The Christophers (3/5 Stars)

 

About a decade and a half ago (probably somewhere between 2013-2015), I attended a NerdNite lecture whose subject was Paul Cezanne’s Card Players. A princess from Qatar had just purchased it for approximately $250,000,000. The question we wanted to answer was why? What about this painting demands such a value? Directly below is said painting:

As you can tell just by looking at it, it is a painting of two men playing cards. Is it a decent portrayal of the same? Sure, I guess. I mean, it isn’t obviously bad. We could go through its details, it’s Post-Impressionist, its made with oils, Cezanne took this and that long to create them. None of that matters, at least not when we are talking about what makes a painting’s value rise over six figures. And you can’t just lay the blame at money laundering and dubious tax write-offs. This painting was purchased by this Qatari princess for the National Museum of Qatar, where if I am not mistaken, the general public can go see it. So, this princess really thought it was worth $250 million. 

Two major things. One is fame. Cezanne is famous. Imagine a normal used toaster and how much you would pay for it. (Probably nothing, you would go buy a new toaster). Now, what if I told you that this toaster had been owned by Marilyn Monroe. Now how much would you pay for it? Some of these paintings that are bought for dumb amounts of money are not only painted by famous people, but then owned by famous people, multiplying the fame quotient when they are subsequently auctioned. But for Card Players probably the single most valuable thing about it was that it was one painting in a series of five paintings. And where are the other four Cezanne oil paintings of dudes playing cards? 1) The Barnes Foundation Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; 2) The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; 3) the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, France, and 4) the Courtland Institute of Art in London, England. It seems that this princess thought that by purchasing the fifth Cezanne, she was acquiring prestige. Now, a Cezanne completist would have to travel to some of the world’s most prestigious museums in New York, Paris, London, Philadelphia to see them. And then also Qatar. 

(Maybe also, having never worked a day in her life, the Qatari princess doesn't understand the value of money.)

The above should explain the behavior of the children of a famous artist Julian Sklar (played here by Ian McKellan) at the beginning of The Christophers. They are meeting with a little-known but talented artist Lori Butler (played by Michaela Coel) and proposing that she surreptitiously pose as an assistant for their aging father with the ulterior motive of completing a series of paintings, in storage in his attic, that he started and then abandoned a few decades ago. These paintings are “The Christophers" Series 3, which as is explained, is a set of paintings that themselves are the third installment of two previous series, which are already famous. One of the paintings from Series 2 has just sold for 2 million dollars. What makes up the value of a painting, as noted above, will explain why the paintings themselves don’t seem to matter. What is important is that Lori Butler use the old man’s paints and materials, that way when the completed paintings are “found” after the old man dies, they can be authenticated as his own. The story behind the paintings (they are portraits of a gay lover back when that was taboo), Sklar’s fame (he hosted a popular TV show called “Art Fight” in which he said mean things about amateur paintings), and the fact that they complete a series, is what makes them valuable. The children are confident, with good reason, that they will sell for millions regardless of what they look like. They’ll cut in Lori Butler for a third of it.

Dare I say, this ruse is the most interesting thing about the movie. The majority of it concerns conversations between Lori and Julian in which he pontificates about art and Lori has conflicting emotions about the scheme. Lori is a big fan and a talented artist, but she was once a contestant on “Art Fight”, wherein Julian joked and insulted her, and then thought so little of it that he doesn’t even recognize her when she shows up to steal from him. A fair amount of the movie concerns Julian directing Lori to destroy The Christophers, either by shredding them or by burning them, and her keen attempts to out-psyche and thwart his directives.

This is tiring. Why do we care whether The Christophers are shredded or burned? Would we feel bad for the children (played here by James Corden and Jessica Gunning) who would be denied an inheritance? No, of course not. Do we feel bad for the general public who won’t get to see the great art which is The Christophers, Series 3? Maybe, but are we sure? Because we never get to see The Christophers. So, what is convincing us that they have artistic worth? We just assume they have artistic worth because the characters describe them as having such. The writer/director Steven Soderbergh deliberately keeps the paintings out of view. In one elongated scene, Julian Sklar deliberately completes one of the paintings in a self-described awful fashion, applying pink paint, glitter, and feathers. I say self-described because Soderbergh keeps the camera behind the frame the entire time, so we never get to see what Julian is doing or how it turns out? Why don’t we get to see it? Isn’t that a telling choice?

The answer here is that if we could see the paintings, we could judge them for ourselves, and then we might have our own opinions about them. By keeping them out of our view, we have to play the movie’s game and assume what the characters are saying about them is true.

The problem here of course, and what makes art in general irritating, is that we have to listen to speeches about how the industry is hypocritical by characters that are hypocritical. Well, if we are denied the ability to judge the art on its merits, isn’t it the children that are the least hypocritical characters here? They, along with the movie, are the only ones who seem to intuitively know that it doesn’t matter what the paintings look like. And, let's be honest, you wouldn't make this movie about a not-famous artist who had a bunch of incomplete artwork in his attic. So, why do I have to sit through Julian Sklar’s sanctimony? Someday, I would like to see a movie about how rich people use high art to obtain tax write-offs. I still don’t completely understand how that is done. I bet that would be really interesting, at least more interesting than this.

I’m being harsh on the subject matter, not necessarily about its execution. Writer/Director Steven Soderbergh continues to show off his malleable style. Here is a man who directed Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven, and Haywire, and The Knick, amongst many others in his near 40-year career, who continues to operate towards the subject material, not the other way around. This is a conversational movie. Soderberg uses long takes and wide framing allowing the actors room to give expansive performances. Ian McKellan is 87 years old. Really, we should celebrate him for being upright and memorizing his lines. I’m not sure this is one of his best performances (I haven't seen enough of them), but it is good enough, and he is old enough (i.e. famous enough), to the point where it’ll likely land him a nomination. Michaela Coel is new to me (I know she has been around awhile) and I’m still undecided with her. James Corden does a great job of being greedy and shameless. He should be in more movies. I don't know what exactly happened at the end. One thing I am curious about is: who got paid and by how much? The movie, hypocritically, pretends not to care and aims to keep it vague. But if that was the case, and they were being honest, the paintings would have been shredded and/or burned. Because we still don’t get to see the completed series. All we get to know about them is that they are now famous.

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

The Great 20^th Century Mythos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X-Men: The Last Stand 05/27/06

This movie, the third installment of the X-Men series, literally killed the franchise. I mean seriously, everyone's dead. LIke most characters in today's blockbusters, they are the victims of great special effects. This movie has some of the best visuals one will ever see, but I don't know about you, I seriously couldn't give a shit about landscapes. That's why I didn't paticularly like Brokeback Mountain and that's why I can't give this one a passing grade either.
They call it X-Men but what they should call it is a freak show. This movie suffered like I thought it would in the absence of Bryan Singer, the director of the first two movies. I don't know who directed this one but he didn't much care about the characters. (Rogue has about 3 scenes, Cyclops dies in the first ten minutes, Pyro is incredibly one dimensional) Any identification with any of them comes predominantly from the first two movies in the series, in fact if I hadn't seen the first two already I don't think I would have the slightest idea what was going on in this one. This movie is a roll call for special effects. Since the effects are mutants, the characters basically show up on screen, give us a show, and then leave. Just like the circus. 
It also is a bad sign when the most effective line in the movie is a ripoff of Shakespeare and the funniest line is an expletive. This movie suffers from the disease called no-more-than-two-syllables-in-a-conversation syndrome. Talk about dumb downed for mass appeal.
Another thing I'll say before I stop complaining. Remember how I said alot of people died. Well most of them are shredded into many many pieces. Kids should definetely not see this movie, and it really should have been rated R. 
Two years ago after seeing the horrible Men in Black II, I promised myself, no more sequels. Why oh why do I betray myself so readily