Watch Inside Llewyn Davis star Oscar Issac sing a folk version of Katy Perry's "Roar"

The Coen brothers' faux folk music biography, Inside Llewyn Davis, gets a wide release today, so now seems like a good time to watch star Oscar Issac perform a folksy take on Katy Perry's pop hit "Roar." The actor stopped by Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last week to promote the movie and growled out an acoustic cover that makes the song sound about as gritty and world-weary as a number one pop single can sound. Featuring Jimmy Fallon on harmonies. Watch the video below.

Check out these pics of Benedict Cumberbatch doing motion-capture work as Smaug the dragon from The Hobbit

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opened last weekend to critical praise that ran the gamut from "not as boring as the last one" to "actually kind of decent in its own right," but pretty much everyone agreed that the best part of the movie was the towering, fire-breathing dragon Smaug, voiced by Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch. Feel free to observe this collection of behind-the-scenes shots of the British actor mugging for the camera and crawling on top of tables like a giant lizard while wearing little motion-capturing dots all over his face.

Funny thing: Cumberbatch didn't have to do motion capture for Smaug at all, since humans and dragons don't look enough alike for the technique to really be useful, but he volunteered as a way to get into character, with these pictures as a memento. Check them out below, alongside an interview with Weta Digital's special effects supervisor Joe Letteri about the challenges of bringing Smaug to the big screen.

Listen to Christopher Lee's new heavy-metal Christmas single

This past weekend, Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opened in theaters. Next week is Christmas. This breather seems like a perfect time for Christopher Lee, the 90-something actor best known for playing the velvet-voiced Saruman in Jackson's last Hobbit-themed movie trilogy, to release his latest single, "Jingle Hell," a heavy-metal reworking of the classic American holiday song.

Lee is no stranger to the music scene, having already released two heavy-metal LPs about the life of Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. "Jingle Hell," which features Lee's rich, booming baritone set against a hard-driving guitar track, is available on iTunes. Lee recorded a promotional video for the single below. It is, in his own words, a bit "naughty," so consider yourself warned.

The B-side to "Jingle Hell" is a cover of Frank Sinatra's "My Way."

Christmas to be cancelled if global warming not stopped, threatens Santa in distressing video

You have been warned. To celebrate the holidays and the destruction thereof, Greenpeace has released a very dramatic video in which Santa Claus, looking a bit like a beleaguered terrorist and broadcasting from what what appears to be an arctic fallout shelter, warns the children of the world that he may have to cancel Christmas unless global warming is stopped. Santa is played by Jim Carter, best known as butler Mr. Carson from Downton Abbey, as a grizzled, unkempt man at the end of his rope. He confirms that Presidents Obama and Putin are on the top of his naughty list for remaining indifferent to his plight and that unless action is taken he will "have to warn you of the possibility of an empty stocking... forevermore." Remain calm, watch the video below, and keep it from the eyes of actual children unless you want to answer some uncomfortable questions.

Check out one veteran Disney animator's concept art for a Wicked movie

Minkyu Lee is a Disney artist who worked as an animator on The Princess and the Frog and Wreck-It Ralph and as a director on the Oscar-nominated animated short Adam and Dog. In 2008, still an intern, he was trying to land a spot in Disney's Visual Development department. To show off his skills, he created a portfolio of character designs for a hypothetical movie: an animated adaptation of Wicked, the hugely successful stage musical that's been running on Broadway since 2003. Now he's posted his incredibly charming designs on two Tumblr pages.

Industry types have been trying to turn the Wicked musical into a movie for nearly as long as it's been around, and although the Wizard of Oz-themed spinoff market is currently stuffed beyond sense, it must be pointed out that Stephen Schwartz's all-singing, all-dancing take on the Wicked Witch of the West's past did get there first. Lee's designs make a good argument for giving the property to Disney and letting them animate it, since animated musicals about empowered princesses are kind of their thing.

Listen to a bonus track off the special edition of David Lynch's second studio album

Many people know David Lynch as the film director behind dense, alternatively plotted art movies like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. But he is more. He is also a teacher of transcendental meditation, an advocate for cow-based movie marketing, and a weatherman. He is also, apparently, a musician with two full-length albums to his credit. His latest, The Big Dream, came out this past July.

A special edition of The Big Dream will be available for download later this month. It will sport two new tracks and a couple of remixes. One of those remixes, of Lynch's song We Roll Together by Swedish producer Björn Yttling, is now available online. It features a heavily distorted Lynch intoning mysterious portents like 'Smokestack barking' and 'Went down to the ice cream store' over a minimalist backing track. It's actually pretty effective in an eerie, hypnotic way, but I'm at a loss for words to describe exactly why it works. Like most of Lynch's work, then. Listen below.

Read this: What the 'No Animals Were Harmed' credit at the end of movies really means

Last week, the Hollywood Reporter published an absorbing exposé about the oft-seen 'No Animals Were Harmed' credit that appears at the end of many movies and television shows. The article is thoroughly researched and features interviews with members of the American Humane Association, the organization that gives out the credit, but the gist is that the credit often doesn't mean what it seems to mean. Author Gary Barun reveals that the AHA routinely approves use of the credit for movies on which animals were badly hurt. Or, if the the harm done to the animals is too severe to ignore, the AHA rewrites the credit to read 'American Humane Association monitored the animal action' and doesn't follow up on the reasons for the downgrade. Among the worst abuses:

"A Husky dog was punched repeatedly in its diaphragm on Disney’s 2006 Antarctic sledding movie Eight Below, starring Paul Walker, and a chipmunk was fatally squashed in Paramount’s 2006 Matthew McConaughey-Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedy Failure to Launch. In 2003, the AHA chose not to publicly speak of the dozens of dead fish and squid that washed up on shore over four days during the filming of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Crewmembers had taken no precautions to protect marine life when they set off special-effects explosions in the ocean, according to the AHA rep on set."

The AHA doesn't count putting animals into dangerous situations as harming them, either. For instance, Ang Lee's Life of Pi, a movie about a boy stranded in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, received the 'No Harm' credit despite the real-life tiger used in the film nearly drowning in a water tank during a dicey take. Baurn depicts the AHA, once a crusader for the humane treatment of animals in the film industry, as increasingly unwilling to speak out against Hollywood interests, in no small part because much of its budget now depends on grants from industry organizations. It's a sobering read sure to upset some animal lovers, but also a stirring piece of journalism good enough to inspire people to action. Read it here.

Someone has made soap bars shaped like classic Nintendo game cartridges

If you're a fan of retro video games but don't enjoy washing your hands as much as you think you should, online retailer Firebox has a solution for you. Their website is selling a line of soap bars made in the likeness of classic Nintendo games, allowing people to wash themselves clean and think about Donkey Kong Country at the same time. The commitment to realism is impressive: the Super NES soaps even come with their own (non-made of soap) dust jackets. Gamers, or people with gamer friends wondering how to delight them over the holidays, can buy the soaps in Super NES or Game Boy varieties.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

         A more fully developed world, better drawn characters and sharper satire mark this superior sequel to 2012’s The Hunger Games. Not that The Hunger Games was that bad. It’s easy to lump this movie series in with other sci-fi/fantasy stories aimed at young adults, like Twilight. But both Catching Fire and The Hunger Games do more than coast on the appeal of their young stars. Catching Fire, in particular, is a full-blooded pop satire with a well-realized sci-fi setting and characters you want to root for. Yes, it’s still a movie that pits a couple of good-looking teenagers against the world, but here their struggles actually seem to mean something.

        When we last saw Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), she had survived the Hunger Games, a kind of mash-up between gladiatorial fights to the death and American Idol, and was headed home. When she gets a chilly house-call from the calculating President Snow (Donald Sutherland), she learns she won’t get off so easy. Her attempted double-suicide at the end of the last Hunger Games, President Snow tells her, is being viewed as a sign of rebellion against the all-powerful Capitol. This cannot be tolerated, and if she wants to avoid retaliation she and fellow victor Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) must convince the populace of their loyalty.

        The ever-earnest Katniss can’t quite pull this off, and Snow decides that the only way to get rid of her without turning her into a martyr is to throw her back into the Games where she can die by the hand of someone other than him. Like the last movie, a large amount of Catching Fire is devoted to the time before the Games begin, and it’s a lot better for it. There’s both drama and comedy in the way the rough-and-tumble Katniss tries to adjust to her new role as propaganda tool, and Donald Sutherland gets to lend his glowering charisma in an expanded part. There’s a love triangle, too. Katniss is torn between Peeta, who likes Katniss more than she likes him, and brooding childhood friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth), but her decision is never the focus of the movie. It’s all about public opinion- how to create, keep, and hold it- with the steely, likable Katniss caught in the middle.

        The behind-the-scenes lead-up to the Hunger Games is so compelling that it’s almost a disappointment when they finally begin. Like last time, Katniss must face off against a vast field of contestants, but most have a bit more personality this go-round, especially Jena Malone as an unhinged combatant prone to public acts of nudity. The action also moves at a much faster clip, as though the filmmakers know the Hunger Games are the least interesting part of The Hunger Games and want to run through them as quickly as possible.

        Catching Fire has officially become a massive box office hit, so it comes as no surprise that the producers intend to milk the series for all it’s worth. There are two more movies queued up, each based off one half of the third and final book in author Suzanne Collins’ series.  Catching Fire ends on a cliffhanger, but this nervy blockbuster gives us a reason to feel excited rather than cheated.

Watch Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Robert Redford, and a bunch of other actors in these New York Times-produced short films

Every year, the New York Times devotes one of its Sunday magazines to the movie industry. This year, they've gone the extra mile and recruited longtime Speilberg cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to direct 11 short (like, under a minute short) films starring a gaggle of celebrities, from Bradley Cooper to Oprah Winfrey to Chewetel Ejiofor. Each film is built around a single line of dialogue submitted by a roster of well-known screenwriters like Spike Jonze, Richard Linklater, and Seth Rogan. It's a lot of celebrities in one place.

Some of the shorts are presented as twists on different movie genres- Ejiofor stars as a hard-boiled detective, Greta Gerwig lurches around a sound-stage in a scene from a horror movie, etc.- and some are just weird, in an arty way. The whole project has the air of a vanity project about it, but the films are lushly photographed and free to watch, so all is forgiven. Watch a couple of the snappier shorts below, or check out the complete roster on the New York Times YouTube page.

Watch The Hunger Games, and a bunch of other movies, reimagined as 8-bit videogames

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire came out this past weekend to positive reviews and massive box office success.  To catch people up on the story before it came out, YouTube mainstay Cinefix reimagined the original Hunger Games movie as a top-down Zelda-style action game, complete with bow-and-arrow sharpshooting, tinny soundtrack, and communication via text box.  Watch it below.

The filmmaker behind the 8-bit Hunger Games, David Dutton, has made a whole host of 8-bit film adaptations, including a side-scrolling beat-em-up version of Thor, a Japanese RPG riff on Anchorman, and a LucasArts-y adventure game take on The Shining.  Check out the complete list here.

Watch the other side of Sandra Bullock's distress call from 'Gravity'

Last month, Alfonso Cuarón's interplanetary survival thriller Gravity managed to become a box-office hit despite not featuring a superhero or being a sequel to anything.  At one point in the movie, astronaut Ryan Stone makes a distress call from a Soyuz spacecraft and has a brief conversation with an unidentified person back on Earth.  The two don't speak the same language, but Stone is glad to make contact with another person after spending so much alone and adrift in outer space.  Now, Warner Bros. has released a poignant short film shot by Jonas Cuarón, son of Alfonso, detailing what happened on the other side of that call.

The short film,called Aningaaq, was originally going to be a Gravity DVD extra, but after successful showings at a couple of film festivals has been submitted  has been submitted for Oscar consideration in the best live-action short category.  Check it out below.

A, ningaaq

AninWatch it below.

Take a look at this lovely Breaking Bad artwork

Breaking Bad may have wrapped up in September, but the internet isn't ready to forget.  Over the past few months, artist and graphic designer Isabella Morawetz has been posting a series of lovingly crafted digital paintings based on shots from the show.  According to Morawetz's website, some of the images will be published in a Breaking Bad companion book called Breaking Blue.  Some of them are available to buy in print form.  Pretty much all of them are worth a look.

 

 

A Grand Theft Auto III developer is making a videogame about the 1979 Iranian revolution

In the years leading up to 1979, large numbers of Iranian citizens participated in a series of increasingly impassioned protests against Mohammad Reza, the Shah of Iran, whom many believed was a puppet of Western powers. The protests eventually boiled over into a revolution that would leave hundreds dead and change the face of the country forever. Later, in 2001, a video game called Grand Theft Auto III came out. It allowed players to steal cars and have implied sex with virtual prostitutes. It was incredibly popular. Now, one man is finally trying to bring these two things together.

That man is Navid Khonsari, a director and writer on several of the Grant Theft Auto games and now head of his own development studio, iNK Stories. The game, 1979 Revolution, is being developed for tablets and shows a pretty impressive commitment to historical verisimilitude.  It has political and academic advisers on tap and has imported several concept artists straight from Iran.  Khosari is raising money for the game via a very robust Kickstarter page.  If you're interested in historically accurate virtual recreations of important events and/or video game violence, feel free to donate.

What Roger Ebert Meant To Us- Panel Discussion

This past Sunday, I went to Elmhurst College to observe a panel discussion about Roger Ebert, the famous film critic who passed away in April.  The panelists included Michael Phillips, film critic for the Chicago Tribune, Neil Steinberg, a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, an independent film critic whose name makes sense when you hear it out loud.

Composer Jean Sibelius once dropped this pearl of wisdom: "Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic."  That’s true of every critic I can think of, except Roger Ebert, for whom a group called the Public Art League is building a memorial statue to be installed outside the Virginia Theater in Ebert’s hometown of Champaign, IL.

Ebert, of course, is afforded this special honor in part because he is the most famous film critic in the world.  He appeared on TV, in some form another, for roughly 35 years, reviewing movies most famously alongside Gene Siskel and later with Richard Roper after Siskel died in 1999.  But that doesn’t fully explain why he’s so beloved.  After all, no one is giving Siskel a statue.  Ebert has won multiple Pulitzer prizes, started his own film festival, and wrote reviews that are still quoted among film fans for their perception and wit.  Just look at this bon mot dropped on 2001’s Pearl Harbor:

‘"Pearl Harbor" is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.’

It’s hard not to chortle at that, even if you didn’t see the movie.  The panelists agreed, with several talking about how they would read Ebert’s reviews even if they didn’t plan to see the movies.  According to them, the reviews could be more entertaining than the films themselves, and reading them would save a couple hours of their life.  They also touched on Ebert’s accessible prose style.  Vishnevetsky commented that he changed his own wordy writing style after absorbing Ebert’s direct, unadorned reviews.

Most of the time, however, was spent remembering Ebert as a friend, colleague, and person.  Phillips chimed in with a self-deprecating story about his first trip to the Cannes Film Festival, when Ebert comforted him after the stress of the assignment left him weeping on the side of the street.  Steinberg told a story about how Ebert, once a heavy drinker and long after a champion of Alcoholics Anonymous, convinced his stubborn mother to quit drinking.  Vishnevetsky, who met Ebert toward the end of his life, had little to contribute to such discussions, but the good feeling given off by the other panelists was inclusive enough for it not to matter.  That good feeling extended to the audience, who were allowed to ask questions after the panelists had finished talking amongst themselves.

Film criticism can sound trivial.  All critics do, the argument goes, is rank and rate work made by others without making anything of value themselves.  That isn’t true of Roger Ebert.  His writing is bright and bold enough to be enjoyed entirely on its own merits.  It’s full of feeling and thoughtful enough for it not to sound ridiculous when one audience member commented that she thought of Ebert more as a philosopher who happened to write film criticism than a film critic.  This panel was a warm way to remember a man who dedicated his life to writing and who left a terrific body of work.

Get involved, Internet (if you really feel like it): Help fund a sorta creepy-looking statue of Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert, famed film critic and cool uncle to the Internet, passed away last April, but his influence is still being felt.  Just this past Sunday, The A.V. Club's Ignatiy Vishnevetsky joined a couple of Chicago newspapermen for a panel discussion about Ebert's contributions to film criticism, and Ebert's website is still going strong over six months after his death.  Now, a group called the Public Art League has commissioned a life-size statue of Mr. Ebert be built and installed outside the Virginia Theater in Champaign, IL, long the site of Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival.

The statue will depict Mr. Ebert sitting on a theater chair and giving his famous thumbs-up gesture.  It must be said that the scale model kind of, a little bit, just a tad, makes Ebert look like a melting white monster, but if you'd like to donate you can do so here.  Or, if you'd rather not take part in bringing this thing into the world, you could just buy one of Ebert's excellent books.  Maybe that would be for the best.

Artist George Pfau made a collection of impressionist paintings of scenes from zombie movies

Night of the Living Dead as Édouard Manet might have depicted it.

See my blub at the Onion AV Club.

Relive bitter arguments about whether to boycott the Ender's Game movie with this timeline of Orson Scott Card's misdeeds

After 25-plus years in development hell, the film version of author Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game finally opened last weekend to decent (but not fantastic) reviews and solid (but not spectacular) numbers.  Whether the opening was affected by the furor over Card's well-publicized remarks disparaging homosexuals is not known, but the controversy often threatened to overshadow talk of the movie itself.  Now, Vulture has assembled a handy guide to the sci-fi author's various foot-in-mouth statements and attendant backpedalings, allowing you to relive the debate over whether Card's personal beliefs should affect whether people see the movie over and over to your heart's content.

Ender's Game

            When it comes to Hollywood blockbusters, children have had it pretty rough of late.  Earlier this year, young Jaden Smith had to avoid death by monsters on a post-apocalyptic planet in After Earth.  In a few weeks, Katniss Everdeen and her teenage companions will be pit to the death against each other in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.  And here, pubescent Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) must survive a brutal military boot camp designed to crush the innocence out of him so he can become a leader capable of saving the world from a race of bug-eyed extra-terrestrials.  For a tent-pole action movie, Ender’s Game is restrained, briskly paced, and tightly written, but its solemnity keeps it from becoming fun or exhilarating.

            Ender’s Game begins on planet Earth, where young Ender attends a government-run academy meant to train Earth’s next generation of military talent.  Some fifty years ago, Earth narrowly avoided being conquered by an alien race known as the Formics, and its leaders have spent the time since strengthening their defenses.  Writer-director Gavin Hood drops hints about the tight controls imposed on Earth’s citizens by their government- there’s a cap on procreation, for example- but the particulars are largely skipped over so the movie can focus on Ender’s progression from boarding school brat to military leader.

            Ender rises quickly through the ranks at his school both because he’s adept at interpersonal politics, showing a knack for saying the right things at the right time in front of the right people, and because the adults in his life see something in him.  Colonel Graff, played effectively by a scowling Harrison Ford, is in charge of recruiting at the school.  He and some of the other teachers watch Ender on video monitors and talk about how he’s a genius, a natural leader, the only one capable of defeating the alien threat.  Ender is basically a another version of Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter, a pre-ordained messiah destined to save the world.  But unlike in those stories, there’s no sense that it’s at all enjoyable being Ender Wiggin, nothing to leaven the crushing responsibility of being the Chosen One.  Life at the academy is regimented and competitive.  There’s little room for joy, and Graff works overtime to make sure Ender gets less than even his fair share.  He tries to drive a wedge between Ender and the other students, the better to mold Ender into leadership material.  Some of Ender’s classmates become envious, even violent.  The adults leave Ender to deal with his enemies as they come, satisfied with his nascent brutality even as Ender is disturbed by it.  The largely unseen Formics may threaten humanity with extinction, but the movie sees these adults as the real villains.

            In the movie’s twist ending, those adults push Ender to do something unconscionable, and the final minutes raise interesting questions about the corrosive power of authority and the ambiguity of personal responsibility.  From some angles, Ender’s Game can be seen as adolescent wish fulfilment, with young viewers projecting themselves onto the stoic Ender, an incredibly gifted young man whose talents are manipulated and misused by authority figures.  That’s something of a disturbing way to hook viewers in for what is otherwise a special effects driven sci-fi spectacular, but those ideas give the movie a brooding, somber center that can’t be waved away.  Ender’s Game presents one point of view, a rather downbeat one, on what it’s like to be young.  It remains to be seen whether that will be enough for it to stand out among other movies doing the same thing.

Long-Ended Musical Fued Ended Again

Yoko One broke up The Beatles.  A lot of people say that, but of course it isn't true.  By the time Ono started dating John Lennon in 1966, the famous foursome were already losing interest in their partnership, wanted to explore different musical directions, and were quarreling over their management.  Still, Ono often gets the blame, because she was there.  Whatever lingering resentment that may have existed between Ono and former member Paul McCartney at the time of the breakup has long since dissipated- McCartney has said previously that she did not break up the band and the two of them shared the stage when Lennon was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.  Still, it was confirmed earlier this week that the long-dead feud between the two musicians has finally, ultimately, and forever been put to rest.  It's unclear why this already-settled matter is being reported as being settled again, but it's nice to know.

Incidentally, McCartney has a new album out, 'New'.

Captain Phillips

Whether they’re plundering peaceful fishing villages in search of buried doubloons or attacking shipping vessels off the coast of Somalia, it is generally agreed upon that pirates are bad guys.  What they do is illegal and immoral and dangerous.  Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips, based off a true story of an actual pirate hijacking in 2009, does not dispute this.  But the pirates aren’t cast as snarling villains, either.  Captain Phillips is, first and foremost, an effective action movie, but it’s also a political commentary where the pirates aren’t always unsympathetic and the U.S government is just a little bit scary.

Richard Phillips is a middle-aged commercial sea captain.  He has a wife and a couple of growing children.  He is taciturn, steadfast, dependable and sort of destined to be played by Tom Hanks.  Hanks has always had a likable everyman quality to him, and as Phillips he projects a kind of grounded world-weariness that makes us root for him.  In early scenes we see him make the rounds of his ship, the MV Maersk Alabama, checking for wear and tear, making sure everything is ready for the voyage round the horn of Africa to Mombasa.  The ship is carrying food.  For Captain Phillips, this trip is just another job, and director Paul Greengrass’ focus on the mundanity of it effectively sets up the chaos to come.

Meanwhile, in Somalia, we’re introduced to Abduwali Muse, a wiry young man who volunteers to lead the hijacking of Phillips’ ship.  This is just a job for Muse as well.  After the pirates board the Alabama, Muse turns to Phillips, gun in hand, and says, almost apologetically, that this is “just business.”

Screenwriter Billy Ray draws parallels like this between Phillips and Muse early and often.  On one level, attempts to compare the two are strained, even in bad taste.   Phillips is the one shipping food to give to starving people in Monbasa, Muse the one hijacking his ship and demanding upwards of $30 million in ransom.  Muse and his crew are in the wrong, but the movie gives us little moments where we can empathize with them.  Upon learning that they’ve boarded an American ship, their faces light up like kids at Christmas.  This is a good haul, one that could keep their families fed for a long while.  They chomp a local root to keep their energy up, and you can’t watch them for long without thinking about how very, very young they all are.

But what endears them to us the most is how absolutely screwed they are.  Since the movie is based on a true story, few in the audience doubt that Captain Phillips himself will live, but we don’t know about the pirates.  As news of the hijacking spreads to the United States Navy, it quickly becomes clear that they are not going to be okay.  Greengrass depicts the military as cold, faceless, and merciless.  The Marine snipers crouching under the railings of an American battleship are drenched in shadow, the hulking, armed officers that surround Muse after he is lured onto their boat terrifying in their uniformity.   Muse’s storming of the Maersk Alabama is frightening for the crew, but the movie is more than a little wary of the U.S. government as well.

Hanks’ Captain Phillips is in the middle, a decent man who is unjustly kidnapped but still regrets what must happen to his kidnappers.  In the end, he doesn’t know how to react.  Neither does the movie, not completely, perhaps because there is no right way to react to impossible situations like this one.

Gravity

Stars.

Gravity, the movie, not the partially-understood fundamental interaction of nature, is primarily a visual exercise. And it’s a successful one. The movie is glorious to look at, full of weightless tracking shots dancing through space, eerily quiet moments of astronauts floating in zero-G, and breathless sequences where our puny human stars are thrown against floating debris, battered space stations, and the void. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Apollo 13, movies have used the unique properties of outer space to impress audiences, but Gravity doesn’t coast on the accomplishments of its predecessors. In one sequence, first-time astronaut Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) makes it safely aboard a space station. She peels off her spacesuit piece by piece and curls into a fetal position, hanging in the air, twirling slowly round for a long, silent minute. It’s a lovely moment that works because Gravity is still impressed with the visuals of weightlessness, and we're free to join it.

When the movie isn’t pausing to regard the beauty of bodies in space, it’s a small-scale survivor thriller, a disaster movie for two. Bollock’s Dr. Stone has been sent to make repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, supervised by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney). Ground control warms them that rubble from a defunct Russian satellite is hurtling their way, and soon the Hubble is busted to bits and the two astronauts are drifting through space, joined by a tether and making use of Kowalski’s rocket pack to travel to the International Space Station. Director Alfonso Cuarón comes up with wonderfully inventive ways to highlight their vulnerability by, say, attaching a camera to the front of Bollock’s suit to watch the horizon rise and fall over and over behind her as she spins, helpless, through space, or framing the characters against the softly glowing earth however many hundreds of miles below.

Gravity tries, on occasion, to be more than a showcase for visual creativity, but always comes up short. In the lead roles, Bullock and Clooney are fine, but the script doesn’t really demand they be anything more. You have to wonder why the producers would bother getting two big stars to play these roles in the first place, since their faces are often obscured by space helmets and their performances play second fiddle to the special effects. As the two drift toward the space station, they talk about the Bullock character’s life on the ground. She’s trying to forget about a traumatizing event back home, and the script takes a stab at exploring the theme of how to let go of one’s past. It never makes an impression, though. How could it, when it has to compete with an elemental battle for survival set against shots of the sun rising over planet Earth?

Gravity, then, doesn’t have the ambition of something like 2001, a movie that dealt with ideas as bold as its visuals. But that shouldn’t diminish how impressive these visuals are. These are boundary-pushing special effects at a time when it’s easy to assume that special effects have no more boundaries to push. It’s an argument for keeping movies on the big screen when the temptation is to watch everything at home at your computer. See it on the biggest screen you can and be wowed.

Clue Revisited

 

I was in middle school when I first saw Clue.  I loved it almost immediately.  Daffy, dynamic, and feverishly quotable, it filled a need to belong to a movie's cult that I didn't even know I had.  Apparently I wasn't the only one who felt that way, as Adam B. Vary of Buzzfeed has written an exhaustively researched, utterly delightful article about the movie, detailing how it went from a producer's pipe dream to box office flop to underground success.  It's a fun read, and an interesting indication of Buzzfeed's commitment to providing longer-form pieces.

Movie Review: Planet of the Apes (1968)

Isn't it ironic?

    What immediately stands out about Planet of the Apes, at least when watched from the perspective of jaded millennial movie-goer, is how earnest it is.  This, after all, is the yesteryear equivalent of a modern Hollywood blockbuster- 1968’s answer to The Dark Knight Rises or The Hunger Games, something designed to put asses in seats and keep them there with garish displays of pop opulence.  And yet no modern blockbuster has the courage, or the folly, to be this straight-forward about its message.

    In fact, no modern blockbuster would even go near this kind of message- Planet of the Apes is a sci-fi action movie built to tell us that humans are corrupt, war-mongering beasts doomed to destroy their own planet.  Pretty heavy for a movie that stars people dressed in monkey costumes that look only a few steps more realistic than something you’d see on The Muppet Show.  Camp and solemnity march hand-in-hand here.  That could give anyone who wants it plentiful excuse to mock the movie as outdated, but it’s also an interesting look into a time when audiences weren’t so ready to reject any message they didn’t have to drill through several layers of irony to unearth.

    The plot of Planet of the Apes is pretty well-known. Charleston Heston stars as a grizzly-faced astronaut who crash-lands on a distant planet where intelligent apes rule all and humans gape at each other and forage for crops like so many loin-cloth clad locusts.  Heston is taken prisoner, and all of ape society is aghast at this talking, properly walking freak of nature.  Adorable reversals of popular phrases follow.  “Man see, man do,” one ape says.  The Scopes Monkey Trial is reenacted with apes in the roles of both Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, the latter arguing that apes could not have evolved from humans since the ape scriptures clearly state otherwise.

    Today, all of this stuff would be incredibly tongue-in-cheek, and according to reviews written at the time, they may have been true even then.  But whatever its original audience thought, the movie at least has the confidence to play everything with a straight face.  That leaves it open to ridicule- it’s very hard not to roll one’s eyes and crack wise when some guy in a Halloween costume flaps his lips vaguely in time with his line and says “To apes, all men look alike,” and yet, by wearing its heart so obviously on its sleeve, the movie can land on images of surprising power.  The famous last shot, where Heston comes across a ruined Statue of Liberty poking out of a beach and realizes that humans are responsible for the sorry state of the world, is stark and haunting and effective.

    It’s been said we’re living in an Age of Irony.  People today simply know too much- about their friends, about their society, about other people’s society- to be surprised or delighted by much of anything.  In a world where we can safely assume that everything will eventually go downhill, treating things ironically is the only way we can squeeze enjoyment out of them.  Planet of the Apes comes from a different time, one where people actually enjoyed things for their own sake and believed that warnings against letting humanity’s darker impulses take it over might actually be useful.  And yet there are those who argue that the Age of Irony is over and that most people are ready to embrace simple things like family and country and to enjoy them sincerely.  Whether Planet of the Apes plays like an artifact from a time long gone or a rousing action-adventure with a pertinent warning about our future as a species may depend on which camp you fall into.

    Except for the monkey make-up, which is goofy no matter how you look at it.

Movie Review: Blue Jasmine

Jasmine (Cate Blanchette), unwell.

    The success of Blue Jasmine begins and ends with Cate Blanchette.  As Jasmine, a widowed former socialite who finds herself having to leave her plush Manhatten penthouse to bunk with her working class sister in San Francisco, Blanchette is terrific.  Jasmine is fractured, cultured, and completely out of her element.  Deprived of her wealth and forced to do things like work for a living and learn how to open an internet browser, her rambling monologues about how much she enjoyed her former life begin as hilarious and quickly cross into sad and uncomfortable.  Blanchette plays the character with all of her contradictions fully intact, and gives the film a powerful, memorable center.

    Not that she deserves all of the credit.  Director/writer Woody Allen is having one of his hit years.  It’s popular to disparage Allen for not being as good as he was in the 70s and 80s, and when one considers that he used to produce great stuff like Manhatten and The Purple Rose of Cairo and Crimes and Misdemeanors on a regular basis, you can see where the instinct comes from.  But even as Allen’s output has become more scattershot in recent years, he’s still making quality movies, from Match Point to Vicky Cristina Barcelona to Midnight in Paris.  Blue Jasmine is another one, and it’s one of the meatiest he’s made in recent memory.

    Allen’s movies tend to take place in a privileged bubble.  The characters are generally wealthy, and clever, and are afforded neurosis less affluent people don’t really have the time for.  Blue Jasmine represents the first time in a while that Allen has engaged very directly with the world of today, with a story that almost seems ripped right from the headlines.  Before her trip out west, Jasmine was married to Hal (Alec Baldwin), a Bernie Madoff-esque industrialist who was carted off to jail after it’s discovered that he made his vast wealth by way of an elaborate ponzie scheme.  Jasmine knew what was going on, or didn’t, depending on when you ask her, but whatever she knew it’s clear she was enjoying her material wealth too much to speak up.

    Rooting the plot so firmly in our reality gives the movie a weight that much of Allen’s recent output, even the good stuff like the charmingly fantastical Midnight in Paris, does not have.  Blue Jasmine can easily be seen as a satire of America’s much-discussed 1%, fallen from their high places following the financial collapse of 2008.  And it has the wit to follow-through, showing Jasmine, in flashback, doing everything she can to deny knowledge of her husband’s business.  That stuff is beyond her understanding, she claims- she’d rather go shopping on Park Avenue.

    And yet Jasmine is more than a symbol of pampered obliviousness.  She’s a person, and she is cracking up.  Many lead characters in Allen’s movies are neurotic and worrisome, starting with Allen himself, but Jasmine’s problems go well beyond that.  The break from her old life was so sudden and severe that she is constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown, replaying old conversations from better days in her head when the reality of her new, workaday life begins to encroach on her.  These interludes can be extremely funny, as when Jasmine glowers glassy-eyed at her young nephews from across a corner booth in a diner and free-associates about mixing her medications.  But they’re also frightening, because we sense that she could crack wide open at any moment and not be okay ever again.

    We’re kept teetering on that edge because the script is substantial, the directing earnest, and Cate Blanchette is so very, very good in this role.  She’s both our point of entry and point of exit from the movie, and it knows she’s good enough to carry it to completion.

A-

American Audiences Won't Stand for Female Action Leads, Claims Guy

The Red Reaper, reaping.

Indiewire posted an interesting piece that looks at the difficulties faced by a fantasy movie called Legend of the Red Reaper as director/actor/writer/all-around badass Tara Cardinal shopped it around to various studios. Legendary Pictures, the studio responsible for pulpy stuff like 300 and Pacific Rim, would seem like a good fit for the project, but they rejected it because, as an executive made clear in an e-mail to Cardinal: A) the script is kinda confusing, B) there's too much fantasy in the market right now, and C) the main character is a lady, with lady parts.

Far be it for me to second-guess the opinion of a practiced film executive, and to be fair the trailer for the eventually completed film has a my-first-epic-fantasy-movie sheen to it, but it's a little ridiculous to reject a movie because it has a female lead. This is a post-Ripley world we're living in, the age of Katmiss, and it's long since been shown that female ass-kickers can pack fans in the seats. I may have to see this admittedly trashy-looking movie out of spite now.

If Superman Applied to the Daley Planet Today

Some time ago, venerated news magazine The Onion ran a story on how the most unrealistic part of the Superman universe, which, in case you've forgotten, revolves around a man who can fly through the air so fast he can reserve the rotation of the planet, is that the Daily Planet newspaper where Clark Kent works is economically healthy. Not to be outdone, Twitter user James Grebey uploaded a polite rejection letter penned by Daily Planet editor Perry White schooling Clark Kent on his job options in an age where print media is dead or dying. Between this, the sub-par performance of Man of Steel at the box office, and the fact that I caught a few moments of Superman 3 while channel-flipping this weekend, and it seems America's longest-serving superhero cannot get a break.

Learn Filmmaking From David Lynch, The David Lynch Way

David Lynch, the experimental filmmaker responsible for hit television show Twin Peaks, modern movie classics like Mulholland Drive, and lobbying for Laura Dern to get an Oscar by sitting on the side of the street with a cow, has joined forces with the Maharishi School of Management to create the David Lynch MA in Film Program, where students will be able to make movies, get feedback from David Lynch on their work, and "transcend and experience that unbounded ocean of pure consciousness, which is unbounded intelligence, creativity, happiness, love, energy, power and peace."  Neat.

It's not too surprising that Lynch, long interested in the benefits of transcendental meditation, would attach himself to a school like the Maharishi School of Management, which is located in tiny Fairfield, Iowa and appears to have a lot of courses dedicated to freeing your minds and eating organic food and such.  With idiosyncratic talents like Lynch increasingly choosing to follow alternative paths apart from Hollywood, it may only be a matter of time before the American film industry migrates to the midwest.

But probably not.  Good on Lynch for continuing to blaze new trails for himself.  It must come pretty naturally to him at this point.

Game of Thrones Season 3 FX Reel Reveals Transience of Television Industry, Life Itself

Special effects studio SpinVFX, the people behind HBO's little-known critical darling Game of Thrones, has released a crisply edited montage of special effects shots from the ever-more visually sumptuous show.  Even in this day in age, when we should by rights expect simple over-the-shoulder shots in romantic comedies to be the product of millions of dollars worth of green screen work, I'm still surprised by how often I don't realize I'm looking at something not there.  I mean, I didn't think the producers built a 500-feet-tall wall for the actors to climb, but it never occurred to me that shots of, say, Arya looking over a river to the Twins had been digitally altered, although it certainly should have.

They include some shots of the Red Wedding, too, which doesn't look to have been digitally enhanced, just to rub that one in some more.

House Hunters

On Tuesday, I watched an episode of House Hunters.  I’ve actually watched several, and almost always enjoy them.  The show is weightless and without import, the television equivalent of diet soda or elevator music, but I watch it and I like it.  A lot, even.  This I confess to you.

I’m not exactly alone, either.  House Hunters, long the flagship series of the House and Garden Network, has been on for thirteen years and produced over 500 episodes and a small fleet of spin-offs.  The show is somewhat unique among reality television series in that it has no host- there’s no Ty Pennington or Gordon Ramsay to pull us from episode to episode, just the prospect of a new person or pair of persons on a quest to find the perfect home.  It’s simple and cheap and may not even be real, but I’ve watched it more than I care to admit, and if it’s on I’ll probably watch it again.  Why?

House Hunters works because it’s relatable.  Take last Tuesday’s episode, the series’ 1084th.  It follows Jonathan and Jenny, a newly married couple living in Atlanta, as they struggle to move out of Jenny’s parent’s basement and into a house of their own.  Jonathan and Jenny are not trying to be the last man standing on a desert island or belt their way to a recording contract.  They’re looking at real estate, comparing square footages and shelf space and roach populations to decide where they’ll hang out for the next few years.  Jonathan is kinda pudgy and Jenny is a brunette- they’re very nearly real people, and we can recognize ourselves in their situation.

House Hunters works because it isn’t relatable at all.   We don’t know what Jonathan and Jenny do for a living, but we know their budget caps out at 300k, and we know that they turn down delightful looking houses because, in one case, the hardwood floors aren’t dark enough, and in another because the toilet doesn’t have its own space apart from the rest of the bathroom.  They throw around words like ‘craftsman-style’ and ‘traditional’ as if they’re architectural terms of art with meanings understood only by them, and at one point bemoan the kitchen of house number three, which unlike my kitchen is not confined to one wall of a living room, as too small.   ‘Just who do these people think they are?’ we ask ourselves.  ‘Tools,’ we answer ourselves, and we feel good.

The show, in short, works for many of the same reasons so much of reality television works, by playing on the eternal tug of war between sympathy and schadenfreude.  We want Jonathan and Jenny to find their happiness, and then we want them to choke on it, just a little bit.  And then there’s the packaging.  Each episode of House Hunters is wrapped up into a discrete, unobtrusive, half-hour box.  You can miss one, two, thirty-eight episodes and pick right up with the nice couple from Delaware or the odd single girl from Nebraksa without missing a beat.  The lack of connective tissue between episodes provides it with a fungible kind of freedom- the structure can be, and has been, endlessly replicated with only small changes and still retain its basic allure.  This wouldn’t be true if the show made more demands of its audience, if it required them to do more than absentmindedly judge whether Jonathan and Jenny made the right choice to sacrifice, say, more square footage for a smaller mortgage, but it doesn’t.  It lets audiences make the fun, easy choices involved with house-hunting and spares them the hard ones, engaging the outer parts of the brains and allowing the rest to slip into a soft sweet torpor.

And that’s why House Hunters is a show I feel like I need to justify enjoying, but that’s also why I’ll watch it again.  And probably again.  And again.  I wonder if it’s on now.

New Ender's Game Trailer Flashy, Probably Homophobic In Some Way

I mean, who is Harrison Ford implying that Ender will save mankind from?  Actually, the trailer looks pretty nifty, if prosaic.  The special effects are crisp, the opera rock rousing, and Harrison Ford's world-weary glower as affecting as ever it was.  Still, it's hard to remember a time when Ender's Game author Orson Scott Card was known for being a pioneering science fiction author rather than a prodigious homophobe.  Time will tell if the Ender's Game movie adaptation, out in November, will fail at the box office because of the backlash against Card's opinions or because big-budget action flicks aren't doing so well lately.

The Wolverine

A Canadian mutant in Tokyo.

    “You don’t understand.  You aren’t Japanese.”  So says Mariko, Wolverine’s love interest, as the two of them discuss Eastern symbolism over Japanese surf and turf.  The razor-clawed mutant’s latest adventure takes him to modern-day Japan, where he gets mired in the succession crisis of a wealthy family and ends up defending heir-apparent Mariko (Tao Okamoto) from yakuza thugs, ninjas, and at long last an eight-foot tall, bone-sucking samurai robot.  The Japanese locale is admirably specific for a series generally no more concerned with setting beyond what bits of geography might and might not blow up, but the script still treats Japan and Japanese culture as a novelty- it adds a whiff of the exotic, but the movie has no interest in actually discussing it.  This is, in the end, a comic book flick, but at least it’s one with its own sense of place.

    And director James Mangold occasionally makes use of that sense of place to bring us things we haven’t seen before.  For example, we go in to the movie expecting Wolverine to fight and kill a bunch of guys in hand-to-hand action sequences.  It’s what the character is made for.  We might even expect him to do it on top of a train- there have been similar scenes in other movies, even in other superhero movies like Spiderman 2.  But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fight on top of a Japanese bullet train, where defeating the other guy isn’t nearly as difficult as not getting flung off the roof as the train zips up the coastline at 300 miles an hour.  It’s the most exciting sequence in the movie, because it’s new.

    The same cannot be said for the movie’s plot, which is thin at best and a baffling muddle at worst.  It begins in Canada, where a thickly bearded Wolverine licks his wounds following the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, when he killed would-be paramour Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) to keep her from going nuclear and annihilating the species.  He’s soon whisked off to Japan by an old friend (Will Yun Lee) he met during World War II, who now wants to use the resources he’s amassed in the meantime to eliminate Wolverine’s mutant healing ability and rid him of that pesky immortality.  The best thing about this setup is Hugh Jackman’s reaction to it.  Jackman has been playing Wolverine for years now, and he’s able to convey a world of self-loathing skepticism with the raise of an eyebrow and a derisive scoff.  The movie forgets about Wolverine’s dilemma almost as quickly as it brings it up, but Jackman’s confident, highly physical performance make me wish it hadn’t.

    Instead, the script opts for a weirdly byzantine plot featuring an increasingly complicated network of backstabbing and a large number of half-heartedly developed villains whose motives shift and blend so often I wouldn’t have known who was on whose side if they all weren’t beating each other up so often.  When the movie slows down long enough to focus on Wolverine’s pain, Wolverine’s ambivalence, Wolverine’s regret, it’s engaging, mainly because Jackman is so comfortable and convincing at playing this character.  But eventually the plot gets back on track, and we have to suffer the ride.

    But I will say this for the movie’s Japanese setting: it makes The Wolverine feel distinct.  Too often, latter additions in superhero franchises start to bleed together, hopping from one battle scene to another before setting up the sequel to come.  The Wolverine feels more like an old James Bond caper- the hero visits some faraway location, dispatches a collection of campy villains, and leaves ready for his next adventure.  Wolverine and Jackman have proved themselves sturdy enough to weather more than a few adventures.  If the screenwriters put as much effort into writing them as Jackman does into playing them out, I may even get excited about the next.

B-

Why the Collapse of the Mainstream Movie Industry Could Be the Best Possible Thing to Happen to it

    The mainstream movie industry is in trouble.  That’s the conventional wisdom.  That’s what venerated directors like Stevens Soderbergh and Speilberg have forecast will happen in an environment where studios would rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars on one-size-fits-all summer tentpoles than diversify their outputs.  That’s what can be guessed from a summer that saw several big-budget star vehicles (The Lone Ranger, White House Down, After Earth) fizzle at the box office and several others just scrape by.  And if this summer gave any studio execs pause, a year like 2015 may have them shaking in their tailored suits, with twenty-plus blockbuster-sized movies with blockbuster-sized budgets scheduled for release.

    There’s other conventional wisdom, of course, wisdom which says that modern movies can make up for poor domestic showings by crushing it overseas.  It’s no secret that Hollywood is taking foreign markets very seriously these days, but they’re not the panacea they appear to be.  Many countries have policies in place to ensure that as much money as possible that gets spent there stays there, and American studios get a much smaller cut of box office revenue abroad than they would at home.  In his book The Hollywood Economist, Howard J. Epstein puts the movie studio’s take of foreign box office receipts at around 40%, less after expenses.

    So the industry is in trouble.  Option one is to panic.  If the blockbuster model becomes unstable, it may not last long enough to give us Iron Man 5 or split the final Hobbit movie into a couple more flicks.  For those who would be all too happy to let the bottom fall out from the industry responsible for Smurfs 2 and After Earth, option two may seem more palatable: wait and let it happen.  After all, it’s not as though quality movie-making has stopped.  Good directors kicked out of the Hollywood machine are just finding new ways to get their movies financed and made, and much of the most interesting programming is coming out on television anyway.

    Still, it’s hard not to miss a time when Hollywood made movies worth seeing, when spending an hour-and-a-half at the local Cineplex was actually more appealing than spending the same amount of time surfing YouTube. Intrepid movie fans can still find good stuff, but they have to hunt for it.  This brings us to option three: don’t just wait for the fall of the blockbuster movie industry, but root for it.  A complete implosion might be just what Hollywood needs to kick it back into gear.

    This isn’t the first time the mainstream movie industry has threatened to collapse in on itself.  It happened most recently, and most instructively, in the 1960s and early 70s, when television was making enormous inroads into box office returns, Hollywood stars were refusing to play by the studio’s rules, and foreign pictures out of Italy, England, and France were proving that there were actually audiences for movies that dared to examine naughty subjects like sex, violence, and non-continuous editing.  For a major movie studio executive, it was an exciting, terrifying time to be alive.

    The Hollywood of the fifties and sixties operated much like the Hollywood of today.  Threatened by alternatives to movie-going, most notably television, large studios poured their energy into creating massive, expensive epics that had to be seen on the big screen to be appreciated.  The idea was to make movies that offered things television couldn’t, like color photography and wide-screen picture.  Expensive ‘event’ movies, of course, had always been part of the industry’s strategy; Hollywood had sunk plenty of money into both producing and marketing, for example, visually decadent movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) and Gone with the Wind (1939).  But such movies had previously been made only sparingly.  Before World War II, around one to two movies per year got the big budgets and enormous marketing pushes that marked them as proto-blockbusters.  By the sixties, it was ten to fifteen.  The uptick in big-budget extravaganzas couldn’t sustain itself, and following notable flops like Cleopatra (1963), Dr. Doolittle (1968), and Hello Dolly (1969), Hollywood knew it was in trouble.

    They got themselves out of it by doing things they would have never done if they weren’t desperate.  Threatened with bankruptcy, Hollywood opened its doors to untested directors like Steven Speilberg, Martin Scorcese, and Robert Altman, and allowed them to make violent, messy, openly critical films that would have been unthinkable just ten years ago.  It paid off gloriously.  Movies like The Graduate (1967) and M*A*S*H (1970) each cost under $5 million to produce, and each made back their budgets many, many times over.  In this period, Hollywood actually made money by being different, edgy, and taking chances.

    Obviously, that didn’t last.  The studios were eventually bought out by conglomerates eager to get a piece of the suddenly lucrative film industry.  In 1977, Star Wars came along to show an eager world how much money could be made from movie merchandising, and suddenly it was harder to sell scripts that couldn’t readily be spun off into a line of action figures.  Major studios became more interested in movies that stuck to a formula known to make money and less in those that did things that had never been done.  Slowly, they turned their attention to producing homogenized spectacles capable of wowing audiences on opening weekend and not much caring about what happened to them afterward.  Which brings us to today, with producers unwilling to take a chance on a movie not purged of any idiosyncrasy that might confuse global audiences, of any movie not based off an already-popular book, TV show, municipal code subsection, or what-have-you.

    That’s the way it is, but if the industry is threatened financially, it doesn’t have to be that way forever.  Imagine if the situation got bad enough for Hollywood execs to become desperate.  Where would they turn?  Perhaps to television, where people like Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad) and Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) have been putting out popular, thought-provoking entertainments on a weekly basis for years.  It’s easy to get excited thinking about what talents like theirs could do on the big screen.  Or perhaps they would bring people like the beleaguered Steven Soderbergh, who’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra was rejected by multiple movie studios before becoming a ratings smash for HBO, back into the fold.

    And of course there’s all the undiscovered talent we won’t know about until they’re given a chance.  The idea of the mainstream Hollywood film industry breaking itself down and building itself back up better than it was before is an optimistic one.  One massive hit can replenish a studio’s coffers, and restore their faith in the big damn blockbuster model of filmmaking, for years at a time.  But it’s an attractive idea for movie lovers.  The history is there, and maybe it’s high time it repeat itself.

Stephen Soderbergh Like Spike Lee. Tell Your Friends.

Spike Lee: Artist. Pioneer. Crowd-sourcer.

     In the latest example of what is becoming an increasingly common trend of successful filmmakers asking the world for money to finance their projects via Kickstarter, auteur Spike Lee has taken to the crowd-sourcing site to finance his latest, as-yet-unnamed Joint.  His pal Stephen Soderbergh, the man behind Oceans Eleven through Thirteen, has pitched in $10,000.00 as well as an impassioned couple of paragraphs bemoaning the shrinking possibilities of the film industry and why we should support idiosyncratic filmmakers like Lee.

    It's an insightful post, and sweet, but even as more and more big names include Kickstarter as part of their fund-raising strategies, it's still hard to think of someone like Spike Lee needing to solicit donations to get his projects completed.  At least he's only asking for help with a pet project about the 'addiction for blood' unlikely to be seen by more than a few cinephiles.  When Marvel Studios starts asking for money to finance Thor 3, we'll know a line has been crossed.

The Venture Brothers- The Devil's Grip

Hank Venture and the Action Man, enjoying the hell out of life.

 The Venture Brothers is a show that is gleefully, unstoppably full- full of ideas, full of characters, full of plotlines that zig and zap between and around each other with little thought for whether they will ever meet.  The show’s fifth season finale, ‘The Devil’s Grip,’ is overstuffed.  It follows up on the cliffhanger from the end of the last episode, wherein Doctor Rusty Venture is crushed by a giant disco ball, it spends time with Hank and Dean as they adjust to their new lives with their godparents, it wraps up Gary’s Season-long search for meaning, and it continues to add elements to the show’s increasing complex mythology.  It can’t help but feel a bit bloated, but by now the show has learned to embrace its bloat.  It’s made a style of being overstuffed, and it’s learned how to use it to leave us wanting more.

                There are a lot of threads running through ‘The Devil’s Grip’ but the meatiest involves Hank and Dean.  After Doc’s brush with death, Sergeant Hatred ships the boys off to live with retired members of the old Venture team, Hank with Rodney the Action Man and Dean with jet-setting pederast Colonel Gentleman.  This season has seen the Venture twins grow further and further apart, and pairing them up with former members of their father’s team gives us a look into their possible futures.

                Hank, ever the good sport, seems like he’s going to be okay no matter what happens to him.  The Action Man leads a fairly boring life- he mostly just putters around his Boca Raton retirement home.  But Hank throws himself into the thick of it, gladly helping the Action Man seduce a fellow resident who Action Man’s been “trying to drill for, like, 40 years” and gamely participating in a fairly disgusting Team Venture burial tradition.  Hank and the Action Man seem to be the kinds of people who can make themselves happy no matter what their situation, even if their situation is dire at best.

                Things are less rosy for Dean, who’s been slipping into a sullen torpor ever since the end of the previous Season.  It’s hard to blame the guy- living with his sad-sack father and enduring the endless parade of costumed freaks who show up to fail all over his front lawn week after week would be enough to make any teenager a little morose- but this episode makes the case for Hank’s rose-colored outlook on life over Dean’s justifiable funk.  After all, no one wants to end up like Colonel Gentlemen, sitting alone with his memories and passing the time by watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch and cataloguing which appearances of Salem the cat featured an actual cat and which only had “that crappy puppet.”

                Matters between the brothers come to a head at the end of the episode, after they’ve returned to the Venture compound to have a proper burial for bite-sized former Team Venture member Paul Entmann, who the Action Man accidentally crushed under the base of his rocking chair.  Dean finally lets Hank on the dreadful secret he’s been carrying since the Halloween special- the two of them are clones.  Clones, Hank.  Dead several times over.  Hank considers this atomic bomb of information for a moment before responding with characteristic good cheer.  “That.  Is awesome.”  And he means it.  The Venture-verse can be a humiliating, soul-crushing place to live, but Hank has chosen to enjoy it.  Of late the writers have allowed Dean to have a human reaction to the insanity that surrounds him, but I wonder if he won’t find a way to integrate his earlier unfounded optimism back into his personality next year.  In a world this maddening, it may be the only way he can enjoy himself.

                That’s something that Rusty Venture, after over forty years in the business, has never quite learned how to do.  He begins the episode in a dungeon in the Monarch’s home.  Dr. Mrs. The Monarch tells him that she and her husband are going to torture him, and Rusty is prepared to again go through the motions.  Fake a little pain, maybe make an escape attempt, beg for a bit of mercy, and he’ll be home before dinner.  Only this torture session is a disappointment even by Rusty’s standards.  The Monarch is enthusiastic as ever to break his arch-enemy down piece by piece, but Rusty’s apathy and the Monarch’s incompetence prevent either party from getting what they want.  Eventually, the Monarch becomes so disheartened that he just lets his hostage go, and Rusty shuffles home despondent in the knowledge that even the Monarch can’t spare the energy to get that excited about him anymore.

                Of all the characters on the show, Rusty is the one most often stuck in a loop, failing to break out time and again and never learning from his mistakes, so it’s hard to believe that this new blow will inspire him to change, but kudos to the writers for finding new ways to reinforce just how low he has sunk.  The Monarch has a different, more interesting reaction.  After sitting forlornly in his room for a while, he makes an about-face and begins to revel in the limp torture session, cackling to his wife that it was all designed to break Rust’s spirit.  It’s hard to know whether this is actually the case or if the Monarch is just covering for his despair, but it doesn’t matter.  Like Hank and the Action Man, the Monarch has found a way to love the loop he’s trapped in, turning what might be a pitiful failure into an imagined triumph.  It’s odd to think of the Monarch as a healthy individual, but at he's embraced his situation and found a way to be happy.

                So maybe the message of Season 5 is to make the most with what you have where and when you have it, even if you don’t have much.  It’s a compromising, even depressing message for a show full of compromised, often depressed characters.  The producers have shown a remarkable ability to turn the compromises of life into television gold season after season, and let’s hope that we don’t have to wait two more years for them to keep doing it.  Bloated or not, The Venture Brothers clearly has material to be by turns depressing and hilarious for years to come.

Also-s:

• Another thing that happens in this episode: Gary and Sargent Hatred storm the Monarch’s cocoon in an attempt to rescue Rusty, Gary indicts the Moppets for killing Henchman 21, and the cocoon explodes.  Again.  It’s a good indication of how stuffed this episode is that these bits happen mainly in the background. 
• When Hatred approaches Gary about storming the cocoon, Gary cocks a stick he’s holding like it’s a gun.  Even when they’re about to change into costumes and assault a super-villain’s flying fortress, these characters still love to play make-believe. 
• The Monarch does vocal warm-ups before torturing Rusty.  Can't risk tripping over the tongue during one of those villainous monologues. 
• It looks like Colonel Gentleman and the Action Man will be moving to Rusty’s neck of the woods next Season.  With the cast continuing to grow, it really makes you wish they could switch to a one-hour format.
  
  

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