Bill & Ted Face the Music (4/5 Stars)

 

More than most other film franchises, Bill & Ted seems to benefit consistently from low expectations and the suspension of disbelief. The premise of the original movie involved two teenage boys from San Dimas California that dream about being rock-stars, call each other dude, and implore the people they meet to “Be Excellent to Each Other.” They are met by Rufus, a time-traveler from the future, (played by George Carlin), who informs them that they have a glorious destiny to unite the world in song but first have to pass a high-school history presentation. To help them in this regard, he lets Bill & Ted use his time machine to round up historical figures to help them pass. The film somehow works. I think it is because, although Bill & Ted know nothing about history, the movie itself is surprisingly literate. Importantly, the movie is also not snobbish about its education. It perceives the historical figures not as lofty great men, but people, and finds fun in what these people would think of the 1980s. It works much like Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” would work like twenty years later. It is enthusiastic about the past but never uses that knowledge as a platform for superiority. It treats history in a most inclusive, accessible, and excellent way. A tip of the hat to the writers of all three movies, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon. Also, San Dimas High School Football Rules!

Bill & Ted Face the Music keeps intact all of the elements of what made the first Bill & Ted movies work and does just enough to differentiate itself into a new movie. It is a more of a concluding chapter than a breaker of new territory however. There is time travel (like the first movie) and a trip to Hell (like the second movie), but no new surreal concept. What it concerns itself with is the tying up of loose ends. It was foretold in the first movie that Prescott and Logan would write and perform a song that would unite the world. In this movie, we see that destiny fulfilled.

The entanglements of time and heaven/hell travel are given the briefest of surface logic, which is fine for the movie’s purposes. Now middle-aged and so far unsuccessful in uniting the world in song, Bill & Ted are met by the daughter of Rufus (played by Kristen Schaal) who informs them that the world is going to end later that day unless the foretold song is played at a very specific time and place. How specific? Well the movie is about 95 minutes long and Kristen Schall says this at around the fifteen-minute mark, so like in 75 minutes. Classic Bill & Ted movie logic.

But Bill & Ted have not written the song yet. It has been twenty-five years they have been trying to do the same, so how could they do it now by the end of the movie. More Classic Bill & Ted movie logic coming up:

-        Wait, haven’t we been foretold to write this song. That must mean that we are going to do it. We have a time machine, why don’t we just go to the future when we have written the song and take it from ourselves.

-        Excellent idea.

-        Wait, except won’t that be stealing?

-        How is that stealing, when we’re stealing it from ourselves, dude?

But the thing is, it is stealing, and older versions of Bill & Ted don’t like what these younger versions are up to. They excoriate them for being selfish and cutting corners. These are the funniest scenes in the movie with double Alex Winters and Keanu Reeves light-heartedly arguing with each other about time travel ethics.

Meanwhile, Bill & Ted now have two daughters, Billie and Thea, who seem to be the very rare kind of teenagers who believe their parents are to be emulated and impersonated. They want to help and engage in their own most excellent adventure into the past to form a supergroup of all ages. Amongst the greats on their list: Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. They have great taste in music. It is unfortunate though that the artists play their most well-known songs. For Armstrong (played by Jeremiah Craft) that is “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I can think of ten other pieces of music I would have rather heard him play. Still, it is fun to see Satchmo on the screen. Really, the only musician I did not recognize was the most recent, a rapper named Kid Cudi. I have becoming familiar with his oeuvre all morning. Thanks for the tip Bill & Ted.

Like a lot of movies nowadays that derive from source material largely populated by white men, the movie has taken steps to get more people involved, perhaps even with the intention of handing off future installments to the girls Billie and Thea.  A lot of time I find this sort of inclusivity annoying because it seems to reflect not so much a moral imperative as much as a corporate bid to cater to the lowest common denominator in order to increase market share (the real money is in the international box office after all). It is almost axiomatic that most great movies are not inclusive (at least in terms of casting) because they concern specific subject matter and are thus intended for a specific audience. This adherence to particularity is what differentiates those movies from run-of-the-mill films which are designed to eschew controversy/personality in an effort to placate everyone. The usual result is that they resemble something you’ve seen a hundred times before because, spoiler alert, you have.

Here, though I give the inclusivity a pass. Given the personalities of Bill & Ted and the overall tone of the trilogy, uniting the world in song actually does seem to be in line with how the characters would act and where the plot would end up without undue contrivance. It would then make story sense to get everyone involved. The song could have been better, but you know, it is hard to create a transcendent piece of music that involves every musical style in the whole world going backwards and forwards through time. As it is pointed out, the point is not that the song is the best song, but that everyone is playing it, which is a very Bill & Ted argument. They never have been particularly good musicians.

Toy Story 4 (3/5 Stars)

The first scene in Toy Story 4 takes place nine years before the main plot. Woody and the gang are still Andy’s toys. Andy’s family gets a visit from a neighbor/friend who is in the market for household items. Among a few other trinkets, Andy’s family gives away the Bo Peep lamp because Andy’s sister has grown out of it. Bo Peep, you may remember from the first two films, is the romantic interest of Woody. Before Bo Peep is packed up in a box and shipped away forever, she and Woody have a sad moment. And for some reason, I’m sitting there weirdly reminded of that scene in slave movies where the mother is sold down the river.

In the first two movies, the audience wasn’t asked to explore existential questions about the “human condition” of these toys. The third movie had serious undertones, parodies of political science and at least one scene of toy adultery but didn’t ask questions that made me feel weird. Toy Story 4 ventures there. To a certain extent, I am fine with this, but I have to ask: would a child like this film?

When we last left off, Woody and the gang had been bequeathed to a cute little girl named Bonnie. She’s a good kid, but unfortunately for Woody, isn’t as interested in male cowboys than Andy had been. (She’s likes playing with Jessie more). Woody is left in the closet most days where he becomes increasingly lonely and increasingly desperate. On Bonnie’s first day of kindergarten, she uses some arts and crafts to make a new toy out of a spork, some popsicle sticks and some googly eyes. She names him Forky, writes her name on his feet, and, incredibly, the toy comes to life (Forky is voiced by Tony Hale). The toy is essentially born before our eyes and I’m sitting there weirdly thinking “Frankenstein’s Monster”. This Forky is an ugly abomination of a toy.

Forky knows this. He has an immediate suspicion he is not a toy and should not have been created. There are several scenes of him declaring himself trash and trying to throw himself away into various trashcans. And I’m sitting there weirdly thinking Forky is attempting suicide over and over again. The situation is played for laughs, and it is definitely funnier that what I’m making it sound like here, but the existential implications are unmistakably there.

Bonnie’s family goes on a road trip. They stop over at a place with a traveling carnival. Here, against all possibilities, Andy meets Bo Peep. Bo Peep is a lost toy now. She is homeless but does not seem all that bothered about it. After all, she ain’t working on Maggie’s Farm no’ mo. She likes kids but no longer measures her worth by how much she is loved by one. The arc of Toy Story 4 is essentially Woody realizing that he doesn’t need Bonnie and that there is a world elsewhere: the Emancipation of Woody.

Are these just toys? Woody has thoughts, feelings, friends, and an interest in romance. Isn’t he essentially human in the ways that count? If he’s human, shouldn’t he have rights? Shouldn’t he be getting paid for the work he is doing for that kid? Why does he just blindly do whatever he is told? When he states with certainty that there is nothing more noble than being a child’s toy, doesn’t he come off as brainwashed? The more Toy Story 4 explores the “human condition” of these toys, the weirder the franchise gets.

Do these toys ever die? If Forky can come alive through a child’s imagination, shouldn’t he die through the inverse of that situation. Wouldn’t it make more sense for lost toys to once again become inanimate objects. Maybe that would instill the fear of god in these toys and create that sense of fear that would bound them in perpetual and desperate servitude to their child masters. Just something I was thinking about when I left the theater. Are the children pondering the same things?

John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum

It surprises me that I have not seen a Keanu Reeves movie in a theater since 2006's A Scanner Darkly. It has been a long time and this will be the first time that I will have written down an opinion of the man: a fascinating subject in its own right. Keanu Reeves is an enigma in itself. It is hard to think of a worst actor who has been the star in so many great movies. I generally avoid blaming a movie for bad acting. What seems like bad acting a lot of the time is bad writing, bad directing, bad editing, or all of the above. But I have seen some bad acting from Keanu Reeves. He has a basic character that does well enough in action blockbusters but can be woefully miscast when venturing outside basic Keanu. What were they thinking when they cast him as Siddhartha Buddha?

Still even his dramatic failures reveal decent taste. Why is he doing Shakespeare? He can't perform it, but we can give him credit for choosing the roles. A movie star does not have to appear in one of the smaller roles in Much Ado About Nothing. And though The Matrix triology did not depend on its inner philosophical tones to work, it is clear that Keanu understood it well enough. Further, what he lacks in great acting ability he can make up for being incredibly dependable guy. His reputation is divorced from any particular character. It is the man himself. That man, though nominally John Wick, shows up in this movie doing all of his own actions scenes and stunts. Like a decent Buster Keaton or Jackie Chan movie, the plot machinations of John Wick are hardly important. They merely set up action sequences whose existence are in and of themselves impressive. This is a movie whose "making-of" documentary would be just as exciting and for the same reasons. I watched this movie with a person who was impressed with the movie's work ethic of all things.

Unlike a mediocre blockbuster that is content to limit itself to endless battles with machine guns, there isn't an action sequence in John Wick that isn't unique. He fights a giant with a book, he fights two small twins with knives, he fights a few guys in a horse stable (uses the horses too), fights with shotguns, pistols, and throwing knives. You never see the same fight twice and all the fights are lightly edited and in a wide enough camera so that you can tell always what is happening and know that nobody is cheating...too much. The best fight however has to do with superbly trained dog actors. For reasons we don't have to explain, Keanu Reeves and Halle Berry fight a bunch of bad dudes with guns and with Berry's two trained dogs. The dogs do incredible stunts with hopefully well-padded victims/dog-trainers. One dog must have jumped at least ten feet in one scene.

I never saw John Wick or John Wick 2. I was told that all I needed to know was that the bad dudes killed John Wick's dog in the first movie and stole his car in the second. Turns out, that appears all I needed to know. At the beginning of John Wick 3, which apparently starts minutes after John Wick 2 ends and a few weeks from John Wick, there is a huge price put on John Wick's head. All the assassin's in the world are out to kill him. What a great excuse for a lot of fight scenes. Fittingly, the director, Chad Stahelski, had been Keanu's stunt double for many movies, including the Matrix trilogy.

In between fights, Keanu has several serious conversations with older heavyweight actors like Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, and Angelica Huston. Interestingly everyone is somehow connected to Eastern European or Islamic civilizations. This lends to the many dour lectures on humanity and authority. John Wick is the first character I have seen who hails from Belarus. Who knew such characters existed? It is also quite fun to consider the character of Ian McShane who steadfastly refuses to provide anything but terse language and the imbibing of very good looking alochol in an otherwise action-packed movie. Mark Dascascos plays the main nemesis, Zero. Like the more entertaining villains, he prefers to kill with a sword.

Don't call it a trilogy. John Wick is being divided into chapters and this book is likely to contain many. After all, John Wick's dog remains shot and more bad guys are left to kill.

Side by Side (4/5 Stars)

A Quiet Revolution in Movies

Pretentious cineastes like to use the word “Film.” You take a class in “film” studies. You are a “film” critic. You understand and appreciate serious “film.” Contrast that with going to the “movies,” blogging about “movies,” or even watching a dirty “movie.” Nobody ever sees a dirty “film.” The word is high class and reserved for those who treat the medium in a certain artistic je ne sais quoi.

“Side by Side,” is a marvelously educational documentary (shot digitally) about how all of that is changing. With the onset of more and more sophisticated digital cameras, the word “film” is becoming more and more of a misnomer. You can’t call the latest movies by such cinema stalwarts as Martin Scorsese (“Hugo”), David Fincher (“The Social Network”) and James Cameron (“Avatar”) films. They aren’t films. Film refers to a type of medium that records the sights and sounds of the moving picture and these movies did not use that type of medium. These movies were recorded digitally. So “The Social Network” is a serious “movie” not a serious “film.”

So what does that mean for us moviegoers beyond a conversational defense mechanism against predatory semantic Nazis. Well, the demise of the word “film” actually is correlated with the demise of the pretentiousness that goes along with it. Digital movie making is a democratic revolution. It is cheaper. It is faster. It is easier to shoot and edit. It takes the process of putting images onto a screen less of a mystery and hands more control and power over the artistic vision to writers and directors. The losers in the revolution are cinematographers and studios. With the expertise and financial backing no longer needed to produce a film print, you don't need technical experts and corporations. As Lena Dunham, the writer/director of HBO’s GIRLS, wisely notes “I don't think without digital video, I don’t think I would be making movies because I always felt that you had to have a certain kind of knowledge. Basically you had to be a dude who knows how to operate machines.”

So what is different about the process? This documentary pulls no punches is getting technical and does a wonderful job of plenty of interviews with some truly big names in cinema. (Here are a few: Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Danny Boyle, George Lucas, Robert Rodriguez, David Lynch, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, and the Wachowskis. Plus there is a bunch of great cinematographers and editors whose names I did not know, but whose work I recognized.)

First of all, digital will allow you to immediately see a take on the set of a movie. With film you had to develop the picture overnight and watch it for the first time the next morning. David Fincher expressed the difference the most candidly. When working with film, he would ask the cinematographer, did we get the shot? What about the details in the corner? Did we get those? Will we be able to see those details in the finished product? And the cinematographer would go, yes we got it, take my word for it, you will see tomorrow. Sometimes the cinematographer would be correct and you would be amazed at what he captured (Seven) and other times you would be looking at the dailies the next day and go, “What the F***!” With digital, you can rest assured that you actually accomplished something during the day of shooting it and that you won’t have to come back to it.

Second, digital will allow you to run the camera for far longer takes than you could with film. After about ten minutes of shooting film you would have to change the reels, but digital filmmaking can go on basically forever. Some actors like John Malkovich, a theatrically trained actor, talk of why not stopping is better for momentum purposes. On the other side is an anecdote about Robert Downey Jr. on the set of Iron Man 2. Apparently he got so fed up with the digital process and started taking pisses in mason jars and leaving the urine around the movie set in protest of never having a stop in production where he could go to his trailer, rest up, and get his shit together for the next couple of takes.

Then there is the greatest argument of all and that is which medium had the better picture quality. The documentary takes us on a grand tour of all the advances of digital moviemaking in the last thirty years starting from the first digital character, a stained glass character in a Spielberg/Lucas production of Young Sherlock Holmes, the first movies shot entirely on digital, the Star Wars prequels, the earliest indie movies made on extremely low budgets made possible only on digital, Chuck and Buck, to the new camera used for Michael Mann’s  Collateral, to the first movie shot on digital to win an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, and ending of course the ultimate digital movie, the 3D colossus Avatar. As Cameron frankly admits, “You can’t shoot film in 3D, so film has been dead in my heart for the last ten years.”

Today it seems that the pictures produced by both digital and film are almost indistinguishable. (To the very trained eye this is not completely so. Take a look at Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The snow would look colder if shot on film.) With digital, however, you can do far more with the picture in post-production, the best examples being the Roger Deakins use of color-correction in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and Robert Rodriguez’s comic book classic, Sin City, two movies that achieved looks that are impossible with film.

Of course film has its defenders, the biggest and most admirable being Christopher Nolan, who has shot all of his movies, most notably the Dark Knight series, on film. He enjoys the process, trusts his cinematographer (interviewed as well and memorably dismissing 3D as an upsetting distracting scam), and defends the picture quality as being superior to digital. Anyone who has seen his movies knows he has a point. Film is still a very good way to make movies.

But for those who are not blockbuster directors with access to studios willing to indulge their aesthetic choices, digital opens a door that had been kept closed for not just movie history but for all of human history. There is a reason why Shakespeare mostly wrote about kings and it is not because kings are inherently more interesting than the rest of us. The reason is because kings were the ones paying for the plays. When movies are so expensive that decisions for who gets to make what movies are kept to bigwig studio heads of corporate conglomerates what you get is a off kilter proportion of movies made about the upper classes. Anyone who lives in NYC knows this. How many times have you seen a movie where the characters are living in gigantic apartments and they don't seem to be aware of how outrageously way too expensive the apartment must be. I say, the rest of us who live in normal sized apartments are interesting too, but these stories won’t be told until we can afford to make movies too. Digital cameras gives us that ability.

There are plenty of film lovers in this movie that speak some truth about how just adding more people into the ranks of moviemakers is not going to automatically equate better movies in the marketplace. They look at the Sundance Film Festival and its growing amount of inferior submissions each year. Yeah, but they still produce great indie movies on a consistent basis as well. In any case, the British Parliament said a similar thing about democracy in America. Digital moviemaking is unambiguously a good thing. 

Side by Side Official Trailer (2012) from Company Films on Vimeo.

A Scanner Darkly 10/25/06

The only thing that saves this movie is that it's never boring. And for that we have two things in general to thank. One: the animation and direction of Richard Linklater that is completely different than anything I have ever seen. It's apparently a technique in which he shoots actual live footage, and then he animates it through something called rotoscoping. This works especially well in a movie about drug addiction because it allows hallucinations to appear on the screen and seem totally within this movie's realm of reality. The second reason is the strong performances of several supporting characters. Most notably Robert Downey Jr. who's eccentric character plays like he knows he's in a cartoon. Through quiet eccentricities he steals every scene he's in. In scenes when his character is shooting the spit with Woody Harrelson the drama is doubled and usually quite funny. I would love to watch a movie about this character. Unfortunately the movie isn't about him, or even needs his character. 
The real story in this movie is about a narc/drug addict named Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves). This story also is somewhat exciting. I say somewhat because in truth I don't really know. I feel it could have been exciting if the movie hadn't ended after the second act. Here we have Bob Arctor brought into rehabilitation on a mission he knows nothing about. He's supposed to prove that the rehab programmers are the ones who are dealing the drugs. He finds the drugs in a middle of a cornfield, he still under the influence partly and he doesn't have much cognitive power but we sense that he knows what they are. He puts a flower in his sock with the intention of bringing it back to his friends at the main compound. Then the movie ends. I don't have a problem with what's in the movie, I have a problem with what could have been in the movie. I have a feeling that there could have been a kickass third act to this movie, where Arctor meets Barrister (Downey Jr.) in the prison, they hatch a plan to elaborately escape. There's an animated chase scene or fight scene (Something I bet would be totally awesome) and then you know the great twist or enlightening conclusion or whatever. That's what I would have done.
Of course can I give a movie a bad grade because I liked it so much I wished it were longer. I honestly don't think that would be kosher. So there the paradox. They gave me only the first two acts of a what would have been a great three act story.