Boys on Bikes

In preparation for The Bikeriders, I wanted to watch a kind of legendary old British biker movie I had heard about called The Leather Boys from 1965 that has a homosexual twist (or a homophobic one, depending on how you're looking at things).

Well The Leather Boys is not nearly as gay as I wanted it to be. It’s actually a very typical angry young man/woman drama from the 1960s. Lots of married young people yelling at one another and living in tiny rooms when they shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. From the perspective of The Leather Boys, hanging out with the boys while riding around on bikes looks a lot better than going home to tea and baked beans from a can. But I’m not sure the movie really says anything about queerness or queer bike riders or any of that. This seems like a sort of strange addition to the angry young man genre. But it's clear that some of the men in the biker gangs just really don't do well with society—with going to college and getting a job and, like, raising a family and stuff—and then some of the men in the biker gang are there to wear leather and get their rocks off with other leather boys. Seems reasonable enough to me.

Anyway, that is how I prepared for The Bikeriders. And, well, it was fine. 

The Bikeriders is shot in a cool way—it reproduces a series of documentary photos taken by the (completely undeveloped) Mike Faist character—but I don't really understand what Jeff Nichols has to say about this gang of bikers. The character development for all of the men is pretty much nonexistent. We don't really know Austin Butler or Tom Hardy at all. Who are these guys? Why do they hang out together? What are they doing? They actually almost never talk about bikes, so it's probably not really that. But, then, they don't really talk about anything. They’re violent and awful and drink too much and fight for no real reason, but I guess we’re supposed to find that charming. But, like, why?? 

What’s strange is that The Bikeriders just doesn’t have much of a point of view about them. I think I know why, too. The film almost completely avoids politics—there’s one part where a guy gets beaten up because he says he wants to become a cop and another where a guy says he hates “pinkos” who go to college—but the film doesn’t agree with any of this stuff. It’s just sort of presented for us. The same guy who hates pinkos tells us that he really really wanted to go to be in the Vietnam War, except that he didn't really because he got super drunk the night before and then slept through his alarm the day he was supposed to sign up. These biker guys are counterculture dudes, right? They hate cops and the government and having a job and the man. This is what I understand. They're violent, and they think cops and firemen are schmucks, which is why they flout the law and start fights and stuff. It’s the only real reason I can think of for their antiestablishment antics. And it must also be what ties the men together. But none of them ever talks about any of that. And the film doesn’t ask them to. 

Consider, for example, the gang going to Brucey's funeral. Why does the family send their flowers back? And why does the old woman spit in Johnny's face? There's literally no reason for these old folks to hate this group so much—as far as we know. Have they done something horrible that we don't understand? The screenplay, in other words, leaves a very large lacuna in the center of the film. The Bikeriders just seems sort of there, like a documentary that never presses its subjects on anything they say.

As for my homo-preparation for this movie, I was glad I prepped with The Leather Boys. There's this crazy erotic sequence in The Bikeriders when Tom Hardy asks Austin Butler to run the club after he quits (although he's not quitting, so the scene's purpose is actually just for Tom to tell Austin he's his favorite person). But the whole scene is firelit, and they are just so close together that it feels like they should be kissing. They didn't. And I'm not actually sure why they didn't.

Oscar Noms 2017: 6 of 13

Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove

Part 6:

Captain Fantastic

1 Nomination

• Actor: Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises)

Director: Matt Ross

Cast: Mortensen, George MacKay, Frank Langella, Samantha Isler, Annalise Basso, Nicholas Hamilton, Shree Crooks, Charlie Shotwell, Kathryn Hahn, Steve Zahn, Ann Dowd, Trin Miller, Erin Moriarty, Missi Pyle, Elijah Stevenson, Teddy Van Ee

I am rather surprised that Matt Ross wasn't nominated in the Original Screenplay category, as well. This was one of my favorite movies of the year, though, so I will take what I can get. It is not perfect, but I didn't care about any of this movie's flaws. I was only paying attention to what I loved about it. But let's talk about Viggo Mortensen and how this is only his second nomination ever. His performances in The Road, The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring, A Dangerous Method, and A History of Violence have all had some awards buzz around them, but this is only his second Oscar nomination, despite the chatter. This is pretty stunning when you think about it. In any case, I am glad more people are talking about this movie, and I sure hope more people see it. The truth is that Captain Fantastic is an ensemble picture, and this lead performance, although it is clearly the lead of the movie, often takes a backseat to the work done by the ensemble as a whole.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #11 out of 91

Elle

1 Nomination

• Actress: Isabelle Huppert

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Charles Berling, Anne Consigny, Jonas Bloquet, Christian Berkel, Judith Magre, Virginie Efira, Alice Isaaz, Raphaël Lenglet, Vimala Pons, Arthur Mazet, Lucas Prisor, Stéphane Bak

I really really liked this movie, but it is a very troubling film and I have really recommended it to no one. This is primarily because Elle is a film about rape, it is a smart film about ethics and rape and desire, and it asks the audience to do a lot of thinking. The central character is as complex as most Huppert characters; in fact this is a kind of classic Huppert performance – the kind we are used to seeing in more recent Huppert films like The Piano Teacher, Merci pour le Chocolat, and Gabrielle. It is odd, really, that this film has finally scored her her first Oscar nomination. After appearing in numerous Oscar-nominated films (from 1980-1991 that includes Heaven's Gate, Coup de Torchon, Entre Nous, and Madame Bovary), she is only now being recognized by the Academy, even though she has, since then, become an enormous star internationally (nominated for 16 César Awards). In any case, this is her first nomination and it is well deserved – especially since she was also so great this year in L'Avenir. But back to Elle for a second, just so you who haven't seen it have a bit of an idea of what this film is: Huppert's character is raped very early on in the film in a scene that is very difficult to watch. She then decides to take revenge on her rapist. She must figure out who her rapist is first, but meanwhile she is attempting to seduce her married next door neighbor (or is he attempting to seduce her?). There are also plenty of other things with which she must deal: an ungrateful son, a theatrical mother, the remarriage of her ex-husband, an affair with her best friend's husband, sexual harassment at work. This is a complex, fascinating character study that thrills with Hitchcockian levels of suspense. It is also filled with mysterious surprises until the very end.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Actress

My Rating: #20 out of 91

Loving

1 Nomination

• Actress: Ruth Negga

Director: Jeff Nichols

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Negga, Terri Abney, Sharon Blackwood, Will Dalton, Alano Miller, Chris R. Greene, Nick Kroll, Michael Shannon, Jon Bass

I really enjoyed this movie. This is the first Oscar nomination for a Jeff Nichols movie, which I don't think I understand given his amazing output. (Nichols had two films out this year and I liked the other one even better.) But I am glad Negga is getting attention for her performance. Loving is not your typical Nichols movie, either. It has no real science fiction qualities to it, and it is not really a mystery, but it is essentially a story of the South, which is what Nichols does, and it is also – for a movie whose outcome we already know – a film absolutely chock full of suspense. This is, of course, also one of the things Nichols does really, really well, and he uses his techniques of suspense here excellently. It is worth noting, too, that Loving's script and photography are also both very good, and the film's central performance – by Joel Edgerton – was also one of the best of the year.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #26 out of 91

Nocturnal Animals

1 Nomination

• Supporting Actor: Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road)

Director: Tom Ford

Cast: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Ellie Bamber, Armie Hammer, Andrea Riseborough, Michael Sheen, Laura Linney, Karl Glusman, Robert Aramayo, Jena Malone

I adored this movie. It is my #3 for the year. It is a really difficult film, and I understand why so many people had so much trouble with it, but I both really enjoyed the movie and thought it interrogated many interesting things. In fact, I loved it. It's creepy and mysterious and violent, but it is also sexy and unsparing and sad. Nocturnal Animals is a film about revenge, about being unfair to the people in our lives and then about suffering the consequences of that unfairness. Nocturnal is also about art or about trying to make something that expresses how the artists (or non-artist) feels. Let's just be honest and say that I have a lot of trouble articulating why I loved this movie as much as I did, but I thought it was brave and intriguing and gorgeous, while also being very difficult – which is why I've really not recommended it to anyone. As for Michael Shannon's nomination, this came as rather a big surprise to everyone, I think, but it is well deserved. Isn't it odd that Shannon now has two nominations and that they're for Revolutionary Road and this movie? So strange.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #3 out of 91

Back to:
Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One 
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove

Jeff Nichols' New Little Gem

Let the Midnight Special shine her light on me

Let the Midnight Special shine her ever-loving light on me

Jeff Nichols is just so good. Midnight Special is his fourth film (his fifth, Loving, will be out during awards season) and it is a tense, taught, always exciting sci-fi movie that is full of surprises and twists. I don't want to say too much about this, because I don't want to spoil anything, but I can say that Midnight Special is about a dad trying to help his son, who has special powers possibly related to Cyclops from the X-men. He wears goggles and can only travel at night because the sun does very weird things to him. But dad (Nichols muse Michael Shannon) and another man (we don't really know much about who this guy is at the beginning, but he's played by Joel Edgerton who gives a superb performance) are trying to get the boy somewhere or are running away from something.

Do not spoil this movie by watching trailers. Just watch it without knowing anything.

Jaeden Liberher in Midnight Special

All becomes clear as the movie progresses, and Nichols alternates the sharing of plot information that we need and terrific suspense sequences beautifully. Nichols has also created a kind of alternate world (as, indeed, he did with Mud and Take Shelter) so that the film, if it is a science-fiction film, really works like a mystery more than anything else. On one hand, we watch the fugitives run. On the other hand, we watch a government official (Adam Driver) try to figure out what is going on, and we learn simultaneously with him. But what in the hell is going on? Who are the good guys? Where did this boy with super-powers come from? This we will begin to understand only slowly, and as in Mud, more and more is revealed as the movie progresses even though our perspective this time is not the partial understanding of a kid but the alleged masterful understanding of law enforcement and the federal government.

From Take Shelter

But exposition? Forget about it. I kept thinking maybe we would go back in time in order to explain something about how we got here. But forget about it. This ain't no big Hollywood movie, and the questions with which we are left are doing their own kind of work, lingering and haunting like the troubling ending of Take Shelter.

Nichols' worlds are not places that we can understand completely. Or, rather, what Nichols' films give us are our own world with the wonderful returned to it. If we are asking what in the hell is going on here? How can this happen? the film is reminding us that if our science knows a great deal, if we think we can understand the human brain (as in Take Shelter), there are still many many mysteries out there; there are still inexplicable wonders to be explored. And not just that: we are looking for mystery. The characters in Midnight Special want, like Fox Mulder, to believe in something else. And Midnight Special (and I think Nichols in general) is interested in reminding us that there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen in Starman (1984)

In short, this movie is masterfully directed. Nichols gets great performances out of everyone (the other performers are Kirsten Dunst, Sam Shepard, Jaeden Liberher, Paul Sparks, David Jensen and Bill Camp). David Wingo's haunting minimalist score is all low beats and fast drums. And the movie is an edge-of-your-seat, fast-paced, action/mystery/chase/sci-fi kind-of-thing that I loved. It's also a bit of an homage to late 1970s early 1980s sci-fi cinema, especially Close Encounters and Starman. This is definitely one of the best of 2016 so far. I can't wait for Loving to be released in November.

Ooooo. And pay very close attention to the ending.

Toy's House

Honestly, I can't recommend The Kings of Summer enough. I found this first film (directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts) to be a mix between two other movies that I liked very much this year – The Spectacular Now and Mud. I guess that means I am spending a lot of time recommending movies about adolescent boys who struggle with their adolescent lives and try to make sense of the world. The Kings of Summer is about a high-school age kid who is not getting along with his father and so (with his two friends) decides to move into the woods for the summer and live "like men".

In other words, even the kid at this movie's center understand that he is in a coming-of-age narrative. He is trying, actively, to become a grown-up and he knows it. That this bildungsroman theme is self-consciously obvious makes the whole thing even more enjoyable, and The Kings of Summer manages both an ironic and an empathetic perspective (a bit like D.O. Russell's gaze in last year's terribly titled but eminently likable Silver Linings Playbook). We almost never understand the main character Kings to be making the right decision – he makes childish decision after childish decision – but he is a confused, frustrated kid who I couldn't help but love anyway.

Unlike Spectacular Now and Mud, The Kings of Summer is a very funny comedy, with occasionally broad performances by comedians Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally, Mary Lynn Rajskub, and Kumail Nanjiani. Kings straddles this sit-comic approach to the suburban scenes with a Malickian approach to all of the scenes in the forest. The woods look gorgeous: the boys look out at the sunset, and play in the lake, and walk in open meadows, and it really feels like they are outside of the absurd world of suburbia that their parents inhabit. But these are two entirely different filmmaking styles, and if they don't actually belong together, their juxtaposition works very well, so that it made me appreciate the boys' forest retreat all the more. The dream of "getting out into nature" makes much more sense when it is clear how absolutely nonsensical life is in suburbia.

Toy's House (this film's former title)

I read a review of the film that called Vogt-Roberts' first feature "slight", and I can understand why someone would critique it this way. If I compare Kings to Mud and Spectacular Now, I have to say that the acting in the other two films is much better in them than in Kings; thematically, the other two films are more interesting, as well; I can even say that I was much more emotionally invested in the other two.

But I liked Kings better. It is a self-aware film that captures something of the absurdity of adolescence and the impossibility of certain modes of existence. Vogt-Roberts casts a withering gaze at masculinity, and, by way of derision, he mocks the idea that traditional masculinity is the proper telos for adolescence. This is is a very funny film, and if it doesn't quite do realism and honesty as well as The Spectacular Now or suspense as well as Mud, The Kings of Summer has an exquisite and hilarious charm all its own.

P.S. I really do feel strange about liking so many movies that center around male adolescence this year. I wonder what's come over me! Feeling nostalgia over my youth, I suppose.

Two 2013 Films about Fatherhood

Derek Cianfrance's The Place beyond the Pines is insistently about fatherhood – even to the point of being slightly clunky. "Are you thinking about the fact that the man you killed had a son the same age as your own?" a psychiatrist asks Bradley Cooper in the film's second act. "Is that why you're having trouble looking at your own son?" I can't tell you whether or not a psychiatrist would normally ask such a pointed question to a client, but either way, on film it felt forced and slightly obvious.

Thematics aside, The Place beyond the Pines is certainly interesting for its first act. And this interest derives mostly from the fact that Ryan Gosling's character was an unpredictable and erratic figure who never did what I expected him to do. Violent, scary, and very stupid, he was also devoted to his child in an immediate (also slightly terrifying) way. Gosling rides his motorcycle and broods and smokes cigarettes and says very little. His work is not without interest, here, but I think personally I'm a little Goslinged out. Okay not really. But I am a little tired of these brooding, silent figures who have secret love or secret pain or secret shame or something but aren't talking about it. And I know he works with directors other than Derek Cianfrance and Nicolas Winding Refn, but right now those gentlemen's characters seem like the only thing Gosling can do. I know that isn't true, but I also don't think I need any more strong, silent, good-at-revving-engines performances for a while.

Overall, Pines is more a piece about mood than anything else. It is also easy to say "thematics aside" above, but in truth The Place beyond the Pines is all about thematics. It is a kind of long-form meditation on what makes a father, what debt a son has to a father, and how we are or become the fathers to all sorts of sons – even the ones we didn't know we ought to be protecting.

To my mind Pines didn't have much else going for it. It's overly long, and the third act (which ought to be the most exciting section of the film) ends up being the flattest, with characters about whom we care much less than those who have been onscreen for the first two acts. I've read folks complaining on the internet that the third act dragged. To the contrary: the third act is probably the film's most exciting section; it is simply that there's no one onscreen whom we actually like.

Special note about the incredible character-actor Ben Mendelsohn, who is really superb in a supporting role as Gosling's only friend.

Pines is told mostly from the fathers' point(s) of view. Even in the third act when we adopt the son's viewpoint, we are watching as though we were his parent, so the point of view of the father predominates throughout Pines. In Jeff Nichols' Mud, we see the viewpoint of the son only.

~

Mud was everything I needed it to be. Two boys discover an outlaw named Mud on an island somewhere in the Mississippi River and decide to help him for no apparent reason other than that he is interesting and tells good stories. (I can relate; I love a good story.)

Ellis and Neckbone (That's a great handle, kid Matthew McConaughey tells him) are teenagers who really don't know what they're doing. We follow Ellis as he tries to get a much older teenage girl to be his girlfriend, deal with his parents' breakup, and assert himself as a full-grown individual. He is scared and naive and lovable, and the actor who plays him (Tye Sheridan) is unbelievably good. Watching this boy enjoy his first kiss will definitely be a cinematic highlight of 2013 for me.

Ellis is looking for another father figure – one different from his own father, I mean – and this outlaw is dangerous and exciting and apparently willing to fight for the woman he loves. Ellis admires that. Neckbone, too, needs more of a father in his life. His own guardian is a hilarious uncle played by Michael Shannon, who just wants his nephew to hang out with him. Of course, our father figures need their own fathers, too, and still need help even when they're grown. Mud is an orphan, too.

Mud is a suspense film, though, not a meditation. And, like he does in Take Shelter, Nichols handles the suspense superbly. Mud builds and builds until I absolutely loved the characters in the film and didn't think I'd be able to bear it if harm came to any of them. And it is a tribute to Nichols' excellent filmmaking that in a film that isn't a meditation – in a film that is really just a good old-fashioned genre picture – I spent most of my time thinking about fatherhood, about what we want our fathers to be, about what we need from them, and of the fantasies we project onto them about their abilities.

Perhaps it isn't fair to compare Mud to The Place beyond the Pines – they are, after all, working on totally different things – but I saw them back to back and they are both so much about fatherhood that I will probably always think about them together.