Maestro (4/5 Stars)

Producer Rick Rubin famously has one piece of advice for artists: make the art for yourself. The audience should come last. And as he explains, this is not because the artist should not care about the audience, but it acknowledges the counterintuitive notion that what the audience ultimately wants is not art about a particular subject matter expressed in a certain way, but the best art. And the best art always is that which is personal to the artist, that means something to the artist. There is plenty of art out there that is made for the audience, and it will be inevitably mediocre, because by its nature it is designed that way. The bigger the audience a piece of art is made for, the less special it will be. 

I bring this up in the context of Maestro because it would appear to me that Bradley Cooper, an actor, who became a director and co-writer with A Star is Born five years ago is taking Rick Rubin’s advice. I’m not sure anyone was demanding a biopic about Leonard Bernstein or necessarily believed that Bradley Cooper (The Hangover, Silver Linings Playbook, American Sniper) would have been the man to do it. This movie seems to exist because Bradley Cooper thought it was interesting and wanted to do it. I generally agree with Rick Rubin that art developed in this matter is usually the best art. I didn’t know all that much about Leonard Bernstein’s oeuvre, conducting or composing (although I have seen Tar and Amadeus) or his personal history. Essentially, all I really knew of him was that he was famous and composed the score to West Side Story. That didn’t matter. I got what I needed to know from Bradley Cooper. One of the best things about following the work of good directors (and at this point, I am going to include Bradley Cooper in that list), is that it generally does not matter what the movie is about. If a movie is made by someone who is highly competent and cares about the work, it will almost always be worth the time to watch it. And the guidance of good artists is the best way to be exposed to new things.

Leonard Bernstein (played by Bradley Cooper) is a man of many talents in the musical world: he conducts orchestras, he composes symphonies, operas, and musical theater, he plays musical instruments. He is also Jewish and a homosexual. He was born in 1918 and entered into the music business in the late 1930s. That would make him right on time to push the cultural envelope by keeping his surname (as opposed to changing it to Burns) but too early to be openly gay. Leonard marries a woman named Felicia Monteleagre (played by Carey Mulligan) who is content, at least at first, to be his beard, his muse, and the mother of his children. Their relationship in all its complications is really what this movie is about. Both Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan affect arresting performances. (Although this isn't completely relevant to whether Carey's performance was good, I was affected by how much she aged in the story-line. After all, Ms. Mulligan is my age and I've always thought of her as being young or generally young.)

Bradley Cooper is a good director. He shows a general competence with the camera in certain flourishes and the choice of different film stock. (The movie switches from black and white to color based on the time period). But more impressive is his choice to set the camera at a distance and to employ long takes for scenes that are especially intimate. One is reminded that we are witnessing the domestic strife of real people and that these scenes are intensely private in nature. They are so well done and the characterization of the people involved so well developed, one wonders how the details got related to the writers. I am told that in addition to the many public interviews both Leonard and Felicia took together or separately, the creators also spent a lot of time interviewing the children. I suppose it would be impossible to really know what two people who knew each other very well said to each other in any particular room on any particular day (there is one especially intense scene that is incredibly specific as to it time/place, it literally takes place during the Macy’’s Thanksgiving Day Parade), but some scenes are likely to have happened in the manner we see it. For instance, the conversation between Leonard and his daughter as to the rumors going around (that Leonard is cheating on his spouse with men) is not something I think a child would forget or misremember.

I think the best comparison to make for Bradley Cooper is Warren Beatty, another actor turned director that starred in the movies he made. Warren Beatty described such dual roles as exceedingly difficult to pull off. He said being a director required a lot of control, whereas being an actor is about letting yourself get carried away. And because the process was such an ordeal, Beatty only made a few movies this way. How many movies will Bradley Cooper direct and star in? We will see, but I am for him not taking as many starring roles in order for him to make more of his own movies. 

The Killer (3/5 Stars)

I wonder who the narrator is speaking to in Director David Fincher’s latest movie The Killer. Usually a voiceover is directed towards the audience, but here the character involved, an assassin played by Michael Fassbender, is not the type of person who would choose to have an audience. Perhaps what we are witnessing is an internal monologue. Perhaps The Killer is talking to himself. 

Perhaps David Fincher is talking to himself here. The Killer is a competent and slick thriller, directed with competence and acted with proficiency, but it is not a crowd pleaser and doesn’t try to be. It follows an assassin whose philosophy does not inspire sympathy and whose outlook does not change in any distinct way. There is no character development in this movie. 

The plot is simple. The assassin botches an assignment. Then, because of his mistake, his agent attacks his hideout in order to “avoid blowback”. Presumably the agent, a lawyer played by Charles Parnell, wanted to kill the assassin, but the second set of killers never have a chance because they don’t attack the hideout while the assassin is home. Instead of waiting, they go ahead and ransack his place and beat up his girl. And then they leave for some reason. Maybe they all thought that the assassin would just go into hiding for the rest of his life.

The assassin doesn’t go into hiding. Instead, he methodically kills everyone involved one-by-one. Is this really necessary? It doesn’t appear that it is. It doesn’t even appear to be revenge. It is presumed in the movie that the attack on his hideout is to be expected since he screwed up the hit. Or if it is revenge, it is totally disproportionate. (What did the taxi driver ever do?) Then, after killing a lot of people, the assassin does not kill a particular character. That basically confirms this movie’s complete lack of any normal sense of justice. The happy ending was not satisfying to me.

 The Killer is well made as all David Fincher movies tend to be. There are colorful locations and at least one intense physical fight. But really, the movie is a lark. It exists but does not need to. I’m not sure it adds all that much to the crowded genre about professional assassins.

Killers of the Flower Moon (5/5 Stars)

In the early 2000s, HBO produced a remarkable TV Series called The Wire, which I could argue is not only the best TV series ever made, but perhaps the best anything ever made in the medium of film. The first scene of the first episode of the first season is a stand-alone vignette: the Ballad of Snot Boogie.

Snot Boogie is a young black man who has just been murdered. A police detective questions a witness as to how it happened. Well, a group of men played a regular dice game, of which Snot Boogie regularly took part in. Snot Boogie was not good at dice and at some point in most dice games, after he lost most or all of his money, he would scoop up the money in the pot and run off with it. Usually he was caught and given a beat down, until one game he was shot in the back and killed. The detective questions the witness: if Snot Boogie always stole the pot, why did you let him play. The reply: “This is America, man. You gotta let ‘em play.”

Per the audio commentary of David Simon, the point was that American society was so rigged and unfair, that it became absurd that its citizens would take part in the hypocrisy of the American Dream, this notion that anyone could make it. That is, if Snot Boogie was highly likely to never win, wouldn’t it be more honest to stop pretending that he could, to simply not allow him to play anymore? That was The Wire’s America. It is also the America of “Killers of the Flower Moon”, except in this case, Snot Boogie gets super lucky and wins the pot several times over. Then, perhaps, to extend the metaphor, Snot Boogie gets shot anyway and his winnings are stolen.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is a bizarre story that could not take place anywhere but the USA. The Osage, a Native American tribe, were conquered by the USA in the 1800s and were forcibly relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma. It was desolate and unwanted land. That much is a normal occurrence in the annals of human history in all societies. What happened next is extraordinary. Decades later it was discovered that the land had oil under it and the Osage struck it rich. The movie informs us that their nation had the highest per capita wealth in the world in the 1920s. Substantial prejudice exists in the society, the Osage need white guardians to sign off on the disbursal and expenditure of their money and the white tradesman in town charge the Osage exorbitant prices, but even so, they are driving the latest cars, wearing 1920s high fashion, and intermarrying with the white populace (money trumping prejudice). When was the last time a conquered people were allowed to get that far? (To name some modern examples, I doubt we are going to see the Uighers or the Rohingya strike it rich any time soon.) Then, in a case study made famous by J. Edgar Hoover’s upstart F.B.I., many of the Osage start dying, some mysteriously and others not so mysteriously, to an extent that indicates the entire outside society is either involved in the murders or willfully blind to them.

Killers of the Flower Moon was directed by Martin Scorsese and stars, for the first time together in a Scorsese movie, his two main acting avatars Robert De Niro and Leonardo Dicaprio. They play historical figures, Robert De Niro as a man called King Hale an established businessman and philanthropist in the Osage Hills and Leonardo Dicaprio as Earnest Burkhardt, nephew of King Hale, a young man looking for work after his service in the Great War. The third main character is Mollie Burkhardt, played by Lily Gladstone, the Osage woman who marries Ernest Burkhardt and whose family members start and continue to die unnatural deaths. Martin Scorsese has a long and established history of making movies about people not exactly saying what they mean (think of all the Italian gangsters and their way with words) and this comes into play here as well. The characters are inscrutable in a way that perhaps only real people can be. 

We can start with Earnest Burkhardt, whose main attribute is his low level of intelligence. If we can say that the natural Leonardo Dicaprio role is one of ambition and charm (say Catch Me if You Can, The Wolf of Wall Street), this character is decidedly against type. Interestingly, Dicaprio doesn’t usually play uninspiring not-that-bright people, but when he does, they are some of his best roles (Revolutionary Road, Shutter Island). The movie takes a seemingly contradictory stand on Earnest Burkhardt both portraying him as the type of man who would rob at gunpoint, graverob, and coordinate murders of Osage but also one who loves his Osage wife. I assume the source materials bear this out because if it didn’t actually happen, you wouldn’t believe it. I am reminded of reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker which dealt with the enormous decline of violence in the modern era. In trying to explain the same, Mr. Pinker posited that part of it had to do with a sort of moral retardation in past societies. In parallel to a rise in IQs over time from better education, so there was also a rise in moral intelligence. That is, without the direct influence of a type of education that teaches abstract concepts such as empathy or equality between people, you would by default have someone who operates like Earnest Burkhardt. (Empathy is the ability to understand how something may be seen from another person’s point of view. Mr. Pinker suggests that this is an exercise in abstract thinking that a human needs to be taught in order to perform. This is in contrast to literal thinking which is like: I am white. You are red. We are literally different and so different behavioral rules apply.) The best thing that can be said about Earnest is that his disposition makes him predisposed to manipulation and so, given his nature, he may not be entirely culpable as he seems. In one scene, he is so easily manipulated that he fails to grasp that his uncle might be plotting to kill him too. But that is the best thing you can say about him.

Even more inscrutable than Earnest is his wife Mollie Burkhardt. I expect the creators of this movie found far less in the record about what made Mollie tick then the white people who were at some point interrogated by the authorities and cross-examined in court as to their actions. In various parts of the movie, Lily Gladstone’s facial expressions reminded me of the Mona Lisa. Why does she and her sisters marry white men? Is it a status thing? Is she in love with Earnest? Once all her relatives start dying, why isn’t she more suspicious? At some point, it would seem that she would rather be killed by her husband than consider the possibility that her husband would try to kill her. It feels like Scorsese did a decent job of portraying the Osage and the movie’s marketing materials heavily lean on assuring us of that point. Indeed, some of the best parts of the movie are all Osage. The field of the Flower Moon is poetry. The death owls are spooky. The best scene in the movie takes place in a powwow and concerns a moving speech by the chief of the tribe (played by Yancey Red Corn) about the present events and how they will respond to them.

Sitting in on that powwow is the most inscrutable character of all: King Hale. Here is a guy that has lived in the Osage Hills all his life, understands and speaks the Osage language, has made friends with enough Osage to be allowed in the powwow in the first place and is ultimately the mastermind behind a lot of the killings. If Ernest Burkhardt is morally retarded, King Hale is morally deranged. One is reminded of the villain in Chinatown who,when asked why he is orchestrating a particularly nasty scheme, replies without hesitation “The future Mr. Gittes, the future.” King Hale makes a similar argument about the Osage, which boils down to the following: Since they are all going to die someday, there is nothing wrong with murdering them. Then once he is cornered and the truth let out, he somehow believes that society will forgive him. I am reminded of Sam Bankman-Fried, a pioneer of his self-coined “effective altruism,” who seemed to think it was okay to steal from his clients, and that the world would be okay with it, because he felt he was so much better at spending the money. 

Killers of the Flower Moon is 3.5 hours long. But don’t let that stop you from watching it. Indeed, there is a great place in the movie to take a break either for an intermission or even for the day. That would be around the two hour mark when the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation show up. (One thing about being stinking rich is that you can tell your problems directly to the President. It doesn’t appear at first that Mollie’s brief interaction with Calvin Coolidge would have precipitated direct federal action, but then again, Mr. Coolidge was historically circumspect with his words.) The agent in charge is played by Jesse Plemons, an actor who can somehow pull off normcore white guy and dangerous at the same time. The F.B.I does its work in a professional and competent way. Actually, it didn’t seem all that hard to crack the case, only a group of people with authority that cared enough to solve it.

Reality (3/5 Stars)

 

I am a long-time fan of the San Francisco 49ers and as I write this review, our quarterback Brock Purdy is being considered a candidate for the NFL Most Valuable Player award. Now, this award, not unlike the Oscars or any other awards given out for movies, have an inherent absurdity to them. After all, football is a team sport in the same way that movies are a team production. A good football team and a good movie comes about from the successful collaboration of a team. With that in mind, one may think it does the team a disservice by elevating one member of it and declaring that they are the most valuable person there. It may make sense if the team was atrocious except for this one guy who clearly was the only one trying, but these awards aren’t generally given out to individuals that took part in losing teams or bad movies. Indeed, the team winning and the movie being good are generally prerequisites to the individuals gaining recognition. So by definition seemingly, the individuals who win these awards that provide nothing but individual recognition do so with lots of help. 

Having said that, there is an obvious way that Brock Purdy is the MVP of the NFL, one which is never discussed, but probably should be. Brock Purdy’s salary this year is $870,000. The other contenders for MVP Dak Prescott and Lamar Jackson are making $40,000,000 and $32,000,000 respectively. Now, it is arguable that Dak Prescott and Lamar Jackson are better quarterbacks than Brock Purdy. But are they $30,000,000 a year better than Brock? Surely not. Dollar for Dollar, Brock is the Most Valuable Player in the NFL by an irrefutable margin. I bring this up in the context of a movie review about “Reality”, an HBO movie that came out earlier this year, because by that logic, “Reality” could be the best movie of the year. It is a good movie that is well produced. It does not feel or look like it was made on a shoe-string budget, but considering what is in it, you may well be correct in assuming that it is one of the cheapest movies HBO has ever made.

“Reality” is a great experiment in fidelity to source material. On June 3, 2017, a Farsi translator working for the federal government named Reality Winner was met at her home by FBI agents. One of the agents shows Reality a tape recorder and makes it clear that the subsequent conversation is being recorded. The resulting transcript, thereafter made public with redactions of sensitive material, became the source material of a play. That play then became the source material for this movie. The interesting thing from both the play and the movie is that they follow the transcript verbatim (except for that one scene near the end in pink). The entire movie takes place at Reality’s house, first outside in the yard and then in a nondescript back room. The dialogue couldn’t be more natural. Indeed, it is literally natural since it is a verbatim adaptation of a recording. It even has all those quirky lines and asides that you would never find in a real movie, unless it is a “Fargo”-type movie that throws in random stuff to seem more real. For example, Reality keeps an AR-15 in her house. It is pink. 

The verbatim transcript is inherently dramatic. The F.B.I agents inform Reality that they have a warrant to search her house and would like to ask her questions, but they don’t immediately tell Reality why. They want to see if Reality will tell them the truth or lie to them. Reality for her part goes along with what is happening without much objection seemingly because she is holding out hope that the FBI aren't here for that reason. If you know nothing about the real life case, then like myself, you may find yourself wondering what this is about, in a good suspenseful way.

Both sides are playing games and it comes out in the words and the performances. Reality Winner is played by Sydney Sweeney. At first, one wonders why an actress as beautiful as Ms. Sweeney is being cast in this particular role. But apparently the real Reality is young, blonde, and does cross-fit, so it is a plausible choice of casting. Given that there has been no money spent on production value, writing, or special effects, Ms. Sweeney, by herself, probably comprises the largest part of the budget. The lack of everything else puts the focus directly on her, most of the time in close-up. Ms. Sweeney rises to the challenge in a way that is generally not asked of her (or most actors) in other projects. It is a very good performance.

The agents, played by Josh Hamilton (Terribly Polite White Guy with Glasses) and Marchant Davis (Muscular Black Man) inspire confidence in the F.B.I. They have an agenda but don’t use intimidation tactics to get what they want. Indeed, they succeed in their goals through their sheer professionalism. They are upfront with Reality that the conversation is being taped (if Reality didn’t know that she was being taped, then the evidence acquired in the transcript would probably not be able to be introduced as evidence in a prospective trial) and are exceedingly polite (they treat her animals/pets with care). 

This professionalism allows them to better take part in certain manipulations, all entirely legal. They present Reality with a series of false choices. The agents tell Reality that they have a warrant to search her house and that they are willing to show it to her. They don’t actually show Reality the warrant though. They merely tell her that she can choose to see it. Reality doesn’t choose to see it because, presumably, she doesn't want to let on that this search may be about that reason. The agents tell Reality that they need to talk to her and that they can have that conversation at the house or at the nearby F.B.I field office.That seems straightforward enough unless you understand that Reality has a third choice that isn’t presented: she could not talk at all and seek the advice of legal counsel. Reality “chooses” to have this conversation at the house. The best manipulation is the agent’s statement to Reality that they already know what she has done it and how she did it, so the “what” and “how” do not need to be discussed. Instead, the agents explain, they want to know “why” she did it.

Do the agents already “know” the “what” and “how” of the thing they suspect Reality did? That we will never know. But once a perp starts answering the question of “”why”, no further questioning as to "what" becomes necessary. Implicit in a “why” answer is the admission that the act was done in the first place. For all those interested, “why” doesn’t matter and the agents probably only care about that question to the extent that it answers the question of whether Reality was working alone or in concert with other possible whistleblowers and/or foreign agents. What the agents wanted was an admission from Reality that she did the act in the way they supposed she did it. By the end of the interrogation, they have that admission. These agents are very good at their jobs. All of this, if written by a screenwriter, would be very well written. I can only wonder what the producer of this movie felt like when he first read the transcript. I suspect it would be like finding a puddle of oil seeping up from the ground in a field. There is a clear dramatic arc to the story and it wrote itself. You don’t have to pay the F.B.I or Reality anything for the writing or the rights. It is publicly available information.

The transcript is redacted to remove all indication of what classified information it was that Reality leaked to the press. But we now know what it was: Reality leaked a classified report detailing Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election and she appears to have done it right after Donald Trump fired F.B.I. director James Comey for not publicly stating that this interference did not occur. It is a credit to the F.B.I. that the substance of the leak did not affect their determination to enforce the law of the land. It was apolitical for the F.B.I. to prosecute Reality even though what she leaked vindicated the former F.B.I director. It is a discredit to HBO that it does not follow the F.B.I. 's apolitical lead. A subscript to the movie written by HBO infers a belief that Reality was unfairly prosecuted. Given that Reality committed the crime, the only reason I can see why HBO could take this stance is political. Since the leak confirmed HBO’s politics, HBO decided her behavior is forgivable. 

Write it on the blackboard a thousand times: An open society, that thing that makes the “free world” “free” is not about policy but process. It doesn’t matter so much what the result is, but how one gets there. It matters that the law is applied to everyone equally regardless of the sympathy we may or may not have for their cause. Reality leaked a state secret. Sure, it was not an immature data dump the likes of Chelsea Manning to Wikileaks. She leaked only one article on a narrow topic, but still her behavior is not to be tolerated. One may contrast the way she went about it with that of Edward Snowden who leaked far more information, but took ownership of the leak immediately and described how it was done. This would go far in letting the government know that he was acting alone and that there wasn’t a whole network of moles to worry about. Then Snowden left the country. He knew he had committed a serious crime and had forfeited his government job and indeed his citizenship by doing so. Reality, here, thought she could leak a state secret and keep her career. I hope her actions and what happened to her can serve as a lesson to us all. Just don’t do it.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2/5 Stars)

 

Take any 10-15 minute segment of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and you have part of an impressive movie. But taken as a whole it is both too long and incomplete. It suffers from a bad case of evil producer strategy, whereupon the failures of the movie have less to do with the creators themselves but from certain dictates from on high that force bad decisions in terms of length and content.

A very prominent version of this can be seen in the adaptation of The Hobbit. The evil producers had it in their mind to replicate the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and so they set out to make the new movies exactly the same in length and release strategy. The problem of course was that the source material was a novella, not three books of hundreds of pages each. And the content of the novella didn’t have the action set pieces that the trilogy of tomes had. So, in the end, The Hobbit trilogy was way too long and stuffed with a bunch of blockbuster action sequences that were boring as all hell because they weren’t in the book at all. Why this was done is obvious, the evil producers wanted to market the movies as big events, so they needed to be epic (see long) and there needed to be at least three of them so they could have three big opening weekends. I hope they liked how much money they made immediately because no one in their right mind would ever see those movies again, or for the first time, now. I didn’t bother to watch the third. (In that one, they take a single chapter and draw it out for three hours).

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has this same sort of problem. It is a sequel to the well thought out and executed 2019 standalone feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but unlike that movie, it starts with a marketing strategy and then tries to fit a story to it, not the other way around. At 2 hours twenty minutes it is way too long and then it ends on a cliffhanger because apparently it wasn't long enough.

Again, take any ten or fifteen minute segment of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and you have what could be part of a good movie. The animation in particular is striking and impressive in its attention to detail and multitude of forms. Like the original (and now live-action Spider-Man too), the spider-people live in a concurrent multi-verse. These multi-verse each have their own art style. The main version, wherein Miles Morales (aka Black Spider-Man) is our hero, is curated in Brooklyn neo-realism. Another version, with Gwen Stacy (aka Spider Woman) is curated in impressionistic pastels. A villain named the Vulture seems to pop out of a universe styled in the writings of Leonardo Da Vinci. Spider-Punk is made out of british paper-mache.

All of these are good artistic ideas that are well done. It’s just that there is too much of it and not enough actual plot. Action sequences go on too long. Even when the movie is out of an action sequence and it's just normal exposition, there is still a lot of action. In one scene with plenty of background exposition, the characters are actually webbing their way through the city at great speed. The thing is, this occurs right after an overlong action sequence, so we are going from action sequence to action sequence to action sequence. Even word-play jokes are set against a scene of blockbuster action. Did you know that Chai is Indian for Tea? And that when you say Chai Tea you are actually saying Tea Tea? You are not laughing, is it because you are distracted by that skyscraper falling/crashing into the Brooklyn Bridge. The action sequences would have felt more exciting if the movie wasn’t wall to wall with them. And certain dramatic moments would have worked better without all this sound and fury. A big reveal involving the emotions of several main characters takes place during a chase and fight on a bullet train racing up a space elevator. Why? Why do it like that?

When the movie does slow down, it slows down a lot, and in repetitive fashion. How many scenes do we really need of a teenager trying to talk to their parents and getting frustrated. I would be happy with one scene per teenager and set of parents. In this movie, there must be at least 5-10 scenes of that kind of thing.

The thing is, these overlong action sequences and all these frustrating scenes where teenagers are not able to communicate with their parents are the same thing: the movie stalling for time, trying to get to an EPIC length and the cliffhanger to set up the next movie. I for one will not be seeing the next movie. I don’t need to see it to know that they could have combined its story into this one resulting in one good movie instead of two way too long bad ones. (I do not understand why evil producers have this strategy. You can always make more movies. Just look at the James Bond franchise.)

This movie doesn’t even have Spider-Ham in it. What a disappointment.

Corner Office (3/5 Stars)

Certain styles and moods are pleasures within themselves. For instance, the plot in a Raymond Chandler novel doesn’t really need to make sense in order to enjoy the writing. As long as Raymond marks his word in his inimitable style, I’m all for the reading. The man can describe a room. This is why certain authors can find themselves writing about the same types of characters doing the same things over and over again. It doesn’t quite matter what the characters do, but how they do it.

“Corner Office”, a drama directed by Joachim Back and written by Tedd Kupper is based on a short story by Jonas Karlsson. I expect the short story read like a Chandler novel and that this movie is a fine adaptation of it. It wouldn’t have been an easy thing to accomplish. Like a Chandler novel, I expect the best parts of the source material was introspective, descriptive, and contemplative. To keep the interesting parts would likely require plenty of voiceover and a deliberate pace.

This the movie accomplishes through the fine choreography of events by Back and Kupper. The movie stars Jon Hamm as Orson, a serious office worker, who spends most of his day (and movie) in voiceover describing himself and his office to the viewer. His office is weird and Orson is weirder. It is unclear what product and/or service the office provides. Nothing beyond the gray office park is ever shown in the movie. The weather is winter and workers toil under fluorescent lights. The pleasure in this movie is hearing Orson describe it, which is at turns insightful and disturbing.

Most of what Jon Hamm is physically doing is nonverbal. He performs actions and looks at things while his voiceover presents the narrative. One has to remind oneself that the performance is split up between days on set in costume and days out of costume in the voiceover booth because Jon Hamm’s performance and Back’s editing of it is so seamless and effective.

Jon Hamm is at once incorrectly cast and a perfect choice. In the drab office scenes, he never quite hides his generally handsome figure, glasses, mustache, and bulky winter clothes notwithstanding. The lighting is bad but not bad enough to hide Don Draper. In the Corner Office, where Orson is well lit and is transformed into a confident persona, Jon Hamm is as good as he has ever been in a room.

What is the Corner Office? It is described in one scene by Jon Hamm to a company psychiatrist in phrases that fall like poetry (if I could find the quote online, I would put it here). The problem is that no one else at the office thinks it exists. The movie does a good job of putting off the decision as to whether it exists or not till the very end of the film. Even then, it may have been better to keep it ambiguous. Ultimately, I didn’t care about who was crazy. Like Orson, I just really liked spending time in the space. Like a good cup of tea and a Chandler novel on a rainy day, it was relaxing.

Looking up “Corner Office” online, one finds that it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2022, but was released theatrically only in August of 2023. That sounds like not that many people liked it but because it had a recognizable star, it had to eventually get released. I know of no theaters that actually showed it and I live in New York City. At the same moment “Corner Office” was released theatrically, it also became available on demand. I saw it on a plane, which I can confirm, is one of the worst places to watch a movie. I guess I should be happy I got to see it at all. Back in the day, one could read Roger Ebert’s column, which reviewed six or seven movies a week, and be fairly confident that you were aware of every movie you needed to be aware of (just aware, not actually see) to have general knowledge of movie culture. Now the amount of movies has ballooned and the ubiquitous Roger Ebert is gone and won’t be replaced. Even Netflix’s DVD library, which could be counted on for giving the viewer a comprehensive idea of what movies were out there, is gone. Movie libraries are being divvied up between different streaming platforms, which by their nature, can’t support as large a selection as a physical library of DVDs can. So smaller, older movies will inevitably be left out. Where they can be found once the initial on demand period has ended, I don’t know. “Corner Office” won’t be coming out on DVD.

A movie like “Corner Office” is not for everyone and shouldn’t be seen by everyone. It is a small movie for a small audience. The problem lies in how difficult it is for the people who want to see it to find it. And this problem appears to be getting much worse for movie culture in general.

Oppenheimer (5/5 Stars)

 

Seemingly every week we are treated to spectacles: ordinary people with superpowers, vehicles with impossible functions, events that can never happen. Oppenheimer may be the only movie confined to historical fact that gets close to all the extraordinary nonsense continually thrown at us. In 1945 a group of American scientists split the smallest thing known to man, an atom, and created the largest explosion the strength of 25 kilotons of TNT. Human beings had unlocked an unseen but potent energy in the universe and had harnessed for themselves the primal powers of the sun, nuclear fission. A month later, those same humans, specifically Americans, dropped two of these bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in a bid to end the largest war human beings had ever conducted against each other. It worked. The war was over, but an unease settled upon those responsible. After all, this wasn’t magic, it was science. Anyone could do it. And someday they would. And they could build an even bigger bomb using nuclear fusion. Then instead of killing 70,000 people in an instant like the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, millions could die with one hydrogen bomb over New York or Moscow. The Project Head, Robert J. Oppenheimer would later describe his reaction upon seeing his experiment work that very early morning of July 16, 1945. He thought of an ancient sacred Indian text in which the deity Vishnu reveals himself in his sacred multi-armed form and states, “Now I am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

‘Oppenheimer”, Writer/Director Christopher Nolan’s latest movie is a story of two rooms and a flashback. The first room takes place in 1954 where Oppenheimer is appealing a decision of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to not renew his security clearance. The second room takes place in 1959 where Lewis Strauss is seeking to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. In both rooms, the subject of testimony and cross-examination is the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), which is shown in the flashback from his school days through the The Manhattan Project, which culminated in the Trinity Test, the first successful testing of an atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Having a cursory knowledge of American history I knew about The Manhattan Project and the Trinity Test. I did not know that Oppenheimer was denied a renewal of his security clearance less than a decade later because of suspected ties with communism. As for Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.), I had never heard of him before and you probably haven’t heard of him either. Though his senate confirmation hearing pales in importance to everything else in the movie, it is itself a remarkable and curious moment in American history. A president’s appointments to his own cabinet are almost never contested, let alone denied. Before Strauss was rejected it had only happened once in the past 100 years.

This movie is based on the book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. As with all material based on real life, the challenge is not in the creation but in the editing. (My favorite metaphor is that fiction is like painting, documentary is sculpture). Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of this book and the editing of the movie is a marvel in organization. The movie is long but moves quickly. The cast is enormous, but characters are efficiently and memorably introduced. The movie switches between time periods and locations, but the viewer is never confused as to when and where they are. Nolan affects this by shooting the 1954 room and the Oppenheimer flashback in color, whereas the 1959 room and Strauss flashback are in black and white. Nolan even organized enough room for a twist in the plot, not an easy thing to do in a biopic.

Then there is the IMAX. I saw this movie in June in a normal movie theater and was compelled to see it at the Lincoln Center IMAX in September. It will be a good movie no matter how you see it, but you really should see it on the largest screen possible. Nolan uses the IMAX expertly, saving it for close ups of the quantum world, very large explosions, and expansive landscapes. It would not be incorrect to categorize Oppenheimer as a tentpole summer blockbuster. It is a BIG movie with lots of Stars. (This would be an indispensable movie for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon games. In just one example of many, Gary Oldman shows up as President Truman in a great “the buck stops here” scene). It also happens to be very good in the classic sense. The subject matter is compelling and morally complicated. It is rare that you see these two things together. Rare movies like Apocalypse Now and Citizen Kane come to mind.

Christopher Nolan has been a very good director for more than two decades. He is old enough to be a stubborn proponent of obsolete technology preferring shooting his movies with film cameras as opposed to digital cameras. He is also British and makes movies about billionaires, space, and World War II. He then could be characterized as a conservative filmmaker. But, this has never been the case, and continues not to be true. There are several instances of radical choices, for instance, In the first room, Oppenheimer is cross-examined as to adultery. One not only marvels at the presence of nudity in that particular setting but also how well it works. Nolan continues to be an expert on how to use time in his storytelling. The idea of splitting the movie into two rooms in the 1950s and a flashback that generally moves forward from Oppenheimer’s school days to the present and into the future past the two rooms (there are a few scenes in the 1960s) may not seem all that impressive until one considers how the movie would work if it was entirely linear. If the storytelling was linear, the movie would be ten hours long and irretrievably boring after the third hour when the bomb goes off.

About halfway through the movie, Nolan drops the two rooms and tells the story of the Trinity Test for an uninterrupted 30-40 minutes. Here are the most fascinating scenes in the movie. In particular, it is of continual concern to the scientists that the project is justified, after all, as one scientist points out, a bomb falls on both the just and unjust. The only reason why they feel compelled to build a bomb in the first place is because they do not want the Nazis to get there first. Then right before the bomb is built, Hitler kills himself in his bunker and Germany surrenders. There is a scene in which the scientists argue as to whether they should continue. Oppenheimer argues that the science will always be there, that people won’t understand it until they use it, and once they’ve used it, the horror of that understanding will usher in world peace since war will become unthinkable. (I will speculate that there is a much simpler reason why they continued. The scientists wanted to see if it would work.) Then once the bomb is built, Oppenheimer attends a meeting of the U.S. Military brass and they discuss whether and how they will drop the bomb on the Japanese. In one of those “you can’t make this up” moments from history, one of the potential target cities, Kyoto, is struck from the list because of its cultural significance and also because the general in charge of the list honeymooned there.

I am compelled here to note that science, capitalism, and democracy, those things that are the foundation of America as an idea, do not provide strength because they are right. Not all scientific experiments are successful. Capitalism doesn't always provide correct values. Not all democratically elected leaders are good at their jobs. The strength in these three things is that they are processes, not end results. And what they do is that they can be used to point out something that is wrong. The experiment fails, the stock market crashes, the politician is marred by scandal. And just as importantly, once this something that is wrong becomes apparent, the participants have the opportunity to self-correct. You can change the experiment or change your theory, you can create regulations (or remove barriers) to improve market conditions, you can vote out politicians that have proven themselves incompetent.

Before, during, and after the bombs were created and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the participants questioned whether what they were doing the right thing. This movie shows those arguments. It isn’t sure whether the bombs should have been created. It isn't sure whether the bombs should have been dropped. Moving forward, Oppenheimer acts to dissuade the U.S. Government from building the larger more destructive hydrogen bomb. Does that make Oppenheimer a hypocrite? No, it makes him a scientist. The enemies of the Open Society will look at this movie and see only weakness. They believe that history is a story told by the winners and that there is no truth but what power dictates. America won World War II. It won it unconditionally. Does this movie feel like a story told by winners? No, it doesn’t, and that is because we aren’t Nazis or Communists. We are allowed to second guess ourselves. To see the benefit of this openness, just imagine if it was the other way around and Hitler had gotten there first. Then this movie would be a propaganda reel with nothing but admiration of the creators and demonization of the victims. It was a good thing for humanity that America got to the bomb first.

Showing Up (2/5 Stars)

“I’m enjoying my retirement. I get up. I do a little of this. I do a little of that and then it’s time to watch TV again,” says a character played by Judd Hirsch in Kelly Reichardt’s new movie “Showing Up.” And if that sounds exciting, then this is the movie for you. Like all of Ms. Reichardt’s movies, “Showing Up” is understated and slow moving, but holds itself with a strong sense of self-assuredness.

That assuredness borders on the farcical here given the almost entire lack of conflict and/or plot. Our main character, Lizzy, played by Michelle Williams, is a sculptor that has a show opening in a week. It doesn’t appear like it will be that big of a deal. She lives and works in an artistic community and seemingly everyone has some type of show opening at some point. One character named Eric, (inexplicably but capably played by Andre 3000 of Outkast fame) is the sort of person that finds a way to love something about anything. As an example, he mans the kiln at the school and when he burns one of Lizzy’s sculptures, declares that he thinks the burn makes it look even better.

Much of the movie is spent concerning itself with Lizzy’s efforts to get her family to show up at her show and/or bother her landlord Jo (another artist played by Hong Chau) to fix her apartment’s hot water boiler. About twenty minutes into the movie, there was what I thought was a throw away scene when Lizzy finds a pigeon has broken into her house and hurt its wing. This pigeon and Lizzy’s attempts to care for it provide the majority of the drama for the rest of the movie. The remainder of the drama occurs when her family members actually do show up at her show and it becomes readily apparent why the parents are divorced and her brother (played by John Magaro) probably shouldn’t be in public at all. But then the scene deescalates without a big fuss and the movie ends shortly thereafter. It all turns out okay and everyone goes on with their lives.

Did I like this movie? Well, let me just say that it is not on the level of “First Cow.” The sculptures, and other art created in the movie certainly could have been better. Will I see Kelly Reichardt’t next movie? Yeah, I expect I’ll be showing up.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

 

For those counting, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is the first part of the seventh Mission: Impossible movie. They stopped numbering them after Mission: Impossible III in 2006. The franchise is notable in that it has been around for almost thirty years, but has only picked up speed recently, the last four movies being released since 2011. Not that the first movie wasn’t successful, or that Tom Cruise was not a bankable action star. The opposite actually. No, it was just that in the 1990s when the first two movies came out, Tom Cruise had other things to do than action sequences. He was far more of a dramatic actor. He routinely starred in movies that won or were nominated for Oscars (Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire) or had an element of romance in them. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, he starred in some straight up avant garde movies (Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Vanilla Sky). Unfortunately, the days of Tom Cruise taking risks in roles are over. Now all the risks are purely physical. Since 2011, he has done nothing but action blockbusters. 

The explanation for this lies entirely with Tom Cruise. He gets to pick the movies that he is in. I’m going to hazard any entirely speculative guess though. I bet it has something to do with Scientology. I read a book about this once, and it basically concluded that Tom Cruise was near the top, if not at the top of this “religion” (religion is in quotes mainly because Scientologists believe that it is only a religion for tax purposes. The actual tenets consider the beliefs to be scientific fact, hence the name). Tom Cruise was and is the most famous of Scientology's disciples and its most potent poster child. After all, Scientologists believe that once a person attains a certain level in their process, that, in turn, prevents them from getting sick or aging. The ageless Tom Cruise is in this ideology, almost a deity. That sort of deified status is bound to have effects on a man’s character. In Tom Cruise, it would appear to manifest itself in a sort of manic seriousness. I have a feeling that Tom Cruise is doing all of these action blockbusters, one after another, for the money. I think Scientology has lost a lot of goodwill in the past two decades, probably has a much harder time of winning new recruits than ever before, and Tom Cruise is essentially bankrolling the place. And the best way for Tom Cruise to make a lot of money is to strip away everything about himself that could be controversial and present himself as the ideal mass market product: action-oriented, moral, enough of a sense of humor, and sex appeal (but no actual sex). In other words, a well-produced Mission: Impossible movie, like this one.

Christopher McQuarrie returns as Tom Cruise’s ideal action movie partner. McQuarrie has directed the last three Mission: Impossible movies. He has also written seven of Tom Cruise’s last ten movies, all action blockbusters. The two make a consistent and productive team. I am going to bypass talking about the plot for the moment. What you want to know is if the stunts are still very good. Yes, they are. There isn't a set piece as great as the Burg Khalifa sequence in Ghost Protocal or a fistfight that packs as mean a punch as the bathroom brawl in Fallout, but it all still pretty good. The main set piece is a well-publicized stunt of Tom Cruise racing a motorcycle off a mountain and spending many seconds in a freefall (while speaking dialogue). We know that this is the real thing, but how does it show up in the movie? Well, there is a shot in which Tom Cruise pulls the ripcord for his parachute and is dramatically sucked out of frame. I don’t believe the computers can do that yet. Another very good sequence is a comic car chase with Tom Cruise driving a tiny Fiat with one hand through the streets of Rome. Tom Cruise is becoming known for his chase sequences that have camera angles and backgrounds that so very clearly show that this is the actor driving this vehicle going that fast in this place (see Top Gun: Maverick). 

The plot is yet another world endangering conspiracy. I cannot say I quite grasped it except to understand that the bad guy is not a person at all, but some sentient artificial intelligence. I’m not sure if I should have picked up on what this sentient artificial intelligence wants. Perhaps that will be explained in the sequel. Having said that, it is very dangerous. It is particularly adept at pretending to be human and thereby tricking the other humans so that they think they are interacting with other humans. At the bottom of everything though, it appears that the corrupt national security apparatus of the United States Government may be behind it. A corrupt national security apparatus (dare I say, a deep state) seems to be what Ethan Hunt has been fighting this entire franchise. He starts off on some mission given to him by the United States government only to find out that the U.S. Government is the actual bad guy and that he has been set up. As I've mentioned before, this a trope found in a lot of movies. I wonder if it helps sell tickets overseas. After all, if you vilified a foreign government, those people might be offended. Here, in America, we all take turns vilifying the government with every transition of political power.

The core gang is back together. There is Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell and Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn. Gone are Jeremy Renner and all other previous love interests. Tom Cruise’s agelessness is exceptional, true, but it can be noted that Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg are aging like normal people. They are all actually pretty old now. Ving Rhamses is 65. Tom Cruise is 61. Simon Pegg is already 53. (You would think he would be much younger than Tom Cruise because his stardom came of age twenty years after Cruise was an established star). The new girl, Hayley Atwell is invited to join the club. Although she is not young at the age of 41, she is still in an entirely different generation. I wonder what the movie would feel like if Tom Cruise, while still remaining in shape and doing all the same stunts, stopped dying his hair and let his face naturally age. Would it be hilarious? Maybe. My favorite new addition is Pom Klementieff, who plays a femme fatale. I had to look her up in order to realize I had seen her a bunch of times in Marvel movies. She plays Mantis, a member of the Guardians of the Galaxy. This is a more interesting/intense role for her and she has, hands down, the best makeup of everyone. Vanessa Kirby and Rebecca Ferguson round out the other female action stars. All the women are between twenty to thirty years younger than our main star, but perhaps this can't be helped. After all, what actress in their 60s do you think could physically keep up. I am blanking here.

Asteroid City (3/5 Stars)

Wes Anderson’s movies have always had several layers to them. A good example is “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, which starts off with a young girl reading a book of the same name, turns into an interview with the aged author (Tom Wilkinson) of said book, which turns into the young author (Jude Law) interviewing the aged subject of that book (F. Murray Abraham), which, finally, turns into the subject of the movie itself, a story about the young subject of that book (Tony Revolori) and his apprenticeship at the Grand Budapest Hotel under the supervision of the esteemed M. Gustave (Joseph Fiennes). Except by now, after several tellings over decades of time, the style of the resulting movie has undergone several distinctive transitions in style (like a visual game of telephone) each more fantastical than the last. The final form of the Grand Hotel, exceptionally pink and ornate, is too fantastical for real life. But since we, the audience, know that what we are witnessing is a superimposed artifice on something that happened to real people, (It is not explicitly stated in “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, but the story takes place somewhere in Eastern Europe (maybe Budapest, Hungary) and the bad guys in the background are clearly the Nazis and then the Soviets of the 20th Century), Wes Anderson deftly gets to have it both ways. He can indulge his artistic vision without distracting from the underlying humanity of the characters. 

This is a technique We Anderson used again in “The French Dispatch”, masterfully I would say. It is a technique that is employed again in “Asteroid City”, which presents itself as a Radio Drama (shot in black and white and hosted by Bryan Cranston) which is about the creation and production of a play (Edward Norton is the playwright), called “Asteroid City”. By the time we get to “Asteroid City”, we are in a very Wes Anderson and Co. tableau. It is a desert on the border of Oregon and California, sparse and clear, but not looking particularly hot. It is the 1950s and there are roadside diners, cadillacs, and atom bomb tests. The colors are mainly sky blue, tennis green, and sand. But for the same reason this technique was successful in “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The French Dispatch”, it fails here. In those previous movies, the artifice was superimposed on what was a real story about real people. Here, the audience is told that there isn’t ultimately a real story about real people. We are told “Asteroid City” is a fictional play written by a playwright that isn’t based on anything that actually happened. As a result, it isn’t just the art direction that is artifice in this movie. All of the characters and story in “Asteroid City” are artifice too.

The play “Asteroid City” concerns an annual science camp for budding teenage astronomers that takes place in a sparsely populated village centered around an asteroid impact crater and the government research facility that studies it. The families of the teenage astronomers visit to have a science fair, with scholarship for the winner, and watch an astronomical event (something about ellipses). During this astronomical event, an alien spacecraft shows up, an alien gets out of the spacecraft, takes the asteroid, and leaves without a word. Now this happening could mean several things to all sorts of different people. Even if the people who witnessed the event didn’t know what it meant, that still would have meaning. However, if the event never happened and the playwright who made it up doesn’t know what it means, well, then it truly is meaningless.

This is the problem that “Asteroid City” has. In its backstory, the Radio Drama about the making of the play undercuts the play storyline itself by presenting it as something that didn’t happen, or could have happened a completely different way based on the whims of its creators. And if you are like me, and don’t find the travails of Writer’s Block or Actor’s Motivation all that original and/or interesting (like at all), you may find yourself wondering if the movie would be better off if every single black and white scene of the Radio Drama were cut from the movie. I don’t think it adds anything. I think it arguably distracts and trivializes the main story. At the very least, cutting those scenes would make the movie 15-20 minutes shorter. While I’m changing things, how about making Scarlett Johannson something other than a movie actress? Why are we watching an actress playing an actress practicing lines for a movie different from this movie which is a radio drama about the making of a play? The previous sentence isn’t even a joke. It should be. 

Not that “Asteroid City” isn’t enjoyable in parts. I especially liked the speech of General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) and the Cowboy/Alien song. I think there should have been much more of young Ricky Cho’s anti-authoritarian storyline. I enjoyed seeing Jake Ryan with another ten years on him (I first saw him in Moonrise Kingdom and Inside Llewyn Davis in 2013-2014 respectively) and Jason Schwartzman in a starring role, his first in a Wes Anderson film since Rushmore. It’s just mediocre.

Hey, they can’t all be winners. Wes Anderson and Co. produced four great movies in a row over the past decade (Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch). It would be greedy to expect a fifth. All things must pass. 

Beau is Afraid (5/5 Stars)

 

Something that I have gleaned from watching a lot of movies is that human beings have nostalgia for the culture of their youth. It is an entirely normal thing to be convinced that the movies that came out, the music that was around, and the games that were played were some of the best. It has dawned on me that I am an exception to this rule. Indeed, looking back at American culture over a long period of time, I’m pretty sure my teenage years 1996-2006 were the nadir of American culture. It was a time of turnover in the culture, when the last taboos of obscenity and language were being violated in ever increasing numbers, when alternative music devolved into emo/grunge/nu metal, when pop music corporatized itself into boy bands. When my parents were teenagers, they had The Beatles. I had Eminem. (I suppose I could have felt different if I had HBO back then, but I didn’t). The worst part though is what happened to the horror genre in movies. The breakdown of standards concerning violence in movies (thx Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Tarantino’s Kill Bill) led to a free for all that culminated in what was being called “torture porn.” It seemed like all the creativity in the genre was focused on finding new and excruciating ways to mutilate, dismember, and (hopefully) kill characters.

Enough time has passed that we can perhaps look back at that time as a time of puberty, when you drank way too much just so you could know what it was like, but now that you are older, and have already done it, you don’t need to do it again. The horror genre in the last decade has revitalized itself. Since all the taboos as to violence have been broken many times over, creators of good horror films have needed to become creative once again as to how to scare us. And step up they have, none more so than the writer/director Ari Aster. His previous movies include Hereditary and Midsommar. And now here is Beau is Afraid. It is a three hour long odyssey and I spent a majority of its time traumatized.

There is a fundamental difference between the films of Ari Aster and the awful horror movies of my youth. I am convinced that the only way one can watch Saw or its many sequels is to detach themselves from the movie and consider it without any empathy or sympathy, much like someone would watch a geek show at the circus (a thing where a homeless man would bite the heads off of chickens, or so I’m told). In contrast, although Ari Aster’s films have strong horror elements (there is some type of witch’s coven in Hereditary and a forest cult in Midsommar), it is impossible to not be drawn into the story and the characters. Watching Hereditary, the most memorable scene takes place at the dinner table and involves Toni Collete yelling at her son. Toni Collette isn’t possessed in this scene. It’s all raw earned emotion. In Midsommar, there is a scene that may well be placed in the dictionary as the ultimate example of catharsis. A young woman discovers that her boyfriend is cheating on her. The other women in the community help her get it all out. The scene ends with them all screaming together in a barn.

The screening I attended of Beau if Afraid involved a question and answer session with Ari Aster. In this session, our writer/director described Beau is Afraid as a comedy. If it is a comedy, it is much like the “comedies” of Martin Scorsese. I'm thinking particularly of After Hours. Scorsese’s notion of humor was to fling as many terrible things as possible upon an entirely innocent man (it’s a great movie, I recommend it). Beau is Afraid is like that, but the things that happen to Beau are much worse.

Beau is played by Joaquin Phoenix. He lives in a nightmare city, on a block full of urban terror. The neighbors accuse him of playing loud music when he is not playing any music. Grotesque graffiti lines the walls. Crazy, half-deranged people, some of them presently being violent, inhabit his street. And they are not going away. They inhabit his street. When Beau ventures out of his home to the corner deli, this horde of deranged people take the opportunity to break into Beau’s apartment where they party all night long and destroy the place.

This is in the first twenty minutes of the movie. What is extraordinary about Beau is Afraid is that the preceding paragraph is not a dream. That is, at no point does Beau wake up and realize that some of the above did not happen. Nor does the above seem to be some sort of psychological condition within Beau, wherein the crazy people are the delusions of a schizophrenic or agoraphobic. There is no point in the story where someone shakes Beau and tells him that he’s imagining all of this crazy shit. It is happening. There really is a serial killer known as the naked stabber, a deranged man that runs around town naked stabbing people. He stabs Beau. He does. That is why Beau is walking around with bandages for the next two thirds of the movie. And the bathtub scene. Apparently that too is real.

Ari Aster brings a technical mastery to what is being shown. The movie is composed of long shots with incredible framing of background detail and extras. The sound design is doing funky things too. All of it combines into this phantasmagorical hellscape. The scary things aren’t vampires or zombies. They are things that are familiar to you: your mother, the police, drugs, sex, your therapist, teenage girls. In a flashback, Beau’s mother tells him that he inherited a particular thing from his father which is arguably the worst possible thing a mother could say to a son. Alfred Hitchcock would have loved this movie. Martin Scorsese wrote the forward for the Midsommar DVD box set. If nothing else can be said, Ari Aster is an excellent filmmaker.

It must take an extraordinary amount of confidence/resolve for a movie to show what it is showing and not blink. To not, at some point say, okay I’m drawing the line here, and that last part was just for fun. But as far as I can tell, this happens just once and it happens only to make things worse, not better, and that is in the last twenty minutes of the movie. If I had one qualm about the movie is that I would take away that one blink and see where the movie goes without it. This is a movie like Under the Silver Lake that I felt was within reach of being perfect if only it could have reworked some of its scenes.

At the screening I asked Ari Aster the following questions.

What did you mother think of this movie?

Did she think it was funny?

Once you see it, ask me how he responded.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (3/5 Stars)

 

"Oh, Boy, I have a really good feeling about Plan C." - Edgin, Bard

The traditional portrait of a participant in Dungeons & Dragons is a teenage boy, the type prone to non-contact sports and virginity. At least that was the popular portrayal on TV when I was growing up. I didn't really know anybody who played Dungeons & Dragons, and the very few times I came across someone who spoke of it, the stereotype would be confirmed: they would be bragging about being a level 20 dungeon master or something that seemed strange to be openly proud about. 

My first substantial exposure to the game came after school in my mid-twenties. Some of my roommates, all grown men, had a game with other locals. I wasn't involved and regarded my non-involvement with ambivalence. I was generally put off with the requirement to obtain a comprehensive knowledge about something entirely useless. Sure, I was a fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, had read the books and watched the movies, but I had never been a superfan. I tried but did not finish the Similarion once I realized that it wasn't so much a story as much as a history. I've never understood the point of a history, or any argument concerning canon, about a make-believe world. It is in fact possible to go to a bookstore and buy a history of real events. Some of them are quite good. There was something undeniable though about the game going on in the living room. It was a lot of fun. There would be laughter emanating from the room for hours on end.

That much garnered enough of my interest that I tried to become involved. Only then did I realize something rather ridiculous about Dungeons & Dragons. It turns out that this much ridiculed thing from our childhood is rather cliquish. It is almost impossible to join a campaign once it has started (indeed, usually someone in the game will have to leave first for anyone to join) and a campaign can go on for years. Then the campaign ends and this same group of people (say 4-6) will start a new campaign and so on and so forth until the same five people have been playing the game together for longer than you ever thought possible.

I had the pleasure of making it into a game of Dungeons & Dragons in 2019 as a player then turning that experience into starting my own groups as dungeon master with friends and family during the pandemic. I found out first hand what made it so fun. Sure, there was a lot of learned knowledge about useless things, but the role-playing portion of it worked a lot like improvisational comedy. As dungeon master, one of the more important tasks is to switch the game back and forth between story and strategy so that neither part of it becomes tiresome. Ultimately, the adventure books one buys and bases the game on are just guidelines. The experience is one created by the group, much like how jazz is created in a club.

I bring this up in this review of the movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, to point out what an uphill journey making a movie based on this game surely was. First, the expectations are enormous. The built-in audience doesn't have just have a experience reading a book (maybe 10-20 hours alone) or playing a video game (30-40 hours alone), they may have logged hundreds of hours in the company of others. These nerds will intuitively know whether what is being portrayed on the screen is "realistic" and will likely have qualms about whether or not certain things are possible or certain characters are acting the way they are "supposed to act." 

The expectations problem becomes even more apparent when one considers the improvisational nature of the game. Like hearing a recording of jazz or listening to someone rehash a scene of improvisational comedy, something is definitely lost when the spontaneity of the moment is past. If you have ever listened to a Dungeons and Dragons player gleefully recount the story of the last session, you will know what I mean.

So there it is, you have an audience of judgmental nerds who expect the movie to be a certain way, but the creators better not make it like an actual Dungeons and Dragons session because then it won't work at all. Having given themselves these impossible odds, I think this movie essentially pulls it off. The movie's story works as a movie, while placating the nerds by assuming an enormous amount of knowledge.

I bet a person lacking in any knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons would be entirely lost. The world and its history isn't explained. The players simply inhabit what is known as the Swordcoast. How magic works in this world isn't explained. There isn't a mention of the weave or any types of levels or spell slots. There is very little exposition on the different kinds of beings, classes, and monsters. It is assumed that the audience, or at least the audience that counts, already knows this. At one point, the characters venture into the Underdark. Again, there is little to no explanation as to what that is. They just do it. 

The plot is not improvisational. It actually relies on the most basic of movie tropes. It's a Heist Movie and before the Heist, we've got to Get the Band Back Together. This works quite well in a Dungeons and Dragons movie because we need a team and that team needs to go on a mission. The team will require the basic classes in Dungeons and Dragons: Bard, Barbarian, Sorcerer, Druid. The other classes not in the Team will be on the other side as enemies: Rogue, Wizard. Then there is the Paladin, who is on his own side (of justice and truth of course).

These characters act like these characters should act and the movie employs character actors that slot in quite well into the types. The dashing Chris Pine is our Bard. His best friend the Barbarian is played by Michelle Rodriguez. Hugh Grant plays the dastardly Rogue. Some young people I've never seen in movies before play the Sorcerer and Druid (Justice Smith and Sophia Lillis respectively). One of the writer/directors of this movie is John Francis Daley, one of the titular Geeks in the short lived TV Series Freaks and Geeks. 

The way the story is written and how the characters play off each other will remind you of spending time with old friends. Yes, the Bard and the Barbarian have a special relationship because they have very different skills that make their sum greater than their parts. Yes, the Sorcerer is prime for a good coming of age story arc since his power derives from his bloodline and develops during puberty. Yes, the Paladin will play a part, but only on his goody-two-shoes terms.

So, is this a good movie? Sure, but here is a better question: Is watching this movie more fun than playing Dungeons and Dragons? or an even better question: Is it worth watching this movie if you've never played Dungeons and Dragons? I think the first better question is a wash: If you've played Dungeons and Dragons, you will very likely find this movie entertaining, or more importantly, not annoying. Chris Pine and his weirdly symmetrical face continues to be a flattering avatar for nerds. The second better question is: only if you want to feel excluded. This may be a revelation to you but the nerds are not pining for your company. I recall watching the first episode of the first season of TV Series Stranger Things. The older sister of the main nerd wonders in disbelief: how do you spend all day, ten hours straight, playing a game and not finish it? For myself, it was easier to make friends on the football team. Once you've played Dungeons and Dragons, you will understand.

John Wick Chapter 4 (5/5 Stars)

Since I had the pleasure to see and review John Wick 3: Parabellum in theaters in 2019, I have had the opportunity to go back and rent the DVDs for John Wick and John Wick 2. And although one can never tell with these sorts of things, John Wick Chapter 4 might be the end of the franchise, or at least this particular iteration of it. So now we may have a complete view of the entirety. It is a rare thing to behold, a franchise which starts out in the realm of ordinary and then gets increasingly better with each installment. The fourth movie is arguably the best one.

This may seem like an odd comparison, but while I was watching John Wick Chapter 4, I was reminded of the evolution of Wes Anderson’s career. He started out as a simple independent filmmaker with a unique style and vision (think Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums). Over the years however, it would appear that his attention to detail and artistry has pulled into his orbit a multitude of exceptional artists until now a Wes Anderson movie is chock full of wonderful production design, costumes, makeup, etc. in all shapes and sizes in every scene. The evolution of the John Wick franchise feels like this progression. It started off with a normal movie but with some rare attention to detail in fight scenes. Famously (and although I haven’t actually done the counting, I do believe it), it is said that the bullets fired out of each gun in a John Wick movie are counted. When the guns run out of bullets, the stunt direction calls for John Wick to take the time to reload his gun in the middle of the fighting. This sort of detail is usually not picked up by most audience members and for that reason most movies don’t bother with it. But I expect it is the sort of detail that artists working in stunt direction notice, and that along with innumerable other details, has likely led to that evolution of the John Wick franchise, where not unlike a Wes Anderson movie, it appears that the cream of the crop in what this movie specialized in, stunt direction and production design, has gravitated towards the team the produces these films. John Wick Chapter 4 is stunning to look at. The team appears to have gotten access to Sacre Coure, the Arc De Triomphe, Versailles, and other gorgeous places in Paris, France. They continue to place Keanu Reeves in interesting and exceptional fights while adding one of the best in the genre to the cast: Donnie Yen (Ip Man).

There are a lot of movies out there in the subgenre of old man out for revenge. I haven’t seen most of them, although I did see the original Death Wish and Unforgiven. I have not seen any of the multitude of Liam Neeson’s “Taken” movies. John Wick lands squarely in this subgenre, but it contains a shrewd understanding of what actually matters when it comes to how these movies work. The important thing to take away here is the tongue-in-cheek game the movie plays with John Wick’s motivations. Usually in this type of movie, the old man is a solitary man who has had some close family member, almost always a young woman, die/raped in some gruesome fashion. This gives the old man the excuse of justifiably killing a lot of bad guys. In the John Wick series, the bad guys kill his dog in the first movie and steal his car in the second. This all goes to show that the movie understands that motivation doesn’t really matter. It’s just an excuse to get you to the action scenes. Frankly, the whole concept of character motivation comes close to being a running joke in the franchise. The movie employs serious character actors like Ian McShane, Lawrence Fishburne, and Hiroyuki Sanada who expound on the deeply traditional manner of the way things are and the consequences of stepping out of line with the powers that be. And then Keanu Reeves, with his unique brand of charm/bad acting goes “Yeah, but they killed my dog”. And then what proceeds are several hours of exceptional stunt direction. The movie doesn’t ask you to believe/feel that all these people need to die. It knows and you know that the plot is just a contrived artifice for stunt direction. As long as the stunt direction is strong enough to stand on its own, and here it is, that is all the audience needs to be entertained.

This is the type of movie that I would love to hear the director’s commentary about. Especially as to which stunts are analog and which are digital. There is so much that is impressive here that some very good stunts can be considered as throwaway. In the first great action platform, taking place in the Osaka Continental (yes, many samurai swords come out into play here), a stuntman takes a tumble head over heels down an escalator. I’m pretty sure that was an analog stunt (that is the stuntman really went down the escalator in that fashion). It is notable how quickly the movie moves away from that stunt and how ordinary it feels amongst all the others.

There are too many scenes that deserve mention here, but I will name a few. For Keanu Reeves, nunchuk fight scene. For Donnie Yen, nevermind a mention of any particular scene, his entire performance as a blind marital artist is notable. Then there is a minor character played by Rina Sawayama who participates in the Osaka Continental fight. I have been routinely unimpressed by how beautiful women who know kung fu are somehow able to beat up men twice their size in movies. But here, Rina takes on two sizably larger men and she does so in a choreographed fight that retains its plausibility. This is not easy stunt direction. Indeed it is as easy as a person being able to plausibly fight someone who is twice as large as they are in real life (Not Plausible!). But she does it, seemingly without noticeable cheating, and everyone involved should be commended. I also really liked the fight in the Berlin rave with the fat man (Scott Adkins in a fat suit). I know I just started watching 2023 movies but I would be gobsmacked if I don’t pick this movie for Best Stunt Direction in next year’s Oscar picks (also for Best Cultural Appropriation for Japanese/French production design as well as Hong Kong martial arts in general). Indeed, John Wick Chapter 4 will be one of the best movies of the year.