Back to the Future Part II (1989)

This kind of cartoony film was in vogue for a while, I guess, but it's just not for me at all. I don't understand the fake punches and phony violence and the mugging for the camera. This kind of thing happens in Terry Gilliam movies from the period and, I guess, all sorts of other 1980s movies too – Mad Max, Brazil, and Waterworld are other examples. I find this kind of thing so annoying. Back to the Future Part II's charms were all lost on me. I don't think I even cracked a smile during this; I certainly didn't laugh at any of the film's so-called jokes.

Romancing the Stone (1984)

Romancing the Stone is a ton of fun. It's funny, it's full of great action, absurd sequences, and wonderful characterization. I had a blast.

Oscar Noms 2017: 11 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, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals
Part 7 - The Lobster, 20th Century Women, Silence, Hail, Caesar!
Part 8 - Live-action Short Films
Part 9 - Animated Short Films
Part 10 - Toni Erdmann, The Salesman, Land of Mine, Tanna

Part 11:

Allied

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Joanna Johnston (Lincoln)

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Matthew Goode, Lizzy Caplan, Simon McBurney, Anton Lesser, August Diehl, Camille Cottin, Charlotte Hope, Marion Bailey, Thierry Frémont

I pregamed this film, thinking that it might, on an off chance, snag a costume nomination... and it did. This nomination for such a bad movie actually quite surprised me. You can read my original thoughts if you follow the link, but let's just leave it at me telling you that this movie makes no actual sense. A shame, too, because the parts in act one when Cotillard and Pitt are doing spy shit like randomly killing SS officers and upending tables in order to more easily see the enemy before grabbing a machine gun and cutting Nazis in half. That part is all quite cool. The second half is very boring.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #76 out of 95

The Jungle Book

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Jon Favreau

Cast: Neel Sethi, Ben Kingsley, Bill Murray, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong'o, Scarlett Johansson, Christopher Walken, Giancarlo Esposito

This was pleasant enough, but I guess I'm not really sure what the point of making it was. The visual effects look cool, although to my mind the animals don't look like animals so much as they look like very good CGI version of animals. In other words, visual effects are the purpose of this movie, so it is fitting that The Jungle Book got nominated for precisely that. But the new Jungle Book is no more realistic than the 1967 cartoon – it's still filled with talking animals, silly jokes, and the same songs as the original. Or at least a couple of them. And it is here where the film really can't find its footing. The new movie has not figured out a way to make The Jungle Book the live-action extravaganza it wants while also keeping "The Bare Necessities" and "I Want to Be like You". Favreau has the animals sing "Bare Necessities" half-heartedly, as a way of splitting the difference between a musical and a regular film, but then when Christopher Walken appears as King Louie, he sings his own song in full voice like it's a musical number. The whole thing felt uneven, and I was left thinking why they bothered at all. It wasn't a bad movie, but its not different enough from the original to matter at all.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #68 out of 95

Doctor Strange

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Scott Derrickson

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Benedict Wong, Mads Mikkelsen, Michael Stuhlbarg

This was another of my pregames that paid off. I complained in my original post that all of these Marvel movies are about the potential destruction of the known universe and that every single time the entire universe manages to be saved by the Marvel hero. As one reader pointed out, this isn't precisely true. There are plenty of Marvel movies where total apocalypse is not threatening the human race, but that doesn't stop Doctor Strange from being perhaps the most formulaic of the Marvel films yet. There have been so many of them, and this one comes so late, so I get that the well is running a bit dry, but they really need to ask more of these films. Doctor Strange has a great number of cool visual effects, but it hasn't a thing to say about anything. I was fairly bored.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #69 out of 95

13 Hours

1 Nomination

• Sound Mixing

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: John Krasinski, James Badge Dale, Pablo Schreiber, David Denman, Dominic Fumusa, Max Martini, David Costabile, Alexia Barlier, Peyman Moaadi, Matt Letscher, Toby Stephens, Demetrius Grosse, David Giuntoli


And then there's this steaming pile of garbage. First off, this bloated action movie (like all of Bay's overstuffed action movies) refuses to trim itself down to a normal action-movie length. Instead, we are treated to what felt like 13 hours of footage. It just kept going! But it wasn't the length that made 13 Hours so distasteful. I don't know enough about what actually happened in Benghazi to speak to this film's interpretation of events vis-à-vis history, but I can easily say that if this is what happened, I don't understand why everyone has been talking about Benghazi for the last year and a half. The film follows four or five mostly interchangeable macho, fratboy assholes, played mostly by Schreiber, Krasinski, Dale, and Denman, as they swagger around Libya and act like they own the place. As far as I can tell they do not work for the military, but are hired guns who work for the CIA's secret base in Benghazi. So far so bro. But these guys have no desire to work for their actual bosses. They know how things are supposed to be done here in Libya, and they're interested in telling everyone else what to do. I thought all of them were assholes from the absolute get-go. From the very beginning of the film they follow no orders at all and, from what I gathered, they break the secret base's cover by deciding (the film thinks heroically) to go save the U.S. ambassador's life after he is attacked at a mansion where he and his security detail are staying. The ambassador is dead already, and our fratboys disobey orders to go to the compound to try to save him and his guys. Fine. But then the saved guys and the swaggerers with guns lead their attackers directly to the no longer secret CIA base where they endanger the lives of some 75 operatives who had been working in secret in Libya but who are now exposed as U.S. spies. Then the bros defend the base for the last hour or so of the movie. This anti-intellectual film (a Harvard degree is an indication of total cluelessness in this movie) is photographed more than anything else like a single-person shooter video game, and the effects look comparable to one of them. It's designed to celebrate blowing things up, to take pleasure in shooting nameless and mostly faceless Africans, and to justify U.S. presence in North Africa. Perhaps what is most interesting about 13 Hours is its own blindness to the fact that it caused its own problems. The characters wouldn't have needed to be saved if they hadn't have been swaggering idiots in the first place. And Americans wouldn't be dead if they weren't holed up in a secret CIA base in North Africa to begin with. What is so extraordinarily distasteful about a movie like this is that it believes that no one in the military knows anything about what to do in a situation like the one the film describes. Apparently the only people who know anything at all are the men with the guns. And they know what to do simply by virtue of having guns. Because the right thing to do is always to shoot. When the right thing to do is always to kill people, it is the men with the guns who always seem to be able to do the right thing. I hated every second of this.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #95 out of 95

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
Part 6 - Captain Fantastic, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals
Part 7 - The Lobster, 20th Century Women, Silence, Hail, Caesar!
Part 8 - Live-action Short Films
Part 9 - Animated Short Films 

Part 10 - Toni Erdmann, The Salesman, Land of Mine, Tanna

Pregame: the Longshots

My November-February movie-watching is dictated by a couple of important parameters:
The Oscar nominations don't arrive until late January, but if I wait until the nominations come out, lots of things will no longer be in theatres, especially movies that don't do well. But, see, lots of bad movies get Oscar nominations in categories like Best Original Song, Best Costume Design, and Best Visual Effects. So I pick through what I think could be nominated and then basically gamble. What I don't want to happen is have a movie get nominated for something totally random like Best Sound Editing and then have it be in that period of time between theatrical release and Internet release when I can't catch it before the Oscars. This occasionally leads to some pretty egregious pregames... and to me seeing some terrible movies.

Here are some of my most egregious pregames of this awards season:

Trolls. Yes, I did see Trolls. Justin Timberlake's song "Can't Stop the Feeling!" was one of my not-so-guilty pleasures last Summer, and it was super popular. It was written specifically for Trolls, so a nomination seems sort of inevitable. This happened when Pharrel got nominated for "Happy" for that stupid Despicable Me 2 concoction a couple years ago. In truth every year some idiotic films get nominated in this country, and I am forced to figure out a way to see them (Fifty Shades of Grey, The Lego Movie, Ted, The Muppets, you get the idea). I figured I would take the bull by the horns this year and get myself to the theatre for Trolls.

The verdict? It was so totally asinine. But I honestly didn't mind. It was plenty of fun, and even though I think Anna Kendrick is annoying, the movie has Christine Baranski, as well as enough irony about its own stupidity to squeak by. Will it be nominated? I still think so, although there is a lot of competition.

Allied. I am an asshole for seeing this one. I don't know what I was thinking. I think I had in my mind that this was vaguely about World War II and that its 1940s dresses and suits and possibly even the art direction would hook a nomination even though the critics tore this one to pieces and audiences seemed soft on the thing. That costume category can be very strange. How is a person to predict a movie like Mr. Turner or The Grandmaster or The Invisible Woman? These things are difficult.

The verdict? This movie is terrible. I almost never like Marion Cotillard in movies where she speaks predominantly English, and this one is no exception. She looks awkward in almost every scene, as though she isn't quite positive that she understands what she's saying. Now, this could work for her character, who is supposed to be a foreign spy, but it doesn't. And Brad Pitt (who I have said before is a brilliant actor) is totally phoning this one in. He is dull and stilted. He's supposed to be playing a bit of a previously-unloved dork, too, which makes no sense because he is Brad fucking Pitt and is cooler than most people who have lived on this earth in all of human history. Also, the script is terrible, and it appears as though a few superfluous shootout sequences behind enemy lines were added at the last minute just to give this bland narrative some spice. But nothing could have saved it. A disaster. Will it be nominated? No way.

Doctor Strange. I went to see this because everyone was talking about its special effects and because people drunkenly recommended it to me. I know you aren't into Marvel movies, Aaron, but trust me on this one. That sort of thing. Special Effects movies can be dangerous to miss, too, because sometimes the lag between theatres and the blu-ray release can take a while. So off to Doctor Strange I went.

The verdict? Boring. Why are all of these Marvel movies exactly the same. And why is the world always about to end so that all of humanity is threatened with destruction? Can't we, in one of these Marvel movies, just be threatened with something a little less apocalyptic? Perhaps magical space-bending wizards could avert the destruction of, like, 500,000 people or simply figure out how to stop a military coup in a European (or South American, I'm not picky) dictatorship. Why not? Why do they always need to repair the fraying of the space-time continuum or some other silly thing. Like, ooooo, I wonder if the superheroes will manage to stave off the apocalypse until yet another sequel offers a new threat to human existence. Yep, turns out they did! Whew, that was a close one. Will it be nominated? Yeah, I think so. The effects really are cool.

I've already talked about Rules Don't Apply, which I thought might nab a nomination or two, and The Dressmaker, which I thought might get a costume nomination, so I won't go into those here, especially since I don't think either will get nominated for anything next Tuesday. But I do have one more:

Hacksaw Ridge. This is the new Mel Gibson movie, and I had planned to see it with a friend, but he and I had seen a couple of real stinkers in a row, and I got nervous. I couldn't bear watching another really bad one with him. I wanted to make sure the next one we saw together was really good. I also wasn't really sure what this could be nominated for – sound? sound editing? acting?

The verdict? The film's first and second acts are both rather uneven – and do not seem to match one another either – but Hacksaw Ridge is amazing. It's stunningly, shockingly good, and the presentation of the violence during the war sequences is so fast and head-spinning, so disgustingly grotesque, so absolutely horrific that I sat with my jaw dropped for most of act three. I have never seen anything like the violence in this movie. I mean that honestly. And this movie's distaste for the violence of war is not only a part of its plot – the central storyline is about a soldier who refuses to carry a weapon and do harm to anyone else – it is part of its filmmaking as well. The direction of these war sequences is so refreshingly opposed to the horrors of war. It's great.

And will it get nominated for anything? Hacksaw Ridge has emerged as one of the frontrunners in the race this year. It's one of the big surprises of the year. People are talking about Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay. It could rack up 6 or 7 nominations next Tuesday and I wouldn't be surprised. If it does, it will have deserved them.

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.

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. 

A Dialogue on the Butler

I've been having trouble articulating how I felt about The Butler. I enjoyed some of it, but was mostly frustrated with its oddities. So I asked my friend Carlos to have a conversation with me about the movie, in the hopes that I would be able to get clearer about how I felt about the movie.

Aaron: I've been calling Lee Daniels' movies "messy" for a while, and I know he hasn't made that many (Shadowboxer, Precious, The Paperboy), but that is really what stands out to me about this picture and the others. The tone of the The Butler is constantly shifting. There is a disjointedness about the movie. The characters don't feel somehow "themselves", as though they change who they are from scene to scene. This was especially true for Yaya Alafia (Carol) and Cuba Gooding Jr. (Carter). Now, it may be that good acting saves most of thee characters – makes them feel more the same from scene to scene – but that certainly is not the case with Carol and Carter. The film obviously shifts tone wildly, too.

Carlos: Lee Daniels does a few things really, really well. And the one thing that I think he does consistently is pull out transformative performances from his actors. He does this through what seems to be a highly counter-intuitive method of intentional miscasting. Mo'Nique in Precious. Everybody in The Paperboy. And Oprah in this (who turns out to be the shining star of this movie, but never in a million years would she have been on my cast list). But Nelsan Ellis as Martin Luther King was cast perfectly. No argument there.

Mr. Gooding as Carter

Aaron: The other thing is that this is really a kind of Forrest Gump romp through USAmerican history, and so the movie is necessarily sort of shallow.

Carlos: I think most of the problems in Lee Daniels's The Butler (do I have to call it that?) stem from the script. I think, at the heart of it, there is a strong story about race and America's rocky relationship with change. It's also hard to deny that it comes at a time where race and civil liberties are at the forefront of many Americans' minds, and that lends the film a lot of power that it may not have had otherwise. That being said, I agree completely with your Forrest Gump analogy. I had the chance to read an earlier draft of the script before the movie was made and I'll say that the same problems that existed in the script existed on screen. So there's your lesson for the day, aspiring screenwriters: you can't just fix your problems in production. More than anything for me it was his over-reliance on voice-over and jarring transitions between time periods that sunk the movie for me. But the picaresque approach to the story really only gave you a shallow view into the racial politics of the star-studded presidential menagerie, often boiling down their racial politics to a single scene. I actually found the son's journey much more interesting than the butler's. But maybe that was the point.

Aaron: It wasn't the point. The film focuses on the father's half of the father-son relationship. And I think that was sort of the problem – David Oyelowo's character was just more interesting. He plays it beautifully, I thought. Totally boyish and then grown and fascinating. I did want to note one scene that looked really great: the dinner sequence in the White House contrasted with the lunch-counter violence. That was a great juxtaposition. And if I thought his character disjointed, I should also say that I loved Cuba Gooding, Jr. in this. He is a confident performer, and I understand that he is constantly asked to play silly clown characters, but I know guys like him. I felt like I knew Carter, and Gooding approaches a guy like that without judgment (unlike an actor like Terrence Howard).

Mr. Oyelowo as The Butler's Son

Carlos: It also looked cheap.  Did it look cheap to you? 

Aaron: It did look cheap! Why did we both think that? Was that because we saw so little of the White House? 

Carlos: I didn't mind not seeing the White House. It was the lighting. Everything had this fuzzy, soft look and I think it was there because Daniels needed to cover up for the fact that whenever possible he was trying not to use age makeup (I sourced this from a couple of interviews) and the age makeup they did use looked terrible. You would think with a 30-million-dollar budget they could make it look spectacular, but that's what you get when you hire every A- to B+ list actor to fill out your presidential pool.

Ms. Fonda & Mr. Rickman as the Reagans

Aaron: As relates to this casting question, I feel strange about it. This is a sort of Hollywood thing, right? This anticipation we get to have and the pleasure we receive from playing Guess which famous movie star will be playing each president and first lady? It draws away from the film as a document of a historical period and makes everything seem slightly more, well, fake, while at the same time it is totally fun to see Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda play the Reagans.

Carlos: It was gimmicky, and it often took me out of the movie, but it was exactly as you say. Totally fun to see Rickman and Fonda as the Reagans. But I think these choices go back to Daniels' reliance on camp. Which isn't a bad thing. It's just a thing. And it doesn't always work well with the tone of his movies. The Butler becomes more of a spectacle when you have this star-studded cast filling out minor roles. This is a bit of a double-edged sword.  On one hand, it's distracting. You're wondering if Cusack's nose is Nixonian enough, or if LBJ is indeed Liev Schreiber or someone else, or about just how much the right wing is incensed by Jane Fonda playing the wife of the second coming of Christ. But maybe that's the trick? Because you're being distracted by this spectacle but it pulls your focus away from the holes in the script momentarily.

Aaron: I love that you said that this celebrity-sighting thing is actually about camp. Of course you are correct! I hadn't really thought of that, but you are absolutely right. It's just that the film doesn't really want to be campy. Or that the camp sensibility is married in an uncomfortable way to the kind of sentimental narrative for which people like Zemeckis or Ron Howard are known. The two ways of storytelling really conflict quite strongly, and though I enjoyed the campy parts, they made me feel uneasy because I never quite dropped into the sentimental sections of the film. 

Carlos: Speaking of cheap. Can we talk about the ending? 

Aaron: Haha. Do you mean the way that The Butler behaves as though every single issue for which black people have fought in the U.S. is automatically solved by the election of a black president? It is a curious project of forgetting in a film that would appear to have been all about actively remembering precisely those struggles. I do, of course, agree with the sections with MLK where he talks about black domestics, etc. I think that kind of analysis is helpful and super-smart. But the film wants to be about the United States presidents' struggles with racism, and in the end the film pays more attention to the changes of conscience those white men have than it does to either the black domestic at the film's center or the angry black revolutionary who is his foil. 

Carlos: I think you hit the nail on the head. Remember, this was written by a white guy, Danny Strong (of Game Change and Recount fame), and while Lee Daniels really did his best to punch up "the black experience", it only felt genuine in the scenes taking place in the home. I'm looking at you, get-that-cheap-trifling-bitch-outta-my-house scene. But as it stands, the rest of the movie was like watching 15-minute snippets of Lincoln. You know the president has already made up his mind, things are shitty and need to change, and that there is an entrenched force of racists that refuses to budge. And maybe it's just the cultural lens that I'm viewing the film through, but I did want to see more about what shaped the various presidents' views on race. Instead I got a direct set up "problem" and pay off "how they fixed the problem". It got kinda monotonous. (I actually did a double feature with this and The Grandmaster and they had a lot of similar structural problems, except The Grandmaster was shot beautifully and it had punching, so it was more engaging.)

My biggest issue with the ending – and it was the same issue that I had with the script – was that it needlessly politicized a story that should have been for all of us. Now it's for less than half of us. While I understand the importance of button-ending the movie with the election of Barack Obama to reinforce the "see how far we've come" theme, it irked me. Not that I give a shit what the right wing thinks, but this film could have been (and I am being generous using "could") a great cultural touchstone that turned the mirror back on us to ask us how far we've come, but persists in telling us that we still have a long way to go. 

Aaron: I think the ending does precisely the opposite. Maybe this is my inner black panther speaking, but when we think of having a black president as the end of anything, I feel like it tells us that racial oppression is basically over. Seen in this light, the struggles that the film describes feel, by the end of the movie, as though they have actually ended in real life. I am surprised you saw the film in the opposite way. 

Carlos: I guess I was unclear. What was delivered is exactly what you say. But I wanted the ending to acknowledge that this struggle clearly isn't over yet. The ending, as is, feels like the "white guilt" version. I know that Daniels had to do a heavy amount of cuts right at the end, so I wonder what may be lost in the digital trash bin.

Queen O knockin' it out of the park

Aaron: In any case, the film is uneven at best. I think if it's worth seeing it's for the game of spot-the-celebrity and for Oprah Winfrey, who is her own epic version of spot-the celebrity. She is fabulous in The Butler, but it is also impossible to forget that she is Oprah: she's one of the most well-known women in the world. As it happens, she is also a great actress, and it is fun simply to watch that. 

Carlos: Agreed. Uneven, but ultimately worth seeing if not for the fact that we don't get many big theatrical releases that even attempt to discuss race in any sort of meaningful way. And yes, Oprah was and is the #1 reason to see it. For the camp spectacle of seeing Queen O dressed down and lookin' rough, as much as for her spectacular performance.

Oscar Nominees 2013: Part 5 of 13

The Hobbit: an Unexpected Journey

3 Nominations

• Production Design: Simon Bright (King Kong) & Dan Hennah (King Kong, The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King, The Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring) & Ra Vincent
• Visual Effects
• Hair and Makeup

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Aidan Turner, Dean O'Gorman, Sylvester McCoy, Andy Serkis, Ken Stott, Graham McTavish, William Kircher, James Nesbitt, Stephen Hunter, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee

Apparently no one liked The Hobbit's first installment. Well, that's sort of a lie. It has made over $600 million worldwide so far. And counting. But the Academy, it seems, was not having it. In categories where the Lord of the Rings franchise cleaned up – score, editing, both sound categories, cinematography – this movie got left out, despite its technical brilliance. My sympathy, as you can probably imagine, runs low. But I have to say that it deserves to win a few things, and I think it will win Hair & Makeup (I mean just look at the hair in that poster!). And... if I am being honest, I would probably watch this movie again. Just to give it another chance. In a guilty-pleasure sort of way, you understand.

Will Win: Hair & Makeup

Could Win: Visual Effects

My Rating: #51 out of 61

Flight

2 Nominations

• Best Actor: Denzel Washington (Training Day, The Hurricane, Malcolm X, Glory, Cry Freedom)
• Original Screenplay: John Gatins

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Washington, Kelly Reilly, John Goodman, Bruce Greenwood, Don Cheadle, Tamara Tunie, Tommy Kane, Brian Geraghty, Melissa Leo

Um, Best Original Screenplay? It's a little odd because the time-travel picture Looper looked like it was going to get this nomination, but who knows what the writers branch was thinking. Instead they went with this highly moralistic screenplay that is, in many ways, a retread of The Lost Weekend. Being an alcoholic is bad, guys. Not that I disagree, but this film gets across its message... inelegantly. There are good things about the movie – I actually rather liked it – Denzel Washington is great and Zemeckis' direction is tight and exciting, but Gatins' screenplay is heavy handed and unnecessarily sentimental. All that to say: this movie is not taking home any Oscars.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #29 out of 61

Snow White and the Huntsman

2 Nominations

• Costume Design: Colleen Atwood (Alice in Wonderland, Nine, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Memoirs of a Geisha, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chicago, Sleepy Hollow, Beloved, Little Women)
• Visual Effects

Director: Rupert Sanders

Cast: Charlize Theron, Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Sam Spruell, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Brian Gleeson

This film is not winning any Oscars. But I think I probably screamed out loud when I saw that it was nominated. See: I thought it was going to be terrible, and so my friend Julie and I got drunk and watched it together. In fact, it isn't the least bit terrible. The visual effects are delightful, the narrative is interesting, the costumes are completely fabulous, and Charlize Theron goes for absolute broke in the role of the evil queen. It really is a very fun film marred just slightly by a fairly uninteresting heroine. I want to say, too, that two Oscar nominations is kind of a lot! It's more than, say, Cloud Atlas or, say, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen got. Colleen Atwood has enough Oscars, however – three, actually; can you believe she has three? – and she does not need another one for Snow White and the Huntsman. But if her nomination gets you to rent the camp-fest that is this movie, I say more power to the Academy for honoring good design and visual effects work, no matter what kind of movie they appear in.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #35 out of 61

Flying High

Robert Zemeckis's new film is an unapologetic star vehicle for the great Denzel Washington. Zemeckis excels at star vehicles, as we all know, and Flight is no exception.

Flight is a film about a drunk, but it isn't a film about alcoholism for its first half. In fact, the movie is split between a truly exciting action/disaster movie in its first act and a second and third act that are about a man coming to terms with his addiction to alcohol.

The movie's first act is its best part, and Zemeckis deftly handles these tense moments, building suspense beautifully as the plane crash – which we all know is going to happen – is avoided and then avoided again as the protagonist gets control of the aircraft. This entire first section of the film is exciting and nerve-wracking. I was on the edge of my seat.

The film's second section slows down considerably, but maintains the suspense of not quite knowing what will happen. Washington plays his character as someone who might do anything at any point. I wanted this character to succeed badly, and I even made excuses at various points for his drinking. The movie, too, takes pleasure in drug use and heavy drinking, including a boozing, cocaine-loving John Goodman for three scenes filled with humor and vicarious substance-enjoying pleasure. (Flight's humor is odd. In addition to Goodman's character, there is also a very strange and sickeningly funny sequence in a hospital room where two young crazy people keep talking about Jesus and his plan for everyone's life. It is played for laughs and I laughed, but I also felt a little gross.)

For all of the pleasure it takes in drinking and cocaine-use, however, sobriety (and sentimentality) win out after all in Zemeckis's movie. Flight's protagonist and its audience are supposed to learn that we ought to have some principles, even if we don't care about our own lives. And we are also supposed to believe that there is a god and that it does indeed have a plan for our lives, even if the first sequence that states this explicitly is directed in a spirit of ridicule.

Flight, in the end, truly is about acts of god, and this is a movie in which everyone is given a second and third chance to straighten up and, you will pardon the expression, fly right.

Oscar postscript: It looks to me like Denzel Washington is pretty much a lock for a Best Actor nomination. He is a huge star and the performance is absolutely superb. It is difficult to be a huge star and give a great performance, of course: our stars carry lots of baggage with them. But, like I said, this is a star vehicle, and the film seems veritably designed to get Washington a well-deserved sixth Oscar nomination. As for John Goodman or Don Cheadle's Oscar chances, don't listen to the hype. I don't see either role as quite big enough to merit notice at year's end. This film only has eyes for Mr. Washington himself. Bruce Greenwood, I should note, once again does excellent work on a film's sidelines. His role is neither flashy nor conspicuous, but as usual, Mr. Greenwood delivers. He is a dependable and reassuring presence in a film, and I am always happy to see him onscreen.

Olde English in 3D

Julie wouldn't go with me to see Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf, so I went by myself. And I have to say, I don't think I've ever seen anything like it. It's certainly one of the coolest things I've seen all year.
The whole thing is animated, first of all. (I didn't realize that when I went in, I guess.) But Zemeckis is doing the motion-capture thing he did with The Polar Express (a movie I thought was kinda cute). Beowulf is three years after The Polar Express, though, and it shows in the work. Though the facial features of some of the humans can at times be a little wooden, the film's ability to capture the actors' work is really, really cool. This is particularly the case with Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich, whose work we are probably the most familiar with. The animated characters look, move, and speak like the actors we know.
But all of this is beside the point. Beowulf is in fucking 3D and it's very, very cool. Spears fly out at you in the audience, coins roll toward your face. And the camera can go anywhere, of course, because it's all animated, so we can look up at the underside of Grendel while he bleeds down onto us and blood comes into the auditorium. Or we can fall from the back of a dragon down toward a giant spike as the spike basically comes at us in a third dimension. The whole thing was unbelievably cool.
The script is basically idiotic, let's be honest. It's very much all about tits and fighting, but I actually didn't care all that much. There's a fabulous dragon battle with Beowulf riding on the dragon and stabbing him in the throat. (This is, obviously, a bit of a change from the source material, where Beowulf's last battle is with a giant wyrm and not a dragon, but a flying, screaming reptile looks cooler in a movie than an overgrown snake who breathes fire.)
Frankly, I can't really say enough good things about Beowulf in 3D. It's an absolute must-see. Do not miss it. Know that you're going in to a movie geared toward teenage boys, but the wow factor is just too big to skip it. It' s an absolute technical marvel.

Hudsucker

I rented a movie based on the recommendation of a boy. It's called The Hudsucker Proxy and it's a mid-nineties Coen Brother's movie with Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Paul Newman. And it's hilarious. I loved this movie. It's clever, has its own voice and I laughed out loud several times.

I don't feel like writing anymore; I feel like sleeping.

*Addition from this morning.

I was thinking... Hudsucker came out the same year as Forrest Gump (a movie I dislike very much, my dislike made worse by its nabbing of the Best Picture Oscar that year). The movies are kind of similar in their main character, hardly similar at all in any other way, really, but both have a central character who is (mostly) an imbecile. Except that the Coens allow room for the development of character. Hudsucker's Norville Barnes could easily be a character you hate—you do hate him some of the time—even though he's the hero and you're, you know, mostly going to really like him. Ditto my feelings about Paul Newman's Sid character: he's the villain, but I never hate him, not at all. Good and evil are ever-present forces in Hudsucker, even having a midnight clock-showdown, but they never make the story into a mish-mash of feel good nonsense the way Zemeckis makes Gump into this steaming pile of sentiment on the kitchen floor of a cold world.

Chalk one more up for the Coen Brothers and their brilliance.

Fun Story

Watched The Ladykillers this morning (the original).  No thank you.  I hate movies from the 1950s that are like this.  Now, I am opposed to old people to begin with, and the old lady in this thing is annoying as all Hell, but a lot of 50s movies have this Capra-esque legacy that says that good salt-of-the-earth people who are genuine and have good motives always deserve to win out, even if they are dumber than shit.  Notice this in Capra movies like Lost Horizon and Pennies from Heaven.  This is bad Capra.  I genuinely like movies like It Happened One Night and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  The Capra legacy of which I speak are movies that try to recapture this spirit of good triumphing over evil (which usually means stupidity triumphing over intelligence) in movies like Forrest Gump (blecch) and The Majestic (double blecch).  In the '50s, the bad guys always lost and they were always captured or foiled by idiots.  This drives me crazy.  I sound a little bit Fascist here, but it's not that I want intelligence to always triumph over stupidity or banality, but at least sometimes it could happen.  In the 1950s movies just didn't do that.  If you were a good guy you won... no matter how stupid you were.  Is it sick of me to root for the criminals and to wish that they would just snuff the old lady and get it over with?