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.

Love and Mercy (4/5 Stars)

(This has got to be some kind of record for me. I saw this movie a month ago and am only now writing the review. It is lapse of time that does not do the movie justice as I may have simply forgotten much of the movie. I do not think I have but of course if I had forgotten it how would I know I had?)

“Love and Mercy,” is a biopic of the musician and composer Brian Wilson of the “Beach Boys.” The musical biopic has become its own subgenre by now with Ray, Johnny Cash, James Brown, and even N.W.A. amongst others getting their own movie. The formula became so cliche that it was notably parodied in “Walk Hard” with John C. Reilly playing a fake musician called Dewey Cox who, like all the other musicians, struggles with childhood tragedy, crafts a big hit that makes him famous and pulls him out of the poverty, becomes addicted to drugs and overcomes his addiction, and has a back and forth relationship with the woman he will finally come to marry and love. “Love and Mercy” is a welcome innovation to this genre. We are spared the rote genre storylines and instead are presented with two stories that interweave with each other. The first is Brian Wilson’s studio creation of his masterpiece “Pet Sounds,” and his subsequent fall into mental illness amidst the hallucinogenic drugs of the sixties. The second is about how the love of a good woman saved a domineered and overmedicated Brian Wilson from a corrupt psychiatrist.

It is a tribute to this movie that the second story is in ways more interesting than the first even though Brian Wilson is not composing or performing any music in it. It is an odd unsettling scenario of the lash between an overly sensitive musical prodigy and the wildness of the counterculture. I bet the case of Brian Wilson, gone mad after one genius album, was a cautionary tale to the entire industry. The two stories inform each other nicely in a way good times/bad times way until the third act when it turns into bad times/bad times for awhile before settling into a satisfying conclusion of bad times/good times.

Young Brian Wilson is played by Paul Dano. It is an interesting choice given that Dano does not have a classically good voice. However his acting skills aptly demonstrate the notion that emotional control counts more than versatile skill in delivering the goods. The movie, directed by Bill Pohlad, presents the music in an educational way. He does not merely play the hits, he goes into the studio and has the individual musicians play their parts by themselves. Thus the many layered orchestrations of Brian Wilson are deconstructed in a way that better shows their genius. The best example of this is when Dano plays and sings “God Only Knows” on the piano by himself. That song has a really counterintuitive chord progression that I never noticed until now.  Interestingly “Pet Sounds” was composed entirely Brian Wilson in a studio with a studio band called “The Wrecking Crew” while the other Beach Boys were on tour in Japan. So besides the voices of the other Wilson brothers, the actual Beach Boys weren’t really there for it. Which may have been a good thing as Wilson was sensitive and introspective and simply not ready for the craziness that came with the rock band experience. This reality hits home hard when the story cuts to a future Brian Wilson broken down, isolated, and misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

John Cusack plays old Brian Wilson. It is a fine unshowy performance which is perfect for a character that is defined by being under the influence of larger characters. That would be his doctor Eugene Landy who is played by Paul Giamatti, a consummate character actor if there ever was one. Landy is at once sweet and then conniving and then very scary. Giamatti is particularly good at all of those things. Against Landy is a Cadillac saleswoman named Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) whom Brian Wilson meets one day as he shops for a new car. The movie hinges on this character. She is presented with a very delicate situation. Brian Wilson asks her out on several dates and they hit it off. She is particularly attracted to his kind and humble manner. And then as the story progresses she slowly realizes that he is being abused in a very real way by his psychiatrist. And so she has a choice. Is she going to insert her life into this other person’s troubles? What exactly is her responsibility here?

I have had the pleasure of reviewing Elizabeth Banks many times in the past decade. I have seen many of her movies and written reviews for eight of them. In fact she was in the first movie I ever reviewed “The 40-Year Old Virgin” even though I did not mention her or much else in that review. This role is the best work yet and coming off her revelatory work in The Hunger Games franchise as Effie Trinket, a character that easily could be played much worse by lesser actresses, she is hitting a stride in her career. The career of Elizabeth Banks is a great example of miscasting and likewise a good example of the shallow amount of good roles for women in the movie industry as a whole. For much of her career, Elizabeth Banks minimum amount of comedic chops and her great looks got her miscast in a lot of comedic roles as neurotic losers or else as the mean/mature girlfriend playing straight man to whatever comedian got the interesting role. Like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson she is hard to write for because she escapes the cliché’s of the characters she looks like. She is a beautiful blonde but not vapid or conceited. And she can play subtlety, morality, and grace but roles exploring that side are generally lacking. So she is often seen as mean and exasperated or in the other direction lacking self-confidence neither of which give her the ability to show off her acting capacity. She has received much work (a lot of the time at the expense of not as good looking but better comedians) but very few ideal roles. I would confine those to 30 Rock’s Avery Jessup, Hunger Games Effie Trinket, and now this one. It is finely nuanced performance that never misses a beat and I think she should get an Oscar nomination for it. 

Love and Mercy is a fine movie. Interestingly it is the directorial debut of Bill Pohland but he is by no means a newcomer. He has produced many good movies before including ‘Into the Wild’ and ’12 Years a Slave.’ Apparently he thought he was qualified enough to hire himself this time. He was right.

Inside Out (5/5 Stars)

Imagine a movie that is at once wholly original and also completely familiar, startlingly simplistic in its scope yet containing multitudes of creativity and cavernous depths of emotion, and that can also make you laugh routinely, thrill you unexpectedly, and move you to near tears consistently. You would be describing Pixar’s newest feature “Inside Out,” a journey inside the mind of an 11-old-girl from Minnesota who has just moved to her new home in San Francisco. She endures a first day at a new school, a disappointing hockey tryout, and vegan pizza. Little stuff it seems to grown ups but to Riley it is the greatest obstacle she has gone through in a life that hereto had been filled with consistently joyful days. It is also the greatest obstacle her brain trust has ever handled. And by brain trust I mean Pixar’s anthropomorphized metaphor for her mind: a team of emotions that help Riley out from a mission control room in her brain.

The emotions have been perfectly cast from the broad and ever more productive landscape of quality television entertainment. At the center is Joy, voiced by the ever effervescent Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation), Disgust, an appropriately snarky Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project), Fear, a fever pitched Bill Hader (SNL), Anger, Lewis Black (The Daily Show) as himself, and finally Sadness, Phyllis Smith (The Office) in all her humble muted Eeyore-like glory. They function, in a tribute to Pixar’s ability to have it all, as part comedy team, part tearjerk squad, and part science lesson. (If their was an emotion left out, I would posit “desire” which would be the antithesis of Disgust much like Anger and Fear or Joy and Sadness play off of each other so well. Perhaps “Desire” shows up at 13).

This is the sort of movie that transcends movie-ness. Instead of talking about whether the movie looked good or was funny, you want to talk about how the movie was about what it was about. After all, everything that is shown onscreen corresponds to something everybody has experienced but does not really understand. We have these unconscious bodies that operate seemingly disconnected with our consciousness. What connect the two are our feelings. But how do those work? Pixar probably is not that far off. The emotions experience Riley’s life through her frontal lobe (this is a bit like the front windshield of a starship). They can’t tell Riley what to do, but they do color her experiences as they form memories (represented by luminous balls). If it is a happy memory, then Joy turns it yellow. If it is a fearful memory, Fear turns it purple. At the end of the day before the colored balls are shipped off to long-term memory (which apparently is consistent with what really happens when we are asleep), if the wall of short-term memory balls are mostly yellow than the team feels that they have had a good day. Their mission is to keep Riley happy. This presents a problem with the character of Sadness whose presence and efforts to help generally disrupt the mission. At one point Joy draws a circle around her and tells her to not leave it as a way of doing her job correctly. Psychologists have a word for this I believe. It’s called Repression. That’s a rather heavy topic for an animated movie to tackle, but Pixar goes even further. Near the denouement of this movie they will tackle the big D. Depression. And the way they do it will probably make you cry and afterwords you will probably think about why you cried and find a very plausible explanation in the way Pixar has portrayed the workings of the emotions in your mind. And you will probably feel better in an enlightened way because feeling sad is sometimes the most healthy way to respond to external stimuli. Psychologists would call that Emotional Maturity, an attribute that the marketers in our modern society have a habit of scorning. Fear it, they say, and buy this thing that will make you happy again. No, says Pixar, Sadness is there for a reason and the wise person would understand its utility. This is the sort of thing that Pixar has made a children’s movie about. To do that as perfectly as they demonstrate is to be a masters of emotions themselves. I tell you this: not since Hitchcock has a moviemaker been so in tune with what the audience is experiencing moment to moment.

But I get too serious. Let’s talk about comedy and how Pixar does not waste a moment in the entire movie when a joke can be somehow shoehorned in. First of all, the brain trust with all their distinct personalities form as good a comedy troupe as there can be. Through a mishap Joy and Sadness are stranded in Long Term Memory and need to find their way back to the control room.  Their journey takes them through several wonderful set pieces as Imagination Land, Abstract Thought, and Dreamworks Productions that has among other things a unicorn as a movie star.  They meet many comic characters. My favorite are the brain beureaucrats. One team works at Long Term memory and “forget” any balls that are rarely used. For instance they take away all of Riley’s piano lessons except “Heart and Soul” and “Chopstix”. But the really funny part is what they keep: a commercial jingle for ‘Triple Dent’ gum which they reuse again and again as a practical joke. Riley is destined to never ever forget it. Another good example is the two guards in front of the door of the subconscious (which hides an angry clown) that perform what sounds like an Abbot and Costello routine about whose hat is “my hat”. Then another time Joy knocks over two boxes, one of Facts and the other of Opinions. As she tries to put them back she exclaims how similar they look. And I haven’t even mentioned the imaginary friend voiced by Richard Kind who is the best part along with everything else.

“Inside Out” is one of Pixar’s best movies. And I say one of the best because I happen to believe “Wall-E” is one of the best movies ever made. So is this movie. When Wall-E (and “The Dark Knight”) failed to get a Best Picture nomination the Academy expanded the field to ten pictures the next year. That should easily include “Inside Out” this year and I’m not saying it should win (I can’t because I haven’t seen all the other movies) but I would be totally fine with the possibility.

Jurassic World (2/5 Stars)

Nerd Pandering

If I had made a spoof of the Jurassic Park franchise, it might have been remarkably similar to “Jurassic World.” This movie is not too far away from being a total joke. Take two main plot points. First, the theme park “Jurassic World” is not growing in attendance because people are bored with the same old dinosaurs and the investors are getting anxious. Say what? A theme park with dinosaurs is losing its appeal after only ten years in existence? Surely that is one of the most absurd scenarios in the history of movies. But whatever, in reaction to this scenario the theme park is training velociprators like bloodhounds and creating a newer, bigger, more dangerous dinosaur. You see their focus groups suggest that giant carnivourous dinosaurs tend to draw larger crowds. These new attractions have gotten the attention of the U.S. Military which brings us to the second plot point. A contractor named Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) exclaims “Imagine what we could have done with these guys in Tora Bora!?!” I can actually answer that question. An Al Queada soldier with a sniper rifle would take down the raptor from about 500 yards away. And that’s if the beast could actually be transported to Afghanistan in the first place. And these absurdities are what drive the main plot conflicts of the story. Really. This movie just made a record 200 million dollars in one weekend. The silver lining to that I guess is that this movie would not have made nearly enough without the enormous goodwill garnered by the first two very good Spielberg films. So, at least in this instance, critics can be assured that bad movies don’t come out of nowhere and make tons of money. They stand on the shoulders of actually good movies and also in this case a pretty good book.

Let’s talk about the dinosaurs. They are relatively deficient from past movies in their capacity to provoke wonderment or thrills. The lack of wonder has much to do with the movie’s insistence via the characters that the dinosaurs are not so special. In the first movie you followed the reactions of paleontologists whose every dream came true when they saw their first living dinosaur. Contrast that with the two kids who visit the park in this movie. One of them, a child, is sufficiently excited. The other, a teenager, is more interested in girls. I felt like smacking him upside the head for most of the movie. It matters less what is on the screen than what the characters think about it. The experience of movie going is a vicarious one. If the characters don’t care than the wonder is not extended to the viewer. The fact that “Jurassic World” had one of its main characters not be all that impressed with dinosaurs really undercut the whole reason to see this movie: i.e. that it had fucking dinosaurs in it.

These dinosaurs are less thrilling than the ones in the original movie. Now I’m going to make a distinction in the technology but keep in mind that there is actually no particular reason why computer images could not do both. Think back to the original movie and pick out some of the more visceral moments, perhaps the Velociraptor in the kitchen tapping its big claw, or the water vibrating, or Wayne Knight’s death, or the girl being sneezed upon. None of these little things employed computer effects. It would be absurd to use computer effects for them, as they were not needed. However in the new movie, as far as I can tell, the dinosaurs are completely computer generated even for the moments when it isn’t needed, i.e. closeups on faces. And those dino faces look unnecessarily weird to me compared with the first movies. But as before it is not really the problem that the dinos are almost entirely computer generated. The real problem is that there are not really any moments that do not call for computer generation. There are no little moments. All the moments are big. And this is a problem because you need little moments to create suspense (i.e. water vibrating) and also to explain things.

Filmmakers studying Spielbergian masterpieces such as Jaws and Jurassic Park (as no doubt the director of “Jurassic World” Colin Trevorrow has) continually draw the wrong lessons from them. They assume that if you do not see a monster for a significant length of time that it suddenly becomes scarier. This is not true. The reason why the shark and the dinos are scary in those movies is because they are thoroughly explained. That is to say in “Jaws” Richard Dreyfuss explains in length the nature of Great White Sharks and in “Jurassic Park” a paleontologist explains how velociraptors attack in herds.  It amazes me how these scenes are sometimes the first ones dropped in inferior movies. What you get instead is movie cheats wherein the creature, not being defined, is allowed to arbitrarily gain and lose supernatural powers at the movies whim. Here the new dinosaur is allowed to camoflauge himself amongst the trees. This somehow makes it impervious to bullets, lots and lots of bullets. Or take the raptors, which can be trained to follow orders from Chris Pratt until they don’t want to until they want to again. It also does not help when the ambitions of the movie are so great in scope that a wild animal as a villain just cannot work without it having absurd levels of competence in fighting modern technological war machines. Sometimes for the purposes of thrills that do not insult the intelligence of the audience it is better to have a boat that is not big enough.

Now lets talk about the secondary attractions, the people. There is not much to say here other than how well they play out stock imitations of other Spielbergian characters and tropes, most explicitly the one where an adult needs to stop working so much and spend more time with the kids. Then there is Chris Pratt doing his best ‘Indiana Jones’ impression. Not bad although I think he really should be drinking a beer in his first scene and not a coke (and who drinks coke from bottles anymore?). BD Wong, the scientist from the first movie, is back as a scientist here. His presence is nerd pandering which I will get to next. The same can be said about the characters of Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus the computer nerds in the control room. Again, more on that later. Bryce Dallas Howard plays a vapid corporate dummy who disrepects nature and is too high strung and organized for a relationship with Pratt to work. She has these high heels. Pratt at one point when they are in the midst of nature with danger all around them ridicules her decision to wear them. He is right of course. She shouldn’t be wearing them in this context and high heels in general are rather vain and unbecoming for someone already in charge with nobody to impress. So that’s a good criticism. But then the movie does something else: It insists that Bryce continue to wear the high heels the rest of the movie past many scenes when either a sane person would have ditched them or they would have broken past repair many times. Now given that the character is only wearing the heels because the movie itself (written, directed, and produced by guys) has been intent on making her wear them beyond all suspension of disbelief, is it really okay to make fun of the woman’s character for wearing them in the first place. I would suggest that it is not but this is the sort of thing one generally gets when a movie deems as its mission to above all else pander to nerds. In this particular case nerds like to think of themselves as Han Solo and that every girl is Princess Leia who would fall head over heels for them if only they weren’t so stuck up. Chris Pratt and Bryce Howard Dallas are just another reiteration of that classic type of nerd pandering.

I don’t like nerds. I don’t think there is another group of people who would sit through all sorts of stupid drivel as long as it patted them on the back and made them feel special. But boy do studios love nerds. Make a movie about their favorite comic book and the nerds will feel compelled to show up as a matter of honor perhaps if only for the opportunity to complain loudly about how terrible it was done. So the incentive to make decent movies is lessened right there. What is more is that the nerds routinely react with glee when sequels or reboots incorporate the best jokes and lines of the original movie. “Jurassic World” is no exception. There are a ton of inside jokes and callbacks to “Jurassic Park” (Hell, look at Jake Johnson’s “Jurassic Park” shirt) and “Jaws” that make the plot more predictable and all the action tinted with a sense of déjà vu. There is the ‘objects look closer than they appear in the mirror’ gag, there is ‘the loosening of a giant tooth from a vehicle’ trope, there is the ‘flare baiting of the T-Rex’ scene. The best example of all is the musical score. It isn’t John Williams great score from ‘Jurassic Park.’ It is a similar but inferior version whose best quality is to remind you of how great the original was. The most frustrating thing about “Jurassic World” is not that it isn’t a great movie, it’s that it cynically did not even allow itself the space to be a great movie. It deliberately set out to be a nostalgia piece. And the ones to blame are the nerds because they do not insist that their movies challenge them. (One could perhaps argue that the whole idea of having superpowers is an immature way of escaping real world problem solving). As long as they go and see the next Spiderman reboot every five years why would the studios ever give them something different.