Edge of Tomorrow (4/5 Stars)

or: All You Need is Kill!

Roger Ebert once caused an Internet firestorm by declaring that video games can never be art. Boy did he get hell for that. He had a point though and it was that video games because since they had rules, points, objectives, and an outcome that is preordained. Of course, this all denies the massive amount of artistry that generally goes around whatever is the actual game. For instance if you took out the game elements of a superior video game and kept the visual design, the story, and the characters, perhaps what you would be left with was art in the Roger Ebert definition. And what would such art look and feel like? Perhaps like the new Tom Cruise science fiction action flick, “Edge of Tomorrow” is such an example.      

Cinephiles would generally associate the concept of ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ with such great movies time-loop movies like ‘Groundhog Day’ and ‘Source Code,’ but the original manga comic book that this movie is based on, ‘All You Need is Kill!’ is unabashedly a lover of video games and it is possible to argue the movie has more in common with Super Mario than the former. The movie follows the exploits of Cage, played by Tom Cruise, as he is placed in the front lines of an invasion of Europe against an alien foe named the Mimics. Through a freak accident on the day of the invasion, Cage kills an Alpha Mimic and gains the ability to relive each day if and only if he is killed on that day. This is how the Mimics are winning the war in the first place. They can rewind the day of the battle until they learn exactly what the enemy will do. Once they know how the day goes they can plan accordingly the next time they play the game, I mean movie.

This is a video game. You die. You start over. You keep doing it until you get it right. The whole world is at stake. There is a particularly dangerous pitfall to this type of story in that it at some point should get boring if the whole thing just keeps on repeating. This problem is deftly avoided by the director, Doug Liman, the writer Christopher McQuarrie and another great action performance by Tom Cruise. The art in telling this story is knowing what parts to skip. After all, by the story’s logic everything is always the same; so each time Tom relives a day, and the movie suggests that number is in the thousands if not more, we are only shown some of it and most of the time none of it. There is a running joke in the movie where the audience is actually not entirely sure whether Cage has gotten this far into the day or not. Plenty of times you will see a scene for the first time before realizing that Cage has been there one hundred times before and knows exactly what will happen. Other times, he is continually surprised by the day’s developments. The movie keeps the audience out of the know as to what situation it is at most times in the movie and thus retains a sense of suspense as to what will happen further into the movie than one would think is possible.

Another ingredient that helps the movie ride along smoothly is the character of Rita, played by Emily Blunt. Rita’s nickname is “Full Metal Bitch.” She is the army’s best soldier having killed over 100 mimics in her first day of battle. How did she do that? Well, because what happened to Cage, happened to her and she was able to relive the same day over and over again. After Cage goes through the obligatory scenes of trying to explain things to disbelieving army personel it is with a sense of relief that when he gets to Rita, she knows exactly what is going on and sets about training Cage for combat immediately. Nothing really needs to be explained to her, although every day is completely new no matter what. So in plenty of scenes we see things for the first time through her eyes, even though Cage has been there before. In this way, the movie gets away with the former conceit of not needing to show the first time Cage sees something to the audience. In that case, we can follow Rita who knows as much as we do.

This is another great performance by Tom Cruise who, dare I say, is one of the most underappreciated actors of the last decade. It has been almost ten years since Tom Cruise had his Oprah Winfrey “meltdown,” which wasn’t really a meltdown but a crash collision between old media (the interview was 43 minutes long in front of the craziest audience of Tom Cruise fanatics the show could possibly shove together into the same room) and new media (the YouTube clip was about 16 seconds long and completely devoid of context). New media destroyed Tom Cruise’s image in a way that has made it impossible for him to do what made him one of the most admirable movie stars in the 80s and 90s, that is to say take on edgy roles in small ambitious movies like Born on the Fourth of July, Rain Man, Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, Vanilla Sky, etc. But what is extraordinary now is how he is using his image as a hated celebrity to his advantage in his current action hero bent. “Edge of Tomorrow,” is perhaps the best example of this so far. His character is introduced not as a soldier but a marketing spokesman for the army. He sits in TV stations and sells the strategy to the public. He is suave and charming and utterly superficial with that classic/cliché Tom Cruise smile. He is then called to the general’s office and informed that he will be part of the invading wave. Tom Cruise’s reaction is just utter conniving cowardice. This is a man who can go in front of TV cameras and with 100% certainty declare that they will win the battle but is going to do everything he possibly can to get out of actually fighting. If you think Tom Cruise is full of shit, you will enjoy like hell the first half hour of this movie. But that’s just the thing that is so extraordinary about Cruise. He seems to know everyone thinks he is full of shit and so is deliberately taking roles that exploit that image in the best way to tell whatever story he is trying to tell. Cruise is such a strange example of humanity. That this guy, an ardent believer of Scientology, one of the most ludicrous religions ever invented, can also side by side possess a brilliant ability to communicate with an audience is amazing to me. How is that kind of compartamentalization even possible? Anyway, another thing that is generally underappreciated is how well a physical performer Tom Cruise happens to be. This movie is stunt heavy and though I’m sure Cruise did not do all of his stunts, some he obviously done plenty of them and that particular type of skill takes a level of dedication and coordination most actors are simply incapable of. I wouldn’t go so far as to say his performance here deserves an Oscar Nomination like I said of his performance in “Mission Impossible IV: Ghost Protocol,” (a position I still hold to) but it is definitely worth noting. Try spreading the word about how good of an actor he still is because I miss the Tom Cruise that could, between larger blockbuster movies, help smaller stranger movies get made. I like this Tom Cruise too, yes, but I want my old Tom Cruise back as well. What I’m trying to say is I miss my Tom Cruise.

p.s. ‘All You Need is Kill’ is a much better title than ‘Edge of Tomorrow’

X-Men: Days of Future Past (5/5 Stars)

The Great 20^th Century Mythos

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the seventh X-Men film and like nobody has ever said before, the sevent movie finds the series really hitting its stride. It is made special not only because on its own particulars but also because it feeds off the goodwill of several previous good films and because it seems to completely ignore (as if it didn’t even exist) the worst movie in the series, “X-Men: The Last Stand.” I actually wrote a review for X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006. Here is what I wrote then, “This movie, the third installment of the X-Men series, literally killed the franchise. I mean seriously, everyone's dead.”

What an astute observation, Max, because in that movie several very main characters died amongst them Cyclops, Jean Gray, and Professor Xavier. So many died in fact that the next several movies either focused solely on Wolverine while he was not part of the X-Men or took a trip back in time to when everybody was still alive. Now ten years after that fateful movie, Bryan Singer, the original director of the very good first two X-Men films, has presented the audience with a bit of revisionist history. “Days of Future Past,” simply pretends that “The Last Stand” never took place. There is Professor Xavier still alive and breathing as if he wasn’t torn to a million pieces ten years ago. Does anybody care? The answer: a resounding no. “The Last Stand” has faded like the general multitude of inferior movies into the world’s collective amnesia unmourned. This is a hopeful thing. I think we can all think of a couple of movies in our favorite series that were just plain bad and should never have existed in the first place. And now “The Last Stand,” doesn’t. Thank you Bryan Singer.

The Last Stand’s inferiority stemmed from its assembly line of mutants and lack of depth. It had plenty of special effects but had no moral weight. It broke the promise of the X-Men series made when Bryan Singer decided to open the first X-Men movie in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Magneto, as a young child, realizes his powers for the first time at the moment his parents are taken away to the gas chambers. He reaches out to his parents and the metal concentration camp gates between them twist and bend to his budding mutant power of magnetism.  That scene is strong serious stuff and it is also acts a promise that the following movies will be good enough to deserve such drama because if they turn out to not be very good movies it is a dishonor to the memory of the Holocaust.

“Days of Future Past” makes good on that promise. That even though it is a action blockbuster with plenty of special effects and extraordinary mutant powers, it is also a sober metaphor for intolerance whether it be racial, religious, or class. The mutants are beset with persecution by the outside world for their differences. They are viewed as dangerous threats to humanity. Professor Xavier, in a wheelchair like FDR, has a mentality of Martin Luther King Jr. and works pragmatically to heal the divisiveness of the world. Magneto, using terms that parallel Malcolm X, speaks of doing whatever is necessary to achieve protection for mutants even if that means violence with humans. Mutants line up on either side, some attending and teaching at Professor X’s academy and others arming themselves and joining Magneto’s army. Take away all the boyish dazzle of a comic book blockbuster and you have a great 20^th century mythos tackling the most important questions of the last 100 years. How do we live peacefully with people who are different from us?

Of course this is a boyish comic book blockbuster so we also get to have lots of fun as well. There are outlandish spectacles based on mutant powers, big action pieces, and at least one Nixon impersonator. But at its heart ‘X-Men’ is great because it is a series that focuses on character. The mutations work like all great science fiction as an exploration into what regular people would do faced with extraordinary decisions. A person has character and now they are presented with these powers usually upon puberty that expose them to a hostile world. Almost none of the powers are welcomed. In the first movie, Rogue realized her mutant power of power absorption by almost killing her boyfriend with a kiss. Wolverine’s power of regeneration basically makes him immortal, not necessarily a good thing.

Because the characters are so strong and the movie is so big, we are treated to some of the best actors in the world all in the same movie. The movie covers two time periods. One in the future where a Sentinel army with mutant powers are covering the world in epic darkness and one in the past (1973) when the events that brought on the bleak future come to pass. This actually brings together the cast from the first two X-Men movies and the last X-Men movie that took place in 1963. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, giants of great dramatic parts, are the elderly Professor X and Magneto now facing extinction and united in remorse of past choices. With the help of Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) they send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) to the past to stop an assination. It has to be Wolverine because he is the only one that could survive such a trip. His mission is to pull together the young Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) at a time when could not have been further apart to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating a scientist named Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) whose work would lead to the Sentinels.

Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, and Peter Dinklage are some of the most interesting actors to watch on screen for the past five years. They exude screen presence, i.e. the ability to draw your eyes to their part of the screen by simply being there. Mystique larger role in the story comes from perhaps the rising star of Jennifer Lawrence in general who has become in recent years the largest female star in Hollywood not only by being annually nominated for Oscars (winning one) but also by being a box office heavyweight with the “Hunger Games” series. Perhaps no actress since Sigourney Weaver in the 1980s had this kind of streak and I’m pretty sure it is okay to say Jennifer Lawrence has eclipsed even that example. Unlike many other actresses that have their day and fade away, J-Rentz has a dangerous edge to her. In fact, I don’t remember the last time she played someone who wasn’t desperate or veering off in some wild direction. Like Meryl Streep, she seems to have monopolized most of the great roles in her age group and some outside of it. Her normal state is a skin of blue scales, cat eyes, and wild red hair. Her mutant power is her ability to transform into the likeness of anyone she sees. This makes her perfect for anarchy and at heart Mystique is an anarchist.  

One last thing needs to be about Peter Dinklage but not necessarily about him. Peter Dinklage is a little person but is in this movie playing a character that was not a little person in the comic books. That is to say, the part did not call for a little person to play it but Peter Dinklage got the part anyway. Moreover, upon the presence of the Peter Dinklage in the movie there is not the ubiquitous quip or joke or surprised reaction of another character that generally coincides with the presence of a little person in a movie. Peter Dinklage is simply in this movie as this character, period. As far as I know, that is the first time it has ever happened in a movie before. I remember watching the DVD commentary of the “Manchurian Candidate.” The director, John Frankenheimer, was especially proud of this army psychiatrist that was not written as a black person, but for which he decided to cast a black person in the role anyway. Nobody in the movie pays any attention to the man’s race. Frankenheimer said he was proud because never in a Hollywood movie had a black person been cast in a role that wasn’t specifically black. I think Bryan Singer can be proud of casting Peter Dinklage and yes it fits perfectly into the X-Men mythos of tolerance for those of us who are different. 

Night Moves (3/5 Stars)

I would have a hard time explaining why I go to Kelly Reichartdt movies. There is a reason you can only see them in New York City (a few select others) and then maybe only in one theater. They are tiny movies. The pace is slow. The plot bare-boned. The direction is simplistic. This may remind you of other low budget auteurs. Perhaps the dudes in the French Wave, or Ingrid Bergman, or an early David Lynch film. But I hate those other guys. Why did I pay a ticket to see Kelly Reichardt?

I think it might be because Kelly Reichardt lacks pretension. There is very little that is abstract about her movies. Her movies are small not because they are metaphors about larger things. They are small because the subjects are small and Kelly is interested in small things and that’s it. Her best movie, Wendy and Lucy, is about a woman and a dog that takes place over a couple of days as her car breaks down and she tries to get it fixed. The remarkable thing about it is the combination of how specific it is about its subject combined with how little it seems the movie wants you to feel a specific emotion toward the subject. Kelly Reichardt seems to be a competent enough director to make bigger movies that have more to say but her scope stays restrained and her purpose ambiguous to the point where her art achieves a sort of rarefied quality to it. These are serious dramas, sometimes about life and death issues, but they are handled in the complete opposite of a heavy-handed manner.  I always feel especially comfortable watching a Kelly Reichardt film.

“Night Moves,” concerns the simple plans of three environmental terrorists in Oregon, played by Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard. Jesse and Dakota live on separate organic farms. Peter is a contact Jesse has that used to be a marine and lives in the woods. He can make a bomb that will blow up a little dam. It won’t really matter because there are 10 other dams on the river but it seems to them that something must be done and blowing up this little dam may just get people talking about I don’t know taking down the others. The movie concerns itself the most with Jesse Eisenberg who probably at the beginning thinks he is in charge of this operation. But little by little his idea of being in charge becomes more and more marginalized to the point he seems to be acting randomly by the end. And maybe the point is that this would be world changer was just acting randomly the entire time, lashing out more in chaotic frustration as opposed to purposeful planning. I don’t know. Kelly refuses to lecture me. I won’t give away what exactly happens other than to say that true to form Kelly has the bomb explode offscreen midway through and throws a rather unexpected wrench into the ending.

Jesse Eisenberg’s performance is at once granularly specific and mostly opaque. It’s not that he doesn’t have feelings and thoughts. He just has nobody to speak about them with. More ambiguous is the characters of Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard. Their most dramatic moments are kept offscreen for the benefit of profoundly confusing Jesse’s idea of what was his life’s narrative. At one point he stands in the woods staring at his trembling hands. Boy, wouldn’t you like to know what he is thinking.

What was it all about? Is this really how these terrible things happen? 

CHEF (5/5 Stars)

“I get to touch people’s lives with what I do and I love it and I want to share this with you.”

- El Jefe

The science of cooking has to do with the recipe: ingredients, measurements, and timing. The art of cooking has to do with feeding people: presentation, atmosphere, and love. Cooking is the most accessible form of art. Books, movies, and music can nourish the soul but one can live without it. You need to eat. Thus, every meal is an opportunity.

I loved this movie like I love good food. It is a representation of all the good things in life. The story is about Karl Kasper, a chef in a creative rut. He runs a kitchen that has not changed its menu in five years. The owner, played by Dustin Hoffman, insists against innovation. They have had no complaints and are doing well financially. If you went and saw the Rolling Stones he asks, wouldn’t you be mad if they didn’t play “Satisfaction.” Play the hits he recommends. Karl is dejected by this situation. He explains his frustrations in a way that should be instantly accessible to anyone who does art for a living. “Ahi Tuna is a huge crowd pleaser. You put Ahi Tuna on a menu and it will sell out. We all know this. But there are chefs that cook food that they believe in and that people will try because they are open to a new experience and they will end up liking it.” That sentence is a great explanation for this movie. The writer/director/star is Jon Favreau who started out in Hollywood as a writer/actor mostly known for Swingers but then became the big time blockbuster director of such hits as Elf, Iron Man, and Iron Man 2. The man can cook his Ahi Tuna. But this movie, his first writing credit in ten years, is a smaller more personal film that not so many people will see but should be a treat for anyone open to a new experience and I bet they will really like it.

First of all, Jon Favreau did a perfect job of casting by casting himself as Karl Kasper. I can’t think a better actor in this role. Favreau is my ideal notion of what a chef should look like. He’s a big guy but not too out of shape, you know the type of guy who obviously loves food but doesn’t eat terrible junk all day. And it may just be his inner director coming out, but he carries gravitas around him in the way he speaks and acts. At the same time he’s got the focus of a great artist. Just look at that guy make that grilled cheese sandwich for his son. It’s the most important thing in the world to him at that moment. 

You can also see Favreau’s connection to the bigger blockbuster world in the very efficient way the movie is edited and the also in the special effects, which do a very good job of representing the digital cloud of social networking. To be specific, there is a lot of Twitter in this movie and the effects that Favreau uses to portray are perfect. They do what they are supposed to do and nothing else. Something that doesn’t work so well because it is distracting is his Hollywood hookup that allows him to cast huge movie stars in tiny cameo roles. But notice what I just did there. I just said that Robert Downey Jr.’s cameo in this movie was the worst thing because it was distracting. Do I love this movie or what?

Things come to a breaking point with Karl Kasper at his restaurant when a prominent food critic, played by the distinguished and portly Oliver Platt, completely takes apart Karl’s lazy cooking. And here is where Karl earns super great artist points with me. He cares what the food critic says. He cares in general about what his work means to be people. Forced to cook for the critic the same menu by the owner of the restaurant, Kasper quits instead. And while witnessing the acidic live tweeting of the menu cooked by his Soux Chef, he decides to walk into the restaurant he just walked out of and lays down the ultimate criticism of criticism an artist has a right to. The subject is a Chocolate Lava Cake. The critic decries that Kasper didn’t even have the courage to undercook it. Kasper angrily explains that a Chocolate Lava Cake is not undercooked, it is cooked in such a way so the middle is molten, like Lava you Dick! What is Karl saying here? The critic does not know what he is talking about. He doesn’t even know how the art is made. You have no right to criticize what I’m doing if you don’t know how it is supposed to be done. Substitute ‘Chocolate Lava Cake’ for ‘movie’ for ‘painting’ for ‘song’ for ‘architecture’ for anything really.

At the bottom, Karl’s ex-wife, played by Sofia Vergara, hires him as a nanny for their son on her next trip to Miami. In a bistro in Little Havana that serves Cuban sandwiches the real reason for the trip becomes apparent. Sofia wants Karl to open a food truck. He gets to be his own boss. He gets to be creative. (She gets a great food truck for her event planning business.) And at this point the movie makes a pivot. Karl’s son, played by Emjay Anthony, goes along for the ride. The movie becomes not only a great movie about being a great artist but also being a great father. Karl puts his son to work in his food truck. The first thing have to do is clean the truck; the lesson being learned obviously is that doing things the correct way takes work. Love takes work. It takes standards. And it’s worth it. The best moment of the movie is when Karl’s son is about to serve a Cuban sandwich that has been burned. The kid’s reasoning is that the person who will be getting the sandwich is not paying for it. Karl takes him outside the truck and has this dialogue.

“Slow down for a second. Is this boring to you?”

“No, I like it.”

“Yeah well I love it. Everything that’s good that has happened to me in my life came because of that. I might not do everything great in my life. Okay I’m not perfect. I’m not the best husband and I’m sorry if I wasn’t the best father. But I’m good at this. And I want to share this with you. I want to teach you what I learned. I get to touch people’s lives with what I do. And it keeps me going and I love it. And I think if you give it a shot you might love it too.

“Yes, chef.”

“Now, should we have served that sandwich?”

“No, chef.”

“That’s my son. Get back in there. We got hungry people. He’s ready to cook!”

Giving kids work is important for discipline but great parenting involves teaching kids why the work they are doing is worth doing at all and to do that you have to treat your kids as if they were intelligent human beings. You have to trust them with unflinching information about the world. Traditionally, so much of parenting is merely locking your kids in a tower and hoping sensory deprivation will bide the time till they are past the age of impulsive behavior. That won’t work in the 21^st century. Kids will find out anything and everything anyway so it is up to parents to actually do work now and affirmatively teach kids correct things not merely shelter them from bad ones. Hopefully they will figure those things out before they have kids. Most don’t. In “Chef” the son is not treated like a child. The reasoning as Jon Leguizamo, our chef’s soux chef, points out, “You’re kitchen staff. Kitchen staff doesn’t have an age!” Exactly.

God I loved this movie. Try not to see it on an empty stomach and give the best cook you know a big fat kiss afterwards.