present time, blows him away. Eventually, the future employers will end the contract by sending the looper’s future self back, with gold bars strapped to his back (in lieu of the standard silver), “closing the loop.” As it turns out, the head of that crime syndicate in the future, known only as the Rainmaker, is closing all of the loops, so we know fairly early on that Joe will be confronted by his thirty-year-older self, played by Bruce Willis, and will, in one reality, let him live (since otherwise the movie would be more of a short film). As it turns out, Future Joe has reasons for wanting to come back, with eliminating the Rainmaker before he rises to power at the top of the list. Present Joe ends up in the middle of this battle, primarily opposed to his future self but conflicted by what remains of his conscience and by the fact that he’s pursued by the 2044 arm of the syndicate that employs him.

Time-travel stories in general are difficult to plot because of, no pun intended, the loops the writer must close: The connections between cause and effect are much more clearly laid out on screen, and loops left open or closed improperly are fodder for criticism and mockery from sharper viewers. Johnson’s script here limits the number of such loops he opens, and he’s extremely meticulous about maintaining the film’s internal logic, even at the risk of potentially clueing viewers in to the film’s eventual resolution. (Once it was over, I realized I’d missed one fairly strong clue.) This tight writing bears many other gifts for the viewer, such as the scene where Joe and his future self sit down for coffee and breakfast – left uneaten, which I have to say always annoys me when I see it on screen – in which Future Joe explains how he can remember Present Joe’s actions as they happen.

Emily Blunt is extremely compelling – not to mention incredibly gorgeous – in her supporting role as Sarah, the mother of one of the candidates on Future Joe’s hit list, and the woman who takes Present Joe in while he’s on the run from the syndicate. Five-year-old Pierce Gagnon is incredible in his role as Cid, Sarah’s son, articulate beyond most kids his age and able to manipulate his emotions as an adult actor would. Jeff Daniels is brilliant, by turns hilarious and menacing, as the syndicate’s main representative and local kingpin in 2044 – but one of his gunsels, played by Noah Segan (who played Dode in Brick), was mostly a waste of time, not developed enough to have an intriguing storyline, and scarcely necessary to the main plot. Piper Perabo plays a stripper because we just couldn’t have an action film unless there’s at least one woman walking around topless, and she’s maybe the fourth-best looking woman in the movie anyway. (Her character is about as irrelevant as Segan’s.) And there’s a fair amount of over-the-top violence across the film, which may seem like an odd complaint with a hit man and, well, the same hit man as the main characters, but when you see the movie you’ll probably know which parts I mean.

Looper has also spawned a fair amount of analysis online of its internal time-travel logic, with Johnson himself going on record (here and here) to discuss some of its mysteries, including the possible infinite loop created by the film’s ending. That kind of intensive commentary can be a function of poor writing, of course, but in this case I think it’s largely to Johnson’s credit that he can answer most of these questions and yet managed to leave so much extraneous material out of the film, helping maintain some of the mystery until the final fifteen minutes. What starts out as a psychological thriller branches out into both an action film and a morality story on the importance, of all things, of strong parenting, with enough suspense to keep you hooked even if you figure out some or all of where the film is going. It’s far more clever than your typical mainstream action or sci-fi movie, skipping the naked sentimentality of the similarly ambitious Inception without aiming any lower in its plot.

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→ August 23, 2011
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Inception.

Inception is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets Ocean’s Eleven with a few sequences directed by Michael Bay – in other words, a heist movie that involves sneaking into someone else’s dreams, but with lots of guns and blowing shit up. The first two parts are clever and pretty tightly done, but the movie’s gradual devolution as the heist progresses, combined with a hero/antihero protagonist, cut off the film’s upside for me.

Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is an expert “extractor,” a mercenary spy who can infiltrate the dreams of other people and extract critical information. Cobb and his partner in crime, Arthur (an impressive turn by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) employ a dream-within-a-dream trick as their specialty but fail to extract information from Saito, a Japanese executive who then hires them for the biggest job of their careers – an “inception,” or planting a new idea in the target’s mind rather than extracting an existing one. Cobb returns to his father-in-law, who originally trained him in the field, to hire a new dream architect, (Ellen Page, largely wasted as a prop whose “architect” skills come up once in the final heist), and then travels to Kenya to add a chemist (Dileep Rao) who prepares the powerful sedatives used to put the target to sleep, also allowing for a crazy and somewhat pointless chase scene. When the team is assembled and begins attempting to extract the information, however, they encounter two problems: The target has been trained to fight potential extraction, and Cobb himself isn’t fully capable of leading the mission.

Neither my wife nor I found the plot confusing – everything’s pretty clearly explained, but never at such length that you want to go get a cup of coffee till they finish – but the very short cuts in the final third of the movie are incredibly distracting, and a horrible choice of colors made the final battle within the target’s mind impossible to watch. For some reason, that final dream level takes place in what looks like a military facility in a tundra, and everyone – team members and the armed “defenders” who are projections of the target’s subconscous – is dressed in white, usually with hats or hoods up. Other than Ellen Page, whose long hair identified her, everyone else looked alike.

Other decisions with the visual and sound effects brought far more benefits to the finished product. When the characters are falling in the first dream level, they lose gravity in the second, meaning Arthur first must fight the defenders in zero-G conditions (I cannot imagine how much fun that was for Levitt to film) and then concoct a solution to wake his comrades up without the benefit of an in-dream “kick” (usually a fall). The team also uses music to signal an imminent kick within the multiple layers of the dream, and the use of ever slower music the deeper the dream-level helped build tension while also clarifying the varying speeds of time within each dream.

The film seems to skirt the major problem with its central character – that is, that Cobb is no hero, but actually a selfish ass. He takes his team into a high-risk venture where the main reward is primarily his and the risk to the remaining team members is terrifying. He doesn’t inform his team that he’s having a technical problem that has a significant negative impact on their chances of success. Even within the mission, his personal motivation to reach the goal causes him to stay on course even when the risk of failure is increasing. We have to root for Cobb to succeed because he has two young kids at home who have lost their mother and have no immediate hope of seeing their father, but that alone can’t whitewash the fact that he’s put four other people at great risk to achieve his own personal ends.

Of course, the main question about Inception is how to interpret the ending – once again, spoiler alert – although my wife and I both found it fairly unambiguous; her remark after the film was that she was “waiting for the big twist” that never came. The director, Christopher Nolan, has refused to clarify the ending, stating instead that the important part is not whether the final scene represents reality or a constructed dream, but that Cobb has chosen this scenario as his reality, to leave his fugitive life behind and “return” to his children. He’s also pointed out that parents who see the movie are far more likely to accept the concluding scene as reality than non-parents because of our deep desire to see Cobb and his children reunited, which is undoubtedly true. However, we both felt that the only hint of ambiguity in that final scene was the fact that the camera goes black as Cobb’s totem wobbles but before it falls – and unless you want to argue that it’s a dream where Cobb has altered physics but didn’t show it to us until that very point, I don’t see how the totem wobbles without eventually falling. (I admit it was a visually arresting shot, however.) Had Nolan wanted to make it truly ambiguous, he could have ended the film before the kids turned to see Cobb, which would have made it consistent with his other dream-states in the film. Nolan took care of some superficial stuff to try to create confusion, like keeping the kids in similar clothes (although in different shoes), but somewhere along the line, there was a decision to give the ending a little bit of Hollywoodization so the audience at least gets the cathartic moment of Cobb and his kids reunited, but for us that airbrushing pushed the ending past any question of whether it was real.

I’m shifting my standards slightly here, however, to the detriment of Inception; by the standards of mainstream Hollywood films, Inception was intelligent and thoughtful, well-acted, and sharp-looking. But if you remove the frippery of rampant gunfire and chases and the sentimental ending, there’s a smarter movie underneath that had an action film grafted on to it – a successful commercial decision that kept the film from reaching its full artistic potential.

If you like the concept of entering another’s dreams or thoughts, check out the film I mentioned in the first paragraph, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the two or three best movies I’ve ever seen, where two ex-lovers attempt to forget each other by having their memories of their relationships professionally erased – until one changes his mind during the procedure.

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→ August 21, 2011
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two.

I’m mixed on the final installment in the Harry Potter film series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two. On the one hand, it was pretty true to the book, including a number of key sequences, plot points, and quotes, without feeling terribly rushed about it. On the other hand, it doesn’t stand well on its own – it is very clearly the second half of a film, not a complete film in its own right – and the pacing that worked fine on the printed page proved very uneven on the screen.

Harry has to jump through specific hoops to get to the final, climactic battle with Voldemort, and J.K. Rowling made sure to get several of his friends in on the action in that melee, although for some reason Ginny was barely present in this half of the movie. Some of those hoops don’t translate terribly well to the screen, or just lacked the necessary contest of the books, but the film jumps back and forth between action scenes and Harry’s more cerebral quests, creating pacing issues but also keeping the film from becoming incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the story. (That is, those are the good guys, those are the bad guys, they’re fighting. Everyone can grasp that much.) The battle sequences often seemed cut off by the need to get Harry back on screen, though, meaning it didn’t have the same intensity as part one, which remains the best of the eight films if we view these two parts separately.

The staccato cuts also mean that none of the actors beyond Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) gets to stretch out much, meaning we get more mugging and less acting from some outstanding performers. Helena Bonham-Carter looks certifiable as Bellatrix Lestrange but is largely left making faces at everyone, while Alan Rickman – as central to the success of the films as anyone outside of the three main characters – might end up hoping for a Judi Dench exemption if he wanted a Best Supporting actor nomination. I wrote in my review of part one that Rupert Grint and Emma Watson had shown substantial growth as actors, but here they’re reduced to bit players, and the development of their relationship earns little screen time and scarcely any explanation.

The movie looks amazing, both in scenery and in special effects, with the initial attack by the Death Eaters on Hogwarts the effects highlight of the series. (That scene was preceded by a necessary yet too-short return for Dame Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall.) Rowling has always been one of my favorite authors for the depth of her descriptions, and the films have lived up to the prose in sights and sounds, including some of the more difficult settings like the goblin bank Gringott’s.

But that Gringott’s scene encapsulates why I found this second half somewhat unsatisfying. It looked the part. Everyone involved in the scene did his or her job. But there was so much time spent on setup and so little on the climax of the scene that even though you saw them escape (and do quite a bit of damage along the way), the escape doesn’t stick with you as much as the setup does. I can tell you how it looked, and the tension of the scene before the betrayal, but what happened after that didn’t have the same power.

I mentioned half-jokingly the possibility of Alan Rickman getting an Oscar nomination for his role as Severus Snape, one of the meatiest roles outside of the big three across the series. The films themselves were not Oscar-worthy, but knowing the Academy’s penchant for honoring successful series as they close, I did wonder if they’d throw one nomination at someone in the film just to acknowledge the series’ existence. (That is, something beyond a technical award or an award for costumes or design.) Rickman would be my choice, since Daniel Radcliffe would have a difficult time cracking the competitive Best Actor field. Helena Bonham-Carter was convincingly crazy, but she’s barely in the movie and her part was too thin to be award material. Then again, they nominate so many films for Best Picture that perhaps the academy will shoehorn Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two into that category as they did with Toy Story 3: we hope you feel like it’s an honor to be nominated, because we have no intention of actually giving you the award.

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→ December 20, 2010
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One – the seventh Potter film, covering the first half of the final book of the series– is by far the best Harry Potter movie yet, with better acting, better effects, and, most importantly, much better pacing so there’s no more feeling that we’re racing through the story (while hitting as many fun details as possible) to get to the ending before the 180-minute mark.

The pacing results from the overdue decision to split any of the Potter books into two movies, rather than to pack one of Rowling’s detail-dense stories into a fairly short movie. Five of the six previous screenplays took the same tack: Try to make the movie look as much as possible as the depiction in Rowling’s text, adding in the most fun or memorable details, while skimping on back story and compressing or omitting key plot points. The exception was the third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, directed by Y Tu Mamá También director Alfonso Cuarón, who went after the spirit of the book rather than just another faithful yet rote translation. The Gothic look and more rational pacing produced a film that was watchable even if you weren’t immersed in the Potter mythology with imagery that stuck with me long after the film was over.

Deathly Hallows Part One takes its time getting through what is still a dense 400-odd pages of text, assuming that by now you know the back story, ripping through a very tight, effective, emotional intro sequence to set up the almost immediate jump into action-film territory – and there is a lot of action in the movie. There are several major fight and/or chase sequences, and since you know Harry can’t die in this film (there’s a Part Two already on the schedule, which is sort of a clue), developing true tension when he’s in peril comes down to timing on the parts of both the director and the actors. The more natural pacing of the film also helped, as I could sink more into the story as opposed the arm’s-length perspective of the earlier films, where things happened so quickly and without explanation that my investment in the underlying plot was never very deep.

The stars of this film, as in the book, are Harry, Ron, and Hermione, getting their greatest chance to stretch out as actors and succeeding across the board. The acting in the earlier films in the series was often paint-by-numbers – parts were handed out based on appearances, or the fun of having a big star appear in a role, with the actual performances secondary. Rupert Grint (Ron) was probably the best actor of the young troika at the start, but Emma Watson has made the most strides as an actress from start to finish, to the point where she’s able to carry a few scenes in this film.

(Unrelated to the film, I’ve been very impressed with how Watson has handled herself and her career over the last few months, setting an example for taking control of your life and your work that more young women, famous or not, could follow. Watson has made an aggressive move into the fashion arena and attached herself to a bleeding-edge cause, fair-trade clothing – an uncontroversial affiliation, but one that’s several steps beyond where the public consciousness is on fair-trade anything right now. Given the vicissitudes of the film industry and the short times in the limelight for many young actors and actresses, this looks like a savvy business move to extend her personal brand and increase her own control over her career.

And then there’s the hair. I can’t remember the last time a non-insanity-induced change in hairstyle produced such a reaction – Jennifer Aniston on Friends? – but Watson’s decision to cut off her locks in favor of a pixie cut seems like more than just standard-issue rebellion, but a retaking of her own image distinct from that of the only character she’s played on the big screen to date. Again, there’s control at work; Watson described doing it on the sly, but as a planned, thoughtful move, as opposed to, say, showing up in an airport barbershop and shaving her own head. It helps to be cute enough to pull off such a short haircut, but as a way to transform her image on the fly and make positive headlines for something unrelated to the Potter film – although I’m sure Warner Brothers was thrilled for the added bit of publicity around the time of the film’s release – looks to me like a shrewd maneuver that establishes her as her own boss while promoting her careers in film and in fashion.

The risk of pigeonholing is huge for the handful of actors who played the kids in the Potter films – this Collider interview with Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) gets at that issue as well – and the only practical solution is for the actors to take control of and develop their own brands independent of the characters to whom they’re so closely tied. It looks like Watson is doing so aggressively and intelligently, staking out territory for herself beyond acting; tying herself to a good, underplayed social issue; and stating unequivocally that her image is hers, not Warner Brothers’ or Hermione Granger’s or anyone else’s. In a world where young actresses and celebrities typically make headlines for bad or even self-destructive behavior, I worry about being able to show my daughter positive role models beyond those in our immediate circle – women who still bring the natural appeal of celebrity but are also smart, successful, and responsible. So far, at least, it looks like Watson is on her way to becoming that kind of person, and if that helps her achieve her own career goals, it’s just a virtuous circle where everyone benefits.

That said, I’m guessing that, like Watson’s father, I will someday be quite upset when my own daughter decides to cut off her curls.)

Daniel Radcliffe had settled comfortably into the Harry role a few films ago, and despite the fact that he’s front and center for almost the entire film, he has very little latitude within the role – he’s usually being chased, being attacked, or attacking someone else. He gets a bit of comic relief up front when various Order of the Phoenix members take Polyjuice Potion to resemble him, and there’s a fun (and apparently improvised) scene where he dances with Hermione to relieve the tension after a spat with Ron. Rumor has it that the Harry/Voldemort confrontation is even larger in Part Two than it was in the book, so I’m hopeful we’ll get to see more of Radcliffe’s range when he’s not under assault.

That comic relief I mentioned is necessary in a film that’s dark and foreboding and filled with action and mayhem, as well as two deaths of named characters. They don’t feel forced, but comfortable, similar to the scene in Prisoner of Azbakan when the Weasley twins intercept Harry while he’s wearing his invisibility cloak. (And this would be a fine time to point out that the actors playing the twins, James and Oliver Phelps, have been criminally underutilized throughout the series of films. Oliver, playing George, has a hilarious moment in this most recent film where he doesn’t speak a word, but just stands against a kitchen counter with a cup of coffee in hand.) That relatively seamless quality has been lacking throughout the series; often it would seem like a joke was inserted because it was a highlight of the book and the screenwriter couldn’t omit it even if it didn’t flow with what preceded and followed it.

The scenery in the film is remarkable, both indoors and out. I was sure they’d shot some of the film in New Zealand given how much it reminded me of parts of the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but Wikipedia (which we know is never wrong) says it was all shot in the United Kingdom; if someone in London is paying attention, they’ll use footage from the film in future U.K. Tourism adverts, because many of the landscape shots are breathtaking. The Ministry of Magic, which you’ve seen before, remains one of the crowing achievements of Harry Potter set design with its mix of mundane (seemingly century-old elevators) and magical. The Malfoy mansion represents the best in abanoned-property chic, dark, desolate, and appropriately eerie. Even the Lovegood shack is – as so much in the films has been – strikingly like Rowling’s descriptions.

As a part one of two, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One ends without full resolution, but doesn’t seem the least bit unfinished, nor does its status has half of a greater whole hang over the film in any way. There’s a gradual crescendo that will certainly accelerate in Part Two, but the longer format means we get more meaning, more detail, better dialogue, and more chance for several actors – notably Grint and Watson – to stretch out. I’ve watched the first six Potter movies out of a sort of obligation, but the success of this film has me avidly looking forward to the finale.

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→ February 26, 2008
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Eastern Promises and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Continuing with our recent theme of praising understatement in television/cinema, Eastern Promises delivers a similarly un-Hollywood thriller filled with complex characters and a small number of pivotal plot twists, with plenty of ambiguity to keep the viewer thinking, although a slightly coincidence-driven denouement did detract somewhat from the brilliance of the preceding 80 minutes.

Eastern Promises stars Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the tough, stoic, possibly psychotic driver for a Russian organized crime family in London. A teenaged girl connected to that family ends up dying while giving birth in a hospital with midwife Anna (Naomi Watts), who is of Russian descent, attending. But what appears to be – and was marketed as – a straight-up thriller where Anna ends up chased by the mob because of what she knows about the dead girl turns instead into a series of interconnected threads around shifting loyalties within the crime family. Nikolai and Anna are well-drawn, complex characters, revealed in layers as the film goes on, as is Kirill, Nikolai’s boss and the son of the crime family’s patriarch. Even into the final scenes, we’re still learning about these characters.

Mortensen was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, which was superb and utterly convincing, although I didn’t really see how any of us benefited from seeing him naked during the film’s major (and ultra-tense) fight scene. Watts was also superb in her role, and I was impressed by the filmmakers’ decision to dress her down for the entire film – her hair and especially her makeup were appropriate to the role, and while Watts is unspeakably pretty even without makeup, she was credible for the way she was presented.

The film’s ending, however, hinges on a misjudgment and a coincidence to lead to the climactic scene, which I can only imagine the scriptwriter envisioned first and had to work backwards to lead the characters to that place and situation. The misjudgment revolves around the unstated assumption that the hospital would not have a vial or two of the baby’s blood around, which strikes me as unlikely. The coincidence, the one sloppy bit of scriptwriting in the entire movie, revolves around Anna leaving the hospital just as Kirill arrives. A few seconds either way and the final scene never happens. The improbability of it all cracks the veneer of belief the film creates to that point, although the resolution itself is strong enough to complete the storyline and provide sufficient cover for the film’s few, minor lapses.

—

The Bourne Ultimatum is anything but understated. It’s an American-style – or perhaps just a Hollywood-style – thriller with unambiguously drawn characters, clear good guy/bad guy delineation, and enough action to make you momentarily forget the empty-calorie plot.

The first film in the series, The Bourne Identity, had surprising meat on it because of the title character’s identity crisis: He doesn’t remember who he is and doesn’t know his capabilities, then as he learns how skilled he is, he doesn’t know how he became that way. By now, we’re fully aware of who Jason Bourne is and what he can do, so there’s no more surprise when he busts out a new foreign language or escapes from an impossible situation. There’s some cleverness to the setups in The Bourne Ultimatum, and I won’t deny that it was exciting, but it’s not a good movie so much as a good movie for its genre.

Incidentally, Matt Damon reversed course and has now signed on to appear in a fourth installment of the series, which will give Julia Stiles a chance to stand around and look pretty some more, a task for which she seems rather well qualified.

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