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.    

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…

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. 

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. 

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.  

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.    

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.