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.