The Good Dinosaur (3/5 Stars)

When Jerry Seinfeld spoke about making a twenty-minute television episode he described it like running with an egg. That is to say there is this obstacle course one must cross all the while holding on to this very fragile thing and at any point in the obstacle course this very fragile thing could drop and be ruined irrevocably. To reiterate, everything from idea to writing to preproduction to directing to acting to editing to final presentation must be done perfectly. A misstep in any part of the process will render the final product inferior. When a movie fails completely it becomes clear that mistakes were made at most parts of the process. When a movie fails inexpliacably (or say tragically) you can almost sense this heroic effort being undone by a single weak link far along in the chain. Almost never do you see a movie fail the way that “The Good Dinosaur” fails. It’s marketing was perfect, its editing was seamless, it’s animation a pinnacle of the art, it’s casting and voice acting totally fine. Even the writing is not all that bad. No, what went wrong is the idea. The premise of “The Good Dinosaur,” is the problem. Imagine if you will somebody breaking the egg at the first obstacle in the course and then proceeding to run the rest of the way all the way to the finish line with a broken egg. The time to stop production of this movie was during the pitch meeting.

The premise for this movie is that the meteor that killed the dinosaurs missed the earth and that the dinosaurs survived to be able to meet humans millions of years after. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the movie takes this imaginative leap with the dinosaurs that is not intutitive. For instance, the movie starts with a family of Apatasaurs. There is a Dad, a Mom, and three kids (one of which is our cowardly hero Arlo). They are farmers. They grow corn and talk about storing enough grain for the winter. This does not make sense. The main reason is that they have not evolved past anything that looks like Apatasaurs. That is they are still very big, move along on all fours, and do not have hands that can grasp anything. And yet they have somehow built a house and a granary and plow the ground with their noses. The most absurd thing is that they are vegetarians and live in a forest and instead of eating the trees around them are planting itty bitty things of corn. Animated movies always take a certain leaps when they anthropomorphize animals, but this can only go so far. For instance the fish in “Finding Nemo” talked and had dreams and anxieties but they never ceased being fish. What makes the best films of Pixar work is that recognition the audience has when they are presented with the fanciful. Sure, there are not actual emotional beings in our head at a control panel but if there were, it is conceivable that they would work the way they do in “Inside Out.” Wall-E gained a personality over several thousand years but he never ceased being a trash compactor. In “The Good Dinosaur,” the dinosaurs are no longer dinosaurs. The Apatasaurs are farmers but there is no intuitive reason why Apatasaurs would become farmers. And there is no intuitive reason why Tyrannasaur Rexes would become cowboys on a cattle trail. And there is no intutitive reason why Velociprators would become redneck cow stealers. All of this is very well committed to (the nicest touch has to be the casting of Sam Elliot as the father T-Rex) but because none of it seems more than arbitrary the movie has this aura of strangeness that permeates every scene. There are no “Aha!” moments. It is more like, “okay I guess we are doing this now.”

So the movie does not work on a fundamental level. At the same time, it has got to be some sort of pinnacle in animation. In fact, I can see why the sunk cost fallacy of this idea perhaps had so many legs. The storyline has to do with Arlo, the yound apatasaurus, becoming lost and having to find his way home through the wilderness. The animators at Pixar were grandly inspired to say the least at the challenge of composing an entire movie’s worth of landscape scenes. You almost never see this in an animated movie because I expect it is an excruciatingly hard thing to do. I mean imagine drawing a mountain and taking the time to draw every goddamn tree on it. Or drawing a churning river and making the water look like real water. In fact, nature in this movie is so grand and ever present in large epic ways that it is fair to call it the antagonist of the story. I have no idea how this movie was made but I would not be surprised if Pixar did a lot of groundbreaking innovating here. I really wish the egg had not broken at the start line.

One may want to give Pixar a shout out for making an original movie at all. They have so many great brands in their catalog that they could (and have plans for) moneymaking sequels ad infinitum. “The Good Dinosaur,” directed by first timer Peter Sohn encapsulates the reasons big studios can be so risk adverse. It is very hard to take to spend several hundred million dollars on a movie and have it come out subpar. Then again, this year’s “Inside Out” is the flip side to that. It was also an original and it hit the big time. In a year that Jurassic World broke box office records it would have been fair to assume it would be the other way around. William Goldman once had something to say about that. Keep making original movies Pixar, pretty please.

p.s. Thanks for the druggy scene. That was funny.

Spotlight (5/5 Stars)

“Spotlight” is not so great as it is important. This reviewer attends the school that any subject matter no matter how unimportant has the potential to be elevated to perfection by a great artist. But there are some subject matters that are so important already any perceived effort at elevation may seem unduly indulgent or distracting. When Roger Ebert reviewed Steven Spielberg's “Schindler’s List,” he made a point to praise the absence of any of Spielbergian usual directorial flourishes. The movie was about the Holocaust. It would have been disrespectful to do anything fancy with the camera. Such is the same category “Spotlight” finds itself in. It is a movie about the group of reporters at the Boston Globe who broke the Catholic Church paedophilia scandal in 2002. Again the best praise I can give to the director/writer Thomas McCarthy is that he does not seem to be there at all. The direction is as straightforward as possible and nothing is heightened with unneeded suspense or dumbed down when a complicated explanation of court motions or journalistic procedures is needed. 

There are actually two stories in this movie and they complement each other. The Boston Globe in the late nineties was facing like every other local newspaper in America a crisis of falling readership and vanishing advertising revenue due to free digital content. There are layoffs and then there are more layoffs. The Globe is bought by the New York Times and they import a new head editor named Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber). The man is a Jew from Florida. That is to say he is not Irish Catholic from Boston like everyone else at the newspaper. It is his idea to look closer at a couple of stories the Globe has already done about a priest named Gagin accused of child abuse. A lawyer named Mitchell Garabedian said Cardinal Law of the Boston Archdiocese knew about Gagin for a long time and did not defrock him or turn him into the authorities. The court documents that may prove this accusation are sealed and Marty Baron wants to sue the church to unseal those documents.

There is not some great hurry to get onto this story by the people at the Globe. Nobody is really against it as much as it seems like they just don’t want to do it or even think about it. Only Mike Rezendes, the hungry young reporter played by Mark Ruffalo, is eager for the assignment. He is on screen about a minute before he already becomes everybody’s favorite character. Anyway the newspaper’s investigative team, Spotlight, takes on the task of delving a little bit deeper. The first task is to find the lawyer played by Stanley Tucci. Now this guy is a character and it matters too. His insight in one scene is enlightening to say the least.

He is talking to Mike and asks about the new editor. It is noteworthy that it is a Jew from out of town, he says, I should know I’m Armenian. (Mike is Catholic, but Portugese and lapsed). “It takes an outsider to put a light on this sort of thing. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse a child.” In other words, everybody is guilty in some respect.

What is perhaps the most astonishing thing for the reporters is how little needs to be done before the story becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. And whenever they push a little harder and perhaps put a little more pressure on their targets, they get accusatory blowback about themselves. At one point the editor of Spotlight Walter 'Robby' Robinson (played by Michael Keaton) confronts a lawyer who has settled many cases with the church and demands a list of names. He provides one of the best “tough journalist” lines in the movie. “We got two stories here. One is about degenerate clergy. The other is about a bunch of lawyers turning child abuse into a cottage industry. Which one do you want us to write because we're writing one of them?” The lawyer is taken completely aback before he retorts with some emotion that all Robby has to do is check back issues of the Boston Globe. He sent them a list of twenty names five years ago. When Woodward and Bernstein were immortalized in “All the President’s Men” it made those two journalists look like super sleuths. This story is as much about a failure of journalism as much as it is a triumph of it. But even looking at it both ways, it becomes clear why local newspapers are very important. If the Boston Globe did not finally report this story, nobody would have. The national networks on TV certainly would not have come anywhere near this story. It is a very bad thing that investigative teams within local newspapers like Spotlight are becoming an extinct species.

For those interested in the subject matter (or all Catholics), this movie would make a great double feature with the documentary, “Deliver Us From Evil,’ which is about the church sheltering predator priests in California. (There is also a really good double feature in the journalism side. There I would recommend The Wire: Season 5). The complicity of the church is absolutely astounding and although there have been apologies and court settlements, very little has actually been done about the underlying policy that generates such an enormous amount of abuse. After all, what the Boston Globe took pains to explain is that this is not a few bad apples, it is a psychological phenomenon that springs from the celibacy requirement of priests and affects about 6% of the priest population. When the reporters learn that, they do the math. They were looking at 13 priests. Boston has 1500 priests. 6% of that population is 90 priests. Disturbingly they actually find 87 priests in Boston and confirm the number with an inside source from the church. It is a number that is absolutely stunning and there is a haze of silent desperation that hangs over the end of the movie. Sure it is good that the Globe finally uncovered the story, but if there were 87 predator priests in Boston, how did they miss it for so many years? The answer to that may lie in a conversation between the archbishop and the new editor. The archbishop states that it is in Boston’s good for its institutions to work together. Marty Baron disagrees. “Actually I feel for a paper to fulfill its function, it should stand alone.” Society needs its outsiders.

Spotlight should be any easy nomination for Best Picture and Best Writing (Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy). I would also like at least one actor to be nominated from the ensemble as a supporting actor. The movie has great performances by Stanley Tucci, Mark Ruffalo, and Michael Keaton. Take your pick. 

Spectre (3/5 Stars)

It would be unfair to comment only on the drawbacks of Spectre without at first highlighting the things it brings to the table that other films simply cannot accomplish. That would be the epic globetrotting landscapes of the James Bond franchise. This movie directed by the returning Sam Mendes (Skyfall, American Beauty) with a new cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Her, Let the Right One In) is especially impressive in this regard. It was shot on film in the classic style and plays great on a big screen (I saw it at the Ziegfeld). The exotic locales include Mexico City during the Dia de los Muertos festival, Rome bathed in a nighttime orange-green glow of conspiracy, London in a chilly bureaucratic blue, a supervillain headquarters in the middle of the desert, and at least one beautifully soft lit train interior great for white tuxedos and fistfights. It really looks good but enough about that.

Spectre seems to be the culmination of the last three Daniel Craig Bond films. At various times in the movie the images of past characters find themselves on screen. Included are Eva Green from Casino Royale and Judi Dench from Skyfall. Conspicuously absent are any characters from Quantum of Solace; a movie that I really liked for reasons everybody else hated i.e. a realistic supervillain scheme. All of the shadowy bad guys in the previous movies are connected to a secret organization called Spectre that has an octopus as a mascot. It’s really big and does a lot of things. And here is where the last series of movies finally experiences a thematic disconnect between the reactionary pedigree of the franchise and the radical version of the Daniel Craig James Bond.

The James Bond supervillains have historically been colorful silly things. They generally have some outlandish goal like wanting to take over the world (or blowing it up). They have exhorbitantly expensive secret lairs. They have exotic henchmen with quirky ways of killing people. None of these things are all that believable. The Daniel Craig series of movies took the silliness out of the franchise. They took away almost all of the gadgets. They took away the scene stealing physical deformities of the villains. They involved evil schemes that were more or less real (in fact the scheme in Quantum of Solace actually happened which is the main reason I thought the movie had some serious chutzpah.) Heck even the blatant promiscuity is gone. I believe Daniel Craig refuses sex at least once in each of his movies. In this one, the refusal takes place within the first ten minutes during an impressively long tracking. It feels like a nice inside joke. The effect of all this seriousness combined with the retention of superior action sequences and decent character development has produced, I would argue, the best Bond movies in the franchise. Spectre has the look of the last three art house Bond movies but the plot of one of the old sillies. The whole thing feels like a setup to the production of more of the forgettable kind of Bond movies. It seems counterintuitive to me that the last three great James Bond movies would culminate into a standard James Bond movie. But that is me. James Bond movies do have a structure and the franchise has been around for a very long because that structure works for the most part.

If you have many Bond movies there are plenty of tropes here that you will recognize. The running joke of Bond’s propensity to destroy all of the equipment built by the continually annoyed Q (Ben Whishaw) is on full display here. Bond flirts with Moneypenney (Naomi Campbell). Bond rebels against M (Ralph Fiennes now). Bond gets captured by the bad guy, tied to a gurney, and uses a trick watch to escape. There is even a scene involving the love interest (Lea Seydoux) tied to a chair with a ticking time bomb and Bond has to decide whether to save her and probably die or just save himself. You have seen all of this before, but rarely in the Daniel Craig series, (or shot so beautifully by a great director and cinematographer team), which always took itself more seriously than the previous installments.

Nowhere does the disconnect present itself so glaringly then when the evil scheme presents itself. Spoiler alert I guess although I don’t think you will care so much by this reveal. The scheme is a world dragnet of surveillance, the sort Edward Snowden told us about and is in vogue currently as a supervillain plot. James Bond’s part of the British Secret Service MI:6 is portrayed as the responsible old fashioned way of doing spy stuff. Of course it isn’t. I mean the first scene of this movie has James Bond going AWOL in Mexico City having a fistfight in a helicoptor over a parade of several thousand innocent bystanders. It is a seriously dangerous irresponsible stunt by a agent going rogue agaist all orders. I know this is a James Bond movie but I wouldn’t judge the scene on its safety to the public if the movie itself did not intend to grandstand against the surveillance issues of our times and take the position that those are worse. There are too many dramatic conversations where characters inveigh vaguely against the danger of a police state in between set pieces of extraordinary violence that only with movie magic would not kill scores of innocent bystanders.

But let’s be positive about some of those set pieces because they are very good. My favorite parts of the movie have to do with the henchmen, played by a former pro wrestler named Dave Bautista who first came on the movie scene in last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy. He is a big brute of a man. After an awkward introduction he becomes the antagonist for a great car chase through Rome. It’s thrilling and very prettily shot and I was impressed that they got access to the Vatican. James Bond gets away but Dave Bautista catches up on a train as James Bond, in a white tuxedo, and Lea Seydoux, in an elegant dress, are sitting down to drinks. He bursts in from another car and havoc ensues. The fight is interesting in that it becomes clear that James cannot win it. Bautista is too big and too strong. It is a very cool thing to watch. I was wondering if they could end it in a way that wasn’t bullshit. They did.

I wish Cristoph Waltz was more entertaining as a Bond villain to me. On paper he would seem to be perfect. But I can’t say it was a particularly memorable performance or character. Oh and the bad guy from BBC's Sherlock Holmes is in this movie as well. He had far more potential on paper too. 

Crimson Peak (2/5 Stars)

If you had asked me what I thought about director Guillermo Del Toro before I had seen Crimson Peak I may have answered, “He’s like Tim Burton, but scary.” Both men have this undying affinity for the macabre and their movies are works of art to that end. But whereas Tim Burton has long ago forgotten what scared him about ghastly figures, Guilermo has made at least one great movie, “Pan’s Labyrinth” that tapped into true horror. I was hoping “Crimson Peak” would be more like the latter but unfortunately it is more like former. Whatever shock value the undead may have had in Guillermo's earlier movies has worn off and now he presents them like Burton does, all style and no suspense.

The movie stars Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) as a young aspiring novelist in the era of Victorian Gothic Romance. She is subject to sexism by chauvinist editors who do not like her romantic stories that have ghosts in them. This is not too big a plot point and is more of an excuse for the character to comport herself in an annoying way that suggests she has two centuries foreknowledge of being on the right side of history. 

Her budding feminism takes a back seat when she meets a dark handsome count (Tom Hiddleston) whom she feels she should dislike greatly. He is an Englishman from a declining family who is seeking investors for a clay pit dredger he has designed. They hit it off during a waltz at a ball and it seems like wedding bells until something odious is uncovered by a private investigator. Her father threatens the man to break off the engagement in a cruel and public way or he will reveal to his daughter this dark dishonest lie behind his betrothal promise. Take a moment and review that last sentence. If the secret were told to the daughter she would certainly not marry the man, thereby in all probability breaking off the engagement in a prudent and quiet manner. The father takes his course of action because he loves his daughter. Actually he obviously hates her but the movie does not seem to consider this. Compounding his daughter’s woes he is murdered the next day and she marries the count anyway because of course she has no idea why she should not marry him or even suspect foul play.

If I seem unduly vague about the deep dark secret it is because the movie is too. We are not told what the secret is until the last act of the movie. It should also be noted that Mia’s mother died when she was young and her ghost visits her at night and gives her cryptic warnings. She enters the room in the creepiest way possible and whispers “Beware of Crimons Peak!” This too is because she loves her daughter but really could this ghost be more unhelpful. Although it is not revealed what Crimson Peak refers to for a very long time, it could not be easier to figure out what is meant once Mia moves to England and stares at the Count’s estate for the first time. It is obviously haunted and in fact has been especially designed by Guillermo to to look haunted. This detail escapes our young lady.

There is a true disconnect here between production design and what would be considered honest human reactions. The fault lies all over but it begins with Guillermo Del Toro who has put quite a lot of work into making everything in the movie look extravagantly horrible from the mansion, to the costumes, to the macabre undead ghosts, but does not expect the characters to react to them as if they are seeing them. A good example is when our lady sees her first ghost in the mansion. It is a grosteque anatomically correct blood soaked man with half his flesh ripped off. It stalks toward her. She is frightened but not nearly frightened enough by all human standards. And once she leaves the room she is a little jazzed which is the same to to say that she is impossibly calm. Then there is the sister of our Count played by Jessica Chastain. Hers is an awful one-note performance of disdain and malevolence. She does not even pretend to put a conceit of civility while the Count is courting our young lady. This fazes our lady but not enough for us to believe that she is the intelligent woman the movie would have us believe she is. To say that Mia Wasikowska’s performance is wrong is to cover over the fact that the character itself is unbelievable and the story impossible. 

In conclusion, Guillermo has pour all of his efforts into the production design and treated his characters like afterthoughts. Many times a good production design will help performances by making the world the characters inhabit more believable. Here it does the opposite. Guillermo is certainly a great visual artist but that does not necessarily translate into good storytelling when it forces characters to react in weird and unnatural ways. Not all bad production design is cheap and devoid of love. 

I don’t really a critical thing to say about this but it does merit mentioning: Mia Wasikowska’s hair is both the best possible style (while up) and worst possible style (while down) in this movie.

Given that the ghosts are generally unexplained and our lady’s reactions to them are bewilderingly muted, I started wondering half way through if they were even dangerous. They were certainly not particularly scary at any point. There does happen to be an unflinching exposition of gore at the end of Crimson Peak. I don't have a problem with gore as far as to say that it needs to be earned. The audience should be engaged in the story to a point that when our lady cracks Chastain's head in with a shovel, the reaction is not accompanied by bad laughs and groans. This is a bad movie. Guillermo needs to find something that scares him next time. This is just so much fluff.

Bridge of Spies (4/5 Stars)

Steven Spielberg has been around so long now that it is fair to say that his style isn’t like old school filmmaking as much as it is old school filmmaking. His fluid framing, the polish of the dialogue, and the frequency of virtuous themes represent the Platonic ideal all other filmmaking either imitate, elaborate upon, or reject. “Bridge of Spies,” has all the hallmarks of a very by the book movie. There are no missteps mainly because the movie takes very few chances. If you are acquainted with Spielberg, you will recognize a lot of his signature moves that he has already proven are effective in many other movies. “Bridge of Spies” is the safest movie in theaters right now. I doubt there will be many people who won’t like it. But isn't like this is Spielberg's best movie as much as it feels like a breather between great movies.

“Bridge of Spies,” is a historical period piece set in the Cold War late 1950s about an admirable man named James Donovan. He was an insurance lawyer who was summoned to represent in court a captured soviet spy named Rudolph Abel (played by Mark Rylance). Nobody really wants Abel to not be anything other than guilty but at the same time there is this whole American Constitution thing and everybody deserves a capable defense. Donovan proves capable enough to save his client from execution.

Then things take an interesting turn when an American spy named Francis Gary Powers is shot down over Russia. Donovan is called upon to negotiate an exchange of spies. This will all know from our history books, he succeeds at doing. What makes this story new (and probably why Spielberg chose to make a movie about it) is the revelation that Donovan went out of his way to also exchange a release of an American student named Prior from East Germany at the same time. The U.S. government really doesn’t care whether the student gets released as long as Powers comes back so Donovan’s mission is entirely altruistic and self-imposed. He is in fact negotiating not only with the Soviets, the East Germans, but also the C.I.A. And he deserves every bit the title of master negotiator. Donovan is played by Tom Hanks perfectly cast as a smart idealistic American everyman.

The movie is but a series of conversations and it is to the credit of Spielberg and the writers (which happen to include Joel and Ethan Coen) that there is an intriguing amount of trick storytelling that interrupt the what could have been easily stale scenes. Actually we can look a little further into some specific scenes because it is a really good example of superior filmmaking. Take for instance the scene where James Donovan brings up the idea of representing the spy to his wife and children around the dinner table. What needs to happen in this scene is he has to tell his wife about the case and she has to voice the reasons not to do it: social shame, helping the soviets, somebody else’s problem, etc. The scene has a subplot to it. In the previous scene Donovan has his assistant cancel a dinner date to work late on the new case (it is after all just a Tuesday.) At the family dinner Donovan’s daughter reveals that she was just stood up by her boyfriend. It becomes clear that the daughter and the assistant are dating but Donovan doesn’t know it. This is pretty funny and is good for a couple of laughs. Now the interesting part: the scene ends and the daughter and the assistant are never heard from again in the entire movie. That is to say the subplot is a red herring whose sole function is to provide some laughs during the dinner table scene not because these are important characters. Or take the scene where Donovan meets the East German ambassador for the first time. The ambassador pours two drinks while his back is to Donovan. He turns around with the two glasses. The camera tilts down to look at the glasses and then tilts back up to see Hanks’ quizzical expression. This camera move and the expressions stereotypically imply that the drink might be poisoned. The drink isn’t poisoned and there will never be a poisoning in the movie but Speilberg inserted those moves in for purposes of suspense for the sake of suspense. After all the audience does not know whether the drink is poisoned (or whether the previously mentioned romantic subplot goes anywhere) so it does not really matter whether it is or not as long as the audience feels that it might be for a moment and becomes more involved in the scene. This sort of thing shows off Spielberg’s knowledge of a movie audience's general attention span. Right when a talking scene might start to get boring he will figure out a way to instill some suspense or some joke whether it has anything to do with the storyline or not and it always works. 

 

One more thing should get some notice and that is the performance of Mark Rylance as the Soviet spy Rudolph Abel. He underplays the role in such a sublime way that it becomes almost comedic. He is not afraid of the U.S. government as much as he is just resigned to everything. He does not particularly care whether he gets a defense or not. At one point he comments, “The boss is not always right, but he is always the boss.” What an incredibly Soviet thing to say. Whereas when an injustice happens to an American he may actually get mad about it or worry about the outcome. The difference I suppose is that in America our ideals and rights give us hope that justice may prevail and so a fight for justice is worth it. 

Why do I feel like somebody is trying to teach me something. Anyway good movie, Dad. 

Steve Jobs (3/5 Stars)

Steve Jobs, an unconventional biopic about one of the founders of Apple, was written for the screen by the great Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network), directed by the great Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), and stars the great Michael Fassbender (Hunger, Shame) as the titular tech mogul. It is not a great movie and it seems to be mostly Aaron Sorkin’s fault. Let’s jump into it right away.

Jumping into it right away is the first big problem. Sorkin has structured his movie unconventionally to say the least. The movie is divided into three acts, each act being the hour before a product release. In 1984 it is the Macintosh computer, in 1987 it is the Next computer, and in 1996 it is the iMac. The hour before the house is full of chanting fanboys is a very nerve-wracking busybody time. Steve goes around being a total dick to everybody else in the story. In the first act he must have the Macintosh say “hello.” There is a system error and the technical people in the background cannot make it work. Who cares, they posit. It is two seconds in an hour and a half presentation. Steve does not take many perfectly reasonable explanations for an answer and at one point threatens a subordinate with public humiliation. He also gets angry when they can’t turn off the fire exit lights during the presentation. He also refuses to grant his co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen, interesting casting choice) a favor in mentioning the Apple2 team, seemingly because he does not personally approve of the product even though it is the company’s only bestseller. I have no doubt that all of these things actually happened. But that does not mean it is good movie making to dwell on these things. Or to put it a better way, it is not good movie making to only dwell on the aggravating things that happen before a public presentation. Why am I watching a biopic on Steve Jobs? Is it to dwell on the perfidies and sins of a very successful and famous man? Or is it to gain some greater understanding of why he was successful warts and all? This movie shows the warts but it doesn’t show or explain the greatness. The result is a main character that engenders no sympathy. We get hints at why his products are successful. At one point he says he got rid of the Newton hand held device because of its stylus. It does not utilize all of the digits on one’s hand, he explains. Unfortunately this is a throw away line and the enlightenment ends there. I want to know how he got to that realization. What explains why he had that insight? Once that is established he can be as much of an asshole as he apparently was and the movie will still work. But here, I’m just watching an asshole period. I don’t want to do that.

It fills very odd to say that Danny Boyle should not have been chosen to direct a particular movie, but there you go. Again the problem starts with the movie’s structure. It takes place in basically real time in only three places. If that sounds like the structure of a play instead of a movie, that’s because it is the structure of a play. Before each presentation Steve has a moment with four people, his technical engineer (Michael Stuhlberg), his estranged girlfriend and daughter, Steve Wozniak, and the CEO Jeff Scully (Jeff Daniels). In these conversations the characters speak as if they are in a play. What do I mean by that? In a play, because the writer does not have the ability to easily leave the scene and go to a completely different place, the writer makes the characters speak at great length about what happened in the past and how they feel about it. People in plays do not speak the way people do because the audience would not understand what is going on. This generally does not work in movies because the writer can go wherever he wants to go. Movies are not confined by space and time. So it does not make sense when the characters give exposition that everybody in the scene already knows. This happens frequently and leads to several characters saying several times inane things like “I already know that” and “didn’t we already have this argument?” A line that really takes the cake happens near the end where Steve Jobs having gone through the four torments for a third time wonders aloud if he has to see three ghosts before every presentation he does. That’s sort of funny but it is not good funny. The only reason Steve Jobs sees three ghosts is because Aaron Sorkin wrote the movie that way. This joke is the equivalent of somebody choosing to wear an idiotic shirt, pointing to it, and saying ‘who wears a shirt like this? What an idiot.” In essence it is the admission of clumsy writing and I’m glad Sorkin can laugh at himself but I would rather he did not write so clumsily.

But the greater probem with play writing is that it does not conform to the attention span of a movie audience. As Charlie Kaufman once said, “Theater is live. Movies are dead.” The immediate presence of a human being in front of you is more exciting than seeing one on the screen. How many times have you seen a three-hour play that felt like an hour and a half movie? Because of that, characters in plays can play speak (talking at length about the past and their feelings) without the audience growing tired of it. It generally does not work in movies because it gets tedious. Because movies can show instead of tell this is what they generally do. There are ways around this. A famous one is the Sorkin walk-and-talk but I had not really seen it pulled off until I watched “Birdman” and that was with an extraordinary directorial effort. The characters playspeak but it still works because the entire movie is in one continuos shot and that lends an immediate presence to the action. But “Steve Jobs” is not made in that way. It is made in the purely cinematic way that Danny Boyle generally directs his movies. It does not fit the way it needs to fit. That is what I mean when I say Danny Boyle is badly cast.

The movie has plenty of good stuff in it. The talent is just not focused on what will make the movie work as a whole. You have got a bunch of great people working at odds with one another. The silver lining is that the stuff that does not work is generally innovative. That means the astute filmmaker can watch this movie and have a good idea of why certain choices do not work. They may also have a hint at a good movie that was lost. Take the performance of Michael Fassbender. Notice how the character of Steve Jobs is noticeably softened (somewhat) and friendlier in the third act. What happened between the multiple failures of the first and second act and the ultimate triumph of the third act? It seems like the character changed and stopped being such an asshole. Perhaps that transformation would make a good movie someday. More conventional sure but better. 

The Martian (5/5 Stars)

Science. It works, bitches.

- XKCD T-shirt

“The Martian,” like this year’s other great blockbuster “Mad Max: Fury Road” is a movie that would not have been possible before the silent revolution in moviemaking that took place early this century. It is a niche blockbuster that combines the sort of expensive spectacle you have seen before with an unapologetic high common denominator focus of a particular audience. With Mad Max it was gearheads and metal freaks, in this case its engineering nerds and space wonks or whatever they call themselves. Gone are all the trappings of a Hollywood movie. There is no love triangle or family drama, no superpowers or aliens, no class warfare or crime, or even sex and violence. There is a Mars mission already underway at the start. There is a sandstorm and the team has to abort. During the abort, astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is struck by debris and presumed dead. The crew leaves Mars without him. But he is not dead. He is very much alive and now marooned on Mars. It will be another four years before the next mission can get there. How will he stay alive?

No, really, how exactly will he stay alive? Because the math (and there is a lot of scenes of Mark counting things and making calculations) says he will starve in 300 sols (Mars days) if he keeps to the rations he has stored. What follows for the entire length of the movie is a series of engineering problems. Mark has to use his knowledge of botany, chemistry, physics, and several other nerdy things to stay alive on this alien planet for years with nothing but the tools that were brought for a thirty day excusion. In the past studios were very hesistant to give a bunch of money to a movie that would take ten minutes to take the audience through a step-by-step chemical process on how to create water (interesting spoiler: it takes fire to create water) so the main character can grow potatoes. But this movie has taken that chance and given the box office receipts, it will succeed wildly in finding an audience nobody cared to cater to before. 

If you are into this sort of thing. If you are not turned off by people being smart and building cool things, then “The Martian” plays as an almost absurdly easy crowd-pleasing movie. The optimism and can-do attitude and cooperativeness of the best of science is all over the place. Whereas many other mainstream movies are individualistic in that stupid Ayn Randian sort of way (good me against bad world!), Mark Watney’s experience is no Robinson Crusoe type of existence. He is surviving by standing on the shoulders of giants: the knowledge passed down to him from his education, the equipment built for him by the NASA network, and once he achieves communication with NASA, the around the clock expertise, problem solving (math!), and selflessness of everybody on the ground and in space.

For a movie that is ostensibly about one person on one planet, the star power of the cast belies that it is merely that. In the spaceship, the rest of the crew includes Commander Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, and the underrated Michael Pena. On the ground Jeff Daniels runs the show, Kristin Wiig is his press secretary, Sean Bean is in charge of the astronauts, Benedict Wong and his team builds the rockets over there at the Jet Propulsion Lab, Chiwetel Ejiofor is the satellite expert, and Donald Glover is calculating the fail-safe plan in Astrodynamics. Everybody is working together to save Mark Watney and though there are many arguments about the best way to do it, nobody is working against each other. Thus although there is plenty of suspense, there is pleasantly no drama.

Not that it’s easy. And this is where this kind of movie, even as successful as it will be, will be hard to replicate. It was based on a book written with no time constraints by an engineer in network with a bunch of nerds who were checking his work for scientific errors. The whole point was to be as scientifically accurate as possible not merely do enough to assuage an audience. I do not know how to replicate that on purpose but I sure hope some studio will try.

Ridley Scott directed this movie. He made his name a long time ago with such movies as Alien, Blade Runner, and Thelma and Louise. It has been awhile since he has been culturally relevant but he never stopped being an extremely competent filmmaker. He was the perfect person to be in charge of this movie, which is less about drama and more about technical expertise. Matt Damon stars as Mark Watney. This too is perfect casting as he excels at playing exceptionally smart/charming/handsome people.

One last note: would you be surprised that this movie was almost Rated R? As I said before, no violence and no sex, but there are Fucks abounding. The rule is that you have one Fuck. Two Fucks is an R.There are at least six or seven Fucks in this movie. The astute filmmaker will take notes on how you can have a Fuck in a movie without adding to the Fuck count. And yes take note on when to use that one real Fuck. I think they made the right choice here. After performing self-surgery without anesthesia is fine use of your one Fuck. Having said that, Fucks notwithstanding, all parents who want their kids to go to college and study something other than art history should take them to see this movie, It is a wonderful humorous optimitistic story about determination and teamwork that is appropriate for kids of all ages.

Trainwreck (4/5 Stars)

The first scene illustrates the delights and detriments of this movie aptly enough. It is a flashback from the 1980s (you can tell by the video camera film stock) in which a father explains to his two daughters why mommy and daddy are getting divorced. The father explains that monogamy is unrealistic and gives an example of a daughter’s favorite doll. “Now imagine,” he explains, “you can play with that and only that doll for the rest of your life. Would you like that?” His daughter shakes her head. The point is struck home but the father continues with a list of scenarios in which other dolls may be preferable to play with. First of all it should be noted that Colin Quinn plays the father. Colin Quinn is not an actor. He is a tried and true standup comedian that always plays himself. That is to say he employs no impersonations in his act. In fact this might be his first film role ever. 2^nd: His delivery in this scene is funny in a standup comedian way. It gets a lot of laughs. It also however is not a realistic scene. Any other father if he had the balls to explain the unrealism of monogamy at all would not have gone on to illustrate an absurd amount of examples to get the point across. Such is “Trainwreck,” a movie full of standup comedians telling a lot of jokes that are very funny but take away in some parts the reality of the scenes. This is not a good movie in several ways but I feel I must give it four stars on priniciple given how much I laughed during it. It is a comedy.

Judd Apatow directed it. Amy Schumer wrote and stars as the titular trainwreck, a woman that drinks too much and sleeps with way too many men. The cast is composed of a lot of people who probably would not have done a movie but for this particular writer and director. In a small role as a homeless man outside her apartment is Dave Attell, another veteran stand up comedian. The aforementioned Colin Quinn plays her nursing home bound cantankerous father. Mike Birbiglia (another stand up) plays the fiancé of her non-trainwreck sister. And there are a couple of cameos by John Cena and Lebron James that aren’t really cameos. That is to say Lebron James is playing himself yes but in the best friend role to the romantic lead (Bill Hader), his surgeon. It is very funny but also odd because there is the standard cameo joke: Hey there’s Lebron James! And then he just stays around for many scenes and has thoughts and feelings as if he were a real person or something. The movie tries to have it both ways and since it is mainly funny and this is a comedy it works. But it also does not work because if Lebron James is a real character than the cameo joke should not be there. In a way I am arguing for less funny right now for more slow burn impact later. It should be noted that Amy Schumer does not regularly make movies. She makes sketch comedy and before that was a stand up comedian. That explains that.

Amy (the character’s name is Amy because why not?) works for a dumb lad mag. Her strange and boorish boss, played by Tilda Swinton, assigns her to a piece about a sports surgeon because Amy has absolutely no interest in sports and thinks that they are dumb and Swinton thinks that this dynamic will lend the piece conflict and suspense. Bill Hader plays the surgeon. Over a couple of interviews they get into bed in an absurdly quick time (not really his idea). The couple does not so much have chemistry together as the scenes they are in are just consistently funny. Judd Apatow has always tried to insert an emotional center to his movie and generally succeeds in doing so (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People). But here it any sort of emotional catharsis generally falls flat. Let me elaborate on that a little more in a theoretical sense.

A counterintuitive side effect of the ever-expanding role of women in cinema is the ever-brighter portrayal of men. What greater paragons of masculinity can be found then in Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaughy of Tina Fey’s “30 Rock” or (especially) Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson of Amy Poehler’s “Parks and Recreation.” And when Kristen Wiig wrote her masterpiece “Bridesmaids,” her romantic foil played by Andy O’Dowd was a nice, smart, and mature guy. And when this year Amy Schumer wrote “Trainwreck,” she too created a romantic foil played by Bill Hader who is also a nice, smart, and mature guy. In fact, he’s a surgeon, physically attractive (read tall), and rich. And I suspect if I bothered to watch more stuff written by women there would be more examples than these four.

What does this mean? Well it is practical. As a writer it is not atypical to write the love story from the point of view of your own gender. Really, it would feel weird not to. And given that the character is generally informed by one’s own experiences it is not unusual that the main character is more complex than the romantic opposite. Given that most stories follow a hero’s journey type of format where the main character starts one way, goes through a crisis, learns something or doesn’t, and changes for better or worse, it makes sense for most of the personality defects to be on the side of the main character. It can also be said that we tend to idealize the people we are in love with playing down whatever bad traits they have and focusing on the good ones or at least the ones that make us a better person (which would also be useful to the plot).

But I have also heard many charges of sexism when this dynamic is played out in the typical Adam Sandler comedy or the the like wherein a fashionable, smart, mature woman who spends several hours in the gym everyday is interested in a fat immature slob with a fear of commitment. This speaks to a sense of masculine entitlement. Now I wouldn’t rule sexism out entirely (especially in the employment ratio of writers and directors) but am far more willing to believe that this more about many cases of individual incompetence as opposed to a conspiracy. In other words, most people are just mediocre and most romantic comedies have this dynamic because most writers are men. There is not a vast Hollywood conspiracy dictating that guys who lack amibition in business and/or health deserve perfect women. Exhibit A for this is Amy Schumer’s “Trainwreck,” in which a chubby, immature, and too promiscuous woman becomes the object of affection for a smart, successful, and talented surgeon. He’s a nice guy and not stupid so there is no particular reason for him to like the main character other than the old “Adam Sandler” reason: this is her movie. See it works both ways and we will probably see more and more of it. Perhaps it will be so equal someday that women will start to appreciate being portrayed so well the way I happen to like Fey’s, Poehler’s, Wiig’s, and Schumer’s idealistic view of guys (mainly because it is so very rare to see them that way).

Amy (4/5 Stars)

I remember the first time I heard an Amy Winehouse song. Like most people it was “Rehab” and perhaps like most people the song made me laugh. Surely it was a sort of tough guy joke like the T-shirt slogan, “AA is for quitters.” But according to this documentary, Amy’s manager really tried to get her to go to rehab and she really said no. And as the song goes, “I ain’t got the time- and if my Daddy’s thinks I’m fine- they tried to make me go to rehab but I won’t go go go,” that too happened. Amy made a deal with the manager that if her father wanted her to go, she would. Amy sat down on her father’s lap, acted all cheerful, told him she was fine, and he agreed that she did not have to go to rehab. In fact, she fired her long time manager and hired her then publicist for the same job. A publicist has a conflict of interest of course in that they make their money by keeping the star out on the road and by necessity out of rehab whereas a manager is paid simply to take care of the star. I could compose a lot of paragraphs like that one in this movie which is a series of bad luck, missed chances, and human failings along the way to a sad and premature death. 

There is a lot of talk of blame for the death of Amy Winehouse at that infamous age of rock star death, 27. And there certainly is a lot of blame to go around. This documentary is very much a postmortem search for why in this day and age of everybody knowing everything about everybody we could not help one with loads of promise and money. We can talk about her clueless family, her sketchy boyfriend/husband, the insanely intrusive paparazzi, and many other things. But at the end of the day I think we can also say that Amy Winehouse made great art that was informed by self-destructive tendencies. Her story is a tragic one in that what made her great also caused her downfall. In this way she is not so different from Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain who also died of drug related causes at the same age (I don’t know enough about Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix to say they had self-destructive tendencies). Perhaps the biggest revelation of this movie is how exactly personal all of her songs were. This is a revelation in this day and age because the music industry is so very manufactured. We no longer think of a break up song as a song really about a break up but as a crowd-sourced focus grouped image of a lowest common denominator version of a break up. But the entire album of “Back to Black” was literally about a bad breakup. And when Amy Winehouse said-

“I cheated myself-

Like I knew I would-

I told you I was trouble-

You know that I’m no good.”

-it is hard to believe that she meant it. But she did. She meant everything she said. And it was dark and sad, and cut and hurt. These elements mixed with an excellent competence made it great. But because of the former I think it is fair to say she never thought that it would make her so rich and famous given that popular trend in music of fake fake fake.

It is a shame we treated her like a punchline. Perhaps, like me, the majority of people never considered that someone would hang such dirty laundry out in public for everybody to see. It must have been incredibly humiliating. Perhaps she should not have done it. Perhaps she should have sung at a mirror in a closet. If Amy Winehouse could have survived, I imagine it would be by pulling a J.D. Salinger and simply disappearing off the face of the Earth. Otherwise she would have to compromise her art and I don’t think she would have found it possible to do that.

This documentary is very much in sympathy with Amy. Given that she grew up with the almost ubiquitous amount of video cameras around we see quite a lot of her befor she was famous. These glimpses do not provide a definition of a person as much as they nod to any even more mysterious and complex personality unseen. One person described her as someone who would try very hard to make you feel special and then ignore you and break your heart. Was she one kind of person or the other, both or neither. We don't know. She had a great jazz voice and she admired many artists that very few (and none her age) were paying attention to anymore. One of the best moments in the film is her reaction to seeing Tony Bennett on a stage to hand out an award that she will go on to win. Her eyes go wide in awe of his presence. The guy is like eighty years old. Nobody else in the room seems to care about him. There is another great moment that provokes a good laugh when her independent and truth telling spirit come out in an interview. An interviewee’s asserts that Tori Amos puts as much truth and emotion as she does in her music and Amy Winehouse shows a knee jerk contempt for the comment. She shows bad manners for sure but I think we can all agree that she is correct. Like Kurt Cobain, her appearance on the scene was a perfect combination of pure talent and raw emotion that cut the competition to shreds.

If you want to pick out the biggest mistake I think it would be her marriage to the boyfriend that broke her heart and inspired the album, “Back to Black.” His name was Blake and for a year they got drunk, and loved, and cheated on each other. Then he broke up with her and she wrote and produced the biggest album in the world. Now rich and famous she shows up at his door again. A couple months later they are married. Does this sound familiar to my American friends? Perhaps you’ve read “The Great Gatsby.” This is the same mistake Fitzgerald wrote about. No you can’t play pretend and rewrite the past. There was probably some golden moment when they were in love and super high that she kept trying to recapture. That is what addiction is all about I’ve heard. Trying to recapture the feeling of the first time you were high. And the tragedy is you can’t recapture that feeling no matter how many drugs you do. Getting clean (and growing up) is about admitting defeat and moving on. But Amy died before she could do that.

p.s. It is amazing that this documentary got the full blessing of the family of Amy Winehouse as it is so clearly critical of their behavior. But it also makes sense, as the movie’s main charge towards them is a tremendous naivete towards the precarious condition of Amy. It seems her parents took part in the film because they did not seem to fully grasp how bad they would look in it. That would certainly explain her father’s choice to bring a reality film crew to visit his still in rehab daughter in the Caribbean over Amy’s obvious discomfort with the cameras. It apparently never occurred to him that his daughter was being negatively affected by fame. Amazing.