One Small Step for Man

First Man, Damien Chazelle's new Neil Armstrong picture, left me pretty cold.

Oddly enough, this isn't because of Ryan Gosling, whom people insist on calling cold and reserved. I am not sure that I understand why everyone insists on referring to him as distant or standoffish when he gives such sensitive, heartfelt performances that – at least to me – feel open and vulnerable. And he smiles a ton in this movie. He is really enjoying himself here. It isn't as though he's doing that silly Jennifer Lawrence thing where she pretends to be very serious in a movie because she thinks "that's what acting looks like". In First Man, Gosling plays a man who has trouble connecting with others about things that are not aerospace or engineering. But it isn't as though he doesn't let the camera see his vulnerability or as though he hides from us what's happening with him. In fact, I think Gosling's performance is excellent. I loved Neil Armstrong by the end of this film. I felt for him deeply. The reason the film is cold is that Damien Chazelle seems to have intended it that way.

First Man is designed to be very specific about the technical elements of space flight. We get the astronout's perspective for several sequences in the movie, and these sequences are moments in the movie when we are supposed to be flying through space. But because we have a camera perspective that is limited by the astronaut's position, these sequences refuse to soar. They have no emotional pull and instead take on the kind of businesslike, keep-my-head-down-and-survive attitude for which Neil Armstrong was known. In other words, I'm saying that I understand what Chazelle was going for with these sequences, but they severely hamper the film's ability to connect with the audience emotionally.

As I say, the acting is not the problem. Gosling is great, and Claire Foy is very good, and the supporting cast – Jason Clarke, Christopher Abbott (love him!), Patrick Fugit (love him!), Kyle Chandler (love), Ciarán Hinds (love), Pablo Schrieber (love), Corey Stoll – they're all great. Little Luke Winters, who plays the Armstrongs' son Rick, is fantastic.

Christopher Abbott and Ryan Gosling

But the filmmaking is distant. It's not a warm film, and Chazelle seems to be keeping a respectful distance from his characters, as though they're a little too precious to be approached. What we learn about them is basically what we already knew: that they were the emotionally distant men of mid-century America who didn't know how to talk to their kids and gave their careers more affection than their wives but of course they were also deeply emotional men who had dreams of discovery and were willing to sacrifice their lives in quiet, unsung heroism. This struck me as mostly cliché, all the more so because it doesn't ask us to think with a new perspective about these men. In many ways it just tells us that although we might complain about these men a lot, and think they're sexist old dudes who didn't consider women, people of color, and the environment when they made their decisions, we should still be appreciative of them because they taught us all – take your pick – to dream, to look up at the sky and see possibility, to stand together and connect while we watch history in the making. Perhaps all that is true, but I feel like I've heard that song before.

There is a sequence near the end of act two that puts the space program in context, with an interview with Kurt Vonnegut where he's like why are we spending all this money to go to the moon when New York City needs infrastructure? This sequence even calls out the whiteness of the project by playing almost a full minute of a great poem by Gil-Scott Heron (performed by Leon Bridges) called "Whitey on the Moon":

I can't pay no doctor bills

But whitey's on the moon

Ten years from now I'll be payin' still

While whitey's on the moon

The man just upped my rent last night

'Cause whitey's on the moon 

No hot water, no toilets, no lights

But whitey's on the moon

But although First Man acknowledges this problem with the Gemini/Apollo projects, it doesn't have anything to say about it at all. It's as though by acknowledging the problems in such a nicely realized sequence, it can simply move on and go back to ignoring them.

I need to say another thing about this movie and my resistance to it. One of the reasons I had trouble connecting is that Linus Sandgren's photography is really unattractive. Now, maybe it's because I'm used to space movies being gorgeous to look at – films like Sunshine or Gravity or Interstellar, or even popular films about space like Rogue One or Life or Star Trek Beyond – or maybe it's because the most recent movie we all saw about the space race was the candy-coated Hidden Figures, but First Man looks ugly. The visuals at NASA are not beautiful at all, focusing as Chazelle is doing, on minutiae and the astronauts' real lives, and maybe I could excuse that in the name of authenticity. But then the sequences at the Armstrong house are equally unattractive looking. The film is just not shot lovingly. The whole thing feels distant, as though that really was 50 years ago and we simply cannot have access to it. (Also I hated the costumes.)

I think for First Man to work, we needed – in addition to the day-to-day banalities of being an astronaut – also a sense of awe about the moon. We needed access to Armstrong's desire for the moon. Chazelle's film references this repeatedly in the film. Armstrong stares at the moon and the moon stares back. But there is no wonder here, no clear communication of what is so amazing and cool about space travel. Only business-like exactitude. And I know that the point of First Man is that this is why those Apollo missions were successful: A regular, brilliant guy who did the right thing and kept his head down and got the work done is how the U.S. achieved this awesome thing. Fine. But we needed more access to the awe.

There are a few great sequences in First Man, and I liked the movie well enough, but I'm afraid it never really soars.

Androids Dreaming of Electric Dads

Blade Runner 2049 is a long film. That is probably the first thing you ought to know about it. It clocks in at a totally unnecessary 2 hours 45 minutes. This movie is taking its time doing what it wants to do.

The next thing – and you already know this – is that the film is visually stunning. Its production design, costume design, cinematography, and visual effects are all award-worthy, awesome achievements. It just looks so good. The photography and lighting, honestly, are even better in the movie than you can tell from the trailer. There are sequences that are absolutely visually breathtaking.

And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her and opened her womb. –Genesis 30.22

But Blade Runner 2049 is a self-important, pretentious movie, that expects its audience to do a lot of intellectual labor. It doesn't clearly articulate the ethical questions at the center of its filmic puzzle, either, so that if the characters are thinking through questions of right and wrong, or if they're making bold decisions that contradict their programming or their caste in society, we don't really have much access to the thought processes (or perhaps software processes) that lead to those decisions. In short, the movie doesn't really let us in to the characters. Even if I loved Ryan Gosling's character K, I only rarely felt like I understood the conundrums with which he was struggling. (Robin Wright and Carla Juri's characters are notable exceptions to this.)

More than that, the film's characters are obsessed with, and long for, natural things like wood, water, air, and animal life. But Blade Runner 2049 doesn't make this clear enough, and the audience never shares the characters' wonder at the real. So things that seem wonderful or awesome to these people in 2049 are completely ordinary to the film's viewers. And how could they be anything else? Blade Runner 2049 doesn't spend enough time setting up the world for us; it avoids allowing us into how the characters feel about the slum slash police state in which they live.

The King

There is a famous robot play by Karel Čapek – the man who invented the word robot – called R.U.R. or Rossum's Universal Robots. This is also an overly long story, and it aims at questions similar to Blade Runner 2049: viz. What if robots could reproduce? What might it mean for two androids to have a child? R.U.R. is mostly a problem play, and it spends its time talking us through the various ethical and emotional questions involved in having robots working as slaves (the word robot in fact means slave). In other words, there is much to discuss and therefore much time is needed for the play to do what it wants to do. Blade Runner 2049, by contrast, squanders its time, seemingly extending every sequence by at least 45 seconds so that the camera can drink up more of the gorgeous production design. This makes for a ponderous film that is nearly emotionally empty. (A part of this is due to having Ryan Gosling as the lead. He goes for stoic and silent in these kinds of roles – an obvious heir to Harrison Ford's famous sullenness – but this film needed emotional vulnerability in order to stop itself from being one of Christopher Nolan's soulless adventures.)

But it is visually and aurally stunning, and now that I've laid out all of my problems with the movie, all of the reasons that I know the film is not great, I can't say that I cared very much about any of these objections. I really liked Blade Runner 2049. Do I wish Villeneuve had made a better movie? I do. But I was delighted, astounded, even shocked by this one. Roger Deakins' cinematography feels completely fresh in every sequence. The neon-red-on-one-side-neon-blue-on-the-other-side visual that you can see in seemingly every movie – and about which I have complained before – never happens in Blade Runner 2049 even if it is used on the poster. Instead, Deakins' use of color feels inventive, novel, even revelatory. Now, one might easily object: but in service of what, exactly? and this objection would make sense, but for me these images were actually enough. They evoked plenty of emotion for me as colors and light: It was like staring at a Mark Rothko or a James Turrell or a Doug Wheeler.

So, I guess I can't really recommend Blade Runner 2049. If I really liked it, I know that I liked it for very specific reasons. I expect that for most people, this film's self-importance and pretenses will weigh more heavily against it, and those people are – sigh – probably right.

More 2015 Films. Awards-Season Edition. Part 2.

Adam McKay's The Big Short is funny and smart and moves quickly.

It is also filled with delightful, interesting characters, and a whole bunch of total morons. The Big Short is about how the housing bubble burst in late 2007, and it follows a group of guys who bet against the housing market and therefore made a profit off of the collapse of the economy of most of the world. In other words, it is kind of about guys who profited off of everyone else's bad luck.

But it is a tribute to Adam McKay that this film keeps its characters in perspective enough that they are mostly likable guys. The film's much bigger challenge is explaining the complicated financial situation that really occurred back in 2007. This is definitely a tough row to hoe for a comedy, but The Big Short takes a very clever, Brechtian approach. Instead of trying to tell us all of the things we need to know in some kind of expository way where the information is embedded in dialogue that the characters would never actually say (à la CSI), The Big Short's narrator simply stops the film, addresses the audience, and tells us that "now chef Anthony Bourdain will explain what you need to know". The Big Short is the most Brechtian of this year's films, and it had a true Brechtian effect: getting its audience emotional about information. My sisters and I left the theatre pissed; the mortgage crisis affected all of us very much.

The Big Short is also filled with some pretty excellent performances: Steve Carrell and Christian Bale are particularly good, but the film boasts great performances by Finn Wittrock, Ryan Gosling, Hamish Linklater, Adepero Oduye, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, John Magaro, and Brad Pitt. Oh my god, and Melissa Leo has a hilarious cameo. Again, let me underline that this is a hilarious movie about the mortgage crisis and the collapse of the world economy. It is also a film that explains this crisis to its audience, and points out why it happened, who was responsible, and who was affected by the actions of these criminals, none of whom was ever indicted.

Oscar possibilities for The Big Short: Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay seem the most likely. To my mind Picture is a long shot and Screenplay is a lock, but who knows. If people see it, they will respond favorably.

* * *

France's entry this year for the Best Foreign Language Film award is called Mustang, and it is directed by the Turkish-French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven. Mustang is a powerhouse of a film and one of the absolute best of the year.

Mustang follows five sisters living in a small town about an hour from Istanbul. The girls have almost all hit puberty, but are all very much still girls. Early in the film, a crazy village lady accuses the girls of being whores, and their grandmother and uncle, who are raising them, basically lose their minds, lock the girls in the house, stop sending them to school, and begin marrying them off one by one.

The film is made like a suspense-movie, and Mustang is packed with surprises and peripities that you will not see coming at all. It's a story of religious extremism and the ways that religions attempt to control the bodies of women and work to destroy them.

I cannot recommend this enough. It's enjoyable, exciting, and packs an emotional punch. I loved the young women in the film in the extreme. Ergüven's work is extraordinary, and she fills Mustang with lighthearted moments as well as dangerous ones, so that even amid the strict control of the religious nutjobs in the movie, the possibilities for freedom and pleasure shine through. These girls' personalities are bright and beautiful, and they cannot be completely contained by the rules and strictness placed upon them.

Oscar possibilities for Mustang: this film will be nominated for Best Foreign Language picture for sure. No question. It's one of the best movies of the year.

* * *

This is, perhaps, going to seem a little crazy, but Hungary's entry for Best Foreign Language picture is even better. László Nemes's Son of Saul is my favorite film for 2015. 

Son of Saul is a film about Auschwitz, so it isn't going to be for everyone, and it is at times very very difficult to watch. This is a movie about horror, and there isn't any hope to be found in it. Nemes has designed his picture so that it attempts to communicate this as best as it can. It is, to my mind, basically a perfect film, with one of the best central performances of the year, by Géza Röhrig.

I don't want to spoil the movie, but the main character Saul works for one of the Sonderkommandos in the camp. He gets rid of the bodies of Jews that have been gassed, he burns corpses, he shovels ashes into a river, he rifles through the belongings of people murdered by the Nazis in order to pay off guards. This is a portrait of the Final Solution that is like nothing you've ever seen. And the filmmaking is so exquisitely good, that it is organized so that we see every aspect of the camps: the doctor's surgery rooms, the ovens, the yard, the officers dining halls, and the showers. It's absolutely fucking harrowing. And it does not let up. This is not a film that is designed to let up. Nemes wants to show us genocide without the bullshit peddled to us by films like Life Is Beautiful or The Book Thief.

Central to the plot of Son of Saul is the main character's quest to find a rabbi to say Kaddish for a small boy who has been killed in the gas chambers. Early on in the movie he says to one of his companions that he wants to do this: to find a rabbi who can say the prayer for the dead correctly, to mourn for this boy. His companion says "we do say Kaddish for them", and Saul replies simply It isn't enough. To put this another way, the central thrust of Son of Saul is an attempt to mourn correctly for the genocide of European Jews. But this is a task that is already doomed to failure. It isn't enough. It cannot be enough.

Son of Saul had me by the scruff of my neck for its entire running time. It's never boring, not for one second, and it is mostly simply terrifying. Death is around the corner for this man at every instant in this film, and I found this more exciting than any action movie this year. I sat in my seat willing Saul to find a rabbi, to say this prayer, to be successful at mourning. I guess it won't spoil anything for me to say to you that things do not end well for Saul, whether or not he is able to mourn for the boy. The camps were a closed system of power and destruction, designed to destroy as many Jewish lives as possible, and there is no hope to be taken from a story that bears witness to this destruction with any accuracy.

Oscar possibilities for Son of Saul: It's going to win the Oscar for Foreign Language. Done and done.

Lost River

I got the DVD of Ryan Gosling's debut feature Lost River in June. (I still get the DVDs because I am old and they have a better selection). I was excited about Lost River. I like Ryan Gosling: I think he makes good choices, and although I haven't always enjoyed the movies that the directors whose muse he is (Derek Cianfrance and Nicolas Winding Refn) have made with him, I always think Gosling is interesting to watch in these films, even when the films don't work for me.

In any case, I was predisposed to like Lost River. And so I started watching it in early June.

I got about ten minutes in – a ten minutes that played like a riff on a David Gordon Green movie – and then the movie changed tone starkly. The film's star Christina Hendricks was now in a bank office populated by absolutely no one until Ben Mendelsohn enters doing a kind of bizarrely menacing David Lynch kind of thing. This section of the movie is a kind of absurd exposition sequence, in which the main character is introduced to us as in a complete financial bind because of her own ignorance, and (it is immediately obvious) will now be forced to do a series of things that she doesn't want to do but that the film will enjoy watching her do.

I took the DVD out and went to sleep instead. This was already too contrived for my taste.

And then I didn't put the DVD back into my player until last night, when I convinced myself – finally – simply to finish this movie so that I could move on with my movie-watching existence.

Well, I was right when I took it out the first time in June. Lost River is derivative of lots of other filmmakers, which is, I suppose, fine as far as it goes, but Lost River also can't decide which of these guys it likes best. David Lynch is an obvious influence, with his grotesquely vicious worlds and characters who behave without motivation of any kind, but the movie also insists on numerous shots lit by a single source of brightly saturated neon light (pink, red, sometimes green) just like Refn's (awful) Ryan Gosling movie Only God Forgives.

Let me just stop right here: Avoid this thing at all costs. It is slow and ponderous and absurdly self important. And it is insanely, almost sadistically boring. Eva Mendes is a charming bright spot in this dour universe, but there isn't much else of interest and there's no one to root for in Lost River. Stay away.