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.