Sex, Lies, and Videotape

Sex, Lies and Videotape: Screener Gods be willing, I’ll be reviewing The Knick over on Cinemax next month. It’s a 10-episode period medical drama starring Clive Owen, which doesn’t exactly scream “Must See TV.” The hook is that each hour is directed by Steven Soderbergh, which was more than enough to get me interested. Cinemax has already greenlit a second season with Soderbergh again attached to direct the episodes, and this has got me thinking about the role he’ll play over the course of the series. The saying goes that movies are a director’s medium, and TV a writer’s, so The Knick as an intersection between one of today’s most evocative (and retired?) film directors and a serial format has me intrigued.

As such, I’m going back through Soderbergh’s catalogue to catch up on some of his best-regarded work, and a couple of his more recent efforts. To start: Sex, Lies and Videotape, the 1989 drama of sexual discovery and marital atrophy that’s often cited as a landmark breakout for independent filmmaking. Rather than just give the 10-cent review of the film (which I liked just fine, especially since now I understand every weird James Spader-as-sexual-voyeur joke the internet loves to much), I just wanted to instead highlight a few bits of parallelism Soderbergh uses to visually convey the relationships of the film.

The four main characters of Sex, Lies and Videotape form a compass, with sisters Ann (Andie MacDowell) and Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo) on one pole of the Madonna-Whore axis, respectively, and John (Peter Gallagaher) and Graham (James Spader) positioned on opposite poles of the less insulting, but still frequent male sex-spectrum of Successful Asshole and Sensuous Screw-up. John, Ann’s husband, is introduced in his office describing how married life has up-ed his appeal to the opposite sex, but without addressing if he capitalizes on it, he seems pretty comfortable with the suburban life (the bag of chips links him to Ann, introduced complaining about garbage).

Then the scene cuts to the other side of the office, and we get this abstract, colorful painting that exposes us to John’s other side, the first of many cues to how different John and his wife are (even the curve of a pillow serves to add contrast). We soon see him with Ann’s sister, Cynthia, an artist whose household paintings are similarly vivid. The paintings themselves link into another of the film’s motifs, plants, which sprout up like weeds all over the place. John is characterized by overgrown, leafy plants to match his wild streak, while frigid, Christian Ann prefers more ornate, cultivated flowers, both as paintings, and in her presence.

The course of the film sees the stasis of the three characters interrupted by Spader’s Graham, a reserved, yet deeply sexual drifter who leads Ann to discover uncomfortable things about herself, and her husband’s activities. Graham’s proclivity, taping women as they talk about their sexual history, is the basis of the film’s approach to dialogue, with most scenes playing out like extended interviews. Soderbergh extends the depth of focus to expand or contract our impression of how close these characters are, even when they’re seated mere feet from one another.

The film uses its mis en scene to convey how each pairing is altered over the course of the film. The groan of the couch Ann sits on as she awkwardly makes small talk with Graham is echoed by the sound of John’s mattress straining when he and Cynthia share an afternoon tryst. By the end of the film, Ann, having learned of John’s indiscretions and moved on, has given up the homely whites for a livelier polka dot dress. More importantly, she’s traded in her prominently featured crucifix (which finds a mirror in Cynthia’s choker) for the pearl earrings that proved John was unfaithful. She’s forgiven her sister (through, what else, a potted plant as olive branch), while John is back at the office, dressed for failure in awful whites and a worse bowtie.

Sex, lies and Videotape is as loquacious as it is sensuous, but there’s a reason it’s a film, not a book or play. Being heard is one thing, but being seen, whether by a camera, or the eye, puts a face, and a person to the words. When John sees the tape Ann has made for Graham, the film could have ended on the TV static, which provides a parallel and bookend to the pavement zooming by in the film’s opening shot. He’s finally seen his wife; everything after this moment is just epilogue.    

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Boyhood

It’s doing Boyhood more than a little bit of a disservice to, less than an hour after seeing it, try and sum up in 10 minutes what Richard Linklater has spent 12 years making. We can probably save time by dispensing with the superlatives, seeing as there really aren’t any left that one critic or another hasn’t used to praise the film. I can't really think of any that apply to Boyhood as a film anyway, seeing as watching it is as unique an experience as its production.  

Over the last twelve years, Linklater has been filming a coming-of-age story for a Texas boy named Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, who was seven when the project started in 2002. Along with Patricia Arquette, Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei, and Linklater-insert Ethan Hawke, the director has been tracking Coltrane as he ages from a first-grader to a college freshman, checking in every year to see how the kid, the music, the politics, and the culture from Texas have changed over the course of more than a decade.

“Ambitious,” is usually the first word that comes to mind when you hear the pitch, but Boyhood, in being a time-lapse of a boy’s journey into adulthood, isn’t really anything more than its gimmick. That’s not an insult: this is a film where the passage of time is the only real thing that happens. Mason’s family goes through the same wealth of ups and downs as any other’s would over such a long period of time, but the movie is never driving at any point in particular. Hell, the biggest misconception you could have about the movie is that it's Mason's story alone. The more accurate, already taken original title of 12 Years better encapsulates what we’re watching for the 160-minute runtime, with Mason himself, like most kids, spending much of his youth as an observer. 

Unlike most avant-garde cinema that demands the viewer get out what they put into it, Boyhood’s power lies in what you bring with you to the experience. I’m barely more than a half-decade older than Coltrane, so while his on-the-move childhood caused by divorced certainly spoke to my own personal history, it was the middle years of the film that resonated the most, as they coincided with the time in my life that was most individually formative. There are universal qualities to Mason’s journey through life, increasingly so as he gets older, and the story becomes more singularly his, but his life is as random and unspectacular as anyone else’s in its own way.

That’s one way of saying that Boyhood’s shaggy free-form approach can grow a little exhausting over its stretch, but such is life. As the film nears its end, Mason and his college friends bond over a shared question of “what it’s all about,” reworking some famous aphorisms to try and reveal a truer meaning. They not so inadvertently come up with what could be the film's thesis statement, one Linklater and Mason know is just absurd, and laugh off. How can you sum up life in a three-hour film, let alone a sentence? You can’t, so don’t worry about trying. Just sit back, and try to enjoy yourself, because no matter what, Boyhood is going to speak to you in someway. Linklater, as always, is just a superb conversationalist with a movie camera, and he shows with Boyhood, as he has before, that time is the only real lingua franca there is. 

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The Immigrant

The experience of waiting and hoping for something better is a relatable one in James Gray’s new period drama. For as much critical praise as has been heaped on the film for its tremendous performances and richly detailed aesthetic, the biggest ballyhoo has been made about The Immigrant’s closing shot. Once I knew we were comfortably in the home stretch, I was consciously keeping tabs on what might make for such a discussion-worthy closing image, but knew it had finally revealed itself the moment it started to form. Sure enough, it’s amazing, and worth the price of admission alone.

More than that, the final shot, and scene that precede it, are absolutely vital to tying together Gray’s moving, yet often distant portrait of a young Polish immigrant, Eva, trying to survive 1921 New York. With her sick sister held in quarantine on Ellis Island, Eva comes into the care of a kindly but suspicious man who’s quickly taken with her. Seeing as Eva is played by Marion Cotillard, it’s an attraction that’s easy to buy into, just as it’s easy to assume that the good Samaritan, Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), is completely untrustworthy. Add in Jeremy Renner as a charming magician who also takes a liking to Eva, and you’ve got the basis for passionate, dangerous love triangle.

Gray’s best choice with The Immigrant was to not treat his heroine with kid gloves. Eva is smart, bordering on ruthless, constantly shown working the hold she has on Bruno to what little advantage she can afford. The Immigrant captures all the magic, music, money and sex that are at the heart of the American Dream, and the demoralizing conditions have-nots must struggle through to find their piece of it. Corruption and hypocrisy having deeply embedded themselves in the establishment, especially with regards to treatment of women, the film’s use of burlesque, vaudeville, and stage magic conveys both the fantasy of the life these characters are fighting for, and the fantasies they live with in order to cope with their actions. 

There are recurring motifs of portraits, mirrors, and birds throughout the film, and Eva’s constant desperation provides a drive, but The Immigrant often overcooks its symbolism, and actively underplays the dramatics. It’s immaculately staged and performed, and there’s a humor to how Eva’s survivor instincts cuts off the romantic and boyish fantasies both the men in her life have for her. This also makes the film cool to the touch, and at times, draining. An unexpected third act turn looks to be the moment The Immigrant falls apart, but instead flips the script on our expectations. The final half-hour pulls together the story’s sometimes-unwieldy themes of struggle and redemption into a powerful finale that justify whatever earlier reservations you might have about The Immigrant. And that last shot…

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Snowpiercer

Having not seen last year’s Elysium, I can’t say for certain whether its 1% vs. 99% allegory was as aggressively heavy-handed as its many critics seemed to think (this, of course, being a movie about social inequality distributed by a major studio, and trumpeting a “PLZ SAVE US, PRETTY WHITE MAN” arc in its posters). I’ve heard less griping about on-the-nose social commentary from fans of Snowpiercer. This is likely because A) Snowpiercer is just a flat-out better movie, and B) it’s directed by Joon-Ho Bong, so it’s got a heaping helping of South Korean weirdness mixed into its story of class warfare to help lighten the mood.

Starting in the caboose of a class-divided train (rabble in the back, elite up front) that happens to be the last bastion of human life on an apocalyptically frozen Earth, Snowpiercer is a heavily compartmentalized film both in its structure and tone. Early on it’s a gritty powder keg, one that goes off and explodes into large-scale close-quarters violence. Later it’s a bizarre and comic world-building wonderland, and later still, a space-age social deconstruction essay. Yet, the many hats Snowpiercer wears are always present in each stage of the film’s story, which sees Chris Evans’ generically likeable Curtis pushing a revolution forward, the literally unwashed masses fighting, car by car, to get a better seat at the table.

The characters of Snowpiercer aren’t terribly well defined or deep as individual people, but there’s a strong diversity in the casting that makes each of them distinctive. None of the good guys gets to be as flamboyant as Tilda Swinton, camping it up wonderfully as one of the ruling oligarchy’s puppets, but they each have individual goals and shades of personality. John Hurt is a lot of fun as an old mentor who’s more coatrack than man, Octavia Spencer is solid as a mother in search of her son, and Bong regulars Kang-Ho Song and Ah-sung Ko provide comic relief and pathos as a frequently drugged-out father-daughter pairing.

Snowpiercer crams tons of oddball humor and interesting spins on sci-fi staples into its on-rails world, which helps to both prevent the film from taking the class warfare metaphor too seriously, and excuses the fact that very little of this world makes much sense. It’s a big ol’ pell-mell of ideas, tones, and designs, which naturally makes for a bumpy journey. The climax, in particular, suffers from trying to define a method to the madness, ending up being a slogging attempt by Bong (and his well-cast mouthpiece) to talk his way into a conclusion for a film that’s thus far run just fine on sheer momentum. Snowpiercer lacks consistency, but doesn’t have a one-track mind either. It’s an evocative, exhilarating, and unique ride that I’d recommend you take. 

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The Raid 2: Berandal

The greatest sin that The Raid 2: Berandal commits is having the audacity to try and follow in the wake of perfection. 2011’s The Raid: Redemption is -and I say this with hyperbole in check- the purist action movie of the last decade. It was 100-minutes of dudes punching, pummeling, shooting and stabbing the hell out of each other, all taking place in near real-time in the dangerous slumhouse in Indonesia. Writer-director Gareth Evans crafted a martial arts film of singular purpose, and delivered on it so completely and efficiently, that there didn’t seem like any place left to go from there.

Unsurprisingly, reading up on the sequel reveals that The Raid 2 was originally an entirely different film that Evans was planning on making, but due to budget restrictions, he instead made a cheaper film in The Raid, making it perhaps the best proof-of-concept/”let me show you I know what I’m doing” movie ever. Rather than feeling like Evans is cutting corners by molding his original vision of an Indonesian crime epic in order to capitalize on the popularity of The Raid, The Raid 2 is everything an impossible sequel should be, in that it maintains the spirit of its predecessor, while also trying to be its own beast.

Picking up just hours after the first, survivor and MVP ass-kicker of the first film, officer Rama, is spurred into becoming part of a dangerous undercover operation meant to route out corruption in the police force. Free physically and temporally from the confines of the first film’s drug house, Evans builds a far more expansive narrative and world for his follow-up. Setting up multiple different crime families and factions vying for control of the city, with Rama caught in the middle, Berendal sees Evans working out emotional and dramatic muscles that were fueled purely by adrenaline in the first film. There are whole stretches of the film where people aren’t beating the tar out of one another, but it works because The Raid 2 adopts the pacing and style of a suspenseful police thriller.

Often times the film feels like it has more in common with The Departed and The Godfather (as embodied by Eka, a Tom Hagen like adoptee of one of the crime families) than it does Redemption. With so many characters and a translation to be filtered through, it’s hard to tell if some of the finer details of the plot would hold up under scrutiny, and Evans sets up more interesting characters than he has time to explore deeply (more adventures with Bat Boy and Hammer Girl, please!). 

When it comes down to the action, though, The Raid 2 delivers. Like the story, it’s more ambitious and open-ended, with the fight choreography allowing for greater variation and bigger brawls. That purity of the first film is impossible to top though; the action may be more complex in The Raid 2, but the emotional and dramatic simplicity of The Raid made each hit matter more than the double-dose Berendal delivers to try and one-up its predecessor. Evans’ explosive filmmaking style works best when the pressure is more contained; he knew every contour and pressure point of that dilapidated row house from the first film, and the greater scope of The Raid 2 can’t match that kind of intimacy. Still, it’s a thrilling, exceptionally well-directed action movie, and a worthy successor to The Raid simply for being its own thing. 

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Planes

I was supposed to see Sex Tape tomorrow. It’s not like I was all that excited about it, and, hey, gift horses and all that. But the screening schedule got changed, and now I’ll be reviewing Planes: Fire and Rescue instead, the cash-grab Disney sequel to the 2013 cash-grab spin-off of a Pixar cash-grab sequel to what is apparently an okay movie called Cars that’s responsible for this whole mess called The World of Cars. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never seen a Cars, but figured I ought to at least see the first Planes before approaching the sequel. I guess you can probably tell from this paragraph what kind of an experience that was.

Planes takes place in a post-apocalyptic future in which sentient machines have risen up to destroy all humanity in the last great war fought by mankind. This is never explicitly stated in the film, you just have to intuit it from the background details of Planes, otherwise it’s a world that makes no sense at all. The film’s main character is a crop-duster who tends to cornfields for a planet that has no organic beings to consume them. He’s mentored by a crusty war-veteren of a fighter plane on how to be a flying ace, and you get a flashback where the fighter plane’s whole squadron is shot down in explosive hellfire by aircraft carriers. These aircraft carriers don’t have eyes and a mouth like the other aircraft carriers in the film’s present day, so presumably they were operated by what was once the human resistance to the new machine world order.

Presumably the vehicles of the present day have been infected by some sort of memory-wiping nano-virus, acting as caretakers for the planet, perhaps in wait for their creator species to return, unaware that they pushed their masters to extinction decades ago. This is probably why the film is structured as a lazy underdog sports story about the crop-duster (voiced by sentient glop of hair gel, Dane Cooke) competing in a Tour de France-style air race around the world, seeing as everything in this movie is so horribly clichéd, you could literally swap the planes for humans, and it’s the same movie.

France was presumably eradicated during the war, as one of the planes in the race is French-Canadian, and therefore among the least offensive stereotypes that Planes relies on over the course of an interminable 90-minute run. The British plane is stuffy and drinks tea; the Mexican plane wears a luchador mask and calls the Quebecois plane cute nicknames like “enchilada” and “burrito”; the Indian plane talks about how tractors are sacred in her country, and believes everyone will be reincarnated as them after death. The tractors look pretty much like any of the other vehicles, just slightly bovine-ized. Perhaps this hints at a former betrayal by the tractor faction during The Last War, one that saw this traitor species enslaved for siding with the humans.

Planes is like some horrible pick-two scenario that John Lasseter came up. “Disney, if you make this movie, it’s going to be some combination of horrible, racist, and frightening.” Disney then mulled over its options, and asked, “can’t it be all 3?” Oh, and it’s also weirdly sexist too, let’s not forget that! The crop-duster is smitten by how “aerodynamic” the Indian plane is, just as the Mexican plane goes gaga over the sleek curves and surfaces of the French-Canadian one. To paraphrase Nathan Rabin when discussing another animated film that creepily oversexualized its non-human characters, it’s as if the animators were thinking, “oh man, if we do our jobs correctly, everyone is going to want to fuck these planes!”

I’m just going to leave you with this one last frightening image, and remind you that Planes: Fire & Rescue is in theatres Friday.  

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The Rocketeer

When I left the 17-minute preview screening for Guardians of the Galaxy -a ridiculous marketing event designed to get word-of-mouth going on a movie Disney is wringing their hands bloody over (and one that I, admittedly, did feed into)-, I could tell the glorified ad’s job had been accomplished in a roundabout way. My desire to run out and see GotG was completely unchanged, which was a pleasant result, seeing as I expected the footage to either increase my hype levels to frustrating levels, or leave me despairing at having to rewatch a sizeable chunk of the movie again when it’s released in whole. I remain cautiously optimistic about Guardians, but the film I did want to run home and watch right away was Slither, the 2006 horror-comedy director James Gunn made before getting the Marvel gig.

Though I only caught up with it recently, I loooooove Slither, so much so that it’s one of the few films I’ve ever finished, then immediately hit the play button on again as soon as it ended. It was such a shockingly successful blend of tone and style that it became the main reason for me to be excited for Guardians of the Galaxy in the first place, seeing as it’s a comic property that would require a deft touch to translate to film. In light of the Ant-Man debacle, the fear is that Marvel and Disney are sanding off all the rough, weird edges of their movies in the name of keeping a homogenous house style, and without rough weirdness, there’s no point in making a Guardians of the Galaxy adaptation at all.

Anywho, that’s a really winding way of leading up to saying that, last night, with literally hundreds of movies and TV shows available for my viewing pleasures, I decide to watch Disney’s 1991 box office failure, The Rocketeer. The throughline of thinking here is that The Rocketeer was directed by Joe Johnston, who went on to make Captain America: The First Avenger more than a decade-and-a-half later for the very same house of mouse. And, at least for, the gamble on my evening paid off. The Rocketeer has become something of a hidden gem among those who remember the then-ambitious adaptation of the ‘80s graphic novel, a throwback to ‘50s adventure serials with the heart of a superhero story. Watching The Rocketeer, it becomes a completely obvious why Marvel wanted Johnston for Captain America, but it offers plenty to those uninterested in the genealogy of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Rocketeer’s got Timothy Dalton playing a Nazi-collaborating Errol Flynn insert, Paul Sorvino in full old timey gangster mode, and even Margo Martindale as a pan-wielding, no-nonsense waitress; how was this movie not a massive hit?

Well, that’s not that hard to figure out, even excluding that its box office competition at the time was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and City Slickers. The Rocketeer seems a clear attempt to recapture the ‘40s nostalgia at play when Raiders of the Lost Ark made memories of The Greatest Generation into high-flying adventures, but The Rocketeer forgot to steal Indie’s bad boy charisma. That’s not to say star Billy Campbell is wrong for the starring role, quite the opposite; his boyish good looks and non-threatening charm are exactly what the character requires. The problem is that, this being a film from Disney, The Rocketeer is utterly earnest and without cynicism, which even for audiences in 1991, would seem a little hard to swallow.

Ironically, Disney has since gone on to buy Marvel, whose Iron Man and Captain America adaptations owe a lot to The Rocketeer, while Disney’s own attempts at throwbacks these days are a treacley mush. They got it right the first time in ‘91, as The Rocketeer holds up very well for any viewer interested in theatrical superheroics that’s also tired of the bloat swallowing the genre whole these days.   

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They Came Together

There’s been a lot of mixed word on this recently released rom-com parody starring roughly half of TVs best comic actors (and Paul Rudd). It’s been popping up on a number of mid-year lists under the conflicting banners of “Best Surprise” and “Biggest Disappointment,” due largely, I imagine, to the potential of the cast, and for being directed by David Wain. The film’s supporters are often those who share an open affection for Wain’s sketch-based style of directing, so the fact that I haven’t seen Wet Hot American Summer, and mostly like his work with more traditional comedies like Role Models and Wanderlust, meant I was largely unsure as to which camp I would fall in.

I can definitely see a strong case for both sides, as while it can be rip-roaringly funny, They Came Together makes its primary target a horse that’s already been thoroughly beaten. The romantic comedy has turned into a wheezing shell of a genre over the last couple decades, and it’s not like its tropes and foibles weren’t incredibly obvious back when the movies they were in were still good. Rudd and Amy Poehler star as a couple recounting their relationship history, introducing it by directly relating it in terms of romantic comedies. They Came Together is looking down on the films it’s lampooning from the first, but considering how cliché making fun of the rom-com genre’s clichés has become, the film can sometimes seem like it’s overly satisfied with how it skewers such low-hanging fruit.    

Self-aware dialogue that explicitly states the beat in the script being shown isn’t really a parody when all you’re doing is foregrounding the subtext the audience is usually aware of when played earnestly in a legitimate rom-com. When going down the parody well, They Came Together is much, much funnier when picking out the smaller recurring elements of the genre, like an overabundance of holiday-themed parties, and the ridiculous financial irresponsibility of those eccentric businesses the female love interest usually works at. Maybe the funniest gag is one that sneaks up so quietly, you might not notice until the third instance, as at least a half-dozen scenes end with a character dramatically saying “shit!” after missing an opportunity to say something.

The limper material is always held aloft by Poehler, Rudd, and too many terrific ringers to count (can someone please give Jason Mantzoukas or Michaela Watkins a feature already?), but the film’s absurdist streak that makes it more familiar of something like, say, Airplane!, instead of an extended Funny-or-Die video, is where the best material is. There’s a Rake Gag that never has to cycle from being funny, to unfunny, to funny again, because each iteration made me laugh harder than the last. And when the movie does set-up a trope that’s well worn even by other parodists, like a dress-up montage, or a snooty waiter, the punchline is often over-the-top enough to take you by surprise. They Came Together may be divisive, but it’s so jam-packed with jokes that it has the makings of a cult classic for those who love it the first time, and may eventually wear down dissenters over the long term.    

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Shovel Knight

Vidya-games! One in particular really: Shovel Knight! Excuse me while I use every excuse to write out Shovel Knight, just so I can hear it again in my head. I mean, just say it. Shoooooovel Knight. It’s, like, “cellar door,” but for videogame titles.

Shovel Knight.

Anyway, Shovel Knight is a retro-throwback game on 3DS that’s been making a lot of waves recently, mainly because calling it both retro and a throwback is warranted. Plenty of titles over the last decade have tried to emulate the experience of playing an original NES game simply by imitating the look (thanks in part to an increasingly loose definition of “8-bit graphics”), but it’s the gameplay that matters most, which Shovel Knight absolutely nails, thus earning the title of legitimate throwback.

A frothy mix of Castlevania and Megaman, with just a little Super Mario that snuck in while no one was looking, Shovel Knight is a 2D adventure platformer that tasks the player with guiding the eponymous gallant gardener with traversing a dozen-or-so levels filled with traps, spikes, pitfalls and enemies, all leading up to boss encounters with knights of similarly over-specific categorization. Personally, Polar Knight was my favorite of the motely villains making up the Order of No Quarter (again, great name), seeing as he’s an oversized Viking that wields a snow shovel.

In true NES fashion, the controls are pixel perfect: wherever you want Shovel Knight to go, he can, provided you have dexterous enough thumbs to input the controls correctly. Shovel Knight is never a cheat when it comes to difficulty, which is perhaps where it helpfully adds a little modernization to the nostalgic love-fest. Checkpoints are frequent enough to make stages challenging but not maddening, and the game’s death penalty is forgiving enough to make failure something you want to avoid as a matter of pride, not lost progress.

The soundtrack is absolutely terrific, and the old school palette and pixels are just the outer coat of some really gorgeous presentation. Many of the boss characters move with exaggerated animations, and the town’s people scattered about your adventures are a lively assortment of oddballs. Most memorable of the bunch is The Troupple King, an excessively large figure of piscine royalty that’s half apple, half trout, all Troupple. He even dances.  

Shovel Knight’s personality is often its strongest asset, eschewing elbow-in-ribs references to other games or bottom-feeding internet humor for a world crafted with honest to god inspiration. Even in the game’s archaic premise of trying to save the damsel, Shovel Knight finds ways to remix the formula that preserves the classic feel of a NES game, while smartly updating the design for modern standards. It took less than 6 hours to shovel my way to victory, but at a $15 asking price, this is a no-brainer.

 

 

Shovel Knight!

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes

With a screening for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes just around the corner, a revisit of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rupert Wyatt’s unexpectedly successful prequel/reboot, was necessary. I missed it in theaters, but after viewing it on home release was just as surprised as everyone else to learn that the Apes series was not only still relevant in 2011 (especially in the shadow of the execrable remake from 2001), but that it had such wide box office appeal.

A rewatch hasn’t done much to change my opinion on Rise, though that means maybe it deserves even more credit for the often-seamless motion-capture technology bringing the ape characters to life. The naturalism to Andy Serkis’ performance as Caesar is the keystone for the film’s success both emotionally and financially: for better or worse, audiences are much more sympathetic towards on-screen animals than they often are to most humans, even when the humans aren’t written as so in need of a comeuppance as the ones in Rise are (there’s an audacious misanthropy to having your closing credits showcase most of the world’s human population being wiped out by a virus).  

Wyatt could have easily capitalized on this alone to make the film a self-loathing Nature’s Revenge film, a la Godzilla, wherein we kinda get off on the (safely theoretical) premise of humanity’s destruction of earth being forcibly balanced by other inhabitants of the planet There is, of course, an element of that here, but the script and Serkis’ performance make Caesar a captivating and tragic figure all on his own. The brilliant prison-break structure of the film’s mid-section transitions the character from pitiful Andy Dufresne to a charismatic Spartacus, and the 20-minute climax on the Golden Gate Bridge is refreshingly focused for a blockbuster finale; no ticking time bombs, no secondary squad of characters trying to achieve another goal, just a good, clean mad-dash to freedom.

The second viewing did further reveal the ironic contrast between the heightened intelligence of the apes, and how generally dumb Rise is as a film. It treats scientists like magicians with trendier set designers (making occasional overtures towards a theme of “look at man’s hubris!” incredibly grating), which is pretty much par for the course, but even cursory analysis of the plotting on a scientific, geographic, or temporal level reveals a story riddled with inconsistency. It doesn’t really matter though; Apes is a ridiculous premise, but it explores emotional truths about people and our world in ways that all good science fiction should.

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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Yesterday went from Eva Green Withdrawal Day to Manly Men on Boats Day faster than you can say “300-Rise-of-an-Empire-Master-and-Commander-The-Far-Side-of-the-World-double-feature.” I’ll get into more detail about my thoughts on the former in a blog post, but catching up with M&C:TFSotW (God, even the acronym is unwieldy) has made it clear why the 2003 tale of seafaring derring-do maintains a healthy reputation among the seemingly few who actually remember it (a certain, more pirate-focused vehicle from Disney that released a few months before it sucked up most of the oxygen and attention of nautically-inclined audiences).  

Macstander: Side World is a movie for dudes. That’s not to say women can’t or shouldn’t enjoy it, it’s just that like, say, The Shawshank Redemption, it’s a film of only men, living in world of only men. Instead of a prison, Master Mander is set on an English man-of-war pursuing the hated French at the dawn of the 19th century. With a crew of 119 men aged from pre-pubescence to retirement, led by Captain Jack “Lucky” Aubrey, the manliest man of them all (played by Russell Crowe, of course), the film constructs a makeshift and entirely masculine society bound by close-quarters, and confined there over long periods of time.

As a historical epic, it’s really engaging to watch, giving a time-traveler’s tour guide of naval technology, culture, and organization. More specifically though, Commander World is an extremely effective exercise in Bro-manticism: it’s got massive ship-to-ship combat and gunplay for the action-hounds; it’s got the wide-eyed wonder of exploration that any kid with a backyard has ever felt; it’s dramatically rich in themes and speeches about duty and brotherhood; and, most importantly, it’s got Crowe’s Aubrey, a character who’s all men to all men. He can be stoic and badass, or boorish and bro-y depending on the scene, a man who both inspires the younger men under his command, and is himself humbled by the greatest man he ever knew, Admiral Nelson. Whereas most big budget films try to cover four quadrants, director Peter Weird seems to have gone out of his way to make sure male viewers from any decade will have something or someone to latch onto here.

And it totally works. Gary Larson’s: The Far Side casts such a wide net of male-interests within its microcosmic narrative that you can’t help but get swept up in the excitement. My particular point of weakness was Paul Bettany as the crew’s doctor and aspiring naturalist, because, hey, one doesn’t spend four years getting a Biology degree because that think nature is boring. Bettany’s character is meant to provide an occasional critique of the brotherly love the film otherwise embraces wholeheartedly, and it’s necessary. Without, it’d be easy to write the film off as pure man-pandering. Even if it were though, it’d be damn hard-to-resist man-pandering.

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Penny Dreadful Season 1

Pilot

The good buzz I’ve heard on Showtime’s latest seems to be warranted, at least through the first hour. Figures that a few clicks over you’ll find me saying there’s nothing quite like Hannibal on TV, and then what should appear but a cable series that shares a lot of its basic DNA: both are a reimagining of a well-known macabre property that oozes mood and viscera, but one that can fit just fine within the trappings of a procedural.

The adaptor in this case would be John Logan of Skyfall fame, and the overlap here makes sense beyond just the inclusion of a former Bond and Bond girl (and, I’m pretty sure, use of J. M. W. paintings). Logan’s Skyfall was about cracking open the pulpy but ironclad outer shell of a cultural icon to see what made him tick. The movie could only go so far within the timeframe of 2 hours with a character as controlled as Bond, but Penny Dreadful is already showing immense promise in terms of how it might take characters of Victorian literature, and make them into television versions of real people.

The pilot is really a lot of fun, in part because it hues strongly to the conventions of a team-up serial, the kind that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did well when using these characters in comic form, only to be butchered in movie form with a different Bond at the helm. It established roles for the all the characters as part of a potential working group, and it’s easy to see how the show could make for a modern (read: bloody, scary, naked-y and swear-y) take on Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s monster of the week format.

But the pilot works just as much for how it subverts your expectations, in particular with the characters. The darkness dominating the pilot isn’t just magic and superstition, it’s existential; when two characters are talking around this other world of darkness they’ve peered into, they’re as much talking about actual supernatural evil as they are the missing piece in their lives that’s pushing them into the frightening unknown willingly. Though it plays coy with the deep dark secrets the leads are being driven by, that they have that drive is really quite impressive. The Josh Hartnett character, a cynical American actor and war vet, could very easily have been the main fish-out-of-water perspective for this gothic setting. The handful of characters who seem likely to make up the core cast all display an obsessive thirst for something by the end of the hour, so I’ll definitely be tuning in for more. 

Episode 2: Séance

“Séance” is a really great bait and hook of a second outing for Penny Dreadful, which is quickly rising on my “God, I hope this is as good as it could be” list. The first half or so is full of the usual kinds of concessions a show will make to get the attention of viewers who didn’t tune into the premiere based solely on the premise, and therefore might need a little more enticing. The opening half abandons the dread of the pilot for a lighter touch, thanks to a new character played by Billie Piper, who says she’s from Ireland, but whose accent travels all across the European continent in a given sentence. I was unfortunately captivated by Piper’s affections so I spent a good long while wrestling with them instead of hearing any of the banter she was trading with Josh Harenet. Later, a sex scene between Piper’s character and the show’s tweenage heartthrob of a Dorian Grey made the episode’s plays to the cheap seats seem even more apparent.

But then the episode has the titular séance, and all bets are off. Before saying anything else, it should be emphasized how much of the show’s strengths and potential are tied to Eva Green’s performance style. She doesn’t so much go for broke and seem completely oblivious to the idea of limits; there’s no vanity to her embodiment of the character, so she’s freed herself to inhabit the role fully, regardless of how out there things might get.

The episode crosses back over into its weird and deliriously fun fringe territory when Green’s character becomes possessed by a spirit, and goes through the usual stages of being a possessee. Contortions, a 2-pack-a-day Clint Eastwood growl, and a desire to taunt those around you is the devil’s playbook as established by every exorcism movie ever, but because we’ve established Vanessa as a character, and she’s being plaid by Green, the scene puts to shame many cinematic attempts at aping The Exorcist.  

Because we’ve started to establish a familiarity with these characters, the trauma brought about by and implied during the exorcism has weight; we’ll carry on the details we think we learn about Sir Malcolm with us going forward, and that gives the scene its emotional heft. What we do piece together about Malcolm’s tragic backstory hints at something very wrong in his relationship with his daughter, and his feelings on his son, and by letting Green tear like a hurricane through the scene, it makes Dalton’s work that much more powerful.

To sidetrack: the episode’s ending revelation is definitely the kind of WTF-#PennyDreadful-GIF-Tumblr bait that the show could have capitalized on if it was airing on a network (and had, oh I don’t know, about 10 million more viewers). It’s a bold move ripe with potential. Perhaps because I thought where the plot was going originally had many interesting avenues available already, that we won’t see them (at least for now) means that the last-second reversal earned its dramatic punch. Good stuff. 

Episode 3: Resurrection

Arguably the biggest reason reboots/reimaginings work is because established fiction has built-in hooks for the audience that an entirely fresh property doesn’t come equipped with. We’re in the jazz-era of TV and film, where the core of western fiction has been so deeply established that all there is to do now is riff on that core using the instrumentation everyone is already familiar with.

To that end, I realize Penny Dreadful isn’t a revolutionary show, or even groundbreaking, but it is rejiggering elements of story and character into combinations I wouldn’t expect, and therefore, I’m feeling the same dopamine kick of surprise that you get when something legitimately original and innovative comes along. Episode three does an impressive job of humanizing Frankenstein’s original monster, who loomed heavily as a threat in the last episode’s nasty cliffhanger. They do it even better than their back-fill on Frankenstein himself this week, seeing as the pathways in my brain stimulated by characters with unresolved mother issues are all-but attenuated at this point.

But creating a literally theatrical villain by giving him a home in the theatre? I’ve got to say, I love that idea. Again, it’s not half so clever a story as my brain thought it was at first brush, but Logan uses the component to unify and give different perspectives on the show’s established themes. Theatre, as the primary non-literary form of entertainment of the era, was where an audience would go to escape their problems. Extrapolate that to its furthest conclusion, and even at a show like Sweeny Todd (which Logan worked on the recent movie adaptation of), the viewer is there so they can forget about death.

And it’s in the theatre that those who have cheated death live on, in the form of characters and playwrights that endure for hundreds of years. Of course, the show’s theme of change also works here too; just as the industrial revolution has replaced so many workers with machines, The Creature’s mentor must lament that the days of Shakespeare have given way to Ibsen. Everyone on this show is looking for something solid to cling to as they grapple with what they are afraid of, and so by hour’s end, The Creature’s pained request for a companion hits like it needs to. It goes to show just how good Penny Dreadful is getting at making us sympathize with the monsters. 

Episode 4: Demimonde

I like Josh Hartnett in this show. As one of the more frequent weak links being pointed out by others I see talking about the show, I think what Hartnett is doing with his character is really engaging. Yes, he looks like he came out of the same genetic tube that spawned Ethan Hawke, just with a lower incubation dose of raw talent, but the show has played into his strengths as a hunky dope really well, in particular because of how it’s handling Ethan Chandler as a character.

There’s a really smart little bit from the pilot where after Chandler pulls a lady from his audience for some rather unfulfilling backstagecoach sex, he goes through the usual theatrics of a guy looking to drop the one-night stand like deadweight. Normally, we’re supposed to be smitten with the cad’s feigned heartbreak, and the gal he’s just pulled one over on is meant to either buy the illusion, or just generally look like a dimwit for expecting something more out of the guy.

But the show flipped that with just a line, as the random women responds to his bullshit toast to the memory of their tryst with a simple question: “won’t you want to know my name at least?” she asks, with a playful sarcasm that indicates she knew going in that more than likely, both were just in this for a quick lay. Giving the woman the last word not only makes her seem like an actual person instead of just a rube bedpost notch to elevate how cool our hero is, but it also lets us get a moment with Chandler to really hammer home that yes, he’s somewhat ashamed of his actions, and all the moreso because they’re not filling the emptiness in him.

With that, I think the show established a baseline awareness of its sexual politics that it’s been following into interesting territory. Everything between Hartnett and Piper’s character was pretty rough tonight, as Mrs. Croft is kinda the worst even without my accent issues. Like episode 2, “Demimonde” really snaps into place when centered around a piece of theatre, here an actual play instead of a séance. Art as an expression of inner anguish has been a big theme for the show thus far, and every one of the main characters is putting on some kind of a performance.

For Chandler, a B-movie play version of his worst fears don’t frighten him, as he’s come to love the theatrics in both his profession and personality. An underground rat-hunting ring contains the same savagery as the play, but doesn’t dress it up. Chandler loses his cool because he needs that layer of fiction that makes up his cowboy persona to armor himself against the world’s nature and his own. I think we could be getting a really neat look at the stock masculine cowboy role Hartnett’s supposed to fill, and the ending for this week gives a strong indication that traditional gender norms aren’t Penny Dreadful’s interest. 

Episode 5: Closer than Sisters

The big challenge shows face when trying to build a cast out of characters who don’t already have a history together is that you have to get around to establishing their individual backstories at some point. Something like Game of Thrones involves so much shared history that you can usually get away with info-dumping using monologues and storytelling, but not every show is so lucky. Usually, the flashback is the way to go, and some programs treat the narrative construct as a key part of their DNA, Lost being one of the more famous examples, and Orange is the New Black being a more current one.

Penny Dreadful’s appeal stems from two specific sources that don’t jibe particularly well with flashbacks: the diverse cast of characters, and the mystery surrounding them that’s thick enough to insulate a house. “Closer Than Sisters” bumps up against both of these constraints in spending the entire our letting us in on the history of its most intriguing character, Vanessa, the problem being that info is often the death of intrigue. On paper (which the entire episode is, given the conceit that we’re finding this all out in the form of a letter), what the hour has going for is that it’s pretty much the Eva Green Show once the moppet versions of Vanessa, Mina and Peter’s youth take a hike (that’s not a slam on the kid actors, who are all quite good. But, come on, the show pretty much pulsates when Green’s on screen).

Great as Green’s performance still is, it’s responsible for elevating some tired material. Infidelity at an English manor makes for a slow buildup to the show’s particular breed of horror, but a trip to the asylum was not my preferred way of getting back into the gothic groove. I can see the appeal Logan might find in the setting, as the torture Vanessa suffers at the hands of her caretakers is more frightening than a thousand red-eyed ghouls, and it is based on the actual mental health care standards of the day, only amplifying the terror. And just speaking personally, psychiatric horror has always been a horror pressure point for me, but what left me more squeamish was the need to fill in Vanessa’s backstory with physical trauma and abuse, which can be a lazy shortcut to audience sympathy. All the dudes on the show are dealing with angsty man-pain and guilt, so surely Vanessa’s angsty woman-pain and guilt were already enough without the ice baths and head-drilling, right?

We’ll see. I’m hoping the show starts pulling its threads together for the last few hours, as it feels like enough of the players have been sufficiently setup that we can start letting them play together again. 

Episode 6: What Death Can Bind

CHICANERY! Much as that really is the vital piece of dialogue from this week’s episode for understanding the theatrical charms of Penny Dreadful, the actual thesis statement comes the scene after. “To be alien? To be disenfranchised from those around you? Is that not a dreadful curse?” As delivered by Eva Green as just the opening volley in a game of theme tennis with Reeve Carney’s Dorian Gray, it’s a little overripe like the entirety of the scene (again, theatrics being the show’s most endearing quality), but it does crystalize the real fear behind Penny Dreadful: being alone.

“What Death Can Join Together” is a nice congealing of the show’s strengths after the last couple episodes split them apart, and the result is probably the most consistent hour of the show since the pilot. Though the hunting party for the action set piece was smaller than usual, with Vanessa off on a date, and Frankenstein brushing up on his vampire lore, the episode connected all the dots marvelously by showing the characters in various stages of relationships, and the differing ways they try to hold onto them.

For Chandler and Croft, a mental picture will have to suffice, as their romance seems terminal. The degree to which they seem to love one another is hard to buy, as not only have I not really liked the Croft character, but we’ve barely gotten to know her, let alone Chandler. Still, the haste of their relationship is perhaps what fuels the passion, which is valid enough reason. As a counterpoint, the longest coupling was presumably between Dr. Van Helsing and his wife, his crystal clear memory of meeting her erased after we find out how they finally parted.

Vanessa and Dorian, class acts that they are, go with paintings and photographs to capture their moment together, which lets the show add on more and more nods to Gray’s literary origin, that at this point it might be a fakeout. The show is keeping the identity of its monsters so close to its vest that the most obvious answers seem to obvious (chicanery?! We’ll find out). It’s The Creature who’s most desperate to have something to hold onto, as he’d rather have a partner who lives forever than risk being left alone again.

It’s an old saw, but the desire to connect is the overriding drive behind all these characters, as it was for many of their literary counterparts. The opening credits, which I’ve grown to really love, offer the best representation of the show’s central interest. The first half is all mood and dread, a drumroll to the horror show you’re meant to expect. But the second tells a different story, and rather than just representing the characters with sinister symbols, we get to see in profile looking as human as they might ever be- distant, but reaching out for something to hold onto (save for Danny Sapani as Sembene, who just looks kinda bored; can’t blame him, as he’s had very little to do so far). They may be monsters, but the contours of a snake can be beautiful when you look closely enough, and even a bat may want to take flight in the sun from time to time. Another two hours as focused as this one, and Penny Dreadful should end its first season in fine fashion. 

Episode 7: Possession 

“Possession” is more or less everything one could really ask for out of Penny Dreadful, and represents the show operating at (what’s currently) its upper limit. It had all the basic ingredients of the series’ appeal at its disposal, and threw them all into the pressure cooker that is Sir Malcolm’s mansion. Cook time: one month. The result is an hour overflowing with atmosphere, shady backstories, and some of the biggest flashes yet of pure horror.

It’s tempting to just call it “The “Exorcist episode,” but the majority of “Possession” is about everything that happens on the way to getting a priest. Rather than focusing on solving Vanessa’s possession as some sort of immediate end goal, Penny Dreadful settles in for the long haul, in the process establishing the perfect excuse to get all its characters under one roof for an extended stretch of time. It’s an inspired structural choice, as many seasons of television take place over a shorter period of time than “Possession” compresses into an hour.

But you feel the length, which is vitally important to understanding the show’s approach to these well-worn character types, and its own themes. While the flood of spiders and the increasing layers of flop sweat on Eva Green (whose continued excellence here would require well more than 10 minutes to sum up, so I won’t even attempt to) represent the show at its most theatrical -and at its most obsessed with theatricality as a means of connection-, the broader themes are what’s being pulled together by Penny Dreadful tonight.

The actual mythology at play reads to me like a big mush of Judeo-Christian devilry with some added occultism for flavor, and that’s all serviceable. Even though the literal devil is threatening the end of the world, the most captivating conversations are happening between the other characters as the days stretch on into weeks, and everyone starts getting exhausted and strung out (that goes double for Frankenstein). As supporting Vanessa takes its toll, the personas and costumes the characters protect themselves with start to fall away, tempting everyone to start speaking as openly and honestly as possible.

Penny Dreadful’s period setting allows Logan to draw on past historical traumas and present them as being part of what these characters hide with their outsized personalities. Just as The Wolfman, Frankenstein’s monster, and Dracula can become blown-up metaphors for national anxiety, the human versions of their alter-egos are shaped by regret and fear on a scale that’s greater than just personal. Over long nights of staring literal evil in the face with Vanessa, the American colonial past of Chandler and the British colonial past of Sir Malcolm come to the foreground with force; these aren’t the defining motivators behind these characters, but their personal identities are unmistakably marked by their national ones.   

It’s such skeletons in everyone’s closet that let the show’s most powerful demons, shame and regret, come out to play. Frankenstein, despite being the smartest guy in the mansion, diagnoses Vanessa like any ignorant doctor might at the time: blame it on suspicions of sexual trauma. In essence, he’s willing to chalk up all the crazy shit he’s just seen to Vanessa having lady parts, which speaks to his ignorance as an individual, and a student of a field still ignorant about many things at the time.

The clever bit is that Logan flips Frankie’s expectations even further a scene later, when Vanessa uses her knowledge of Chandler sleeping with Dorian Grey to try and castrate the swaggering cowboy. Sir Malcolm is a hard man whose experience in Africa is so wrapped up in the death of his son that he doesn’t seem to care how his other actions there affected the continent. He’s a callus, but weak man, a father trying to hold onto his daughter by risking her best friend. Chandler, the American with New Empire idealism, wants to believe he can do better, but his own shame for the things he’s done and seen makes him prey to someone like Dorian Grey, or the devil inside Vanessa wanting to further shame him for showing vulnerability.

On a plot level, there were things about “Possession” that bothered me (I think we needed to spend more time seeing Vanessa’s perspective as she grappled with the demon’s influence, and the seemingly literal deus ex machina was a headscratcher), but the mythology stuff is all just bells and whistles ultimately. Penny Dreadful knows that entertainment can be at its most powerful when going for spectacle, but the real heart of theatre just comes from having one person willing to share something, especially a secret, with another person. 

Episode 8: Grand Guignol

With a finale title like “Grand Guignol,” Penny Dreadful was practically going out of its way to raise my expectations. As I’ve said  before, the show’s real hook isn’t the macabre horror or gothic aesthetic: it’s the love for theatre. Outside of Slings and Arrows, I really can’t recall another program that centers so much of its story and themes on stage performance. It feels wholly fresh for the medium, and totally strange that it would take until 2014 for a show to wed its dramatic theatricality with actual theatre (which almost certainly means I’m just oblivious to shows that have already tried this…but let’s ignore that, shall we?).

“Grand Guignol” sets a pair of major scenes on its theatre stage that constitute Penny Dreadful’s bread and butter: unbearable yearning and ridiculous action. Caliban saying goodbye to his life behind the proscenium, and the investigation team fighting for their lives below it offers emotion and thrills heightened to supernatural levels befitting the supernatural premise. Penny Dreadful doesn’t really do restraint or subtlety, and I love it for that. Its characters start off as somewhat clichéd archetypes with terrible secrets, but this allows the show to work from the outside in, and the first season has done a really great job of building connections and binding ties between its most important elements…

But, not all of the show’s elements. Or, most of them, really. John Logan has a lot of proven experience in film, but his first foray into TV plays more like a comic book than a show, and it’s hard to tell if he needed more episodes to connect the dots, or less to avoid unnecessary padding. The “twist” with Chandler that’s finally revealed in the finale is a lot of fun to watch, but that’s because we knew it was coming, like, six episodes ago. Hell, it was so heavily telegraphed, I would have gone 50/50 on it all being a red herring. The show’s overarching mythology is still a big mess, and everything involving Dorian Grey amounted to pretty much nothing for the finale (though after watching an early episode of The Rockford Files recently, Rory Kinnear showing up does let me get distracted by how much he looks like a young James Woods).

Not-terribly-long story short: the show is kind of a shambles. But it’s my kind of a shambles, largely because it’s a show about understanding beasts of a flawed nature. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Logan is making a meta-commentary with the season’s final question (“Do you want to be normal?”), but right now I’m glad the TV landscape can offer something as self-assured in its strangeness as Penny Dreadful. Count me in for Season 2. 

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22 Jump Street

As 22 Jump Street was wrapping up, I felt like the film had made good on the high praise that’s been heaped on it. The laughs flowed freely throughout, and it’s an action-comedy that actually knows how to shoot its action as more than a joke. Still, apprehension remained: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had done the impossible by making lightning strike in the unlikeliest of bottles twice. In the wake of the grossly disappointing Anchorman 2, this was a minor miracle, but worry remained: a sequel riffing on the fact that it’s a sequel automatically becomes less funny when its success means there will probably be another entry to come.

Then the closing credits happened, inspiring some of the biggest laughs of the entire film, and assuaging my fears. Turns out, yes, Lord and Miller are even more self-aware than the meta-tastic 22 Jump Street lets on, and clearly, they know they’ve wrung this property out for all it’s worth. It’s hard to imagine Sony and MGM not wanting to team Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill up again, given how profitable the Jump Street franchise has been, but the creative duo responsible for its success behind the camera drops the mic and cuts the power by the time 22 Jump Street is all said and done.

More power to ‘em. 22 Jump Street is lively, inventive, and very often hilarious, but its bag of tricks runs dangerously close to empty. As the film frequently points out, this is largely a retread of 21 Jump Street, with the same relationships and beats either repeated, reversed, or given a fresh coat of paint. The omnipresent, slightly cynical self-aware streak of the whole operation is what elevates the material when the original formula makes itself too noticeable, but that’s a well you can only go to once. For as smart as Lord and Miller (and the writers responsible for the original script) are when it comes to knowing how and when to eat their own tail, it’s ultimately a gimmick. But they know that, which is why, for as satisfying (though maybe just a little less so than the first time) as 22 Jump Street may be, PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET’S NOT TEMPT FATE BY DOING ANOTHER ONE. 

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Days of Heaven

Having only seen two other Terrance Malick films, The Thin Red Line (which I rather like), and Tree of Life (which I’m still processing), a family member suggesting their interest in watching this sumptuous ’78 historical drama was all the reason I needed to knock Days of Heaven off my to-see list (beefing up my Malick experience tremendously in the process; gotta love directors with small catalogues).

I was awfully surprised to find that the last feature of Malick’s before a two-decade hiatus was only 90 minutes in length. Perhaps the relatively brief runtime is a product of the film’s two-year editing cycle, as paring things down is often about the only power one feels they have once everything is in the can. The brevity is noticeable: Days of Heaven isn’t composed of scenes so much as it is a loosely connected fever dream recollection of a longer, more methodical costume drama.

I appreciated the sparseness of the film’s storytelling as much as I did the jaw-dropping depth of its prairie vistas (most surprising of all: discovering that the endless rolling hills of farmland happen to be in my childhood backyard of Alberta). As is his wont, Malick boils down characters to almost biblical simplicity, using them as spectators to, or props within the wider emotional canvas of his environment. I can see why critics might find the film’s imagery to be letdown by the start/stop narrative, but there’s an intimacy to the world of Days of Heaven that I can’t say I’ve seen in Malick’s other work.  

One recommendation: don’t watch the film if you’ve been listening to a lot of Comedy Bang! Bang! lately, or else Linda Manz’s narration is going to do nothing but remind you of Bobby Moynihan as the stabby orphan Fourvel all film. 

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The Martian by Andy Weir

I consider being poorly-read to be among my greater character flaws, so you should automatically take anything I have to say about literature with a grain of salt. Well, “literature” might be stretching the definition, seeing as I usually only read biographies and paperback beach novels. We’ll wait until I get through the entire works of Shakespeare, and try to sum that up in 10 minutes before the real depths of my illiteracy show themselves.

That being said, The Martian, the story of one astronaut’s struggle to survive while stranded on Mars, is almost certainly one of the worst written books I have ever read. Now, what’s there to unpack within a sentence that harsh and seemingly vitriolic? Well, it doesn’t mean that the book isn’t enjoyable, because it is: Weir has a really entertaining premise that he explores with great excitement and a propulsive sense of plotting. I also don’t want to imply that his chosen background for approaching the material is invalid: Weir’s career in sciences is obvious with every lovingly explained chemical reaction, description of a tech spec, or moment of stakes-raising number-crunching, and it’s because of his passion for science that long passages spent puzzling out answers for high school math/chemistry/biology/physics questions can be very engaging.

My problem with The Martian is that the specificity of its author’s skillset is made abundantly clear by anything that doesn’t feel like it belongs in a textbook. Compelling characters, interesting dialogue, ambient descriptions -all the things that let you invest in a novel, instead of feel free to immediately dispose of it upon completion- are missing from The Martian. The book’s narrative structure relays events in the past tense, so most of the time you’re just being told what the story was. When Weir does break format, it’s jarring, and clearly signals a necessary perspective shift for dramatic effect. It also usually means dealing with the secondary characters, a rabble of paper-thin cutouts that talk like Internet commenters at the hyper-caffeinated pace of Amy Sherman-Palladino characters. The book is wall-to-wall with the smartest people in the world, so hearing them spew nothing but sarcasm makes NASA sound more alien than anything on Mars.  

Weir’s understanding of the internal workings of advanced space machinery seems sound, but he doesn’t have a blue print to follow when writing his protagonist. Disguising dated pop culture references as a personality, spending months with the book’s hero becomes a patience-testing chore. Sure, we expect astronauts to be hyper-competent to the point of blandness, but at least someone who’s boring won’t make bad Reddit jokes all day. The Martian is essentially the Apollo 13 of space novels, a uniquely premised and fast-moving exercise in problem solving with a smarmy streak that goes from eye roll-worthy to outright irritating about halfway through.  

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