In what is becoming an “Alien” franchise tradition, a subsequent
installment cannibalizes a superior predecessor. I don’t mean that
the sequel is inferior or simply does the same thing in an inferior
way, I mean that is actually undercuts the pleasure of watching a
previous movie. This happened the first time in Alien 3, when in
between “Aliens” and “Alien 3” the movie actually killed off
important characters that the viewer had come to know and very much
like. “Alien: Covenant” does the same thing, killing off the main
female lead of “Prometheus,” Elizabeth Shaw, played by Noomi
Rapace. The ironic thing about the “Alien” franchises is that one
of its major themes is corporate disregard for human life in the face
of profit, and the main culprit of these in-between movie killings is
most likely the waning stardom of previous main characters. At least
that is what seems to be the main impetus behind the lack of Noomi
Rapace here. In 2012 came out, Noomi Rapace, coming off the iconic
“Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy, was a the zenith of her
star power. In 2017 she has become largely absent whereas Michael
Fassbender, the other survivor from “Prometheus,” is still
around. So “Alien: Covenant” kills off Noomi Rapace even before
the movie starts and became the Michael Fassbender show. It is
notable that this is the first canonical Alien installment that does
not feature a strong female lead.
The problems start there and keep going. I am going to limit myself
to just a few complaints, but not before noting that this movie was
directed by Ridley Scott who directed both the original “Alien”
and “Prometheus.” I merely point this out to state that he should
know how to make a better movie than this one.
A large problem with blockbusters nowadays is that they use digital
effects too much. Digital effects have their place, and that is when
the filmmakers cannot make the thing they want to show without
digital effects, like say a large crowd, or a landscape, or another
world. When digital effects are used to make something really small
and close, they should not be used at all. The filmmakers should just
make the thing they want to be represented. Compare the baby-alien
chest bursting scenes in the original 1979 “Alien” and the one
this year in “Alien: Covenant.” Even though a span of
thirty-eight years of continual special effects evolution has
occurred, the 1979 version is more believable, more visceral, and
more effective. It’s that way because they made a puppet out of
real material and performed the operation physically. The same scene
in “Alien: Covenant” looks like a digital recreation. It’s
detailed but the audience can tell the difference. There is no
financial reason to do it this way. In fact, a puppet is probably
cheaper.
This movie breaks all the rules of the Alien. For it to be a
believable story, the rules having been set down explicitly need to
stay there. Here is a short list of broken rules in “Alien:
Covenant.” One: Aliens can be killed by bullets from guns. Two: The
Alien gestates in the stomach and bursts through the chest (as
opposed to say, through the upper back vertebrae, which is novel but
doesn’t make any sense). Three: The Alien needs time (maybe a
couple of weeks) to impregnate the host, grow inside it, burst out of
it, go into the wilderness and come back fully formed. In this movie,
that whole process happens in a couple of hours.
Mr. Scott perhaps broke these rules because he felt the audience may
have been impatient. Well, the first “Alien” movie was great
because he took his time to establish the rules and follow them,
which made them visceral and effective. If he couldn’t find a way
to do it here, he should have gone back to the drawing board. After,
the end product is an “Alien” movie that doesn’t have
believable Aliens in it.
As far as the philosophical underpinnings of this movie, I am
disappointed to relate that it did not follow through on the promises
“Prometheus” made in what it was trying to accomplish here. I
feel like “Prometheus” got thrown under the bus quite frankly.
I’m not happy with this movie. Two Michael Fassbenders did not make
it all okay.
The best and longest running joke in “Baywatch” takes place over
lifeguard lunch wherein the cocky new guy, Matt Brody, played by Zac
Efron, is being quizzed on what it takes to be part of the Baywatch
family (yes, it’s called a family by the head guy Mitch Buchanon,
played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). Matt Brody apparently
thinks that being a lifeguard stays at saving beach goers from
drowning. The lifeguard lists off several scenarios they encountered
just the last week: a hoard of jellyfish, sand-grifters, and various
criminal conspiracies. “The situations you are describing sound
like scenes from an entertaining though far-fetched TV show,”
remarks Brody before insisting once again that the lifeguards should
probably just call the police in these situations.
What makes this joke work so well is the deadpan absolute seriousness
that Dwayne Johnson brings to his character’s mission to “Protect
the Bay.” This man really believes that these sorts of things,
including the main plot of trying to bring down a drug kingpin, is
his responsibility. It is absurd but Dwayne Johnson makes it work to
the point of hilarity. This performance reminded me of the
performances of the late great Leslie Nielson in the “Naked Gun”
and “Airplane” franchises. The movie is crazy but “The Rock”
anchors it by playing the part so straight.
The feel and tone of this movie comes from the “21 Jump Street”
mold. The original TV series was, on the surface at least, a drama
that took itself seriously. “Baywatch” as much as it deals in the
superficial pleasures of the show (hot woman in swimsuits running in
slow motion) makes fun of the TV show as well. A good gag is when
Mitch Buchanan pulls out his keys to the lifeguard shack. On the key
ring is a “Good Luck!!!” message from the previous “Mitch
Buchanan” played by David Hasselhoff. Apparently this particular
bay has been run by two separate Mitch Buchanan for the past forty
years.
Some gags work better than others. I could have done without the
morgue scene, but overall, like “21 Jump Street” the
relationships and jokes make sense and it is fun watching these
characters interact with each and go undercover in various costumes
at the smallest provocation.
In one area, this movie does much better than others. There is a
subplot involving a chubby nerd played by Ronnie Greenbaum who has a
crush on C.J. Parker, played by Kelly Rohrback in the orginal Pamela
Anderson role. Normally I don’t find the nerd chases hot girl story
lines all that interesting. I never feel like the nerd really earns
the hot girl. In this movie, I feel like Ronnie Greenbaum earns the
hot girl, probably in the scene where he creates a diversion at a
party by putting on a show-stopping dance number.
I liked this movie. The director, Seth Gordon, previously made one of
my favorite documentaries named the “The King of Kong: A Fistful of
Quarters,” which can rightly be said to be the best documentary
about people obsessed with the old “Donkey Kong” stand-up arcade
game. I only mention it to recommend it. It’s good.
Perhaps you have heard this horror plot-line before: A group of white
settlers/tourists/explorers head into the desert/woods/jungle where
they meet indigenous rednecks/savages/headhunters that proceed to
torture and kill them. It’s a staid subgenre of horror that has
rightly been deemed racist because the indigenous people are
represented as one dimensional villains. As far as I know, this
sub-genre has always steadily produced movies, but those movies have
never been mainstream, at least not in the last fifty years when it
is fair to say that mainstream movies started going out of their way
to not be racist.
“Get Out” is an installment to this subgenre, the twist being
that it is about a black man who travels into the suburbs where he
encounters a nefarious group of white liberal elitists. Also unlike
the rest of the subgenre this movie is mainstream, written and
directed by Jordan Peele, and hitting No. 1 at the box office. That
essentially makes it is the most blatantly racist mainstream movie I
have ever seen in a movie theater.
Obviously as a person who has seen many old movies, I have seen more
racist movies than “Get Out.” The most obvious is “The Birth of
a Nation.” That movie is enlightening in the sense that it gets one
into the mind of a true racist, D.W. Griffith. You can’t learn
anything about black people in that movie. You can however learn
quite a bit about the insecurities and fears underpinning the racist
ideology of the white people. The same can be said inversely about
“Get Out.” You won’t be able to learn anything about white
people from this movie. The characterizations are absurd and
contradict themselves. You can however get a really good glimpse into
the insecurities and fears of writer/director Jordan Peele, and maybe
judging by the popularity of the movie (“The Birth of a Nation”
too was very popular) the insecurities and fears of the modern black
person. Like the insecurities and fears of D.W. Griffith, its a
rather pathetic portrait and like “Birth of a Nation”, “Get
Out” should go down in history as a pitiful document of its times.
Spoilers abound here: The movie concerns Chris Washington
(played by Daniel Kaluuya) who is traveling to the countryside with
his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (played by Allison Williams) to
meet her parents for the first time. Unbeknownst to Chris, Rose has
dated black men before, about ten of them in fact. She chooses them
for their physical prowess, seduces them, and takes them into her
family’s mansion in the woods where her family brainwashes them and
sells them as slaves to the highest bidder. This bidder, a frail
physically inept white person, through elaborate brain surgery, comes
to inhabit the body of the physically adept black man. The black man
stays in the neighborhood but his “blackness” has essentially
been removed. He wears slacks and fedoras and speaks in a calm eerily
comfortable tone with no slang at all, just like a white person.
(This particular character, a disappeared black man from Brooklyn who
has been ‘turned white’ by the evil suburb may stand in for such
disappeared black men like Ben Carson. I suspect black people may
feel that such people are brainwashed tools that aren’t really
black anymore.)
There is a lot of psychology to unpack here already but what is most
striking about this movie is its caricature of the nefarious white
people. They are actually really nice. They vote Obama and go out of
their way to be polite to Chris. They are obviously meant to be
stand-ins for the polite white people of the real world who are aware
of racism and make an effort to be tolerant. We already knew that
angry violent racists are bad people, but this movie goes further:
All white people are bad and have conspiratorial motives against
black people no matter how nice they seem on the surface. I expect
Jordan Peele, a mixed-race college graduate with a successful
television and movie career, has met a lot of nice white people in
his life. Like a total asshole, he is essentially stating here that
he does not trust them and holds them in contempt.
It really saddens me when people make the argument that this movie is
important because it shows how black people feel. Feeling something
does not make it right. Tribalism is a natural thing and may feel
correct, but that does not mean that racism is justified. This movie
does not make the argument that “racism is bad,” it makes the
argument that “white people are bad.” There is a distinction here
that is sadly lost on many people who ascribe to the identity
politics of our day. In their view, black people can’t be racist
because one needs to have a position of power in order to effectuate
racism, and black people do not have power. (Obviously, I hold a
different view as to what racism entails and whether black people
have enough power to be responsible for their actions.) Through that
view, this movie can be justified as some little ‘payback’ for
all the racism in the past. Enjoy yourself in your revenge, Jordan
Peele, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that this sort of shit
helps solve the problem.
2016 in movies provides a sea change in my relationship with movies. This was the first year where I felt certain that I no longer had a hold on movies in popular culture. It has been a feeling seeping in for quite awhile, but now I know it for certain. I perhaps saw 50 or 60 movies this year and only saw half of those in theaters. That is not nearly enough to have seen all the best. The revolution in movie making that has cheapened the process (see the great documentary by Keanu Reeves "Side by Side") has taken away the ability for even an avid-movie watcher as me to even be aware of everything that is out there. Two of my greatest experiences in the medium of this last year weren't even movies. They were television series: "American Crime Story: The O.J. Simpson Story" and "Stranger Things." These shows were extraordinary examples of story-telling but they aren't even allowed in my picks this year because they aren't movies (I don't know, I'm generally flexible, maybe next year I will include TV series in my Oscar picks).
The diversity and sheer amount of movies gives light to the idea that we are becoming more and more insulated by our own neighborhoods. A couple movies I saw this year that were terrible (i.e. Birth of a Nation) were excitedly advocated by the New York City crowd that I am apart of. At the same time, a couple movies I saw because they showed up unexpectedly in the Oscar Race but had not been mentioned at all by anyone I knew personally (i.e. Hacksaw Ridge) turned out to be great. That was the best movie I had seen this year. Nobody I know has seen it.
In the end, I think this is a good thing. The utter cheapness of movies allows anybody anywhere to make them. This allows culture to grow in places that would be otherwise fallow. In "Hearts of Darkness," Francis Ford Coppola remarked that his dream was that movies would become so cheap that a fat girl in the Midwest could make a masterpiece. That day I feel is probably here. The unexpected problem is that my Netflix queue is already so long that I will probably never see it.
Here are my Oscars 2017 (for the 2016 year Picks)
WRITING (ORIGINAL
SCREENPLAY)
The Lobster
Hell or High Water
Hacksaw Ridge
10 Cloverfield Lane
Hail Ceasar!
To say that "The Lobster" is a romantic comedy is to truly push the definition of that category. And yet like "Punch Drunk Love" there is no other way to put it. It is really the most Original of all the Screenplays this year. It creates its own world with its own rules and then follows them to the unsuspecting but logical end. It works and for me at least, it was romantic.
WRITING (ADAPTED
SCREENPLAY)
Arrival
Moonlight
Silence
Deadpool
Deepwater Horizon
The maturation of Peter Berg, director of not only "Deepwater Horizon" but also "Patriot's Day" this year is one of the best stories of the year. This the guy who once directed "Battleship." His last several movies are some of the smartest, and given their non-fictional basis, some of the most important movies being made. "Deepwater Horizon" is a textbook example of good screenwriting tackling really complicated engineering problems. There is only so much screenwriting can do in this medium to explain complex engineering. "Deepwater Horizon" does it better than most movies ever made.
VISUAL EFFECTS
Dr. Strange
Deepwater Horizon
Captain America:
Civil War
Deadpool
Hacksaw Ridge
It is a rare thing when I watch a movie and I'm blown away by visual effects. They are so dime a dozen nowaday. But "Dr. Strange" showed me something of a kind I had never seen before.
SOUND EDITING/SOUND
MIXING
La La Land
Deepwater Horizon
Hacksaw Ridge
Sully
Arrival
I can't say I fully understand this category (see all previous Oscar Picks), but the Oscars seemed to think "Arrival" knew what it was doing, and I see no reason to disagree. It was a very good movie, and as I am not honoring it elsewhere, I'm glad to do it here.
PRODUCTION DESIGN
Hail, Ceasar!
Arrival
La La Land
Silence
The Handmaiden
That 1950s movie studio had great sets.
MUSIC (BEST USE OF A
SONG)
“No Dames” -
Hail, Ceasar!
“Die Zauberflote,
K. 620” - Florence Foster Jenkins
“Hello
Stranger” - Moonlight
“On the Nature of
Daylight” - Arrival
“The Greatest Love
of All” - Toni Erdmann
Well, right? Sometimes the right choice of a song speaks so much more than a thousand speeches and proves my theory that a song doesn't need to be original to garner attention and respect.
MUSIC (ORIGINAL
SCORE)
Moonlight
La La Land
Lion
Christine
Arrival
I know, there were original songs in "La La Land," but I figured they were all the same song and should work more like a Score. Of course La La Land had the best music of the year.
MAKEUP AND
HAIRSTYLING
Hail Ceasar!
Nocturnal Animals
The Handmaiden
Actually I think both "The Handmaiden" and "Hail Ceasar!" have better makeup and hairstyling but I'm honoring them elsewhere here. This is for Laura Linney's big hair and Amy Adams red hair.
FOREIGN LANGUAGE
FILM
Toni Erdmann
I only saw one Foreign Film this year, but I would be surprised if it weren't the best one. There will be an American remake with Jack Nicholson and Kristin Wiig and I'm sure that movie will be great too. What is especially interesting is that it is a German film, takes place for the most part in Romania, and as it concerns international business contains a good deal of English. Which parts are which languages speaks quite a bit about how people speak in the Europe of 2017.
FILM EDITING
La La Land
Nocturnal Animals
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
Moonlight
It is interesting how "Hacksaw Ridge" won the Film Editing Oscar and was never considered part of the race for Best Picture because Film Editing is usually so intertwined with what makes a great movie. It is an editor's medium as many filmmakers have said. "Hacksaw Ridge" although only arguably the best movie the year, was certainly the most unappreciated, at least where I'm from.
DOCUMENTARY
O.J.: Made in
America
All I'm saying is I wish I had seen more documentaries. This one it is fair to say, is a great one.
DIRECTING
Damien Chazelle –
La La Land
Mel Gibson – Hacksaw Ridge
Scott Derrickson – Dr. Strange
Barry Jenkins – Moonlight
Peter Berg – Deepwater Horizon
Damien Chazelle is somebody special. I hope to see what he can do with a story that is not about musicians or Hollywood.
COSTUME DESIGN
Hail Ceasar!
Doctor Strange
Allied
La La Land
The Handmaiden
This one is for the Kimonos.
CINEMATOGRAPHY
The Handmaiden
Silence
La La Land
Moonlight
Hail Ceasar!
La La Land was the best looking movie of the year. period.
BEST SUPPORTING
ACTRESS
Kate McKinnon –
Ghostbusters
Naomie Harris – Moonlight
Michelle Williams – Manchester by the Sea
Nicole Kidman - Lion
Rachel Weisz – The Lobster
It is weird how I didn't see a better performance by a Female Supporting Actress. This is always a weak category and Kate McKinnon, well she's great.
BEST SUPPORTING
ACTOR
John Goodman - 10 Cloverfield Lane
Jeff Bridges – Hell or High Water
Mahershala Ali -
Moonlight
Michael Shannon – Nocturnal Animals
Tom Bennett – Love and Friendship
I'll let this clip speak for itself. I liked Michael Shannon, but I picked him for Best Actor already a couple years ago. Mahershala Ali has been great and not been picked for awhile now.
BEST ACTRESS
Meryl Streep – Florence Foster Jenkins
Amy Adams – Arrival
Rebecca Hall – Christine
Sandra Huller –
Toni Erdmann
Kate Beckinsale – Love and Friendship
There is something really special about this performance. Because the movie is so low key, the performance sneaks up on you. I'm attaching here my favorite clip, but without the first two hours, you won't understand why its' so great
BEST ACTOR
Viggo Mortensen – Captain Fantastic
Andrew Garfield – Hacksaw Ridge
Joel Edgerton – Loving
Casey Affleck – Manchester by the Sea
Denzel Washington
– Fences
This one was tough, but I have to give credit to Denzel. He made a movie that was so obviously based and confined by its play setting a verve and direction that a less actor wouldn't have made possible.
BEST PICTURE
Deadpool
Hell or High Water
Deepwater Horizon
Moonlight
Doctor Strange
Hacksaw Ridge
Loving
Arrival
La La Land
The Lobster
This was one year when I really did not have a clear preference. There was that mixup at the Oscars telecast and I was like, okay, I'm cool with either one. But "Hacksaw Ridge" touched me in a way no other movie did this year.
The resiliency of comic book franchises rests on the enormous wealth
of material that subsequent installments of the franchise may draw
upon. Whereas a franchise made originally for the screen like a Rambo
or a Die Hard often face a narrowness of choice (in chronological
order and with bigger explosions), something like the X-Men franchise
has an extraordinary versatility in the types and time periods in
which the story-lines take place.
After three movies that took place in the early 2000s (X-Men in 2000,
X2 in 2003, and X-Men: the Last Stand in 2006), the next movie took
place in the 1960s (X-Men: First Class), another one simultaneously
in the 1970s and the apocalyptic future (X-Men: Days of Future Past),
another in the 1980s (X-Men: Apocalypse) and two Wolverine centered
movies (X-Men: Origins Wolverine, I think in the 1980s and The
Wolverine (set in 2010s Japan).
Now we have Logan, which is set in the future in 2029. Logan, like
all the others, is based in part on a comic book. Like all the
others, it does not feel like the intuitive choice for the next movie
in a franchise (i.e. in chronological order and with bigger
explosions). It’s tone and style is very different, more Western
than Superhero blockbuster, which says much about the incredible
diversity in X-Men literature. I’m sure there are nerds out there
fretting what the presence of “Logan” does to the canonical X-Men
Universe. These movies don’t always fit together. (In fact, I think
because of the time paradoxes of X-Men: Days of Future Past, the
events of the third movie X-Men: The Last Stand has now officially
never happened.) Who knows what the installment of “Logan” will
do to the status of the overall story, given that it is particularly
dark and according to its plot, all the mutant X-Men are dead.
What is left in the dusty world of bleak 2029 is an aged Wolverine
who is slowly losing his powers of indestructible healing, a now
dangerously senile Charles Xavier (played again by his old
counterpart Patrick Stewart), and their albino housekeeper named
Caliban (played by the comedian Stephen Merchant.) They live right
across the Mexican border on a dusty farm. Charles is being housed in
a giant steel tank and takes knock-out medicine. His mind is too
powerful and unstable to focus. Technically the government now
considers it to be a weapon of mass destruction.
Everything is bad and then it gets worse. Logan is found by a nurse
who has absconded with a child that was created with mutant powers by
an evil corporation with the evil intent of patenting the mutating
genes. She asks Logan for help, Logan is reluctant to help, Logan
reluctantly helps, and many people die in the aftermath.
“Logan” is a great movie masquerading as a comic book
blockbuster. It directly reminded me of the Christopher Nolan
“Batman” movies in style and tone. There seems to be almost no
digital effects. Everything is down to earth and gritty. The movie
was written and directed by James Mangold who has shown before the
ability to not confuse spectacle with drama (“3:10 to Yuma,” “The
Wolverine”).
Hugh Jackman, as Wolverine, puts in his best performance out of the
now nine times he has played the character. He also has never looked
so much like Wolverine. Patrick Stewart makes a great case for why a
man of his dramatic talent should be in a superhero movie at all.
Stephen Merchant, best known for being a comedian, is an inspired
choice of casting for the dramatic role he plays. And then there is
Daphne Keen who puts in a performance that should not be possible
given her age. I feel like I need to see a documentary in the quiet
revolution of child performances in the past twenty years that make
something like Ms. Keen possible. For those of us who remember
Macauley Kulkin being the best child performer of his time, it is a
revelation to see children pull off the myriad of great performances
in “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Looper,” and now “Logan.”
Over the soundtrack the sound of old Johnny Cash plays. It is a
fitting end for a great character.
“Fences” is obviously adapted from a play. It helps to keep
reminding yourself of this as you watch. That way you can get past
the long speeches in confined areas without succumbing to the
unreality of all. People act differently within the confines of a
play and when they are brought into the wide open of movies it can
seem weird. So it is best to come into this movie with that
expectation.
The biggest choice any adapter of a play needs to make is how much of
the talking of the play should be ditched for scenes of action.
Director Denzel Washington ditches so little of the lines that it
hardly makes sense for to see “Fences” as a movie. If you can see
it as a play, do that instead, the immediacy of the live medium will
make it more exciting and easy to follow. Not that “Fences” is a
bad adaptation. Denzel’s directs in long takes and makes everyone
speak very quickly. This helps move the whole thing along even if it
must as designed stay in a backyard for the most part.
Denzel stars as Troy Maxson, an arrogant man who bitterly notices that his life
was unfair and that he is too old to get a better one. He is a
garbage truck hauler with ambitions to be a garbage
truck driver. He also wants to turn back the clock about thirty years and play baseball in the major leagues. He once was a very good ball player., but as the play
goes along it becomes clearer and clearer that he didn’t really
have a chance to make it. Everything went against
him: racism, non-existent parents, his own character. It is
hard to tell where societies ills end and where his weaknesses start.
This blinds him to the promise of his children, his relatively good
life, and his own faults. There are several dramatic scenes that
start with this man being on the high road talking a lot and end with
his moral grandstanding backfiring. A good example is when his grown
son, a musician, asks to borrow ten dollars. He makes a big scene
about how his son should get a real job and not mooch. Then it turns
out that Denzel was in prison for his son’s childhood and really
does owe his son ten dollars every now and again no matter how old he
is.
His wife, played by Viola Davis, is a standard long suffering wife.
She is an upstanding reasonable woman, the sort of character whose
personality is sacrificed to provide a foil to more complex and
interesting people. Someday someone might make a story about a guy
like Denzel, (“which has happened many times before think “Death
of a Salesman”) about a woman instead. Maybe once the 60s roll
around again.
All in all, there is great acting in “Fences.” There is almost
nothing else and no potential for anything else. And I’m not sure
if anyone else noticed, but there is only one fence in “Fences.”
This movie should really be called “Fence.”
This movie never really makes up its mind about what it thinks about
Ray Croc, the man who franchised McDonald’s, a small family owned
chain in Southern California, into a global company. Is he a hero or
a villain in this story? Does he represent good things like ambition,
persistence, and work ethic? Or does he represent bad things like
bullying, cutting corners, and unfair dealing? Or is he half-good or
half-bad? I actually think the last one may be closer to the truth,
but the movie is ambiguous.
Now the creators of the movie may have felt that keeping the movie
ambiguous is a way of portraying Ray Croc in a half-good/half-bad
way. But saying nothing about either
thing isn’t the same about saying something about both things. “The
Founder” would have been a much better movie if its creators were
more insistent on having more of a point of view. A much better movie with a very similar plot is David Fincher’s
great movie “The Social Network.” That too told the story of a
small business that grew into a giant and the collateral damage of
early partners it left in its wake. That movie is superior to this one because it was explained to the audience why it was necessary that the collateral partners were pushed
aside and explained why that wasn't completely fair, whereas “The Founder” never quite
makes the argument that Ray Croc was wrong in how he expanded
McDonald’s (he is shown maintaining a great product and giving
business opportunites to many hardworking normal people) and never
quite makes the argument that Ray Croc was right in how he cut out
the original founders, the McDonald’s brothers (Ray Croc’s real estate deals are shown in a slippery
manner and the movie blatantly shows the infamous hand shake deal
that courts later said couldn’t be proved.)
The lynchpin of the whole thing was a milkshake that didn’t need a
freezer. It was an insta-mix. You put it into a glass of cold water
and stirred it for a couple minutes. The McDonald’s brothers (played by the perfectly cast Nick Offerman and John Carrol Lynch) balk
at this even though Ray Croc and all the other franchisees prove that
it will save them a lot of money. What does the movie think? Did the
McDonald’s brothers have the right to stop all the other
franchisees from saving money with insta-milkshakes? Are the original
standards of McDonald’s sacrosanct and not worth the expansion of
the franchise? This could be clearer.
Another thing mixed up in this could be clearer. Ray Croc was married
to a woman who didn’t share his ambitions. The woman who came up
with the Insta-milkshake became his later wife after he divorced the
first one. What does the movie think about this? It kind of waffles
here too. It is under the impression that the first divorce is not a
good thing. But it can’t admit (because I don’t think the
evidence is there) that the second marriage was a bad thing. When I
watched the “Social Network,” I felt it was making an argument
that the company, Facebook, and its success was important enough to
warrant hurt feelings and disloyalty to members that weren’t on
board with the program of making it the biggest and best thing ever.
“The Founder” is in the same position, but doesn’t make the
argument. I’m not entirely sure what “The Founder” thinks of
McDonald’s. Does it think it should have stayed in San Bernadino?
Or does it think it should have expanded across the world? This is an important question because Ray Croc was responsible for
the second scenario and he could not have done it with the McDonald’s
brothers as his business partners.
Ray Croc is played by Michael Keaton, one of those actors that is
sort of beyond definition. He looks white-bread neutral and yet the
man has played Beetlejuice, Batman, Birdman, and a police sergeant
that moonlights at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and quotes TLC lyrics. He is
an off-kilter surreal actor playing in a boring white man’s body.
He is perfect for Ray Croc, whose weird enthusiasm and persistence,
renders him borderline uncanny valley. That is he looks human but there is
something not quite right. Like L. Ron Hubbard, he seems to have
brainwashed himself. Early scene of him as a traveling milk-shake
salesman has him alone in his hotel room listening to self-motivation
records on a loop. It would be nice if the movie had an opinion about
that.
The first McDonald’s in San Bernadino looks and feels like a great
restaurant. In fact, it reminds me of the best fast food restaurant
I’ve ever been to: In-N-Out. The menu is only burgers, fries, and
soda/shakes. The quality of the food is great. The people working
there are clean cut and well paid. As a mainly Southern California
restaurant, the restaurant is airy and people can easily eat outside.
Contrast this with your average McDonald’s today. A depressing
conglomeration of colors and menu options, all of which contain
substandard ingredients, and a general aura of uncleanliness confined
in the commercial space of a crowded urban area (at least in NYC). Of
course we don’t see what McDonald’s became in “The Founder,”
and I really don’t know what the makers feel about what
happened.
“Silence” is an outlier in movies. It was adapted from a book of
the same name by Japanese author Shusako Endo. That book is a
fictionalized account of a historical occurrence. The persecution of
Christians in mid-17th Century Japan. The Christian evangelists are
Portugese Jesuits. (This movie substitutes English for Portugese but
the Japanese stays the same.) Persecution and even martyrdom do not
faze the Jesuits. As one states in the movie, “the blood of martyrs
are the seed of the church.” And yes, the Japanese shogunate starts
realizing this. So instead of making martyrs out of priests for not
apostatizing (renouncing God’s name publicly) they start torturing
and killing innocent Christian Japanese civilians, mostly just poor
fisherman, whether or not they apostatize until the priests apostatize. This is a much harder
choice for the Jesuit missionaries. They were ready to give up their
lives for God, but they weren’t so ready to watch other men do it
when an apostasy by the priest would save them.
There is much pain and cruelty and heavy theological talk in this
movie. Almost immediately it becomes apparent why it took the director
Martin Scorsese twenty years to get funding to make the movie. There are no commercial reasons for making the
film. But that in itself is a reason to go see it. For it is a good
movie and a good movie about this subject matter is something you probably haven't seen before.
The movie starts in Portugal with more bad news. The persecutions
have been off and on in Japan for fifty years now and all the
Christians have resorted to practicing in secret. But this latest news is the most dire yet. Father Ferrera has been reported to have
apostasized in public, changed his name and taken
a Japanese wife. Two young Jesuit missionaries in Lisbon do not
believe it. After all, Ferrara was their teacher. These two men are
Father Rodrigues (played by Andrew Garfield) and Father Garupe
(played by Adam Driver). Over the concerns of their monsignor, they set
off to Japan to find the truth and Ferrara. They are told that theirs will be the last mission the Jesuits take to Japan as it is now too dangerous for any
Christians there.
Indeed it is too dangerous for Christians there. Rodrigues and Garupe succeed in finding a
poor fishing village inhabited by secret Christians. They say mass and give absolution under dark of
night. But sooner or later, simply by being there, they draw the
attention to the authorities somehow. And the authorities start
cruelly torturing to death all the poor men, women, and children that
look up to Rodrigues and Garupe for solace.
At this point, Rodrigues and Garupe split up as Rodrigues goes
further to look for Ferrara. And giving meaning to the title of the
movie, he starts to have a crisis of faith. Where is God when his
faithful are going through unimaginable tortures? Good question.
“Silence” is a good complementary film with Scorsese's last sincere
exploration of Christianity, 1987’s “The Last Temptation of
Christ.” (Fun fact: That movie was one of the reasons why there
weren’t all that many blatantly religious movies between 1987 and
2004’s ‘The Passion of the Christ.’ It turns out when certain
Christians don’t like how Christ is portrayed (in that movie 100%
human and 100% divine) they denounce and picket. Movie studios wanted
none of that.) It reflects the sincere interest of a Roman Catholic
and what it means to have faith in the most trying of times. I heard
that he held a screening for Papa Frank, another Jesuit. I’m not
surprised by Papa Frank's openness.
The movie falters somewhat in its casting of Andrew Garfield. Try as
I might, I had hard time seeing him as someone who would have lived
in the 17th Century. He seems too smooth in the face for
that. I actually think this movie could have been more effective if
Andrew and Adam Driver had switched roles. Adam Driver doesn’t
really look normal and that I feel is what these characters require.
The Japanese in the movie, unknown unless I’m betraying my lack of
knowledge of Japanese movies, are cast perfectly. Shin’ya Tsumakato
plays Mokichi and really looks like he has been living hard in a dirt
poor fishing village all his life. Yosuke Kubozuka plays the
interpreter Kichijiro. This is a rather pathetic person who ultimately draws
less of the audience’s contempt as it does its pity. Finally, the
big bad inquisitor Inoue is played by Issei Ogata as not big and bad
and not even particularly intimidating. Actually he’s rather polite
and goes out of his way to reason with Father Rodrigues about the
futility of spreading Christianity to Japan. Of course he’s also
evil, anyone who tortures and kills innocent people always is, but
like all well written characters, his stance is explained well and
understood, which makes Father Rodrigues’s reaction to it all the more meaningful.
“Silence” is a good movie. For its kind of movie, it's one of
the best. All too easy a thing to accomplish given there are so few movies
like it.
