The Revenant (5/5 Stars)

This much is true: In 1823 on Captain Henry’s expedition up the Missouri River, Hugh Glass was attacked by a bear. He was severely wounded. His compatriots could not carry him all the way back to the fort. Two young men, Bridger (18) and Fitzgerald (23) stayed behind to wait for help as the rest went ahead. Bridger and Fitzgerald abandoned Hugh Glass without food or supplies. Hugh Glass crawled and stumbled the some 200 miles back to the fort alone.

This much is also true: Right around the time Director Alejandro Innaritu and Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki were accepting their respective Oscars for Birdman, an on location film shoot was going on in the frigid winter of Wyoming or South America or some other godforsaken place. The conditions were so terrible that they were starting to leak into the press Apocalypse Now style. “The Revenant” was that movie and watching the movie, it looks like hell froze over on the film shoot. I do not know if this movie will join “Apocalypse Now” and “Fitzcarraldo” in the legendary realms of ridiculously hard film shoots but the affect in the theater is akin to those movies. In other words, this movie does the original true story right. It feels like Leonardo Dicaprio (Hugh Glass) was attacked by a bear, abandoned by his compatriots, and ended up crawling two hundred miles to safety through blizzards and Indian attacks. It is an intense awesome movie.

A main star of the movie (and what separates it from all other Westerns) is the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki. He is well known for two things. First are his long takes. There are plenty in this movie but I hardly recognized or paid attention to them. When watching his previous movies like Gravity and Birdman, the long takes were part of the excitement. They are less so here as Lubezki uses them plenty but does seem to feel as if he needs to use them exclusively. That is to say when it makes story sense to not keep on the same shot, he doesn’t. Second is simply the look of the movie that seems to only occur in movie shot by him. For the past decade he has perfected this beautiful look in movies such as The New World, The Tree of Life, Gravity, Birdman. It must be hard to do because it looks so great and yet he seems to be the only one doing it. “The Revenant” was shot entirely in winter using only natural light. The result is a movie that does not look like any other movie. It is a ghostly haunted visual effect of denotes the hardness and coldness of life at that time. Lubezki rightly was awarded the Oscar for the past two years. He may very well win again this year and he would deserve it. He is in the prime of a spurt of aritistic genius.

Leonardo Dicaprio may very well win his first Oscar this year and he too would deserve it. This actor I believe has achieved a certain Meryl Streep-ness or Philip Seymour Hoffman-ness that makes it seem that he is perfect for every role he finds himself in. The secret is a full on commitment to the role and if there ever was anyone committed to a role it is Dicaprio here. Here he is wrestling a bear, swimming through icy rivers, eating raw meat, and fighting hand to hand with Indians. His last role was “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It takes a special actor to be the right choice for both roles.

Playing his antagonist, Fitzgerald, is an actor that was made for rugged terrain, the art house muscle man Tom Hardy. The movie does a good job of setting up his villainy. He has worked painstakingly for the last six months only for an Indian attack to steal all of the wealth of the expedition. He was half-scalped earlier in his life (he has a scar that makes him partly bald) and so does not particularly like or more importantly trust Hugh Glass’s half Pawnee son. He is a desperate angry man. Between the two is Captain Henry played by Domnhall Gleeson, who is good looking enough to be a man with money but odd looking enough to belong in the 19^th century. This guy is everywhere this year and impressively pulls off many different characters.

I am playing with the idea of drawing up a syllabus of American History through movies and “The Revenant” is one of those movies I would love to have in it. What makes it better in historical terms that any old western is the unflinching way it shows the elements and the noble/savage way it treats Native Americans. This is particularly important because we have a tendency to look at history in black and white terms. But that is not how this movie treats the Akirawa tribe. It humanizes them and gives them appropriate motivations but it also does not hide the fact that they are extremely dangerous and have their own tribal prejudices. It also portrays them as losers in their struggle as is noted by a scene in which Fitzgerald and Bridger walk through the remnants of a massacre of an Indian village. This too is important.  Lastly, what other movie do you know takes place in 1823. No other movie. Exactly. 

Birdman (5/5 Stars)

Or: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance

When Roger Ebert came upon a long shot in a movie he applied the Goodfellas standard to it. This standard referred to Martin Scorsese’s famous shot of Henry Hill taking out his girlfriend to the local nightclub. The shot starts with Hill handing his car keys to the valet and then taking his girl past the long line outside the club into a backdoor through the kitchen (he slips several guys $20 each) and into the main club area where the proprietor brings out a special table just for him and plants it in the front right next to the band. Hill sits down and his friends at the next table buy him a bottle of wine. The shot ends at 3 minutes 13 seconds. Subsequent filmmakers, inspired by Goodfellas, attempted such long shots of their own and Ebert was continually dismayed by what he saw. The copycats got the technicalities correct but missed the point. What made the long shot in Goodfellas great was not that it took a lot of skill and coordination to pull it off (it did), but that it was the correct way to tell the story. Scorsese was relating to the audience how Henry Hill’s position in the mafia opened doors to him that were closed to regular people. The best way to show that would be how quickly he could get a seat in a crowded at the Copacabana in real time. Add on that the song that played over the entire shot, The Crystal’s “Then He Kissed Me,” and the audience also gets a great idea of how his girlfriend felt about the whole thing, i.e. she was super impressed by it. The long shot in Goodfellas is not a showoffy ‘look what I can do with a camera’ conceit. It is the story. That is what makes a long shot great or not great. After all if just making the shooting process as hard as possible were what made it great, then Hitchcock’s “Rope” is the king of long shots (the entire 90 minute movie only has four takes). But it isn’t and you don't really need to see “Rope.” Hitchcock was just playing around with his camera to see if he could do it. There was no reason that movie needed to be told that way.

Which brings us to Director Alejandro Innaritu and Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s “Birdman,” which is not unlike Rope. I mention the cinematographer because he happens to be the best in the business. He works with Terrance Malick (Tree of Life and To the Wonder) and Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men and Gravity) and this is not the first time he has worked in incredibly long shots. In other movies though the long shots generally concerned action scenes. (The point of long shots in action scenes is to give a more realistic ‘you are there!’ momentum to what is happening on the screen. If you have ever seen ‘Children of Men’ and ‘Gravity’ you will know what I mean.) But ‘Birdman’ is not an action movie. It is a story about Riggan Thompson a washed up movie star who was last culturally relevant a quarter century ago when he played the very popular comic book character ‘Birdman.’ He enjoyed great success as ‘Birdman’ but soon became unable to do anything else. When he refused to do “Birdman 4,” his career went down the tubes. Now he is staging an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” on Broadway. He is desperately trying to become a serious artist again and is fighting against the widespread notion that he is a cartoon character and can’t be anything else.

Now why does this need to be shot in one continuous long shot (It is and it is very technically impressive but nevermind let’s apply the Goodfellas standard). Well, the surprise answer is something I have never seen a long shot in a movie ever accomplish. Surprisingly the way the long shots in this movie are used, they actually take the focus off of what the director is doing and allow the audience to focus much more on the actors. It is really kind of exhilarating. Wactching ‘Birdman,’ a movie about people putting on a play, actually feels like a play. It is even written like a play. By that I mean that characters provide through dialogue much more exposition than usual and at other times go into emotional monologues and speeches at length the way that is generally impossible in movie time. You may have noticed that a three hour play basically feels the same length as a two-hour movie. The whole ‘being there’ aspect of a play elongates the audience’s patience whereas movies generally need to move much faster. But here, because of the extraordinarily skilfull camera of Lubezki, the momentum of the long take gives the actors far more leeway for dramatic performances. And boy, do the cast in the movie rise to the occasion. There is some serious throw down acting in this movie and it occurs all the way through it.

Anchoring the movie as Riggan Thomas is none other than Michael Keaton who if you remember him at all you probably remember him as the Tim Burton era Batman. The role is so perfectly tailored to Keaton’s life (his career did have a downturn after he stopped being Batman) that it provokes the question of whether the movie was inspired by him. Probably not but he is the perfect casting decision on paper and it turns out as well in practice. It is a great performance and should be a cinch for an Oscar nomination. Certainly nobody this year has done “more” acting in a movie. Playing against him as his main antagonist (among many) is Edward Norton as one of those crazy method ‘actors’ that throw fits when they drink water instead of gin in a scene when they are supposed to be drinking f*cking gin. Then there is Zach Galifinakis as Riggan’s best friend, agent, and producer. Zach plays the sane one in this movie, a choice that reminded me of the casting of Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The movie is crazy, so why not cast a crazy comedian as the serious one. It works. I liked it. Rounding out the cast is Naomi Watts (a long time actress and newcomer to Broadway), Emma Stone (who has huge eyes), Andrea Riseborough, and Amy Ryan (divorcee of Riggan). All of them do good jobs even if they don’t get the really big moments like for instance running through Times Square in only underwear with a marching band in the distance. Someone does that, won’t tell you who.

‘Birdman’ is a seamless auditory and visual experience. There is an element of magic in the movie that is not fully explained but after awhile does not really need to be. It feels correct and is fairly understood as an extension of the scene’s emotional tone. There are plenty of details that lend to the overall otherworldliness of the movie. A couple of great ones cherry picked from the movie include the fog machines, the Christmas lights at the liquor store, a Japanese critic, and a certain quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth at precisely the right time. Birdman is a must see movie. It is one of the best of the year and should at least net Lubezki’s 2^nd Oscar in as many years.

Babel 11/29/06

I liked this movie and I feel incredibly artsy fartsy saying that. I'm quite sure that if it hadn't been for the fact that I've already seen hundreds of movies, I probably wouldn't have understood this one at all. Having said that I almost didn't understand this movie. It was spoken in six different languages and the subtitles were in Italian. I must have missed half the words and weirdly I think that might have added to my enjoyment of the movie. I just assumed the dialogue was perfect and whatever was happening on the screen was completely motivated. 

Let's see, this movie had three stories. All only distantly connected, the Japanese story hardly connected at all to the other two. We had the Mexican-American story. The American-Morroccan story, and the Japanese story. Six languages, Spanish, English, Morrocan, French, Japanese, Japanese Sign Language. The coolest thing about this movie is that it respects our interest in different cultures. We get great cultural views from a Japanese dance club to a great Mexican wedding. If you can be interested in being a 'fly on the wall' as different kinds of people go about their lives then this movie is for you. If you're expecting something like Crash, which was what this movie was compared to, then you're in for some dissapointment. The storylines run parralel but never intersect. I wanted them to, but then again I liked each of the stories enough that I really didn't care in the end. I finally got why the movie was called Babel half way through. Language barriers.

The only two main actors I recognized were Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Both very good performances. Brad Pitt's characther reminds me alot of George Clooney's charachter in last year's Syriana. They both have beards and find themselves in a Muslim country among other things. He might get a nomination. I don't know. They gave the Oscar to Clooney didn't they.