Blade Runner 2049

Alternate Title:  Ryan Gosling's Sad Face

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  A replicant blade runner becomes embroiled in a mystery involving Deckard, Rachel, and what befell them after the events of the first movie.


Things Havoc liked:  Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to a very special edition of the General's Post. Why is it very special? Well, because this film represents a staggering milestone, the 300th review on this little project of mine, a number so astounding that I can scarcely believe it's real. Three hundred times, we have sat down to consider the movies on offer from our local theaters, amidst pain, pleasure, rapturous applause and bilious hate. And so before anything else happens here, before we undertake the review that actually lies before us, I want to take an opportunity to thank each and every one of you who are reading this, whether this is your first review or your 300th, for all of your kind words and support, and even for your angry denunciations of my terrible, terrible opinions. I have no idea what has driven me to make three hundred of these damn things, but I know that without you, I would not have even amassed a single one. So thank you all, from the bottom of my cold, ossified heart, and let us now consider a remake of a film made the year I was born.

I was not looking forward to a remake of Blade Runner, and I expect every one of you can easily figure out why. The trailers for one thing made the movie look like an action movie version of the original, but more importantly, the track record for nostalgia-based remake/sequels to Ridley Scott classics is not at all a good one (consider the double-suck-whamy of Prometheus and Alien Covenant if you don't believe me). Harisson Ford has been phoning in all of his older roles for the last few years, so that gave me no hope, and while I like Ryan Gosling and... respect (?) Dennis Villeneuve, that alone wasn't enough to make me excited about the prospect of them ruining another old classic. Still, I confess to having been at least a bit intrigued by the possibility that they might do Blade Runner justice, and went to see it anyway, and... well whatever else the movie is, it is certainly not the Total Recall/Robocop remake-disaster that I was afraid of. Far, far from it.

Set thirty years (obviously) after the original film, Blade Runner 2049 starts things off in an interesting manner right off the bat by giving us a replicant as a main protagonist. Not the is-he-or-isn't-he speculative replicant question that the first movie spawned (something helped by its fifty-seven different "authoritative" versions), but an honest-to-god, established-as-such-right-from-scene-one replicant in the form of KD6-3.7, an advanced, perfectly obedient replicant played by Ryan Gosling and his ten thousand sad faces. This decision immediately makes the film more interesting, as it totally changes the perspective we have on the universe. KD6-3.7, or K for short, is a Blade Runner, tracking down escaped replicants and 'retiring' them by force. A more advanced model than the rebellious replicants of the previous film, K is exceptionally good at his job, which affords him the opportunity to live independently and carry on a relationship with his holographic AI girlfriend Joi (Cuban actress Ana de Armas), a development which, if nothing else, proves that someone in the writing staff saw 2013's Her. Gosling plays the character the way he generally plays every character, guarded, quiet, and with a face made of sadness, but as always, Gosling has chosen his projects well, and this is a movie that befits such choices. His character rapidly becomes embroiled in mystery and conspiracy, as the remains are discovered of a replicant who seems to have died in childbirth, the implications of which are many and disturbing to the status quo. But Gosling plays the character very cool all along, neither affecting a robotic monotone, nor giving in to the sorts of loud emotions that don't really fit a Blade Runner film.

The rest of the cast does reasonably well. De Armas' AI hologram manages to exceed the rather thin material she's given, portraying an AI trying to understand and push the boundaries of her experience. I joked before about Her, but the movie contains a scene halfway through where Joi hires another replicant to be her physical proxy for an evening, a scene far trippier here than it was in the previous film (something helped by the fact that we're asked to imagine Ryan Gosling in the throes of passion instead of Joaquin Phoenix). The corporate interests, such as they are, are played meanwhile by the dynamic duo of Jared Leto, playing the evil (or at least supremely creepy) corporate overlord/replicant magnate Niander Wallace, while his second in command, a replicant named Luv, is portrayed by Dutch actress Sylvia Hoeks. I'm still deciding if I will ever forgive Leto for his role in Suicide Squad (probably not), but he tones it waaaaay back in this film, still a creepy bastard of course, but one that seems drawn from a genuine place as opposed to random stupidity and artifice. As to Hoeks, she's a discovery, a chilling, lethal, corporate killer-assassin-replicant, the sort of thing we got to see in all the movies Blade Runner inspired, but not in Blade Runner itself, and Hoeks does an excellent job with the material. Cameos from everyone from Dave Bautista to Lennie James also liven the film, but the best thing in the movie is Robin Wright, who has spontaneously started showing up in all of my movies this year, playing K's supervisor, Lt. Joshi. Where Robin Wright has been all these years, I have no idea, but she's perfect in this, as a veteran LAPD officer trying to keep the city from spiraling out of control, one who plainly humanizes the synthetic replicant who reports to her to a point, but only to a point. It's a nuanced performance that makes me regret Wright's absence all the more these last few decades.

Blade Runner was a revolutionary film in many regards, with a style, visual and directorial, all its own, and here, at the very least, the filmmakers have done their level best to ensure the new film matches up with the old. The visuals are dark and sodden, whether storm-lashed cities and coasts or fog/smoke-shrouded ruins in which men scrape a life together from the detritus of the world. As with the previous film, natural items like wood are a premium, and languages blend together in a mishmash of cultural crucibles. Standard cyberpunk fare nowadays, but Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival) thrives in this sort of setting, delivering a slow-paced atmosphere picture, completely belying my concerns that someone or other along the line was going to have the bright idea to turn Blade Runner into an action movie. Several sequences, particularly the modified Voight-Kampf test that K is made to undergo periodically to ensure his conformity, are jarring to the point of bewilderment, as is the intention, and the film overall has a washed-out, drained quality to it despite the voluminous neon and product placement on display. Affer all, a Blade Runner movie is one of the few circumstances where product placement is appropriate. Overall, Villeneuve delivers an aesthetic that perfectly matches the original film, both in style and in pacing, obviating any concerns that this would be nothing more than another crappy remake.

Things Havoc disliked: In fact, so dedicated is Villeneuve to the desire to stray away from a typical Hollywood style of filmmaking that the end result is... kinda boring.

Blade Runner 2049 is not a short film, well over two and a half hours overall, but it's not the length that's the problem, it's the pace, combined with the resolute refusal to let the characters do much more than march about in an emotionless affect. Please don't mistake me, this isn't The Lobster or something, but the original Blade Runner did have action, have a comprehensible plot, have things happening within it, which seems to have been tossed from this movie under the theory that if nothing happens throughout the movie's run-time, nobody can accuse the film of being shallow.

I mean, that's slightly unfair, because things do happen in Blade Runner 2049, but I will be damned if I can piece together why they happen, let alone what they are intended to mean to the characters involved. The plot, such as it is, seems to wander about largely at random, from set-piece to set-piece, and so much time is taken up just luxuriating in the setting and atmosphere, and so little time taken up with anything actually happening, that what the movie starts to feel like is less a meditative examination of the ineffable and transitory nature of human experience, and more like Salvador Dali's vacation slideshow. Part of the problem is the soundtrack, which in the original was composed by the immortal greek album/film composer Vangelis, but which in this movie is undertaken by Hans Zimmer, a composer whose work I used to love, until he achieved such success with the Inception soundtrack that he decided to basically repeat the leitmotifs from that film (BWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!) ad nauseum for every movie he scored thereafter (consider Dunkirk if you want to see the result). As a result, the music, which in the last film was daring and bold and set an artificial, noirish vibe for the entire goings on, is in this case nothing but undifferentiated foghorn noise that symbolizes nothing (to me at least) except the promise of future migraines.

The plot contains multiple cul-de-sacs, concepts and ideas that are brought up largely for the sake of bringing them up and then forgotten about entirely, such as an underground replicant-rights movement whose existence is revealed to us all of a sudden midway through the film with no setup, who acts as a Deus Ex Machina for two minutes, and then who disappears with nary a mention ever again. There is, in fairness, something to be said for this sort of narrative, wherein the movie is about the main character meeting strange and diverse people who have their own agendas unconnected with the overall plot, but that only works when the overall plot itself is comprehensible, and this one just isn't. Early hints that certain characters may be feeling a particular way beneath the surface about their circumstances are abandoned immediately, lest the actors be made to act, as opposed to standing about like drones serving the purposes of the narrative. By the end of the film, I was having tremendous difficulties determining why people were acting the way they were, what their intentions were vis-a-vis one another, or what the hell was going on in general. This descends into even elementary mistakes on the level of continuity editing or idiot balls. Where, for instance, does one character spontaneously obtain what appears to be a missile-armed attack craft during one of the penultimate sequences, and why do the bad guys insist on knocking our protagonist unconscious repeatedly and then leaving him, unharmed, where he has fallen, without even taking the opportunity to deprive him of the vital clues or transportation he will need to continue to oppose their plan? Everything here, to me, points to a film that was entirely driven by the art department and the director's vision, rather than by the writers and the script, and while there are films for which that approach has paid great dividends (the better half of Tarantino's works, for instance), without proper care, the result veers dangerously close to just turning into a self-indulgent mess.

Final thoughts:   I sort of respect Blade Runner 2049 more than I actually like it, respect the achievement in producing it, and in adhering to a vision that is in many ways daring, though not in the same ways that it was back in 1982, respect the sensibility that went into trying to ensure that as a sequel to a nostalgic classic, it had a duty to try not to ruin the memories of the original with Hollywood pap. But all that respect does not really translate into me recommending the film unreservedly. It is a long sit, even for the time it actually takes up, and if your patience for staring at dim visuals while listening to atonal electronic music is limited, there is not going to be a lot here for you. I saw the film with two companions, one of whom quite liked it, and one of whom hated it, and that, I think, is a microcosm of the reaction that this film can expect to engender. It may, on some fictional objective level, be a great film, but here on the temporal plane, as a piece of entertainment, it is unavoidably inadequate on several levels. Whether those levels are minor nitpicks to you, or outright dealbreakers will depend entirely on what purposes you have for film overall. For my part, I'm glad I saw Blade Runner 2049, but it's not a film I have any need to experience again, let alone the nineteen different "authoritative" versions that may well be coming over the next few years.

Oh, and for those wondering why I didn't once mention Harrison Ford's reprisal of his original character in the review above, as either a good thing or a bad one, well it's because it is neither. Harrison Ford is in the movie, playing Harrison Ford. Like so much of the rest of Blade Runner 2049, whether that is a good or a bad thing depends entirely on how desperate you are to see Harrison Ford continue his farewell tour of all of his old classics.

Final Score:  6.5/10

Next Time:  Jackie Chan does Taken... 'kay...

Dunkirk

                                                                                                             
Alternate Title:  We Shall Bore Them on the Beaches...

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  A soldier, a civilian sailor, and a fighter pilot, all participate in the Battle of Dunkirk.

Things Havoc liked:   Christopher Nolan is a bit of a polarizing figure. There are those who regard him as the visionary auteur of modern high-concept classics like Inception, Memento, and the Dark Knight, and believe him to be a genius of tremendous skill and craft. There are also those who regard him as the talentless hack director of incorrigible disasters like Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises, and believe him to be a useless waste of cinema-space, incapable of producing a human element to go with his admittedly-pretty pictures. Strangely enough though, I find that very few people regard Christopher Nolan as I do, a director of considerable talents within a narrow range of filmmaking, whose high-concept balancing acts are not always buttressed by sufficient skill to actually pull them off, but who must, at least in some regard, be admired for the attempt. Perhaps there's no room in people's lives for gradations any longer, but I do like Nolan's work so long as he stays within his comfort zone, and given that Nolan's best films tend towards the clinical (Inception being basically two hours of exposition punctuated with explosions and Edith Piaf), I was interested in seeing what he might do with a classical, lavish war film. The cast is certainly no blemish, comprising reliable British fixtures like Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branaugh, Cillian Murphy, and even Michael Caine, and while I've not seen Nolan attempt a war film, I have seen him attain great success through ensemble casts in an intricate plot before. This seemed right up his alley, all told, and given the year that 2017 has shaped up to be, I was very much looking forward to this one.

Things Havoc disliked: So... let's get a few things straight.

I am aware of my reputation, as both a film critic and a historian, for getting a trifle... dogmatic when it comes to "historical" films like The Eagle, or The Flowers of War, or even Dallas Buyer's Club, and of flying off the handle into epochal rants concerning how a bad film has mutilated history, or how the critics of a good one are attempting to do so. With Dunkirk being such a historical film, I can appreciate the expectation that some of my readers have that such a rant, one way or the other, is soon to forthcome, and wish to allay those fears. For while I do have certain quibbles with the history portrayed in Nolan's Dunkirk, they are, for the most part, reasonably minor, and unimportant to the overall question of the film's quality, nor do I intend to stand upon soapboxes and direct fire and thunder at those who have misinterpreted the historical context of the film in making their own criticisms, as I so famously did to Roger Ebert's bafflingly ignorant assertion that Zhang Yimou was in the habit of whitewashing his own films. Cognizant as I am of the fact that most of my audience are not as obsessive about historical questions, I wish to assure readers that I shall not be using this time we have together to rant deliriously about history, real or imagined, within the context of this film.

I shall instead be ranting deliriously about everything else, because Dunkirk fucking SUCKS.

Yes, you heard me correctly, Dunkirk sucks, in fact it sucks with tremendous vigor and velocity, an ugly, tone-deaf, ineptly-produced calamity of a film that stands up to neither logical thought nor emotional judgment. It is all of Christopher Nolan's worst habits rolled into one and combined with new, fresh, entirely unexpected bad habits which he has manifested solely for the purpose of rendering this film an unwatchable, boring mess. The problem here is not that Nolan is an untalented filmmaker, nor that, as a war film, it is highly unconventional (Nolan himself has insisted that it is not a war film, but a "suspense" film). The problem is that whatever you choose to call it, it is one of the most boring movies imaginable, an achievement of some note given that the subject of the film is, theoretically at least, a battle involving hundreds of aircraft, thousands of ships, and hundreds of thousands of men. Except of course that Dunkirk is not about this battle nor the masses of men and machines that fought in it, but about a small handful of characters who do nothing but stare into the middle distance for a minor eternity while the soundtrack attempts to convince you to engage in trepanation by means of your soda straw.

God, where do I even start...

Dunkirk is a film built around three intertwining narratives, that of a soldier attempting to escape France and return to England, an elderly yachtsman called forth to save the British sailors so-trapped, and a fighter pilot engaging in combat over the Channel. All three of these narratives take place on different time-scales, the soldier's ordeal lasts a full week, the sailor's a single dodgy day, and the pilot's an excitement-filled hour. The film interweaves the various threads together in a tangled web, along the lines of better films like Cloud Atlas, but unlike these, the material for each storyline is unevenly applied. The soldiers must escape death some dozen different times, generally through repetitions of the formula "get on boat, boat sinks, get on other boat", something the movie does so many times that it begins to resemble outtakes from Waterworld. The pilots, however, have nothing whatsoever to do for most of the runtime, resulting in entire scenes where a pilot, caught between a dwindling fuel tank and a German bomber attacking a defenseless ship, will resolve their dilemma by looking at the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge, then the bomber, before the movie mercifully cuts away to another storyline for a few minutes. Don't worry though, when we return to the pilot after several days have passed for the rest of the cast, he will be looking at the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge, then the bomber, then the fuel gauge...

Seriously, the above sequence repeats itself five times.

But it's not just the macro-editing of the film that's the problem, it's everything. The score, made by legendary film composer Hans Zimmer, who has worked with Nolan on most of his best films and scored everything from Gladiator to The Lion King, is one of the most incompetent pieces of music I've ever experienced in or out of a theater. Not only is it entirely comprised of the same sort of atonal electro-music that Under the Skin tried to use to make whatever its point was, but it does not vary, either in "intensity" or tone, from the beginning of the film to the end of it. Action scenes, danger scenes, quiet scenes of soldiers staring out to sea, heroic scenes where the cavalry finally arrives, all of them are set to the same formless mass of abstract electronica, with the result that the film has no emotional depth, and scenes that are intended to be scary, claustrophobic, or suspenseful, fall completely flat tonally. Not that they wouldn't even without the score, as the film manages to take the massive scope of the Battle of Dunkirk and turn it into a cross between a Vincent Gallo film and a Calvin Klein ad. Hundreds of thousands of men fought in the Battle of Dunkirk. Thousands of ships and aircraft participated. Yet the entire film comprises perhaps five aircraft, half a dozen ships, and maybe a couple hundred extras at the most. This isn't some stylistic attempt to humanize the battle by restricting the perspective to that of a few men, this is the High School play version of Dunkirk. Tiny knots of huddled men stand dwarfed by the enormous, empty beaches that surround them, all while a couple of officers sit on a pier and wonder out loud if a ship might come for them today, or perhaps tomorrow. Once in a long while, a single German bomber will appear out of a clear, empty sky, and drop a single bomb, whereupon the several dozen men trapped in France will fling themselves to the ground in terror, before rising anew and resuming their long, lonely wait. I knew that I said I wasn't going to complain about the historicity of the events in the film, but if the movie is attempting to convince us that these events are small pieces of a much greater whole, it utterly and completely fails to do so. At one point, one of our heroes traverses the distance between the front lines of the German assault force and the beaches where he will spend the next eight or ten days in less than thirty seconds. I have literally fought paintball matches that took place in larger canvasses than this film conjures up for one of the greatest battles of the 20th century.

I could speak here of the actors, but they truly do get lost in the mess, whether it's people I adore, like Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branaugh, Cillian Murphy, or Mark Rylance, or people I've never seen before, such as the bulk of the faceless, characterless soldiers who stare into the distance in this film in the hopes that someone will remember to give them something to do. Hardy, one of my favorite actors working, spends the entire movie hidden behind an oxygen mask, speaking in monotones and staring at fuel gauges (then bombers, then fuel gauges...), while Branaugh has literally nothing to do except exposit information to the audience about the tremendous scale and epic scope of the raging battle taking place off-screen, which we are expected to take his word on, I suppose. The other soldiers meanwhile, so nondescript that I absolutely lost track of which one was our main character, do nothing except board ships, jump off said ships, sit on the beaches staring at the waves, and act stupidly, such as a sterling moment late in the film where desperate soldiers demand that one of their number jump overboard, so as to lighten a ship's load enough to make it off the beach, heedless of the fact that they are currently standing in four feet of water within the ship's hold, water which outweighs the lot of them by a factor of twenty or so.

And this is a film that critics are calling one of the greatest war movies ever made?!

Final thoughts:   Even by the standards of the disaster that was Interstellar, Dunkirk is a gruesome misfire, a truly awful film that, among other things, manages to do what even Red Tails did not, and render dogfights boring. I am well aware of Nolan's stated intention of making a non-war war film, a movie that was more suspense than action and one relying entirely on practical effects, but whatever his intentions, the resulting film is terrible on every level you measure it by, a bad war film, a bad suspense film, a bad historical film, and a very bad film in general. I am well aware that this review stands in stark contrast to the universal acclaim with which Dunkirk has been greeted, acclaim which utterly mystifies me, even when I try and put on my professional critics' hat and see the movie through the lens of people paid to tell you about how their taste is superior to yours. The film's incredibly short run-time (106 minutes for a film that, despite what Nolan wants to claim, was plainly intended at least in part as a war epic), subdivided into three awkwardly-assembled plot threads of uneven length, does not stop the final product from feeling about nine hours long, and if there's any artistic, or god help us, political point to be made in the decision to make the least warlike war film ever, I have completely failed to discover it, either during the viewing or in my research since. It is, in short, a dismal failure of a movie, certainly one of the worst that the otherwise strong cinema calendar of 2017 has offered us.

I've defended Christopher Nolan many times in conversation and in these reviews, pardoning his flaws as a filmmaker, his weak characters and basic emotions, because of his evident strengths of concept and plot. It was for this reason that I forgave him for the unreserved mess that was Interstellar, and for this reason that I was excited to see what he would do with a war film like Dunkirk. Having now discovered the answer to that mystery, I have to confess that, despite all the love I bear Nolan's Dark Knight series and Inception, I will be taking a very long, hard look at any work he does in the future before deciding that it's worth a gamble, as, no matter how often I go see films, no schedule is generous enough to make tolerating crap like this acceptable.

Dunkirk, in short, should be thrown unceremoniously into the sea.

Final Score:  3.5/10

Next Time:  Let the inevitable ripoffs of John Wick begin!

Mr. Holmes

Alternate Title:  Elementary Filmmaking

One sentence synopsis:     An aged, retired Sherlock Holmes, tries to recall the fading memories of his last case, the one which led him to retire in the first place.


Things Havoc liked:  I'm back, ladies and gentlemen, and I have another movie for those of you who missed my incoherent screams of anguish. It's about Sherlock Holmes futzing with beehives and has an adorable kid sidekick!

Wait! Wait! Stop! It also has Gandalf!!!

Ian McKellan is a treasure, as everybody on the internet already knows, and that is what led me here, to a quiet, simple movie about everyone's favorite constantly re-imagined detective. McKellan plays Sherlock at various ages between 60 and 93, showcasing the world famous detective both when he was still at the height of his abilities and in the fading twilight of his life, exiled by choice to a cottage in southern England where he keeps bees, drives his housekeeper mad, and desperately tries to find some superfood (royal jelly, prickly ash sap) that will restore his failing memory. McKellan is a wonder to watch in largely any role I've ever seen him in, and that remains the case here, as the movie wisely turns down the sociopathic assholery that seems to have become compulsory in Sherlock Holmes adaptations in the last decade or two, and instead simply turns Sherlock into a grumpy old man, whose experience with feats of deductive genius is so extensive that even the degeneration of his long term memory cannot materially harm it. The movie is full of moments where Sherlock "does his thing" (as one of the characters literally puts it), but the results are, as they always should be, impossible to follow until you suddenly realize how obvious it all was to begin with. Yet the film isn't just about sitting back and admiring Sherlock Holmes (as has also become compulsory), but simply using him as a vehicle to examine regrets and memory, thankfully without literally turning into Flowers for Algernon.

Show of hands, how many of you actually got that reference?

The reason the movie does not degenerate into a piece on failure and death (now you get it), is weirdly enough because the filmmaker (Bill Condon, who may one day find forgiveness for Twilight 4 and The Fifth Estate), supplies cantankerous old Sherlock with a kid sidekick, usually the death knell for movies like this, but in this case salvaged by two factors. One is the actual sidekick in question, a clever boy named Roger, played by unknown Milo Parker, son of Holmes' housekeeper, who bitterly resents his own working class background, and clearly sees Holmes as a symbol of a better, more educated, more intellectual life than the one he is almost certainly destined to have. Unlike movies that fell apart because of these sorts of characters (The Water Diviner comes to mind), Parker doesn't play Roger like a cute moppet, and McKellan's Holmes doesn't seem to know what to do with a kid anyway, and therefore simply treats him like he would any other mere mortal, layering contempt on him if he doesn't match Holmes' exalted intellectual standards, and permitting mild surprise whenever he does. It would be condescending if Holmes didn't treat everyone that way, and as Roger is clearly used to being condescended to (as are most children), one gets the sense that he enjoys hanging about with Sherlock Holmes if only for the novel experience of being condescended to by a professional. All analysis aside, the dynamic is simply excellent. Both McKellan and Parker handle their characters beautifully, and the movie even manages to coax a good performance out of Laura Linney, an actress I have never liked, whose last appearance on this project (2013's Hyde Park on Hudson) was not precisely a triumph.

And that's really all there is to Mr. Holmes, a simple, Sunday Afternoon kind of movie, not a mystery thriller nor a Lear-esque Damn-the-Heavens mediation on old age and death, but a quiet piece with good performances by good actors. Nice touches, rather than staggering acts of genius or shocking plot twists, are the stuff of this film, such as the notion that Doctor Watson, under the pen-name of Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote the stories of Sherlock Holmes in a sort of Hearstian semi-biography, something which leads to the admittedly funny idea of Sherlock Holmes going to see the famous Basel Rathbone movie adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, and then grousing endlessly about the inadequacies he is now expected to live by ("I do not wear a deerstalker!"). I liked the mundane, quotidian uses to which the elder Holmes puts his deductive skills, and the way in which the movie lets the audience figure the riddles out before inevitably spelling them out, and the simple, non-histrionic method in which the film allows Sherlock his subtle victories of intellect and deduction before re-framing the film entirely away from his state as the sharpest man in the room. There's a great deal of depth of feeling to Mr. Holmes, but none of it is shoved front and center onto the screen, as Condon clearly trusts that McKellan and his cohorts are strong enough actors to manage without the need to demolish all subtlety.

Things Havoc disliked:  The film is never boring, but it is very slow, and on occasion one may be forgiven, despite a solid script and excellent actors, for wondering just what the point of a given sequence is. So it is with an extended secondary flashback sequence to a trip to postwar Japan, where Sherlock must come face to face with the aftermath of Hiroshima. Though the sequence did provide a welcome opportunity to see Hiroyuki Sanada in a non-crap movie for once (thank you Railway Man), there really isn't much of a point to this entire subplot, as the film makes nothing of the themes of Sherlock being out of place in the modern world that it seems to be aiming at with this idea. Indeed, for the amount of time devoted to this excursion, there really isn't anything to show for it. Sherlock seeks for a plant in Japan to restore his memory. He finds it, tries it, discovers it doesn't work, and moves on. Vague gestures are made towards other thematic components of this plotline being involved in the rest of the film, but nothing definite really ever comes of it, and given the movie's already leisurely pace, slowing things down further with pointless vacation slides was probably not the best idea in the world.

Final thoughts:   Still, not every movie has to be Mad Max, and Mr. Holmes is honestly quite a good one, despite its pace and the occasional diversion into pointless rambling. Maybe I am a bit too forgiving of Ian McKellan (I'm the one guy who liked Apt Pupil), but I'd rather be wrong about spending a couple hours with actors I enjoy, than right about avoiding them. If you're looking for deep, thunderous drama from your British indie pieces, or simply want a spiritual sequel to the eighteen different interpretations of Sherlock Holmes on television in the last five years, then this may not be your cup of tea. But even in a year as overloaded with blockbuster action as this one, there's always time to stop and smell the beehives, if only to deduce by the flight pattern of the worker bees that summer is ending, and it may be time to start trimming the hay.

Or alternately, time to see what the studios decided to drop at the back-end of Blockbuster Season...

Final Score:  7/10

Next Time:  So... what did they decide to drop at the back-end of Blockbuster Season?

Ex Machina

Alternate Title:  PEBKAC

One sentence synopsis:     A young developer at a massive software company is invited by the company's reclusive CEO to participate in a Turing Test of his newly-developed AI robot.


Things Havoc liked:  So that was a pretty intense review last time, wasn't it, guys? What's say we take on something a little more relaxing and low-key? How about a weird, transhumanist sci-fi piece?

It's been a while since I saw a movie like this one, a movie whose intentions are decidedly non-standard and aimed at the existentialists among us, and whose ambition is to ask the Big Burning Questions and find highly debatable answers to them. I tend to be kind of lukewarm on this sort of fare, as it's a difficult balancing act to pull off. Too easily, movies turn into Transcendance or the Matrix sequels, bullshit luddite scare-story crap about how technology will ruin us all and science is evil. And Ex Machina's possession of the dreaded "universal critical acclaim" moniker, the one that has gotten me in so much trouble in the past, did not incline me originally to go and see it when it first came out. But several factors, including strong recommendations from real people whose opinions I trust, and the pedigree of the director, Alex Garland, better known as the screenwriter of 28 Days Later, Dredd, and Sunshine (all three of which are excellent films, even if it took me a year or so to recognize Dredd as one), finally convinced me that this time it was worth taking a shot. With a certain Dinosaur-related movie casting a rain shadow on the horizon, I wasn't exactly spoiled for choice.

After several years in which I didn't hear anything, all of a sudden I seem to be buried in Oscar Isaac. Early this year it was A Most Violent Year, a role entirely divorced from the last turn of his I'd seen in Suckerpunch, and now we find him here, playing Nathan Bateman, a Mark-Zuckerberg-style CEO/genius of a Google-analog search engine giant named Bluebook. Ensconced in his reclusive mountain hideaway (more on that later), he has managed to produce an AI of incredible complexity, incarnated in a somewhat human-looking robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander). He now seeks to test the robot's actual intelligence the only way he knows how, which is to have it undergo a Turing test administered by a randomly-selected employee from Bluebook, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson). This basic concept underscores the entire film, albeit with increasingly strange intercessions from the insecurities and hidden agendas of all three of our protagonists, but serves as a compelling enough thread to hang the movie on. Isaac, whom I've been on record as praising the work of several times before, is just as good here as he was back in January, playing in this case a meat-headed, bro-ey super-techie, the sort of which abounds in Silicon Valley, I assure you. If he's not engaged in drinking himself into a blackout stupor, he's engaged in working out compulsively and being a giant DudeBro, a term which should require no translation if you think about it long enough. In between the slurred babble and the power lifting though, Isaac manages to easily get across the mad genius of the character, who obfuscates everything he's actually intending to do behind layers of comradely artifice, as well as the sociopathy inherent in anyone who would willingly construct a survival bunker in the middle of what appears to be the Yukon and there compulsively build and deconstruct robots by himself. This character would not have worked with a lesser actor behind it, but Isaac makes Bateman feel less like a contrived introvert than the natural consequences of mating a genius mind with an amoral god-complex CEO. Larry Ellison would be right at home with this guy, if he were smart enough.

The other half of the movie is anchored on Vikander's turn as Ava, and it's equally good, a performance that rides the line between an animatronic puppet and a calculating, thinking machine, dipping from one to the next periodically just to give the audience flashes of what might be going on beneath. Literally created to appeal to the guileless Caleb, she appears to know it, and confronts him, immediately, with questions as to whether or not Bateman is a reliable experiment-runner. The repeated question of what will happen to her if she doesn't pass the Turing Test, one which she brings up whenever she seems to feel it is safe to do so, is the occasion for one of the film's trippier (and more disturbing) sequences. By and large though, Vikander manages to portray a robot who, whatever your personal reaction to her might be (the filmmakers/Bateman clearly designed her with the uncanny valley in mind), always seems fully capable of the odd actions she takes, having established the character, initially, as one whose capacities are clearly deeper than anyone, including her is letting on.

As I said before, movies like this like to ask the Big Questions, and then have characters wrestle with them on-screen for the benefit of the audience. There's nothing wrong with this approach, particularly considering that the film sidesteps several elements that usually derail these sorts of movies, bypassing the inevitable "how did you do this" exposition dump with the clever conceit that the genius is sick of giving seminars and just wants to talk to someone. A lot of good metaphysical ground is covered here, with the movie quickly skipping past definitions and into philosophy, including the famous "Mary's Room" knowledge argument concerning qualia and the subjectivity of experience. One of the best sequences in the film in fact is when Bateman explains, not the means by which he created Ava, but the inspiration. The notion of a Search Engine as the model for consciousness and human experience makes a great deal of intrinsic sense when you stop and think about it, and the film posits several interesting suggestions both in the course of the discussions that Bateman and Caleb have, and via the slow revelation of the actual agendas of the characters involved. Consciousness is a difficult problem for philosophers even today, and the film at least acknowledges that this is not going to get any easier once we manage to make robots that are convincingly human. After all, the core problem with the Turing Test is that the best judges we have for evaluating them are humans.

Things Havoc disliked: I like a movie that knows what it's about, and doesn't mess around with frivolities, but there's a difference between a movie that cuts out the fat and a movie that cuts out the meat, and Ex Machina is quite unfortunately the latter case. I know that we're here to think about the philosophy and marvel at the metaphysics of it all, but all along, the grumpy old rational part of my brain kept chiming in with old-man arguments concerning that annoying little plot.

Remember what I said above, about a reclusive billionaire living in the Yukon and building AI-controlled robots? Does any element of that seem... I don't know... weird to you? I mean yes, Bateman's established quite well as a weird guy, but there's weird guys, and there's conceits that just make no sense. Bateman's private sanctuary is so far removed from civilization that it takes two hours in a helicopter just to get from the edges of his private estate to the center of it, which leads to inevitable questions concerning things like supplies. More importantly, he lives with no actual support staff, a servant named Kyoko is quickly revealed to be just another part of the experiment. Elementary precaution would seem to indicate that perhaps creating radical new forms of life is the sort of thing one might wish to do in a circumstance wherein there are faster means than Dogsled to reach you in case something goes terribly wrong. I'm aware that guys like Bateman or the other Silicon Valley demigods are more than capable of producing a God complex big enough to assume that they can personally take care of anything that goes wrong, but we the audience, as objective observers, are asked to accept that Bateman is a mad genius, orchestrating this entire thing for the benefit of his tests. That's hard to do when elementary mistakes that could lead to cataclysmic consequences seem littered about his setup. One of the worse is that he seems completely unable to master the seemingly random breakdowns in the compound's power systems that take place periodically, even though we've established that he is clearly the greatest mechanical and electrical engineer on the face of the planet. So incongruous is this that I, at least, assumed it was a plot point, to be revealed later on as "all part of the plan". Without spoiling too much, the movie seems to intend this to be the actual case, something mind-boggling to me, particularly given that we, the audience, figure out what the causes of these breakdowns are in very short order. I can't tell, at this juncture, if this is intended to be some commentary on the notion that Bateman isn't actually as smart as he thinks he is, or if the filmmakers actually thought that audiences would be kept in total suspense as to who was behind an unexplained phenomenon in a film with three characters, one of whom is incapable of producing that phenomenon, and the other of whom is trying to stop it. Indeed, the answers to this and other plot points were so obvious, that I, at least, out-thought myself in assuming that the film could not possibly be as simplistic as it was pretending to be, right up until it revealed that it was.

There's also the issue of the third of our three main characters, Caleb himself. Domhnall Gleeson is not an actor I know a great deal about, other than the fact that he's the son of the great Brandon Gleeson, whom I love dearly. But based on this performance, I'm not about to extend that love to the son. His character is simply all over the place, a confident, calculating, expert analyst in the sessions with Ava, who degenerates into a bumbling, overawed goofball in other sequences, before more or less going crazy and doing strange things for no reason. It's not entirely Gleeson's fault, mind you, that this all happens. About midway through the movie, the film has him undergo a personality shift so abrupt and involving actions so self-destructive that I was half-suspecting (overthinking again) that we were about to reveal some Blade Runner-esque twist wherein he was a robot all along. Nothing of the sort materializes of course, but it causes the movie to become very confused. You cannot make a film that is about grappling with deep metaphysical concepts like the nature of consciousness and the subjectivity of experience, and then turn around and also shoehorn in a plot about psychological obsession and madness. It's not that the movie gets overloaded, though it does, but that the very nature of a metaphysical argument requires that the participants be of reasonably sound mind for us, as the audience, to gain anything from their discussion. If we layer actual insanity (which appears to be what's happening here) on top of the metaphysics, then how are the conclusions to make any sense to those of us not suffering from total psychotic breaks with reality? Say what you will about the Matrix, they made the effort to make Neo into an everyman, a window whereby the audience could connect with the weird philosophical stuff on display. Without that window, there's no common experience to use as a bridge, which buries the movie's actual intended themes under a tangle of artifice and broken perspective. Artsy filmmakers may love that sort of thing. I don't.

Final thoughts:   Ex Machina is a good film, worth seeing in almost any context, interesting and engaging in its own unique way. It is not, however, a great film. It certainly aspires to greatness, as any good film should, but in its haste to get there, it did not sufficiently tie up the boring mechanics of plot and credulity and character development that are the bases for great films. It is also not the first movie I have seen to do this, as this sort of thing does tend to afflict high-concept sci-fi on the harder end of the spectrum, generally because a young, skillful, "visionary" director felt that this concept for the film was so far beyond the usual Hollywood fare that he needed to bring it to life, and could not be bothered to attend to the more boring parts of storytelling, so eager was he to produce something new. This is not really criticism on my part. New concepts do need to be nurtured and grown with care, often by directors and filmmakers with more enthusiasm and talent than mature judgment. But Ex Machina, for all its virtues, is not as revolutionary as it thinks it is, and certainly not revolutionary enough to excuse basic filmcraft mistakes as wide as these.

All that said, I don't want to leave everyone with the wrong impression here. Flawed though it undoubtedly is, there is something highly engaging about Ex Machina's simplistic structure and broad conceptual themes. They may not be completely revolutionary, but they are rare enough to be worth notice, and a chance to see good actors hashing these issues out is not one to be forsaken lightly. I am, after all, on record as having claimed more than once that a film does not need to be flawless to be a masterpiece, and that indeed, some masterpieces are better for the flaws contained within them. I wouldn't go so far with Ex Machina, necessarily, but it's a unique little film, and one worth checking out if high-concept is at all your thing.

As to Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson? They'll be appearing together once again in another little sci-fi film coming out later on this year. But we'll get to that one in good time...

Final Score:  7/10

Next Time:  Time to go see giant, angry monsters killing people and rampaging across the screen uncontrollably, sending people screaming in every direction in their wake.

No, not the ones you're thinking of...

Nightcrawler

Alternate Title:  Director in the Dark

One sentence synopsis:    A sociopath tries to strike it big as a freelance news cameraman chasing crime and accident stories in nocturnal Los Angeles.


Things Havoc liked: I give up.  I surrender.  My hypocrisy only goes so far.  Jake Gyllenhaal is a good actor.  And I enjoy watching him in movies.  Are you happy now?!

I have a series of actors that I have no use for, and many of them have featured on this little project before.  Vincent D'onofrio.  Jennifer Garner.  Anybody commonly associated with Tyler Perry.  Gyllenhaal was, for many years, a featured player on my list, probably due to his roles as a teenager and young man in such dreck as The Day After Tomorrow, October Sky, Prince of Persia, and Donnie Darko (yeah, I said it!)  But like Joshua Gordon Levitt before him, Gyllenhaal just kept making movies.  Good movies.  Movies like Source Code and Zodiac and End of Watch.  And there's only so many movies I can enjoy by someone before I can't maintain the fiction anymore.  There was a time when Leonardo DiCaprio was that whining little snot from Titanic, after all.

Nightcrawler, a character study by first-time director Dan Gilroy, is a tight, careful film, focused relentlessly on one of the weirder characters I've seen this year.  Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, an strange, socially-stunted sociopath, a man who apes and analyzes the emotional reactions of the people around him more than he shares them.  This is a concept that has been explored before, most notably perhaps in the Showtime series Dexter, save that here the character is not a serial killer but a "nightcrawler", a freelance news cameraman who spends his nights seeking out footage of accidents, crime, or bloodshed to sell to morning news channels, the gorier and "rawer", the better.  This is not an occupation that lends itself well to a balanced emotional state to begin with, and Lou takes to it like a duck to water, starting out with a single camcorder and winding up with a full-fledged production studio, assisted along the way by his absolute lack of fear, a head full of self-empowerment business slogans, and a complete antipathy to social norms that would normally restrain someone from filming the dying or worse.

And that's really all there is to it.  Nightcrawler, like Taxi Driver before it (or this year's Locke) is a movie that is about one subject, and which seeks nothing beyond chronicling his career wherever it goes.  There are, of course, other characters he encounters, most notably Riz Ahmed playing Rick, an out-of-work latino laborer whom Gyllenhaal recruits as a navigator and secondary cameraman, who only slowly grows to realize just who he has begun moonlighting for.  But Gyllenhaal is front and center here, a thin, wiry figure who manages nonetheless to evoke a great deal of presence by the sheer absence of regular social norms that he evidences.  This is not to say that he is awkward, indeed like many real sociopaths, he is charming and witty when the occasion calls for it.  But it is visibly all an act, and when the occasion calls for it, the frankly predatory side of his persona comes bubbling to the fore with impressive facility.  Never does Gyllenhaal go completely wild-eyed maniac, but you can, at most times, see the possibility of it within him, as though at any moment he is engaged in cold calculation as to whether he is liable to get the best results from a smile and a witty remark, or from an act of inhuman violence.  Either one is fine by him.

Things Havoc disliked: Gyllenhaal I have finally come around to, but the same is not true of every actor or actress I dislike, and so we get to Rene Russo, whom I have liked more and more as she has done fewer and fewer things.  About the limit of my tolerance for her was as Freya, wife of Odin, in the Thor movies, a role which required only a few short scenes and nothing more.  As a full-fledged character, Russo isn't terrible, but she is playing a pastiche of a cliche, a news director for a struggling TV station who is willing to do "anything" to get the footage she needs.  Russo does her best to conjure up the required desperation for a role like this, but she comes across like she's reading cue cards, as she flip-flops from a hard-assed news reporter to a vulnerable victim in the schemes of our main protagonist.  She also has the unenviable task of playing stand-in for the author once it comes time to soapbox windily about how ethical the news "used to be", and how things are "so different now" because we live in a fallen age and blah blah blah.  A tertiary character (Mad Men's Kevin Rahm) exists solely to pop up every so often to recite windy dialogue about how Russo has abandoned her conscience and done terrible things.  Fine, I suppose there's something to be said there.  But then the film decides that it's not enough Russo show no ethics, she has to do stupid things for the sake of increasing her own crepulence, including giving up on the chance to be the first to break a huge story so that she can smash more gore into her lineup.  I have no doubt there are news directors who act this way, but most of them don't last long when they start confusing the quest for violence with the quest for money, the latter of which is the real Holy Grail of media.

Final thoughts:   I actually enjoyed Nightcrawler considerably more than I expected to, as the movie, despite a fairly short horizon, manages to generate a sufficiently deranged atmosphere (something Los Angeles is always good at generating) that despite the manifestly evil things Lou is doing, you have a perverse desire to continue watching him do them.  The last 45 minutes or so is an escalating lesson in proper suspense-crafting, not from any of the old standbys of Killer-in-the-house or whatnot, but from Hitchcock's old saw that when a bomb under a table goes off, it is action, and when it does not, it is suspense.  The film's ambitions of being a biting media satire hold it back, particularly when it starts to get preachy about the good-old-days, but as a character study and a vehicle for Gyllenhaal to act creepy and weird, it has very little to speak against it.  And while there's still something about Gyllenhaal that just rubs me the wrong way, it's gotten increasingly hard for me to defend a dislike for an actor that keeps turning in good performance after good performance.

Eventually, it seems, even my ego has its limits.

Final Score:  7/10

Next Week:  The most British man in the world plays the most British man in the world.

The Homesman

Alternate Title:  Bitches Be Crazy

One sentence synopsis:    A single pioneer woman and an old-hand claim jumper must take three catatonic women from Nebraska to Iowa in the early 1850s.


Things Havoc liked:  Like with many movies in this review project, I chose to see this movie because of its cast, a cast that could sunder mountains and leap tall buildings with a single bound. Hilary Swank, Meryl Streep, James Spader, John Lithgow, William Fichtner, Hailee Steinfeld, this is the cast you assemble when it's time to blow me away. And when the movie in question is a western, then casting someone like Tommy Lee Jones as the lead (effectively) is the icing atop the cake. Jones is a national treasure, one of my favorite actors, whom I enjoy watching even in bad movies (I can even stomach Batman Forever), and particularly when it comes to Westerns, one of the grand old men of the art form, worthy of being spoken of in company with Clint Eastwood or James Coburn. In everything from Lonesome Dove to The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Jones has shown himself an almost quintessential western actor, and given that he also co-produced and directed this movie (as he did the aforementioned Three Burials), I was stoked to see this. It also helped that my alternatives were Dumb and Dumber Too or The Interview.

I've been hearing lengthy, wizened recitations on "The Death of the Western" for as long as I've been alive, so if you don't mind, we'll leave the post-modern millenerianism at the door. That said, the Homesman is not a traditional western, being bereft of gunfights, action in general, or, to be perfectly frank, the West. Set in Nebraska of the 1850s, one of the starkest and bleakest landscapes I've ever imagined, the focus here is not on the West as a place of opportunity and adventure, nor even a place of hardship and loss, but a place of almost unfathomable isolation combined with abjectly primitive conditions that lead one to wonder what possible fate could draw people out there. No excited wagon trains of would-be settlers seeking a better life here, this is a cold, miserable place, where people eke out a living while desperately trying to retain their very sanity. Poised on the knife-edge of this struggle is Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), a single woman approaching middle age (a rarity to say the least back then), whose prospects for marriage and simple companionship are dampened by her blunt nature, plain looks (it takes some doing to make Hilary Swank look homely), and the sheer lack of people in Nebraska, particularly single men. I haven't seen Swank in ten years, not since Million Dollar Baby, but she fits right back into the swing of things here, as a somewhat-neurotic frontierswoman who volunteers to help take three completely crazy women back to Iowa, despite the fact that it means leaving her evidently prosperous homestead behind. One gets the very real sense from her, though it is never spelled out, that she isn't doing this out of the kindness of her heart, but because she suspects that if she spends one more minute in Nebraska, she will actually go mad. I've known quite a few people who've gone through that state even today who could sympathize.

Tommy Lee Jones meanwhile, plays George Briggs, though we never discover if this is his real name or not, a claim jumper whom Cuddy encounters while being lynched, and enlists to help her get the three women in question back to civilization where they can be cared for. Given the women's catatonia, and Cuddy's own bag of issues, Jones, in consequence, gets to play the adult in the room most of the time, something he's always been good at. We learn bits and pieces about him from half-mentioned anecdotes and small gestures, and unlike a number of writer/director/actors I could mention (Costner comes to mind), Jones clearly does not intend for him to be a stand-in for Jesus. He drinks, gambles, drunkenly dances and sings to the accompaniment of his own gunfire, to say nothing of his claim jumping in the first place. That said, the movie does not really deal in such concepts as "good" and "bad" guys, having neither villains to defeat nor heroes to follow. It is merely the story of a number of people in a strange place doing a strange thing, and what befalls them as they try to do it.

Things Havoc disliked:  Or rather that's what it would be about if anything actually befell these people.

I occasionally encounter movies like this, films that want to be defined more by what they aren't than by what they are. This isn't always a bad idea, but it does lend itself to issues where a film, desirous of not being a "traditional" thing, forgets to be anything whatsoever. The trailers, cut together as they are to promise a narrative, really represent instead the entire film's narrative pushed together, with the rest of the film being filled with... well nothing really. And given just how much of the cast I have yet to speak of, that's quite a problem.

Let's begin with the crazy women in question, all three of whom are given hints towards an actual backstory, one having lost her children to diptheria, one raped repeatedly by her husband, and the third having gone simply mad enough to kill her own newborn baby. Played by, among other people Miranda Otto (Eowyn), and Grace Gummer (daughter of Meryl Streep), one could imagine all manner of interesting stories being told through the lenses of these women who found life on the frontier utterly intolerable and lost their minds as a result. Instead, the movie treats them like props, leaving them catatonic and mute the entire length of the film, MacGuffins for the main characters to labor over getting to Iowa. No character development whatsoever is afforded to them, which would be fine if the intention of the story were to present a situation wherein change is impossible or some other sort of stylistic choice. But instead it's as though the entire purpose of having these characters was forgotten about, and the film might as well have been about transporting mules.

And it's not just the three mental patients that this happens to. Assembling a cast of actors this talented had to be hard work. The least you could do would be to find something for them to do. Meryl Streep, of all people, who I maintain is the best actor in the world, gets about five minutes of screentime near the end of the movie, where her role is... well damned if I know what her role is. She seems to exist purely to relieve one character of a plot device. James Spader meanwhile turns up halfway through the film as a hotelier in the middle of nowhere, a role so strange that I can only assume that vast chunks of his work was left on the cutting room floor. Halee Steinfeld, who was so good in True Grit (my very first review!) seems to exist solely so that Tommy Lee Jones can buy her a pair of shoes. I realize that a film this stacked is gonna have limited space to go around, but nothing happens in this movie for most of its runtime. Surely with this many actors in this rich a setting with this much potential for psychodrama, SOMETHING could have been come up with?

Or maybe not. Maybe this was the intention all along, to present some kind of super-minimalist western in the vein of a Jim Jarmush film or something. But if that's the case, then the same question applies here that I ask whenever Jim Jarmush himself comes to town: Why? Why was this film made? What story seemed so vital that it needed to be told? Was this supposed to be some kind of mediation on Prairie Madness (yes, it was a thing. Click the link)? If so, why do we get to do nothing with the crazy women beyond checking in on them once in a while to make sure that yep, still crazy! Was it a character study of Swank and Lee's characters? Maybe, but then why do we not actually get to see their characters in more than snippets, and why does so much of the movie consist of them not revealing anything to the audience. The film gets so obsessed by the end with not being any kind of "traditional" western (which is dead, you know) that it winds up not being anything at all. The last forty-five minutes of the film in particular, while they are shot and acted well (as was inevitable given the cast in question), almost literally consists of nothing more than a series of events, unconnected with one another, which happen, and then are over. Nothing is learned. Nothing is done.

Final thoughts:   I cited Jim Jarmush above, because he's made movies like this one before, among them the almost unwatchable Dead Man, which also starred a number of A-list actors in a western setting accomplishing not very much at all. The Homesman is nowhere near as unbearable as Dead Man was, but it is still a fairly boring movie, competently executed, but for purposes I cannot fathom, even a week later. My viewing companion, whose perspective on these things is very different than mine (for which everyone concerned is grateful), informed me that this movie has received a great deal of attention in feminist circles, though why this is the case, neither she nor I could guess. It is a movie about two people taking three catatonic other people across an empty terrain until they no longer have to do so. If that's your cup of tea, then look no further.

As for me? I think I'll stick to Jim Jarmush-like films actually made by Jim Jarmush. If nothing else, his boring movies are usually inventive.

Final Score:  5/10

Next Week:   Either war docs or Iranian vampires.  TUNE IN NEXT TIME TO FIND OUT!!!

Birdman

Alternate Title:  What is this I don't even...

One sentence synopsis:   A washed-up movie star famous for his decades-old role as a superhero tries to adapt a Raymond Carver play to Broadway while dealing with his crazy family and psychic powers.


Things Havoc liked:  Three years of hard-bought experience have taught me to duck whenever a movie shows up that begins receiving universal acclaim. I'm not talking about movies like Lord of the Rings or Avengers, the blockbusters that everyone at least "likes" even if some like more than others. I'm talking about darlings of the indie circuit, the "masterpiece", once-in-a-decade films which seem to come about every four or five months or so, the ones that generate Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes scores that beggar belief, and which would appear to have every single critic in existence foaming at the mouth in praise of. I've seen a good half-dozen movies who fit this category to-date, and without exception, every single one of them was a disappointment, varying in quality from the "decent" (Beasts of the Southern Wild, Boyhood), to the "wretched" (Under the Skin, Dear God... Under the Skin). My policy with these things is to consult reviews only after seeing the movie in question, but inasmuch as it sometimes becomes impossible to avoid the buzz, I tend to get a sinking feeling whenever I realize that the movie I'm about to see was praised by every critic known to exist, as it usually puts a ceiling on my ability to enjoy the movie. You can thus imagine just how thrilled I was to learn, moments before I entered the theater, that this movie was being touted by an entire phalanx of major movie critics, as one of the finest things ever made.

Of course, the rules only apply when one is not dealing with Alejandro González Iñárritu.

You remember Alejandro González Iñárritu is, don't you? I certainly do. He wrote and directed Biutiful, the second film I ever reviewed back in 2011, one which, I assure you, I am in no danger of ever forgetting. Biutiful was a weird, atmospheric, magical-realist film about a low-life criminal dying of cancer, a memorable experience to be sure, as it made my shortlist of "Great movies I never want to see again" (sharing that distinction with Sophie's Choice and Grave of the Fireflies). While I'm not overly proud of my reviews from back then, I stand by my final statement that you should watch that film immediately if you find that there is altogether too much happiness and cheer in your life. The good news here is that Iñárritu, who was also the director of Babel and 21 Grams, decided here to dial back the hopeless fixation on misery (somewhat) in favor of other things. The bad news is that those other things are more or less raving insanity.

Michael Keaton, an actor I jump at the chance to whenever I can, plays... well... his character has a name but it's hard to see it as anything but Michael Keaton, or perhaps Michael Keaton after taking a particularly heavy dose of PCP. Keaton, or rather "Riggan Thompson", once was a movie star with a successful franchise of superhero flicks about a man in a costume who fought crime, but that was decades ago, and in the twilight of his career, he is on Broadway now, desperately trying to produce a play about love and relationships and all the drama that circulates in people's lives, despite the twinned problems that nobody will take him seriously, and that he is positively barking mad. Keaton has always thrived on madness, either implied or outright, as his best performances in things like Jackie Brown, Beetlejuice, or... well... Batman, all make clear. It shouldn't be much of a surprise then that he is absolutely fantastic here, edge-of-sanity crazy at all times, harried by the pressures of his play, his career, the voices quite literally in his head, and his completely unexplained ability to manifest telekinesis (or something) during times of great emotional stress (as though there are any others). Simply making this film, given its obvious parallels to Keaton's own career, was a ballsy move, but he goes all out in it, deconstructing himself and anchoring the film with a performance that feels exactly right, no matter how weird it gets.

And it gets weird. The reason it gets weird is complicated, of course, but part of it at least is that the movie seems to flow between the various characters, from Keaton to others and back again, something which is rendered far more tolerable by the fact that basically everyone else is just as good as Keaton is. Actresses like Emma Stone and Naomi Watts are always good of course (even if I haven't seen Watts in about seven years) the former as Keaton's bedraggled, rehab-shuffling daughter/personal assistant, the latter as a newly-minted Broadway starlet trying not to screw up her big shot. But the surprise is from those actors who are very much not, particularly Edward Norton, whom I've never much liked, and Zach Galifianakis, whom I've never liked. And yet I do here, as Norton is superb at playing a veteran, method-to-a-fault stage actor, who rides the line of being an insufferable prick without actually necessarily being one, while Galifianakis, of all people, is tasked with playing the voice of reason, Keaton's best friend and manager who is running himself ragged just trying to get this insane thing to work. I don't know whose idea it was to make Galifianakis the straight man in this, but to my astonishment it works and works well, as this is easily the best thing I've ever seen him do, and probably close to the best for Norton as well.

Perhaps it's me, or perhaps I'm being overly affected by Guillermo Del Toro, but I've come to associate Mexican directors with a very strange, fantastical style of filmmaking. Iñárritu's own Biutiful had a completely out-of-place magical realism sequence in it after all involving Javier Bardem talking to dead people in the middle of a realistic movie about immigration raids and sweat shop laborers being poisoned to death with carbon monoxide. Here that element takes front and center, not only with more inexplicable fantasy elements (Keaton has, or is at least strongly hinted as having, telekinetic powers enabling him to fly, break things, and even kill people), but with a visual style that attempts to replicate the effect of having the entire movie be a single, unbroken take. It isn't one of course, but the seams between shots are very cleverly hidden, as the camera moves up and down and through the backstages of the theater, into dressing rooms and down dingy corridors, up onto rooftops and down into the street. This might have been distracting if the movie weren't so weird overall, but in this case simply adds to the dizzying effect of everything piling on. The camera twists and turns and drifts from character to character so much that we lose sight of where we actually are at times, as chaos seems to be unfolding all around us. Given this, and the natural pressures of live theater, the overall effect is one of immense tension, as we keep waiting for fresh catastrophes to disturb, yet further, our main character, and his tenuous grasp on reality.

Things Havoc disliked:  Speaking however, of tenuous grasps on reality, this movie eventually gets so overwhelmingly weird that it starts to break apart. The surest sign of this being the duration. At 119 minutes, Birdman is hardly a long film, but boy does it feel like one. Perhaps it's simply a facet of the unrelenting tension in the film, of sitting there for hours on end waiting for shoes to drop, to the point of actual physical exhaustion, but having left the movie, I would have sworn that we had been in there for three hours. I have nothing against long movies, but there comes a point in any film when you are ready for it to end, and a movie that continues on past that point is liable to earn itself some ire, at least from me.

And part of why I felt this way may be that not every character justifies its existence properly. Keaton's ex-wife, played competently enough by Andrea Riseborough, has absolutely no purpose in the film except to stand there and serve as a soundboard for Keaton's escalating levels of craziness, occasionally stirring them up by leveling criticism on his life choices in ways calculated to make him even more crazy. Worse yet is Lindsay Duncan (of HBO's Rome), who plays Tabitha, the New York Times' theater critic, who midway through the film confesses to Keaton that she despises him and all his ilk (movie stars trying to become serious theater actors), showering his career and pretensions with venomous contempt, before informing him that, sight unseen, she intends to write the single most devastating review in the history of theater criticism and destroy his play and life, all from pure spite. In addition to displaying a staggering overestimate of the influence of critics (Spider Man, Turn off the Dark, concluded its four-year Broadway run this past January despite being roundly savaged by every critic alive), this reaction is not merely crazy (which would at least be consistent) but vicious and hateful to the point of monomania. No less than Roger Ebert himself was once thrown out of the Film Critics' guild for reviewing a movie he had not seen all the way through, and the concept that a theater critic would be willing to risk their hard-won reputation doing the same is almost laughable, to say nothing of the fact that a review that outlandishly bad would be almost certain to generate buzz rather than defuse it. The film battles hard to regard this subplot as the straw that breaks the camels' back, leading Keaton to act in wildly crazy ways, secure in the knowledge that his life is ruined anyway, yet the entire notion, to say nothing of the manner in which it is ultimately resolved, cheapens the last third of the movie considerably.

Final thoughts:   What does one do with a movie this insane? Does one throw up one's hands and rate it Q out of 10? Does one flunk it for being an unapproachable mess, or praise it immodestly for being daring and avant-garde? None of these things are really my style, and yet I confess I had a hard time coming to grips with just what I thought about Birdman. I see most films on Tuesdays, and yet, even on the rare occasions when I'm actually on schedule, my reviews are not finished until the following weekend. Part of this is irredeemable procrastination of course, but part of it is the base fact that sometimes you need to let a film settle in your mind before you write the review of it, give it time to percolate and discover what you feel about it in retrospect, not just in the moment. This is what turned Gone Girl from a 7 to a 3.5, and in this case, is what turned this movie from a fairly mediocre score to the one you see below. Ultimately what I remember from this film is not how uncomfortable it made me, but how much I enjoyed seeing Michael Keaton on screen again, how much I was pleased to finally like Zach Galifianakis and Edward Norton, how much Emma Stone lights up the screen and how ageless Naomi Watts seems, despite the interval it has been since last I saw her.

In short, for all of the criticisms I level at these two-hour blocks of would-be entertainment, I enjoy watching movies, all kinds of movies, and I enjoy watching actors I like (and even ones I don't) giving good performances in movies. I enjoy innovation and daring and a bit of unstated zaniness thrown in, and I enjoy watching good directors direct good films with wit and skill and creativity and charm. I enjoy these things all, and when a movie is made sufficiently well to remind me of what it is that I enjoy about watching movies in the first place, then how bad could it really have been?

Final Score:  7/10

Next Week:   Keanu Reeves shoots many people.  Again.