READY PLAYER ONE: Remember When….

 

 

Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg, 2018)

One of the mollifying aspects of nostalgia, which has taken a strong grip on American culture of late, especially as we all cope with exponential advancements of technology and the constant bombardment of media from streaming services, is that it provides a recess from the fast-paced media-driven craze of today’s world. It allows us to dive back into a time when everything just seemed quieter. It’s rather ironic then that Ready Player One is so high-octane and exhausting. The movie is a pop-culture junkie’s version of snorting three lines of cocaine. For some, that’s a high. For others, it’s another instantly gratifying entertainment that provides no lasting value. I feel somewhere in between these two extremes.

The film’s most interesting aspect is in its mythologization of James Halliday, the OASIS’s creator. His character essentially mirrors the way nostalgia has evolved in internet culture. It starts off as a fond personal memory of cultural markers which shaped us, especially those “nerds” such as Halliday, as adults.  But once internet culture got a grip of nostalgia it turned into something weird and malformed. Its personal weight started to lessen. It flattened into a 2D stream of a million different “references” whizzing by your eyes with each click. Halliday’s OASIS is filled with his favorite media references when he was a kid, but they’re so vast and they exist in such quantity and velocity within the game that they don’t register as anything other tokens of remembrance. The OASIS, as a virtual reality program, is the physical written and produced manifestation of an “Only 80’s/90’s Kids Will Remember This!” meme that you see re-posted on Twitter every day.

The underlying darkness of the film’s social commentary occurs as we, along with the central characters, discover the clues that tie together Halliday’s life. His obsession with his own past, the pop culture remnants of his childhood as well as the devastating regrets he had as a person, descends into unhealthy levels as more is revealed. At the end of the film, after Wade wins the game, Wade Watts is transported to Halliday’s childhood bedroom, where he speaks with him. It’s not enough that the film suggests Halliday was so possessed by a long-gone past that he downloaded his own conscience into his video game (Wade asks, “you’re not a hologram are you?”), but that Halliday also keeps a younger version of himself alongside for company.

The lack of fulfillment in Halliday’s life forced him to retreat to an era where he felt he was his best self, his happiest self, so much so that he kept that version of himself near him at all times. In small doses, these moments of escape provide mental balance and a harmonious re-connection to where we came from. But the further we are dedicated to constantly holding onto what used to be, in pop culture, politics, social ideas, anything, the less we find ourselves dedicated to progress. In the end of the film, Wade decides to change the way the OASIS works. His final statement declares that people need to spend time outside and in the “real world”. This is as deep a cut as Spielberg has possibly ever made on American society.  Spielberg’s ability to elevate the shallow and lazy self-satisfied geekdom of the novel into an actual discussion of nostalgia’s effect on human memory and its toll on us, is what makes him one of America’s greatest filmmakers.

That Movie Awards Thing is Tonight

 

The Oscars are not the Super Bowl for movies. They’re the Pro Bowl for movies. They are a conglomerate of what “certain people” deem to be the cream of the crop Hollywood cinema that year and present them in a fun but ultimately meaningless competition that has no real intrinsic value beyond increasing the brand of an actor or filmmaker or other artist and exposing some worthy (and many unworthy) films to a wider audience that may have not at first thought of watching them. When someone says a movie has won Oscars, it means something to people who casually enjoy movies once in a while.

And as always, the discourse on the Oscars is hilarious and frustrating:

I’ve been using twitter a lot more than any other social media outlet because it gives the most information and interaction at a faster rate than any other (non-forum) place on the internet. Sure, it’s a brain-melting hell-hole, but we’re all going to die from nuclear radiation or overheating at some point in our lives anyway so might as well be reckless and fun in the process.

So here are 5 Twitter-related things that are DEFINITELY going to happen during the Oscars Broadcast:

1. Trump is going to tweet while he has diarrhea from the 5 Big Macs and 3 Fish Filet sandwiches he ate for his afternoon snack. Alpha Male. This is a given. Our mayonnaise-filled glazed ham president is a showman above anything else and the one thing he is terrified of is other people showing him up. This happens on the regular in government, but it gets under his skin the most during the Oscars because he has no way of regulating it. Deep down, he actually wants to be there, with all those beautiful people in their beautiful outfits. For everyone who voted for Trump who thinks once he gets out of office he’s going to live the life of a blue-collar conservative on a farm in Kansas… buddy, his toilet it made of solid gold. And knowing the neoliberal cretins who run the Academy, you’ll see Trump on TV smiling at the Oscars once his term is over. Trust me.

 

2. The jokes are going to be bad. I don’t understand why they make non-comedic actors who present awards like “Best Costume Design” do joke skits while presenting. They’re not good.  The actors don’t even fucking memorize their lines (I still can’t believe this) so they have to read a teleprompter while delivering the punchline that we’ve already heard from some weird ass twitter account called “OsamaBinBallin69420” or something. Yeah, ok, we get it, the woman fucked a fish in The Shape of Water. I wish they just had a separate broadcast which only played the actual nominees and winners being announced and everything else is just replaced by a scene from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread.

 

3. Tomi Lahren is going to get her ass handed to her. This is becoming a yearly tradition. The wanna-be Ann Coulter who got fired from The Blaze because she laughed when she saw Glenn Beck’s shriveled up dick cannot help herself during the Oscars. She wants to get owned. Maybe it’s a fetish. People will happily oblige.

 

4. People are going to be unhappy no matter what wins Best Picture. Did I say the Oscars was like the Pro Bowl? I meant it’s more like political elections. No one is happy. Ever.

 

5. Three Billboards in Ebbing, Missouri is going to win Best Picture. This is the only prediction I’m making. Three Billboards in Ebbing, Missouri is a garbage fucking movie with horrible writing, bad characters, and piss-poor acting (except Frances McDormand). I was sitting in the theater looking around while the movie played wondering if anyone else was having the same disgusted reaction as I was. I couldn’t believe some of the lines that were written in this filth. “I hope you get raped” stuck out pretty hard. The CGI deer and Woody Harrelson’s goodbye letter were unintentional comedy gold. And Sam Rockwell, who is a marvelous actor, is getting recognition for his worst performance, playing one of the dumbest written characters in movie history… a racist cop who suddenly, out of nowhere, grows a heart of gold and tries to redeem himself. I hate this movie. But I’m ready for it to win. This movie is the perfect embodiment of Hollywood and neoliberalisms complete tone-deaf approach to American politics. Of course the Oscars are going to vote for it! For years the worst movie to ever win Best Picture has been the Harvey Weinstein-produced abomination Shakespeare in Love which won in 1998 (over Life is Beautiful, Elizabeth, Saving Private Ryan and the deserved winner, The Thin Red Line.) That changes tonight.

 

 

THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER – It’s Lanthimos’s world and we’re all just slowly dying in it.

 

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017)

 

There’s nothing better than watching a film made by a director you absolutely love and have it meet every expectation. It becomes even more enjoyable when the tonal frequency of the filmmaker is compatible with yours. It’s a pure coincidence, of course – no great filmmaker remains great by catering to an audience – which is what makes it special.

Since his breakout film, Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos has been relentless in his personal translation of the world around us: The mundane attributes of a typical human society stretched to lengths and limits and turned upside down so that even the most vanilla of daily moments are revealed as absurdly ritualistic. The bare bones of this concept are not unique… David Lynch did it with American suburbia, Charlie Kauffman with industry and media, and Roy Andersson with middle-class Norwegians. What sets Lanthimos apart is that his characters are not mere pawns of a greater society, they are the society. While the other filmmakers play with characters in a world bigger and more comprehensive than they can really wrap their heads around (Blue Velvet, Being John Malkovich, and A Bird Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence all feature people who are naive and alien to the world they have entered), Lanthimos’s central characters build the world and make its rules themselves.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which can be considered Lanthimos’s first dive into genre cinema, plays on the same sort of premise set by James Wan’s Saw series. A sociopathic teenager named Martin (Barry Keoghan, who deserves every award for this) sets the rules for a game wherein the central character, a surgeon named Steven, (Colin Farrell) must make an unthinkable sacrifice to save himself and others. If he doesn’t play by these rules, then everyone dies. Unlike Jigsaw, Martin is not presented as a criminal mastermind, but as a timid, bumbling pubescent teen.  His actions are motivated purely by isolated revenge and not some greater worldly moral postulate. As Martin says, “this is the only thing I can think of that comes close to justice.”

Martin is a world-builder and very much in charge of everything that happens in the film. Much like the Father in Dogtooth who raises his children on strange and false fears about the world, or the Hotel Employees in The Lobster who set a timer on single people finding a mate, everyone else is at his whim. The Greek mythological allegory going on in the film is Iphigenia in Aulis, which is a tale of events sparked by Agamemnon killing one of Artemis’s sacred deer. This God-like stature of Martin is prevalent in the film, by the fact that his methodologies for enacting this vengeance are never discussed, and how he gets around is never shown. His phantom presence, over time, clouds over Steven’s family to a suffocating degree.

Despite this, Lanthimos’s villains can never be too self-serious. They are still manifested as humans, and like all humans in Lanthimos’s world, they are also uncomfortably funny. One of the most terrifyingly giddy moments in the film is when Martin showcases how much he believes his own words as he bites off a chunk of Steven’s arm, and then proceeds to do the same to his own arm. In the most monotone voice possible, mouth full of blood, he drools out, “See? It’s metaphorical.” This can be expected from a filmmaker who revels in the fact that no moment can be completely normal, but is always a direct representation of how numb we are to the absurdity of societal norms and our own thought processes. Pushing this even further is that outside of the genre tropes of a typical horror film, everything else is filled with Lanthimos’s standard ingredients, namely his dialogues which make every phrase sound like its being recited by robots attempting to mimic human conversation.

The mix is discomfiting, and that’s really what it aims to be. In the end, all of Lanthimos’s films are about things humans feel often. His darker and more sadistic tone with this film doesn’t change the fact that it’s a movie about loss and our urge to get back at those who wronged us. But even in the face of death and murder his characters can’t help but dive into whimsy. When first confronted with his impossible situation, Steven bargains with his mistakes by saying “A surgeon can never kill a patient. An anesthesiologist can kill a patient, but a surgeon never can.” It’s a hopeless tactic of ill-conceived logic, but when we’re pushed to the brink of doom, we’ll say anything to keep ourselves going. In Lanthimos’s world, our fears and actions and words become parts of a Greek tragicomedy. In every character, we see something about ourselves laughing back at us. We can’t help but (uncomfortably) laugh along too.

Kingdom Come – Sean Baker’s THE FLORIDA PROJECT

 

Centering a film on children, especially annoying and mischevious ones, is walking a tight-rope. How far can you take their shenanigans until they become completely unlikeable? Where do you draw the line so their cutesy antics remain “bad but funny” and never go to being actually cruel? Mooney, Jancey, and Scooty, all around the ages of 6, 7, or 8, engage in a wide spectrum of practical jokes, from spitting on peoples cars from the balcony to shutting off the power grid. Yet, they remain the absolute heart and soul of Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, a highlighter-markered dramedy adventure with an incredibly dark undercurrent.

The title of the film is taken from the developmental code-name for Walt Disney World, and its no coincidence because the film lies entirely within the shadow of “the happiest place on Earth”. From rainbows and Disney gift-shops to rich tourists passing by getting scammed by Mooney and her mother Halley into buying stolen park passes, the title becomes a rather darkly comedic joke, juxtaposing the lavish and carefree living of American families on their way to a magical vacation with a community of people barely making ends meet.

For the kids, Disney World is but a distant and unattainable pipe-dream. Instead, their kingdom is a four-story pink motel in Kissimmee, Florida which houses a diverse group of families, many of them poor and struggling. It’s easy to forget the psychological toll that poverty plays on children. Their reckless behavior is hard to sympathize with and understand. The concept of poverty and day-to-day uncertainty in life is so foreign for many us who, like me, grew up in the suburbs in a stable home with a steady income and a virtual guarantee of food, water, a paycheck, and electricity.  That these kids act out in a bunch of mischevious ways, curse like sailors, know a lot about sex and genitalia, is not a matter poor parenting as much as it is a matter of them being forced to find entertainment in the real world wherever possible. There are many movies which showcase how children cope with difficult living situations by creating their own worlds and forming their own mythos (the most obvious example here is Pan’s Labyrinth where Ofelia’s adventures with Pan result as a means of coping with death and brutality in Francoist Spain). For Mooney and her gang, the world is their oyster and in a much more serious sense, it’s their coping mechanism for a life that is incredibly unfair for children to have to live.

Sean Baker’s ability to bring a sense of genuine awareness and understanding of the downtrodden without resorting to gross sentimentality and reality TV kitsch is even better developed here than his previous entry Tangerine, an electrifying film about trans prostitutes in Los Angeles. He doesn’t force us to agree or like any of his characters, instead, building their humanity through their day-to-day struggles. Halley does her best at building a life, or really more a shield, for her daughter Mooney who doesn’t really grasp the idea that her mother has to steal and resell wholesale objects and have sex with married men to get food on the table. The constant pestering of the motel manager, a friendly but firm man named Bobby (a fantastic Willem Dafoe) doesn’t help matters. She’s vindictive, violent, a poor role model, and most of all, incredibly spiteful. It’s hard for us to find anything redeeming in Halley’s parenting of Mooney. Yet, their bond and love for each other are never in doubt.

In many ways, Halley is similar to the character of Sin-Dee in Tangerine. Bold and brash, and obnoxious to many faults, but ultimately we come to terms with the fact that their attitude is what kept them going this long. It wasn’t a trait that was built internally, but externally, a product of a fight to survive in a world which has completely discarded them. Baker’s themes of poverty are sewed into every fiber of the film, and The Florida Project‘s greatest moments come from its character’s ability to see the joy and magic in a world that many of us would consider an absolute misery. The movie’s tagline “Find Your Kingdom” is melancholic, because it shouldn’t have to be their kingdom. They deserve better. But for as long as they are there, they might as well stake their claim as the commanders of their world.

 

IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM YET… STOP READING. SPOILERS BELOW

 

 

 

What is going to be one of the most debated and divisive endings since maybe Chris Nolan’s Inception or The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, the ending of The Florida Project is a jolt of electricity. It looks weird, it feels weird, it ends in a way where we have to slap ourselves and ask, what the fuck just happened? Corey Atab of Slate Magazine wrote a cool piece on why the ending is absolutely PERFECT.

In my personal view, the ending of the film ties back into the concept of “escaping reality” which is a theme that exists in many stories centering around children in difficult situations. The end of the films poses an inescapable and terrifying truth of life, where Mooney is going to be taken permanently away from her mother. We know this is not going to change, we know that there is nothing but ugliness ahead… yet, the children still have hope. Much like the end of Pan’s Labyrinth, where Ofelia’s life screeches to a tragic halt, a devastating conclusion to an existence in fascist Spain that featured war, death, hunger, and not much else… yet, the legend of her friendship with Pan, and her legacy as a Princess in the Kingdom of the Afterlife poses an alternate reality. Is this a cheap twist to squeeze happiness out of misery? The cynical may think so. But children’s minds, their imaginations, their hopes, and dreams are always different than ours. They are shaped by a yet unrelenting and untied belief in good. So when Mooney and Jancey run for their lives towards Disney World and the Magic Kingdom and a legacy build on fairytales and princesses, it isn’t just a naive escape from an inevitable reality, it is a confirmation that whatever may come, they will keep running towards a happy ending.

Love in the Time of Heroin: Jerry Schatzberg’s THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK

 

The Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971)

 

Since it started streaming on Netflix, Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park has been seeing a sort of resurgence among movie fans and cinephiles. Centering on the lives of two heroin addicts in love near New York City’s proverbial “Needle Park”, the film navigates the maddening desperation and hopeless attachment of this couple to showcase a grim underbelly of addiction in America.

Despite sounding a bit like the exploitative “poverty porn” you’d see on a TV primetime news special, the film deals with its subjects, and its audience, in a respectful and unsensational manner, highlighting humanity over depravity. It doesn’t manufacture grim atmospheres nor does it play up the debauchery of its subjects to exploitative ends. Rather, the film’s characters resonate with us as charismatic, congenial but also incredibly flawed and frustrating people who succumb to the worst of vices and eventually trap themselves in a cycle they can’t break out of. Both Bobby and Helen, despite having their relationship hinge on their dependency to heroin, do things normal couples would do: eat sandwiches in the park, talk about their life ambitions, get jealous, and stick up for each other.

That it’s bubbling up from the depths now to be discovered by a Netflix-streaming generation is rather fortuitous. While many of us may think we understand heroin addiction as an obvious social problem, the breadth of our knowledge is limited solely to the depiction of junkies as depraved and scary individuals. The academics among us will throw around data like the increased opioid overdose rates among teens and what percentage of those are heroin induced. Even those of us who empathize with the idea that an addict is someone who needs help, not punishment, can’t say much about the day to day experience of an addict beyond stealing money and getting a fix.

The Panic in Needle Park shouldn’t be treated as some ‘be all say all’ of the junkie demographic (it is a work of narrative fiction after all, even if it presents its subjects unfiltered) but it does serve as one of Hollywood’s single most responsible documentations of the slow and painful collapse caused by addiction. That it filters itself through a love story, as we see the co-dependency that heroin entraps both of them in forcing them to drag each other down, makes it all the more devastating. Addiction within the film is not solely in the context of drugs, but also love and money. Helen’s dependency on Bobby for emotional comfort is reciprocated equally as Bobby begins to depend on Helen for his scores. His need for money turns their supposed loving relationship into a pimp-prostitute business contract. He continues to get jealous every time Helen sleeps with someone for money even though their desperation makes it a necessity. Despite the abuse and the perversion by which their relationship is defined, Helen can never seem to leave Bobby. Their arguments and fights and bouts of domestic violence are always outweighed by the knowledge that they are each other’s sole meal ticket to money and heroin.

The central mutual self-destruction of two people who love each other makes The Panic in Needle Park easy pray to becoming a sappy sob-story which manipulates our emotions and draws out the tears. Schatzberg and his screenwriters Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne however, create incredibly multi-faceted characters who’s likability and unlikeability at different points throughout the film keep us empathetic but aware that we are not so far removed from them. There are things in our life, be it people, substances, or places, we keep going back to despite them being terrible for us. Attachment is a powerful thing. So is dependency. Addiction is a culmination of both and magnified ten-fold. In the end of the film, the whimpering and forced sadness we would normally feel in a “traditional” melodramatic Hollywood treatment of drug addicts is instead a practical understanding of Bobby and Helen’s plight, and if maybe not quite expected, an appreciation for them as humans.

A note on the acting: The movie’s claim to fame is that it is “Al Pacino’s debut role”, which is a false statement, though the film is the first role in which Pacino is the lead actor. Opposite him (Bobby) is the ethereal Kitty Winn (Helen), whose film career unfortunately only spanned six films (including The Exorcist) within one decade, after which she inexplicably retired from acting. If her performance in Panic in Needle Park, which won her the Best Actress award at Cannes in 1971, is any indication, we missed out on an actress who could’ve been at least as great as Ellen Burstyn or Sissy Spacek, her young 70’s indie contemporaries.

Making bad decisions and having a GOOD TIME

 

Good Time (The Safdie Brothers, 2017)

 

There eventually comes a time where I witness an undeniable talent in the film world. Last year it happened with Moonlight and its director Barry Jenkins, and this year it happened with Good Time and its directors Josh and Ben Safdie. It’s a beautiful thing really to see filmmakers who inject such a personal serum into every fiber of a film. It’s beautiful because it has become so rare. It’s beautiful because barely anyone has a fucking imagination anymore. Many are too scared to reveal a whole deal about themselves.

Centered around a drug-rattled and morally questionable protagonist named Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson, who, like Ryan Gosling before him, has officially transitioned from cheesy teen heartthrob to an actor you actually want to pay attention to), the film takes us on a winding journey through Connie’s pathetically desperate attempt to save his brother Nick (Ben Safdie) from a botched robbery for which he was sent to jail.

The Safdie Brothers don’t hide their artistic flair, and their inspirations, influences, and general view of the world are on full display. The opening shot, a robotic, thundering zoom into a glass building next to a sunny coastline, is like something directly out of a Michael Mann film. Everything that comes after subverts expectations of what I’ve become accustomed to being fed by “traditional” action thrillers.

Ironically, there is hardly anyone in Good Time who is likable. Nobody is lionized as some criminal hero. Connie manages to skirt many an attempt by police to stop him, and weasels his way through a number of fortunate situations, but there is hardly a reason to root for him especially since his actions are at the detriment of innocent civilians (It’s worth also noting that, whether intentional or not, the film perfectly showcases how black individuals end up being collateral damage and scapegoats in majority of criminal activities conducted by white perpetrators). The sad and easily-combustible cesspool-like environment here is a tamer version of the Safdie’s pervious much more gutting and much lower-budgeted film, Heaven Knows What (which I reviewed here).

During Good Time, I found myself subconsciously wishing for Connie to get caught. He’s not Tony Montana, nor Don Corleone, nor Henry Hill. He has no air of superiority. He has no larger-than-life personality. He’s not charismatic. He’s just a slimy bumbling prick who needs to get what’s coming to him. His victories are luck, not an act of strength. His moral ambiguity and lack of clear lines make for an interesting introspection into how we perceive criminals in movies. Is the bumbling dirty poor criminal, who acts against the law out of desperate survival deserving of more sympathy, as a bit player scheming a system built to crush him? Is the organized white collar criminal, with power and wealth at his fingertips the one we should be tearing down?

Social and cultural undertones included, GoodTime provides a thrill ride that doesn’t rely on set pieces and pre-conceived situations as much as its characters’ decisionmaking. Connie and the rest of the cast’s fuzzy standing on the scale of “hero and villain”, which changes almost every sequence, change the way we’re supposed to think of action movies. There are no “keys to the city”, no “damsel in distress”, no “beating the bad guy”. Everyone in this movie is there for one reason: Surviving, for themselves, at all costs.

BRIGSBY BEAR and the nostalgia of one.

 

Brigsby Bear (Dave McCary, 2017)

 

Over the course of several years, and certainly since I’ve discovered new avenues for seeing lesser-known cinema be it through festivals, independent theaters, and the explosion of various streaming media platforms, I’ve almost always come across the most unexpected movie gems away from your regular AMC multiplex.

Dave McCary’s Brigsby Bear is the best Hollywood movie made in the first half of this year… and you probably don’t even know that it exists. It’s a small independent production, distributed by Sony Pictures and produced by the Lonely Island trio, who have been churning out underrated comedy genius for a while now (seriously, if you haven’t seen Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, I don’t know how you can consider yourself a fan of comedy). The fact that this movie hasn’t seen the light of day in regular mainstream theaters is insane because it probably speaks to the pop-culture cultism, and charming nostalgia embraced 90’s millennial kids more than any film in recent memory, and it does so without being too obvious or self-obsessed about it.

The central character, James, is a man-child who’s entire existence since his birth has been inside of an enclosed igloo with his mother and father in the middle of the desert and his only exposure to any form of other human connection is a TV show called Brigsby Bear about a giant stuffed bear and his two identical twin assistants who save the town-people from various evil villains including a Sun God. To call Brigsby an obsession for James is to undersell it. James’s life is consumed by it, to the point that he spends every day watching episodes, breaking them apart, creating mythologies around their characters, and posting his fan theories on the internet.

Originality isn’t what really sets Brigsby Bear apart. The film follows a conventional progression of a character’s “self-discovery” and its emotional appeal is derived from nostalgia. Once James eventually becomes re-acclimated with “normal society” outside his igloo sanctuary, he gets the idea to create his own Brigsby movie. Alienated from everyone by the fact that nobody “understands” his love for a TV show, the movie’s moral argument centers around how we reconcile with the idea of “normality” itself. Do our experiences as children and what we consume in media as children ultimately shape who we are? And is this good? The answer to the second question depends on who you ask.

What sets it apart is its consciousness for generational gaps, and that it is, unabashedly, a film for millennials. In the internet age in which my generation has made it a symbol of pride to be a “90’s Kid”, most of us would predictably sympathetic towards James’ militant conviction for his childhood art. For older generations, the film may be a bit difficult to get through. However, McCary never allows his characters to devolve into being one-not. All of them are frustrating and agreeable at different points, and they make mistakes and redeem themselves multiple times throughout the film. This makes Brigsby Bear incredibly enjoyable because unlike many films which pit generation vs. generation or artistic types vs. practical types against each other, this movie understands that they’re all heterogenous entities, with different ideas and views of life, all of which are malleable in the real world.

I try not to send out direct recommendations of movies to people, but I loved this movie. I think you will too.

DUNKIRK – Racing Against the Clock

 

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

From the opening shot of a group of young British soldiers walking through the streets of a battleground French town during World War II, Dunkirk ignites its time bomb narrative and makes you hold your breath for the duration of the film.

Nolan’s penchant for cutting between different points of action simultaneously and muddling our perception of time between events was first showcased in the tunnel sequence in The Dark Knight, repeated again in Inception’s final dream collapse, and now here in Dunkirk, it has finally been used to its fullest effect. The film structures itself in three intertwining parts: The Mole* (where the majority of stranded British soldiers remain), The Sea (where ships hope to carry them back home), and The Air (where British jets fight with the Luftwaffe).

Nolan even quickly spells out the background of the Dunkirk situation with title cards, where German forces had cornered British and French soldiers at The Mole and the British were waiting for ships to take them home and escape death at the hands of the Germans. Of course, the Luftwaffe was flying around trying to sink any naval rescue the British had in mind. Thus, the situation was dire and the clock was ticking as the Germans were closing in.

The transparency of intentions may sound disappointing, as fans of Chris Nolan have grown to enjoy putting the pieces of his ambiguous film-puzzles together after the credits roll, but then, Dunkirk is a true story of a real event with real people. Nolan plays this straight and appropriately so. Nevertheless, there are many facets of Dunkirk which belie the traditions of a Hollywood war film, and Nolan’s direction innovates along with Hoyte van Hoytema’s camerawork and Lee Smith’s editing juxtapose points of view and deep focus shots that are mesmerizing in 70mm projection.

Adding to the technical innovations, the politics of the film, a topic which is almost impossible to not touch on in today’s climate, are in themselves unique in comparison to how Hollywood deals with war. Modeled more closely after Terrence Malick’s masterpiece The Thin Red Line rather than Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Nolan concentrates on time, survival and the impending fear of death rather than the blood-and-guts patriotism (there is no blood in this movie) most war films aim their eye on. Sure, the pride of Britain is on display especially in Mark Rylance’s character, who is fundamental about his duty to his countrymen, but even that is more often discussed in the film as a general act of “doing good” rather than a soapbox stance for national pride. He continually says he needs to save people, not necessarily Brits. The idea of the “nation” or “citizens” is actually missing from a lot of the movie. In fact, the Germans are identified only once or twice as the enemy. In this approach, the film posits that the bravery and will to fight on for these soldiers stems from the fear and desperation that compound with each minute. They are strictly fighting to live.

Within the film’s race-against-time narrative, there are several microcosms of the same theme peppered throughout, where two young soldiers try to carry an injured man to the boat before it sails off, a pilot crash lands in the ocean trying to get out of his cockpit before it fills up with water, soldiers try to escape from the ship’s kitchen before being trapped and drowned. All of these moments are handled with efficiency by Nolan, who lays all of his cards on the table and replaces his often critiqued overwritten dialogue with well directed and nerve-wracking action sequences beautifully captured by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. Part of me thinks Nolan used this as an opportunity to shut all the critics up about his inability to direct action as well as Michael Bay or Michael Mann.

Dunkirk is exhausting, and it hits you like a machine gun. Every moment runs at fast-forward and every cut jumps from one tense moment to the next gripping us in with an ambiguous sense of time that leaves us hanging in the balance at each second. Combined with Hans Zimmer’s deafening score which features a relentless ticking of a clock in your ear, Christopher Nolan embarks on a 106-minute sprint of directorial showmanship in what may not be his best, but at least at first watch, I can say is easily his most technically accomplished film.

 

A Ghost Story

 

A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017)

 

When considering David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, there’s a good chance someone brought up mainly on mainstream Hollywood cinema will not have the patience for it and will desperately start staring at the theater exit and checking the time on their cellphones within the first half-hour thinking “fuck… I should’ve just watched War for the Planet of the Apes again.”

The reason I say this is because that was precisely my reaction during the first half hour of this movie. Yes, me. The person who considers both Lav Diaz and Bela Tarr, two of cinema’s directors notorious for the length and ‘slowness’ of their cinema, to be among the best storytellers film history has to offer. I sat through Tarr’s 6-hour long Satantango, a film which is comprised of merely 100 or so shots each with minimal dialogue and completely in black and white, as well as Diaz’s 7.5 hour long From What is Before, similar in style and composition to Tarr’s film and neither of them seemed even close to as long or frustrating as the first half of A Ghost Story.

So what exactly happened here?

The film revolves around the death of a significant other. Two people, C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara) are in a loving but emotionally rocky relationship in a house which C is very attached to. After C dies in a tragic car crash he becomes a ghost and starts to wander around the house, mute and unable to physically interact with the mortal world, while M greives in increasingly depressing silence. Lowery films all of this with comatose static shots which linger for lengthy intervals with minimal dialogue and sound. Some of them are effective, such as the sequences of M packing up her life and finally moving out of the house that C loved so much, while others are unintentionally funny in their preposterousness.

One of the most silliest moments in the film is a sequence in which M sees a pie that her neighbor left her as a “sorry for you loss” condelence and then out of a fit of silent rage, begins to consume the entire pie. This event occurs in the frame of a single static shot with M crouched on the kitchen floor stabbing at the pie repeatedly with her fork, stuffing large chunks into her mouth and chewing with a lot of jaw-aching effort. It goes on for so long and with such a mechanical monotony that I could feel everyone else in the theater telecommunicating with me, the same exact message: “Are we really going to be sitting here watching this girl binge eat an entire fucking pie?!?”(She ends up stopping four bites shy and vomits it all out in the toilet across the hall)

What augments the utter banality of the film’s first half is that Lowery’s deliberately slow style here is completely let down by the setting he’s working with. Unlike similarly quiet and paced films such as Bennet Miller’s Foxcatcher, Lowery is restricted to the interiors of a rather unremarkable house and its even less remarkable surroundings. The communal farm in Satantango had such a heavy air of depravity that every scene, even if it lasted for long durations and shot in black and white, was rife with detail and texture and a sense of doom. Foxcatcher had the benefit of the DuPont estate being remarkably picturesque as well as haunting in its stillness, beautifully complimenting the deliberate pace of Miller’s style. A Ghost Story takes place in the suburban neighborhood in a house that has almost nothing going for it in its current state post-C’s death.

Luckily, the house doesn’t stay this way, as M eventually moves. Before she does however, she sticks an anonymous note in the cracks of the wall of the house. Lowery plants this seed to keep tying us, and C’s Ghost, back to the relationship he was tragically ripped from. It is gimmicky, but it’s the first hint of intrigue in a rather painfully bad start.

The second half thankfully moves a lot faster, but it doesn’t get that much more interesting.

As we enter the post-M era of C’s Ghost’s time floating around the house, the film departs from physical reactions of loss and death, into a much more philosophical territory… for better and worse. The changes in tenants, buildings, and landscape of the property elicits a rapid passage of time that leaves C’s Ghost further battered and lost in the memory of the house he has now become a part of. The several instances where C’s Ghost scratches the wall to retrieve the anonymous note remains really the only thing that keeps us caring for his character. There is some serious emotional heft in these scenes and the best parts of the film are those which ties us back to C and M’s relationships, the good and the dysfunctional. Everything else, remains childish.

Another giggle-worthy event is when C’s Ghost peeks at another ghost in a neighboring house and having a vague conversation about “waiting for something”. Is… comic relief? Is Lowery doing this to poke fun, give us a breather from the ghosts and loss, and love? Or is this guy being straight-faced and actually believes this to be good philosophical storytelling?

Perhaps the best description of A Ghost Story’s attempt at profundity is the scene when a group of 20-somethings occupy the house and throw a party. In the kitchen, four of them have gathered around, a bit buzzed, talking lightly about the meaning of “life”. One of them, a bearded hipster one would wager, goes on an incredibly verbose pseudo-intellectual rant which aims to make so many badly concieved points, that it makes none. The critic blurb I see most often connected to this movie describes it as “cosmic”, but its journey to discern our ideas of memory, death, and time sputter out before getting off the ground.

Wakefield – A story of a patriarch

 

Wakefield (Robin Swicord, 2017)

It’s unclear what the motive behind the movie Wakefield is. Not just the characters or the world they exist within, or the film’s “message”, but the reason for its existence. Why did director Robin Swicord, who gained fame for her literary adaptations such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Memoirs of a Geisha, feel the need to write and make this movie? I have a few thoughts, but I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m asking for the purpose behind a film’s creation. Frankly, it’s a question we should ask Hollywood films more often, and more often than not the reason is money. But that’s clearly not the case here because, besides me, I don’t know another human being who has seen this Bryan Cranston starrer which released three weeks ago. Yeah, did you know Bryan Cranston acted in a movie that released three weeks ago? Money could not have been part of the equation. The real reason behind my curiosity is the actual plot and story of the film….

Adapted from a short story by E.L. Doctorrow which in itself is a reimagining of the same story originally written by Nathaniel Hawthorn, Wakefield is about a family man with a city job who comes home late one night after being stuck on a malfunctioning train and follows a racoon loitering through his garbage into what seems like a storage area above his garage… and (take a breath)…. decides to just live there and spy on his family for a whole year.

“What the fuck?” – you right now, probably

Bryan Cranston plays the titular character, Howard Wakefield, a man disillusioned from his monotonous day to life-cycle of wife, kids, and job. He lives in a very upper-class WASP neighborhood, decked with picket fenced McMansions, luxury cars (Wakefield owns a Mercedes), fine china, private-school going children, and Joseph Aboud tailored suits. The need to cutting lose from a daily lifestyle is something a lot of people experience, particularly at Wakefield’s mid-life crisis age. However, instead of the expected trope of blowing off money on expensive things, Wakefield’s crisis takes him into a faux-“survivalist” lifestyle. I say faux- because he technically has food and shelter at his disposal at all times. He’s not ever in any real danger through this whole ordeal.

But the way he enters into this commitment away from his family seems preposterous. Coming home late one night, he notices a raccoon scavenging in the bins on his driveway. In an attempt to shoo the rascal away, he instead sends it up the stairwell in his garage into a storage floor. There, Wakefield notices his wife and kids finishing up dinner without him and… decides to just spend the night. Over the course of a week, he argues with himself over what time would be appropriate to re-introduce himself into his family without it being a gigantic ordeal. Clearly, he supposes, his wife will assume he has been cheating. It’s such a strangely evolved concept that it not only challenges us into identifying with a clearly unlikeable person but also in the idea of what the hell the story is getting at.

Going through E.L. Doctorrow’s short story, written first-person, a marked distinction from Hawthorne’s original which is told as a third-person account, much of the actions Wakefield executes are hardly explained beyond a mere “unknown circumstances” or “can’t imagine why”-s. It’s almost as if this man doesn’t have any control over his mind or body, that he believes fully that his several months in that attic were a literal out of body experience as much as an out of lifestyle experience.

Is Wakefield clinically insane? He talks about the events towards the beginning of the story as having a Doppler effect, or a string of occurrences which seem to prophesize on the collapse of human civilization. He mentions his actions had a snowball effect of irrationality from the first night he spent in the storage area to the following several months. But his constant acknowledgment of his irrational behavior rules that out.

The most logical interpretation of the film’s underlying social themes, in my eyes, is that Wakefield is engaging in a despicable patriarchal power move. One with an heir of complete self-importance in regards to his family. By removing himself from the family, and watching their struggles he finds a sort of sick joy in knowing they can’t handle life without him. He is not so much insane as he is sociopathic. The evidence of this is obvious in several instances where his wife is getting help from a friend on finances, and Wakefield chuckles knowing there’s no way she can afford her lifestyle without his paycheck let alone manage all the monetary budgeting that he and he alone does for the household. Given Swicord’s talent in translating fiction into a visual portrait of multi-dimensional individuals for the screen (her best work, in my opinion, Matilda, takes many moments of a whimsical child’s life and breaths soul-crushing emotional heft into them, quite daring for a children’s movie), her taking a short story to feature length with such a difficult to handle premise was not something I was particularly worried about… but the end result showed that stretching Wakefield as a character leads to many wrong turns and confusingly contradictory portraits of who he is, and why we should accept him as believable.

Much of the second half of the film, a swift turn from the first half, Swicord concentrates on humanizing Wakefield into a compassionate, humble character who ultimately has a self-realizing epiphany. It’s the classic case of a film which steers away from difficult, murky territory of seeing a truly depraved person eaten by his own mind and into a story of glorious self-fulfillment, that too, at the detriment of everyone around him. It’s strange coming from Swicord, who’s writing sensibilities clearly lean towards a feminist reading of the material. Why would she have us believe in this man’s motives as being anything less than a narcissistic act of neglecting three women in his life on a whim? That he is actually capable of learning a lesson and that is what catalyzes his return to society, and not that he is so egotistical, so emotionally distanced from his family as humans with wants and needs, he feels he can waltz back in just like that.

The film would have us believe that by removing himself from everything Wakefield has gained an appreciation for it all… one of the most tired and uninspiring Hollywood lessons. It’s like an American Dad episode written and directed with a straight face.