Two 2015 Movies about Punching People

More boxing movies? I am not sure, actually, why Hollywood keeps making boxing movies, or for that matter, why I keep going to them, but boxing is certainly that most cinematic of sports. The camera gets close up in the faces of the pugilists; we hear the thuds and thwacks and the clang of the bell; and it really does feel like we're there. I'd definitely rather watch a boxing movie than a basketball movie (there aren't many of those, come to think of it) or a movie about, say, the 400-meter relay.

The trouble is that there have been so many boxing movies and there are, consequently, so many established tropes and clichés. I remember being totally baffled when everyone went nuts over David O. Russell's The Fighter: isn't it just another typical boxing movie? But, then, I don't know if I can tell you why I liked Creed enormously and why I found Southpaw to be mostly boring and cliché-ridden. I am going to try anyway.

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Antoine Fuqua's Southpaw is a movie about a rage-filled champion whose wife is senselessly killed and who, following this event, completely loses his mind, does an enormous amount of dangerous activity, loses his house, and gets his kid put into protective custody because he is a total mess of a parent. He must (and this is a standard boxing-movie trope) get a new trainer, straighten up and fly right, and bounce back.

Jake Gyllenhaal is pretty awesome as the film's protagonist (he's sentimentally called Billy Hope), and the actor has really been on a roll, with excellent performances in Prisoners and Nightcrawler; sooner or later critics and the Academy will pay attention. In Southpaw he has transformed physically into a completely ripped and lean beast of a man-child, and his characterization is very interesting: he mumbles and stumbles his way through the film, solidly creating an unpredictable but rather lovable figure.

Still, I found it hard to root for this character, and maybe this is because the film as a whole is so dependent on feelings. Billy Hope is pure anger, lashing out at anyone and everyone, and then, when he needs to get his daughter back, he becomes pure sentiment, weeping his way through the film's third act. Southpaw sees this transition as totally natural, and perhaps it is, but I remain rather unconvinced by the idea. Does a man with enough of a problem with rage that he gets his kid taken away from him suddenly become father of the year after a couple of weeks working with Forest Whitaker? I am skeptical.

I think the kid thing bothered me, too. I need to become the light heavyweight champion of the world because my daughter needs lunch-money isn't, after all, that exciting of a reason for a film's final sequence. Once we got to act three I really kept hoping that Southpaw wouldn't end with a big boxing match but would avoid the trope and end with Billy Hope training kids and just worrying about making ends meets instead of worrying about getting a championship belt. If one's major concern is paying the rent and feeding the family, one doesn't actually need to make a $30 million deal with HBO. But, no, Southpaw ends the way you think it's going to end; no surprises here – just lots of feelings.

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Creed has plenty of feelings, too, don't get me wrong. But I was into this movie from the very beginning. Ryan Coogler's film has its share of clichés, as well – difficult childhood, disapproving mom, complicated relationship with a trainer, and phrases like the real enemy in the ring with you is yourself.

But Creed just does all of this better. Michael B. Jordan is a young office worker named Donny Johnson who fights in Mexico on the weekends. He's the son of the boxer Apollo Creed from Rocky and Rocky II, III, and IV, and Creed both plays up this history and does something interesting with it. How does a person have a legend as a father and also try to make something of himself? What does the name mean? Does it hang over one like a curse? An impossible hurdle? Or can it be something that strengthens and emboldens one? This might seem like a less interesting reason to fight than, say, the love of one's small child, but I found this an infinitely more interesting character study.

Coogler's film also has Sylvester Stallone, the Oscar-nominated star of the Rocky films, and (obviously) a huge movie star in his own right. Stallone is wonderful in this, a retired boxer who wants nothing anymore to do with pugilism and isn't interested in training a young fighter. For Apollo Creed's son, however, Rocky Balboa sets aside his resistance and starts to work again.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan

Stallone is great, but Michael B. Jordan, the film's star and the star of Coogler's first film Fruitvale Station, makes this movie. Jordan is a fine actor, who keeps getting great roles and keeps turning in great performances. His work in Creed is sensitive and angry and frustrated and confused all at once. The part must've been written for him, and he is perfect for it, allowing us into the character's personal struggle even while the character puts up walls.

The conscious, knowing tribute (it never felt like a gimmick) to Avildsen's 1976 film works beautifully because it's understated and mediated in clever ways. Donny watches his dad and Rocky fight, for example, by pulling up YouTube videos of their matches. And the famous theme from Rocky creeps quietly but unmistakably into Ludwig Göransson's Creed score. Another reason this works is that the characters in Creed are actively trying to deal with the events of the Rocky movies, even to destroy them.

These are some reasons, I guess, but I don't think I can fully say why I found Creed's use of boxing-movie clichés to be interesting and Southpaw's boring. Maybe I just like narratives about men dealing with their fathers better than narratives about men dealing with their eight-year-olds. I think, though, that Creed just really is a better movie all around – better acting, better script, better editing, better photography. I loved it.

Tangerine

Not to be confused with Tangerines (Mandariniid) (an excellent movie), Tangerine is a film that was apparently shot entirely on an iPhone. (I am actually ignorant, but I have heard that the title Tangerine is apparently a filter (? or a color?) related to the iPhone. I don't know.)

This movie is about two transsexual prostitutes on the streets of Los Angeles, and we follow one of them as she tries to get revenge on a young woman who has been having sex with her boyfriend while she has been in county lockup.

The film also follows a married man who drives a cab and who also has sex with these two prostitutes (and a particular crush on the woman who is so hell-bent on revenge).

This is, of course, an interesting premise, and Karren Karagulian, who plays the cab driver, is really great. But that pretty much sums up all the positive things that I can say about Tangerine. I thought this movie was absolutely terrible. The acting was awful: from the very first minute of the film I knew we were in trouble. I didn't believe the top-billed actress, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, for one second. She spent the entire film commenting on her character – a character she clearly despised even while playing her.

The film's editing, too, doesn't make one lick of sense. We jump back and forth between Razmik, the cab driver, and Alexandra and Sin-dee, the call girls, but the film can't figure out why it jumps between them, and the stories themselves don't work together. The whole idea is supposed to be a kind of vérité / dogme 95 thing, but it is far too contrived for that, jumping from one improbable character that the script despises to the next.

Even worse is the "screenplay", which is not a screenplay at all. Instead, Tangerine appears to be mostly an improvised sort of thing. The film might have benefited from an actual script, and the acting, if scripted, might perhaps have seemed less phony, less forced, more authentic. But as it is, Tangerine feels like something that wants to sell us the idea that it's real. But to the contrary, it felt outrageously fake.

Bone Tomahawk

I was really hoping that Bone Tomahawk was going to be great. It's a horror / western that stars the awesome Kurt Russell, as well as Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, and Lili Simmons. I found the trailer for the film simultaneously bizarre and terrifying, and so I was looking forward to it.

But... although the script is mostly great, the movie itself is a fairly consistent letdown.This has nothing to do with Kurt Russell's taciturn performance as the film's main character, and nothing to do with the earnestness and nuance that Patrick Wilson mobilizes in order to play his role, but everything to do with the uneven way the film is directed by first-timer S. Craig Zahler.

The film's plot is delightfully gruesome. A trio of people is kidnapped in a small, 19th century Western town in the desert. The town's sheriff, two deputies, and a vengeful husband ride off to find the three. They have been kidnapped by cannibals – a bizarre tribe of Americans who paint their bodies white, implant whistles in their voice-boxes, speak no language, have no name, and rape and murder their own mothers. Grisly stuff.

Everything about the film, though, is uneven. The performances are occasionally great, but sometimes very very stilted. The score sometimes fills a scene beautifully; at other times, Zahler has opted for no music at all and the film feels lifeless and boring. A different (gorgeous) sort-of western from this year called Jauja spends most of its running time in longshot, observing its characters from afar and studying, instead, the landscape and the feeling of the world. Bone Tomahawk seems to want, occasionally, to do this same thing, to observe its characters from a distance, to set them out from a very general background of desert by putting them in relief. But the camera doesn't seem to cooperate. It jumps from closeups to wide shots without apparent rhyme or reason, and the film's meditative elements seem only half-hearted, as though what we're all really here for are the grisly sequences that we watch in act three.

Matthew Fox as John Brooder

These are decidedly grotesque. The centerpiece of this sequence is the scalping of actor Evan Jonigkeit.

He is then turned upside down and hacked down the center of his body lengthwise. It is extraordinary to watch and really, really gross. Definitely the nastiest thing I've seen all year. There are a bunch of other grotesque images here, as well, and they are worth watching, but I found myself wondering what exactly was happening. If the grotesqueries in act three are the point of the film, why waste all the time in acts one and two doing faux character study as we follow the men to the camp for three days and nights? Why not concentrate on the murders and the corpses that result?

Comedy is a problem in this film too. Nearly all of Richard Jenkins' lines are directed to be a kind of steadily running stream of feeble jokes. Some of them are funny – the audience I was with chuckled out loud at several – but this film is a horror/western, and the comedy always felt out of place to me, or as a kind of attempted but failed nod at the Coen Brothers.

And I suppose it is mean, but I thought Lili Simmons was terrible in this. Her performance holds a single register throughout, and she never looks or acts like a woman at the frontier. She's a beautiful woman, and a nice match for the very pretty Patrick Wilson, but she struck me as awfully miscast. Matthew Fox, on the other hand, is great. He is mean and effete and arrogant and just delightful, even if the camera tends to avoid him and the film's narrative disposes of him.

In any case, the film felt to me like something that had as its priority the telling of a story, instead of having as its priority the way to tell the story. Bone Tomahawk needed as its director someone who didn't write the screenplay.

Clouds of Sils Maria

Rich, complex, Chekhovian, and very sexy. Talkier than other Assayas movies, but Clouds of Sils Marie deals with the problem at its center through circumlocution, spinning around and around it, talking about it, certainly, but then, as it turns out, the important stuff is never what is said.

Clouds is all about desire, and the clouds at the film's center (or are they at the film's peripheries?) are a perfect metaphor for the desire(s) the film attempts to describe in roundabout, impossible ways. These eponymous clouds are known for a phenomenon where they come down through a mountain pass and shape themselves into the form of a snake, coalescing for a very brief moment before going off on their own and becoming simply clouds again.

Clouds of Sils Maria is also, in many ways, an All about Eve for 2015, discussing our desire to live other people's lives, the difficulties of embodying the lives of others, and the ways that other people's lives can take over our own, both by eclipsing them and through sheer force of the other person's will.

The acting is flat out superb. Juliette Binoche knocks it out of the park yet again, and Kristen Stewart is flawless. I was really into this picture.

Votes for Women!

Suffragette is a fairly straightforward Hollywood-style movie, although Suffragette is a British film, perhaps more emotionally akin to last year's The Theory of Everything than to anything else I can think of at the moment. [The following may have some spoilers, but this is all historical fact, so none of it ought to be particularly surprising if you know what happened to British suffragettes in the years before the '14-'18 War.]

Sarah Gavron's film follows a young working woman in 1912 as she becomes politicized around achieving greater rights for women in a country (England) that doesn't extend rights to women. This fight about women's rights (especially the rights of working women) is fought under the banner of voting rights. In this way Suffragette has obvious debts (in style as well as structure) to last year's Selma. Gradually Maud Watts, the film's main character (played by Carey Mulligan) comes to understand that she actually has no rights whatsoever in England. She is beaten, imprisoned, tortured by London police, her child is taken away from her. She is disowned by her husband, fired, kicked out of her house, and reduced to homelessness on the streets of London. Her body, she finds out quite clearly, is not her own, and she has no recourse to fight any of these assaults upon her her person or her family. And so she decides to join the suffragettes, and the suffragettes decide to fight.

All of this is shown to the audience in an emotionally rousing, sentimental style, and the film does its best to spend time awaking all of the feelings we have about justice and motherhood and bodily integrity. In this way the film succeeds somewhat and is a crowd-pleaser, but it is not my kind of film. The older white-people crowd will love it – the audience I was with applauded when the film was over – and the film in many ways makes people feel good about beliefs that they already possess. Yes women should have access to their children; no one oughtn't to be fired for a political view; no one oughtn't to be sexually available to one's employer. Yes women are just as smart as men; no women oughtn't to be kicked out of their houses by their husbands; yes women ought to be able to vote.

But, then, these women are also terrorists, let us make no mistake. They become criminals, existing outside of the law, defying a government that affords them no protections. And here is where I am pretty sure that my read of the film differs from the read of its intended audience. For me, Suffragette became a film about unchecked state violence.

At numerous points in the movie, police literally beat peaceful protesters until they are bloody and then they arrest them and imprison them for any amount of time they wish. The police violence on the bodies of civilians goes absolutely unchecked. Here, for me, is where the film becomes more interesting. Watching this violence onscreen we might be in Harpers Ferry or Auschwitz or Selma or Ferguson or Baltimore in 2015. Police in Suffragette act with absolute impunity. They are the law and there is no law above them to check their actions because the bodies broken by their violence possess no rights of their own. In this way Suffragette, if it is a film about the struggles of working-class white women in Britain in 1912-3, can also be read about violent resistance to police brutality and unjust governments across the globe in 2015. It certainly called up for me police violence against black bodies in the U.S., the violence that says that people from non-European countries deserve no protections under the EU, and certain Republican presidential candidates' refusal to accept immigrants from other countries, including Mexico.

Ms. Bonham Carter

But the film also conflates "voting rights" with other problems, and this is where I got a bit confused by the film's politics. Many of the problems I articulate above – problems with the lack of rights attached to women's bodies in Britain before the first World War that the film addresses (men's presumed sexual access to working-class women, women's rights over their own children, the gender pay-gap) – are really unrelated to voting rights, or at least their links to voting rights are not made clear by Suffragette. This is, perhaps, one reason why one easily jumps to thinking about other injustices in the world rather than thinking deeply about the means the women took to achieve their desired political result. Because this is a sentimental film, the whole thing becomes about justice and injustice in the generic. These are women who couldn't get any newsmedia to cover their struggles and so they resorted to terrorism to get media attention, including suicide terrorism. The film, for reasons I find baffling, isn't really interested so much in these political tactics as it is in "good" and "evil". In this way Suffragette to my mind falls far short of a film like Selma, a movie that discusses political realities and the decisions with which activists must grapple when attempting to achieve political change.

In any case, Suffragette should do pretty well with Oscar, I'd wager. Expect a nomination for Carey Mulligan and maybe also one for Helena Bonham Carter (both are great). Ben Whishaw is also great, but his character is "bad" and in a picture this sentimental he won't get any awards love. A costume design nomination seems like an easy get, here, too. And Alexandre Desplat will probably get one for his score. In short, expect a couple. As I said, this is a crowd-pleaser.

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Oh! One last word. There was some brouhaha during the marketing of Suffragette about the film's (white) actresses posing in t-shirts that contained the phrase "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave" as a way of marketing the film. My opinion of this kerfuffle is that it was (like most things that happen on social media) a too-quick, knee-jerk reaction that practices both an anti-historicist view of political struggles and (as my reading of the film reflects) a too-strict view on readings of cultural products like films. For me, Suffragette was about the immigration crisis in the EU and unchecked police violence against black bodies and the gender pay-gap in the U.S. Representations always make meanings that vary from their ostensible subject matter, and to attempt to restrict the word "slave" to a particular historical period erases real instances of the enslavement of bodies that are ongoing in the world today.

Beasts of No Nation

Clearly one of the best films of the year so far is Cary Joji Fukunaga's Beasts of No Nation.

It is true that I generally find it difficult to find a lot of words when I am talking about a movie that I simply love without almost any reservation, but I am holed up in the Portland airport waiting for a red-eye back to Central Florida from the ASTR conference, and I am way too tired to read. In other words, forgive me if this post is out of control; know that I have slept very little the last few days and won't get to sleep for another large number of hours.

Beasts of No Nation is a film about child soldiers, better even than 2013's War Witch. This is a film mostly in English and it is upsetting a lot of people because it is being released on Netflix simultaneously with its (Academy-qualifying) theatrical release. Distributors can say whatever they like about this, however. It will not alter the fact that this is a superb film.

If War Witch is Beasts of No Nation's most obvious recent cinematic reference point, if you ask me the film's debts are primarily to the ecologically minded utter genius filmmaker Terrence Malick. Malick's style isn't copied here – that would be profoundly unfair – but many of Fukunaga's questions about the world are the same. Like Malick, Fukunaga is fundamentally interested in the natural world that violence destroys and the ways that adults have powerful effects on children.

I am evoking Malick, too, because Fukunaga uses (but does not overuse, as some of Malick's acolytes do) a voiceover technique, where the film's main character articulates to us the reasons he has made the decisions he's made and the ways he deals with the psychic wounds of having done what he has been forced to do. This allows Fukunaga (who also wrote the screenplay) to describe the wounds experienced by a character while at the same time turning his camera on the jungle or on plant- or animal life.

Both filmmakers also present the violence in their films in fundamentally ethical ways, treating acts of bloodshed with horror and surprising the audience with the viciousness exhibited by their characters. Fukunaga doesn't let us be sentimental about violence without then following sentiment with ruin, with terrifying details that shock us out of our tendency only to mobilize the default emotions of pity or fear. (I guess I shouldn't speak for all of us, but I am convinced that this is how these things work so I'm just going to keep talking.) Sequences of excessive violence treated with a truly horrifying perspective have the power to unsettle us deeply, so that once we move past pity or shallow sentimentality, we can move into an area where we no longer feel like we understand this violence's limits. What I think this refusal to allow us to see violence's limits does is transmit to us a deep feeling that we no longer understand what humans are capable of doing. It becomes clear – we know in our bodies – that there are worse things than the director has allowed us to see. We know we have not understood. Beasts of No Nation does not let us rest in the complacency of believing we "get" it. The limit Fukunaga's film makes clear is not the limit of the violence of child soldiery but the limit of our ability to think it.

It is this kind of superb moviemaking for which Fukunaga has come to be recognized. Think about some of the sequences in True Detective's first season; there were entire sections of that show when my jaw was in a permanently dropped position.

Mr. Attah

It goes without saying that the film's photography is breathtakingly detailed and exquisite. Fukunaga was his own DP, and the film's cinematography is precisely what we have come to expect from his camera: images worthy of Malick himself. His camera, like the master's, lingers lovingly on the land, treats with beauty and respect the bodies that have been destroyed, refuses the pleasure that audiences desire when they watch violence. And he has set the film in the most gorgeous locations. Characters slog through trenches of bright red clay, the sun on the ocean serves the function of allowing the film finally to breathe near its end, and the banal, artificial lighting of the war rooms and bunkers allow the audience to appreciate beauty where the film wishes us to do so, and feel constrained and even slightly nauseous when such a feeling is merited.

I must, of course, also tell you that the acting is excellent. Abraham Attah, a fourteen year old Ghanaian actor, is absolutely riveting as the lead character, Agu. And Idris Elba brings extraordinary depth to this terrific villain. His performance is so extraordinarily brave that the film, almost entirely through Elba's performance, is able to address the tensions of desire that exist between the exploiters and the exploited in this situation of child soldiery. I am using only the word desire (without qualification) here on purpose. What becomes clear throughout the film is a kind of longing for youth, for acolytes, for sexual subjectivity, for mastery, that comprises the exploitation of child soldiers. It is a harrowing insight from what is, finally, a brilliant film, absolutely not to be missed.

Walking on Air

I thought Robert Zemeckis's movie The Walk – which is based on a story told in James Marsh's Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man on Wire – was a trifling bit of fluff.

I had heard tell that The Walk was an exciting movie, that it took some time getting started, but that once Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker who put a wire between two corners of the Twin Towers, got onto his wire and started walking across, the movie was really going to get going.

I had also heard that people were getting sick in this movie, getting vertigo or becoming disturbed somehow by the dizzying heights portrayed in the film. (This obviously appealed to me.)

But... The Walk is, more than anything else, a kind of whimsical fairy tale. The screenplay is designed like a children's story, and it is actually narrated by the actor playing Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) from the balcony at the top of the Statue of Liberty's torch. He tells us the story from there, while pulling rabbits out of hats and making coins appear from behind the ears of ingenuous children.

One might say that there is more to this film than whimsy, but The Walk insists on a kind of triviality, one that believes in the magic power of mimes. Throughout the film Petit talks a great deal about Art with a capital A, and he believes that his walk is a grand, superb artistic gesture. Frankly, I am inclined to agree with him. But Zemeckis's film is not interested in Petit as an artist, despite the number of times the word art is repeated in the screenplay. For Zemeckis, the protagonist of The Walk is a kind of magical grown up who can show us all what it is like to be a child again. Petit is reduced from what he thinks he is (an artist) to a kind of street magician, a latter-day Peter Pan who refuses to grow up and from whom we all can learn how not to be old. I don't know about you, but I think that kind of thing is silly.

The Walk is also a miniature love letter to the World Trade Center towers at the center of the film. This is understandable, and this aspect of the film is The Walk at its best. Near the film's end a character says something like "People have hated these towers since construction began on them, but now that you did what you did, people say they love the towers – they say that the towers mean something to them now". The actor who says this line, Steve Valentine, renders it beautifully, and embedded in his delivery is what happened to the towers in September of 2001, and what Petit did as an artist to change how people saw the towers. (The Eiffel Tower had its haters when it was first erected in 1889, as well.)

In short, the likability of the film's star and the sensational quality of the narrative the film wishes to tell are both undermined almost irrevocably by The Walk's writer and director. There was a cool film hidden in here somewhere, but maybe the cool film to which I refer is actually just Man on Wire.

Pal Joey

Pal Joey is actually really good despite Kim Novak's terrible acting. The gowns by Jean Louis are incredible: imaginative, gorgeous, novel. There are a couple of good tunes in here, too – and Rita Hayworth gets two great numbers.

But this film is at its high point when Sinatra blows the roof off with "The Lady Is a Tramp".

Murder, Inc.

This is bad. Peter Falk is great, and the star, Stuart Whitman, is excellent. But this faux-documentary is poorly directed, badly shot, shoddily edited, and hastily scripted with a silly bit of moralizing at the end and an absurd narrator device that isn't introduced until midway through the picture. Shot in Cinemascope, you'd think it would be more interested in its photography, and it seems occasionally to be so, but mostly this picture is just getting by. It felt like a rush job more than anything else: a total mess.

Jauja

Jauja is an entrancing dream of a film. It is a kind of combination of Tsai Ming-Liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which is to say that it is definitely not for everyone. But I was into it.

Generic Title (Bridge of Spies)

A (sober) conversation with my friends Chris and Walter about Spielberg's new movie Bridge of Spies. This does contain spoilers, so be forewarned. Still, none of us recommends this movie, so you can probably just keep reading and then skip the film.

Walt: Ok fellas, I'm off to see Bridge of Spies. Wish me luck.
Chris: Stay strong.
Walt: Let me just say that I am the youngest one here.
Chris: Off to a good start.
Aaron: I just got out of the movie.
Chris: Initial thoughts?
Aaron: It was boring.
Chris: Agreed.

Aaron: What was this movie about? America and stuff, right? Principles? Doing the right thing? I don't mind a movie about all of those things, really, but I think what bugged me about this movie was something I kept puzzling over the whole time it was going on. What kind of movie is this? Is Bridge of Spies supposed to be a character study? It certainly isn't one; we know nothing of the main character except that he is a kind of symbol for "American values" and "giving a guy fair shake" and that sort of thing. We literally get only one little flash that there might be something else to his character in that little moment when he says that the Yale kid is the same age as someone else (no one follows up on this little red herring, but it is some indication of this character's humanity). But then if the movie isn't about this character, then it is a movie about plot, which means this is supposed to be a kind of suspense movie! If it is, then why is it so slow? There are all of these ponderous scenes where characters philosophize about the right thing to do, but where is the suspense??

Chris: So this is basically a heroic tale of human compassion, right? Mark Rylance has this line in the holding cell where asks for a pen and paper to sketch with. Hanks denies him and Rylance responds with something to the extent of "You would want your man to be treated just the same over there, right?" – cut to soft-focus close up of Hanks trying his best.

Walt: It was a parable or something. Or something.

Chris: The trailer wants us to think it's a thriller and at the very top (the opening sequence with Rylance being pursued) I was totally on board with that. But then this goes away and I wasn't sure what was left in its place. The plane sequence was pretty great; wish there was more of that. Something that my buddy Joey brought up was that we never get a chance to really care about the Hanks/Rylance relationship, because we spend so little time with them together. This caused the final bridge scene to fall flat since it was hard to care about them as much as the movie wanted us to. 

Hanks is feeling a little bloated

Walt: I think I just watched three different movies (or maybe I’m just responding to the three endings). At some point we’re in the one of the Berlins and I’m like “this is the same movie? But I thought Alan Alda…” Ugh, it was so bloated. I feel like Spielberg used to be so tight and now he’s become so much more ponderous. A year or two after The Color Purple, he called the it “the most grown up film I’ve made”. And if I think about it, all of his grown up films are bloated. So maybe it's not about where he is in his career so much as it is that he think grown up films should be bloated. Really, though, the movie kind of wanders. I remember watching an interview with him in the '90s talking about how he has this group that he screens his films with (I’m guessing Scorsese, Coppola, yadda yadda yadda). What the hell kind of notes are they giving him, anyway?

Aaron: And I wonder about the novel, actually, because there are really three plotlines – this had to have been cleaner in the novel, and it certainly could've been written more cleanly for the screenplay.

Walt: I didn't know that it was originally a novel. That makes sense. I don't think the adaptation is very strong. This thing should’ve been an hour on the history channel, not a Hollywood film. Seriously, why did anyone make this movie? What do we need it for right now? Spielberg reminds me of my dad in a way: he still thinks we should hate the Russians and that Castro is public enemy #1. This movie hated Russians. And Amy Ryan. They must hate her, to give such a great actress such an impossible and ultimately meaningless role. All she does is complain, right to end, when he doesn’t bring back that sweet sweet British marmalade. Imagine Odysseus returns home, saves Penelope from all the suitors and she just complains about how he didn’t bring back one of those amazing Trojan rugs! Also, what’s with Tom Hank’s son? Why is there even one scene with him? And what about the humor? All those jokes stood out like a sore thumb.

The camera loves Amy Ryan but this movie doesn't.

Aaron: I love your note that it is three different movies. But for me this is both a screenplay problem and a direction problem. There are so many little jokes. Spielberg can't help himself with these little bits of silliness. It baffles me. I'm thinking of that chief prosecutor in the GDR picking up the wrong telephone. Ha ha. And the little trick that Hanks plays on the assistant who is dating his daughter. What a prankster! And when that little joke comes back to bite him when the assistant spills the truth to Amy Ryan I actually laughed out loud. I thought this was quite a comical sequence. But this has nothing to do with the rest of the film in either its plot or its tone. It is very early in the film, and is, I presumed, designed to set the tone for what we're watching, but it's so comic that the tone it set confused the rest of the movie.

Chris: Oh yeah, that assistant... what happened to his plot line/why was he in the movie? For the joke?

Aaron: You are so right about the stuff with Hanks' son. Who cares. Maybe it is supposed to contrast with that final moment on the train? "American kids used to live in terror and sleep with their bathtubs full, but now they happily scamper over the fences of their neighbors so that they can more quickly get to the orange juice in Mrs. Thompson's icebox."

Walt: I don’t see a strong enough connection between the kid in the bathtub and the kids jumping the fence, but I had other things on my mind when that was happening. Yeah, his kid meant nothing.  When he’s deciding on whether to handle the negotiation and who does the pilot remind him of?  Some older kid that works for him that he’s not even related to!

* * *

Walt: But anyway, it’s about the power of the everyman or something. A guy realizes how awesome his life is or how awesome it could be, maybe. Like Joe vs. the Volcano, except the volcano is just a bunch of shitty people he has to wade through. Tom Hanks had a cold in that one, too, except he got better as the movie went on. Maybe that’s the difference between comedy and drama? The cold gets worse in drama. Oh my god. He had a cold. I kept wondering about that in the movie, but it just hit me. Cold. Cold War? Oh my god, I bet that’s it. Like they read a Syd Field screenplay book and got to the section where they suggest you give the character a physical marker à la Jack Nicholson in Chinatown (Jake is nosey so his nose gets cut) and thought “oooh, we should do that for Tom, too! I mean, it’s the Cold War, amiright, Stevie?”

Chris: Worst bit: That old woman on the train. She notices Hanks and scowls at him (you know, because he's defending a traitor). Then weeks later she happens to be on the same train car with him, but this time smiles because he did good job. Steven, we get it.

Walt: Oh my god, that woman on the train. She smiles for an awfully long while, doesn’t she? That’s bad train etiquette, even in an age where you didn’t have to lock your doors at night. Also, what about when Tom Hanks is looking out the subway window down onto the Brooklyn streets and is most likely thinking "god, I’m glad we’re not Russian"?

Aaron: Can we talk a little about Tom Hanks's acting in this? I kept looking at him in this picture and I just don't get it. What is he doing?

Tom Hanks is a little lost.

Walt: I don’t know what to say about Tom Hanks. I love him. I miss him, actually, but not enough that I want him back yet. He should hang out for a while. Thanks to TBS, he’ll never really go away, anyway. They basically just alternate screenings of Big and You’ve Got Mail. I mean, he was fine, he really was. But just because he’s our Jimmy Stewart doesn’t mean he has to take roles that they can’t offer Jimmy Stewart anymore. 

Chris: Hanks was not bad, but forgettable. I thought he was fantastic in that Captain Phillips movie and had high hopes for this. I will say he was a great casting choice, as was everyone. Rylance was fantastic but we didn't get enough!

Aaron: I thought Mark Rylance was great, and I also really liked Peter McRobbie (who plays some sort of higher-up dude in the CIA), and I also thought Sebastian Koch was perfectly cast and he was probably my favorite thing in the whole film. He was so good.

Walt: I enjoyed Mark Rylance. I’ve seen some clips of him doing Shakespeare and one of his funny Tony acceptance speeches, but that’s about it. I found him a bit too adorable, though. Wasn’t there something about him that was just kind cute? With that “would it help?” catchphrase? What a darling. I loved the KGB guy (Mikhail Gorevoy) and Sebastian Koch as well. In a movie that tried so hard to make everything look so dangerous, the danger he presented felt authentic to me.

* * *

Chris: Positive thoughts: Cinematically, it was everything we've come to expect from Spielberg. Just beautiful to watch with great attention to detail. Really lovely.

Walt: You’re right: it was beautifully shot. Spielberg is a master at conventional visual storytelling. That shot of Hanks on the bridge in the 1st ending was breathtaking. I thought the film should’ve ended there.

Aaron: Yeah, it surprises me that you guys thought it was well shot. The whole thing looked simultaneously washed out and milky to me. All of that bright, hazy sun pouring through the windows (this was especially annoying when we were in the chief prosecutor's office at the GDR). I don't understand Kaminski's style anymore. What is the point of bleaching all of the color out of every shot? 

The milky glow of sunlight beatifying our star

Walt: I agree with you that the lighting exposure in a lot of the film didn’t really work, but I’ll still defend the visual storytelling.  Little things, really, like the reveal of all the policeman in front of Tom Hanks' house. A lot of other directors would have shown all those police cars at the beginning of the scene to establish the tension, but Spielberg holds that off and waits until after he’s confronted by the single policeman to reveal what looks to be the entire precinct out there. Before that reveal Hanks and the policeman are on equal ground, but after, we see that Hanks’ character is all alone in this. I’ll also stand behind that beautiful shot of Hanks on the bridge in the first ending. However, I will not stand behind the several shots of using window panes as a literal framing device.

Chris: To be fair, the dismal/it's really cold look with the saturated color scheme was effective. Russia looked terrible and I wanted to put on another coat. Then we get a nice sepia tone for the pilot plot because we're going back in time. Haha.

Walt: Oh man, and what about how the Supreme Court glowed like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude? Spielberg really loves the America. And the 50s. I didn’t mean to write the “the” in “the America”, but it actually seems right somehow. 

Aaron: But I don't think it is fair to say that Spielberg loves the 1950s any more than any of the cohort that he came of age with - Lucas and Barry Levinson and Zemeckis and Coppola all love the 1950s. It was an important time for them. "When men were men" or maybe "when ethical questions meant something" or something like that. The movie does try to deal with those things. As much as Spielberg loves the U.S. – and that absurd shot at the end where Hanks is glad he's not a Soviet is evidence of that – the  movie can't help but notice that the Americans themselves are just as bad as the Soviets and the East Germans at several points. Note Hanks' crack about his East German prison cell being no better than his digs in West Germany. And then there was that crusty old judge and his total railroading of American justice, and the CIA's attempts to get Hanks to violate attorney-client privilege. The movie can't help but show us that Americans are no more a just group of people than the East Berliners or the Soviets. For all its highmindedness about the Constitution and liberty and all of that, the soldiers at the end are still dishonorable assholes to that kid who got shot down over Soviet territory and managed not to talk even though he was tortured. Bridge of Spies believes that the American people are, in truth, just as bad as Soviets and East Germans; we just have better laws over here.

Mark Rylance being adorable.

Walt: Oh man, I totally kept cracking to myself “when men were men” during this movie.  And you’re right too, that the movie includes Americans in the shitty people/volcano that Tom Hanks has to fight (I thought of Lionel Barrymore a lot when watching that cranky judge. Doesn’t that judge belong in a holiday movie about a guy who doesn’t believe reindeer can fly or something?). Perhaps Spielberg is wrestling with the idea that while he was having his American Graffiti moment there were all kinds of assholes pulling strings at the highest level. But do we need this movie for that? Or this story?

 * * *

Walt: Was anyone else struck by Tom Hank’s color palette at the end of the film?  He’s passed out on the bed wearing a charcoal gray suit with a dark red sweater poking out the sleeve.  Does he come back from East Berlin a lil’ bit Communist?  Does it signify Mark Rylance’s last impact on him?

Aaron: I didn't notice a change in his color palette when he returned. Perhaps that was further evidence of that never-ending cold??

Walt: Also, why go through the bit at the end where Rylance mentions that if the Russians don’t embrace him upon his release at the end it will signify his death only to tell us in the credits that nope, never mind, he didn’t die actually?

Aaron: That Mark-Rylance-doesn't-die bit was so Steven Spielberg - a habit he has that is just as marked as his multiple endings. Create tension and make something seem really scary, and then show us that we had nothing to be worried about after all. It happened when the CIA guy followed him in act one, as well. That guy seemed really dangerous, but turns out he was able to be defeated simply by a few snide remarks about American values and some nonchalant snacking on an almond or two. I kept hoping Rylance would get shot on the bridge itself by those snipers. I know that's terrible, but this movie needed some actual stakes, and then all of that tension would have actually had a payoff.

Walt: I fully expected him to get shot. Otherwise, oooooo snipers.  Better watch out, cause, y’know, they might… let you know if someone’s coming or something.

Chris: This was a true event right? So there's boundaries.  I assume Rylance's character didn't get shot on the bridge - then again maybe that whole scene didn't actually happen on a bridge. I don't know.

Hanks on the eponymous bridge

Walt: It had to happen on a bridge, otherwise no title. The bridge was so inconsequential to the film though. What’s the bridge of spies? Is it East Berlin? Tom Hanks? The actual bridge? It works on many levels, but so little is made of the actual bridge that there’s nothing concrete to tie it to. I’m just generally confused. About why the movie was made and what we’re supposed to get from it. I’m sure Spielberg’s great uncle loved it. It felt like a movie that a great uncle would tell his filmmaker nephew that he should make. “Now THAT would be real story.  None of this treasure-hunting crap. You wanna talk about danger?  When I was in Berlin…” 

Aaron: I am not actually sure how I stayed awake.

Chris: So why are people giving so much love to this movie? Is it palpable to today's attitudes towards war?  The paranoia factor? Are people just suckers for Spielberg? The shot that rings most true for me was the Germans getting shot down climbing the wall: that demonstrated the terror of the entire situation for me. That "oh shit" moment. Then Steven screwed it up by having American kids climbing over a fence at the end.

 * * *

Aaron: I am not really a Spielberg fan or a Hanks fan, so I don't have the same kind of affection or emotional attachment to these Hollywood icons that the two of you do, but to me this kind of "prestige picture"/Oscar-bait garbage that Spielberg makes is completely uninteresting. It reminds me of the sort of old-school Clifford Odets-style of writing: a kind of writing that makes itself look very important but actually doesn't say anything at all; it simply pretends to be serious. I think Spielberg should stick to genre pictures.

Walt:  I love Spielberg and I love Hanks, but I’m over their being paired together. I’ve heard that Spielberg thinks Hollywood is broken, though he and his “cohorts” as you called them, namely Lucas, were really behind the breaking. Now he’s trying to make up for it by being a grown-up, except it feels like a 14-year-old’s version of what being a grown-up is. Not that “being grown up” really means anything anyway, but Spielberg seems to think it does, and who better to cast in a grown up movie than Tom “American Dad” Hanks. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do about either of them as a fan of theirs.  I just want them both to go away. Like Star Wars. Just go away so that I can be glad to see them again. 

Chris: If I had to rate this movie with a facial expression, it would be the one that old lady made on the train. Mildly disapproving with a touch of confusion. 

YSL

There were, oddly enough, two Yves Saint Laurent movies released in France in 2014. One, entitled Yves Saint Laurent, directed by Jalil Lespert and starring Pierre Niney, was released in the U.S. last June. This year, the film Saint Laurent, directed by Bertrand Bonello and starring Gaspard Ulliel was released on May 8; the second of these films was submitted by France as its Foreign Language entry to the Academy Awards last year, and is (technically) eligible in all categories except that one this year (though I don't see it getting any nominations).

Well, two films about a legendary gay fashion designer? I obviously needed to watch both of them. Mostly, though, I just couldn't believe that this happened. How is it that two films could be made about the same man, the same set of events, released in the same year, and then nominated for a total of 17 César awards? And at the Césars both Pierre Niney and Gaspard Ulliel were nominated (for playing the same famous person) and both Jérémie Renier and Guillaume Gallienne were nominated (for playing the same famous person's famous lover). Niney won, for the record; no one else did.

There's a reason Niney won and Ulliel and Renier did not. Yves Saint Laurent is a standard biopic film, following YSL as a very young man becoming the head designer at Dior, getting fired, starting his own fashion house, and then becoming enormously famous, enormously bored, enormously drug-addicted, etc. Yves follows this story as best it can, highlighting especially the love affair between Yves and his partner Pierre Bergé. Yves is a likable film with a very gay sensibility and an aim at understanding who the man was, what his ups and downs were, and why he did what he did. It's also a story of triumph over adversity, a sort of complicated queer hagiography, that sees YSL as worth exploring because he was a celebrity and a gay man who conquered surprising odds and made something of himself. But I finished the film wondering why they bothered. I mean, why tell the story of this man at all except to celebrate the life of this gay icon? I mean, where's the thesis? What does this film have to say about the man that the newspapers haven't already said?

Saint Laurent is something else altogether. Saint Laurent is a filmmaker's film. It is not a movie that is interested in story or in making sure we understand YSL's rise to fame. In fact, Saint Laurent begins its narrative in the late 1960s, long after YSL and Bergé became lovers, long after the house of YSL was founded, even after YSL's famous Mondrian collection in 1965. Saint Laurent explores, instead, what it means to be an artist, the demands we make on the geniuses among us. And the movie spends time trying to understand, not YSL's decision-making processes or his artistic genius, but what he went through as a talented person who was beset on all sides by people demanding that he create.

Saint Laurent is a gorgeous film, brilliantly edited and shot, and judiciously but cleverly using split-screen techniques: early on in the movie, YSL's collections are juxtaposed with the upheaval in the world during the late 1960s, and late in act three there is a fabulous split-screen Mondrian sequence. Saint Laurent claims that YSL's designs were Proustian, as opposed to Lagerfeld and other people's pop-culture designs. And Saint Laurent itself aims for the Proustian, allowing the film to play about in memory. There are flashes of the past and even of the future throughout Saint Laurent. What do we remember and when do we remember it? And what does it mean to be in the present when the present is so pregnant with what (we think) is past?

Saint Laurent as a film is far, far superior to Yves Saint Laurent. It is a pleasure to watch from start to finish, filled with mysterious images, flashes of memory, and far less judgment than the other film. Saint Laurent, too, focuses on the labor that goes into creating the dresses themselves. We spend a great deal of time in the shop itself, watching the women labor over cutting out patterns and attempting to get things just right. It is a kind of filmic materialist analysis of the house of YSL. And if Saint Laurent is far less interested than its predecessor in making sure we understand what happened in YSL's life, it is much more interested in making sure we understand how such a life might have worked, the true cost, confusion, and frivolity of being a genius.

The Martian

I won't say I disliked Ridley Scott's new film, exactly. I didn't. I rather liked it.

I mean, The Martian is so milquetoast, so contrived, so thematically conservative, so filled with A-listers, so diverse, so generic, so outright plucky, that it would be difficult to dislike it with any real fervor. Instead one feels as though one got exactly what one bargained for. Yes, this is how a big Hollywood movie that takes place in space is supposed to work, this is what is supposed to happen, this is where Twentieth Century Fox's big dollars went, listen to the disco music, sit back, and enjoy yourself. And try to stay awake.

But, as I say, I didn't really dislike it. The Martian is enjoyable enough, and at any given moment during the movie there's usually something fairly cool to look at. The performances, too, are just fine: my favorites were Donald Glover, Benedict Wong, Chiwetel Ejiofor (always good) and Sean Bean, each of whom looked like he spent time thinking about who his character was before he got started. Michael Peña was good, too.

The problems with The Martian, to my mind, all stem from its self-satisfied quality. The movie is just so sure of itself, so shallow, so obviously doing its Hollywood thing, telling jokes that it just "knows" audiences are going to eat up – "space pirate" and "science the shit out of this" indeed – that its smugness started to wear on me.

For real though: Is anyone watching this movie ever actually concerned as to whether or not Matt Damon will be able to be rescued and returned to Earth safely? The characters in the movie seem occasionally concerned with this, but I couldn't muster any identification with the emotions I was seeing onscreen; Damon's rescue, his success, his total triumph over the implacable, uncaring powers of the universe, seemed a foregone conclusion before his team ever even left him on the red planet. And who can identify with Jessica Chastain's guilt over having left him there when a) we already know he's alright and b) everyone else in the film has already told us that it isn't her fault at all? I just couldn't get into these people with their phony feelings. Are you guys scientists or characters in a nineteenth-century melodrama? (Maybe this was why I liked Benedict Wong and Donald Glover; they play their characters like big giant nerds who don't actually know how to act around regular people.)

I want to say a couple more things that I thought about while watching this movie. Two years ago, when Captain Phillips came out, I got really stuck on all the money that I was seeing up there on the screen. Within the plot of Phillips it is perfectly logical to spend millions of dollars to rescue a single guy who has been kidnapped by pirates. This happens in The Martian, too, and it is a little more justified in The Martian's case, because its main character is actually an employee of the U.S. government and is on an interplanetary mission for that government, but watching NASA expend this enormous amount of effort to rescue this dude (and it really is a completely extraordinary amount of time and money), started to irk me after a while. This annoyance moved into overdrive for me when Damon dismantles a spacecraft in act three and just tosses the very expensive equipment into the Martian dust like so much detritus. This is, of course, a fictional story, but, then again, this is precisely what governments do. Certainly spending all of this money to save this one guy is sentimental and clearly politically advantageous (the film stresses this last point), but I can't help thinking about the lives that don't matter in this world, particularly in the U.S. So, save the martian, by all means, but why this guy? What is it about this guy's life that is so worth saving when there are so many lives we don't value at all, when we in fact spend time passing laws so that their lives are destroyed?

I have one more criticism, and this one, too, is a criticism of the film's politics. During the denouement of The Martian, Damon gives this speech about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, making things work, solving problems, and depending on your ingenuity. Now, I don't completely object to ingenuity or solving problems – in fact anyone who knows me will tell you that my chief priority in life is to make myself smarter and to work at improving myself – but the idea that this Martian did all of this stuff "by himself" is patently absurd. Although the film seems to want to stress that the NASA scientists were a bunch of interlopers, giving Damon bad advice about his potato-growing techniques and only being able to come up with the idea of punching a hole in the roof of his Rover, the movie still makes it quite obvious that this character could not have figured out how to get to the Sciaparelli Crater without talking to the guys at JPL. In fact, the Martian has literally hundreds of people working to help him, and even within this film's individualist narrative, the U.S. team would also never have been able to do what they did without the help of Chinese funds and ingenuity, as well. Even the stuff that Damon figures out on Mars when he is by himself is only possible because the writer has given our protagonist (like the eponymous hero of Robinson Crusoe) everything he needs to be able to survive all of the reversals the writer plans to throw at him. Individualism in this movie is a total myth, a myth that the movie seems to believe in, but not a position that is even remotely tenable.

Finally, let me return to one thing that I noted earlier: this film looks beautiful. In fact, whoever designed Mars for this movie did a spectacular job. I don't think the red planet has ever looked this gorgeous in a movie. The designs are at times deeply moving and occasionally even breathtaking. They top even the best of the images in the other big desert movie of the year, Mad Max: Fury Road.

But this is indicative of the film's chief priorities. The Martian is all about surfaces and not at all about substance. The Martian's tears are, in the end, only as real as his faux-dislike of disco music.

The Scorch Trials

This movie is not about another test that the children go through, thankfully. So the "trials" in the title are not really trials at all. Thankfully. But this film, like the film before it, is filled with these sort of absurd peripities where we think we're watching something real and then it turns out that it is all being plotted by someone behind the curtain. This got extremely tiresome in the first Maze Runner, and it continues to be tiresome in The Scorch Trials.

This movie is fairly asinine, and I was annoyed through most of it. (This one, by the way, is about zombies, which replace the first movie's cool spider-robot-brain creatures. Oh well.)

In fact, there isn't much that can be said to redeem The Scorch Trials except that I was glad that Giancarlo Esposito had a nice meaty role that let him show off his abilities. Otherwise, this is utter silliness, although I continue to enjoy these films where twentysomethings playing teenagers run as quickly as they can from things that are chasing them. See: Insurgent.

The Omen

I loved this. Terrifying with great performances, a love of the grotesque, and a great score by Jerry Goldsmith.