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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Jurassic World Dominion

Jurassic World Dominion consists primarily of two stories. In the first, trilogy protagonists Owen (Christ Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) lead an effort to find their quasi-adopted daughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon), who is kidnapped early in the film by an evil company that wants to study her cloned genome. In the second story, the heroes of the original movie, Drs. Allan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Satler (Laura Dern), and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), attempt to infiltrate that company to investigate and reverse a plague of genetically modified, giant locusts that are devouring crops around the world, threatening a global food shortage.

You might notice that neither of these plots have anything to do with dinosaurs. And you might ask: isn’t this supposed to be “Jurassic World”?

Good question.

And not only do these two plots not involve the creatures that we’ve all paid to see, but they lend themselves to very little emotional investment. In the case of the Maisie storyline, it’s made clear before her kidnapping that she hates her current life as, basically, a prisoner in the woods. So her removal, during which she’s never hurt nor threatened to be hurt, doesn’t cause much alarm. In fact, if anything, she seems to be happier following her kidnapping than before it. The rescue effort, then, isn’t exactly gripping storytelling.

And in the case of the locust storyline, none of the characters in the film are affected by the supposed global catastrophe of the locusts, so the threat is only theoretical, talked about. All we see is one independent farmer whose crops are eaten up. Too bad for her, I guess, because she never reappears. Are people around the world really going hungry because of the locusts? This is never shown to us, so we never feel the danger.

These baffling mistakes in central story conception suggest a franchise with no ideas left. Jurassic World Dominion is sad and predictable. It goes through the motions of a blockbuster, but the aim of these gestures is merely to justify its own existence, not to provide enjoyment.

The movie is disturbingly similar in, in fact, to another failed trilogy conclusion: Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker (2019). Both films jump from setting to setting with disorienting, aimless action that doesn’t advance the story. Both films are satisfied with generic messages of empowerment, eschewing believable dilemmas or moral stands. Both films dredge up old characters from the franchise’s heyday to unite with the newer, duller cast, enabling eyeroll-worthy banter about old geezers being out of touch and kids being downright crazy these days.

On that last point, though, there’s an intriguing wrinkle here, because in Jurassic World Dominion, the kids actually are crazy.

In the original Jurassic Park films, most of the main characters understood that having man-eating dinosaurs around was a very bad idea. But in this film and the previous installment, the characters are possessed by the insane belief that having these creatures around is a good idea. And not only that; they believe that dinosaurs should be allowed to simply roam free—not on a remote island, mind you, but here in the wilderness, where they’re certain to eat people, drive other species to extinction, and mess up the entire ecosystem.

Who would defend such a position? Late in the film, Owen and Claire risk the lives of every character to save a baby velociraptor, which will surely devour a few campers some day, because Owen promised its mother that he would. Malcolm appropriately deadpans: “You made a promise…with a dinosaur.” But he and the entire audience are defied: the baby raptor must be saved.

Where is the military? Why hasn’t every dinosaur been exterminated? What is this madness? Apparently there is a black market for dinosaurs: why? Do people want illegal, disobedient pets that will kill them in their sleep?

Jurassic Park was a fine idea, because it was conceivable that one man could err drastically enough to enable the existence of such a park. But Jurassic World? Come on. We’re not that dumb.

Although, apparently, we’re dumb enough to believe the marketing hype and buy tickets to see this movie—just like the dinosaurs being herded into containment using brain microchip “signals.”

Hey, maybe they’ll fit in here in 2022 after all.

 

-Jim Andersen

More movie reviews: Spider-Man: No Way Home

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Movies Explained

Tenet Explained (and Debunked)

I’m not a fan of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi action film Tenet (2021), but for the past year it’s been my most requested movie for analysis. So this piece will serve as both a walkthrough of the plot of Tenet, as well as a debunking and criticism of various aspects of the movie.

The central premise of Tenet is that some time in the future, scientists discover a way to irradiate objects or people in such a way that their progression through time is “inverted,” meaning they go backward through time instead of forward (or back to forward again, if they’re irradiated once more). This phenomenon is explained to a new agent known as “the Protagonist” (John David Washington), who’s recruited by an organization called Tenet that uses this technology to stop those from the future who aim to use it maliciously.

The Protagonist’s training officer demonstrates how bullets and other apparently inverted objects don’t appear to follow standard laws of physics, because, unlike us, they’re experiencing time in reverse. As an example, the Protagonist is made to aim an empty gun at a target with bullet holes—and miraculously, the inverted bullets zip out of the target and into the gun.

Now, let me interject immediately to say that right from this opening premise, there are myriad problems and inconsistencies. One that immediately comes to mind is: if, as Protagonist’s training officer demonstrates, there are random objects and weaponry out in the world traveling backward through time, because they’ve been inverted by future combat forces, then why weren’t inverted bullets and AK-47s discovered by ancient civilizations? Why did early paleontologists not dig up skeletons and artifacts from the future? After all, we managed to find dinosaur bones from 65 million years ago—how did we miss the inverted futuristic bazookas that had been going backward through time for only decades?

Another enormous problem: if an empty gun can “catch” inverted bullets out of bullet holes, then…when did the bullet holes get there? Who shot them into the target in the first place, and how was that possible if they were inverted?

I’m waiting…

Tenet moves extremely quickly, to the extent that it feels like a significant portion of the film has been ungraciously cut. Since it clocks in at 2 hours and 30 minutes, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Warner Brothers imposed a hard cap of exactly this runtime length on Nolan, who’s known for long films. Whatever the reason, Tenet‘s jam-packed pace makes it virtually impossible to properly digest what we’re being fed. The Protagonist’s trainer says of the time shift phenomenon, “Don’t try to understand it”—a convenient request given issues like the ones I mentioned above—but even if we wanted to understand it, there’s no time to do so during the film itself. Thus, to it’s necessary to meditate on what we’ve seen after the fact; hence this essay.

Tenet’s story eventually comes to focus on a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), whom the Protagonist suspects is up to no good. Indeed, we soon learn that Sator is acting insidiously on behalf of the leaders of a future generation. (To recruit him, his bosses from the future simply inverted his instructions for the job and buried them in the obscure Russian town where he grew up, knowing that decades earlier he would volunteer to dig there for plutonium and find the instructions.)

In return for Sator’s cooperation, his bosses from the future have bestowed on him massive wealth. This is another simple operation, performed like so: Sator descends a box into the ocean and saves the coordinates electronically (“for posterity”), so that in the future his bosses can obtain this saved information, locate the box in their time, and place inverted gold bars inside. The bars then travel back through time to Sator in the present, where he simply hoists up the box to find his payday inside.

Sator’s mission is to assemble a nine-piece “algorithm” that was invented by an unnamed future scientist. This algorithm, as explained by Protagonist’s comrade Neil (Robert Pattinson), is an equation that, if activated, would effectively reverse the entropic time flow of the entire world. If this were accomplished, Neil assures us, all living things in the present day would be obliterated, as well as all living things that ever existed in the past.

The reason the future folks want to enact this ghastly plan is that Earth in their time has become uninhabitable, and reversing the flow of time—and obliterating all previous life—would allow their civilization to continue, but with environmental conditions improving over time, not worsening. Essentially, the human race of the future, in a state of desperation, wants to bulldoze the past to make way for itself to turn around and retreat backward into time.

Sator’s involvement is necessary because the inventor of the algorithm got cold feet at the last minute and decided not to use it, killing herself for good measure so that it couldn’t be reproduced. She became worried, like Robert Oppenheimer before the first testing of the atomic bomb, that her creation might do more damage than intended. Specifically, she worried that the algorithm might not only have destroyed the past as planned, but potentially her own generation as well (we’ll get to her concerns in more detail later).

Before committing suicide, this scientist divided the algorithm into nine sections and inverted them all into the past, splitting them amongst the nine nuclear powers. (How this was accomplished is very unclear to me.) Sator, growing up in Russia in the midst of high nuclear tensions, was therefore an ideal candidate to acquire the pieces. (I can’t quite follow the reasoning here, either.) He’s collected eight of the nine segments and therefore only needs one more, which Tenet tries to prevent him from acquiring throughout the movie.

Making matters worse, Sator has inoperable pancreatic cancer, and, selfish bastard that he is, he’s perfectly happy to annihilate the world as he departs it. Tenet deduces that once Sator obtains the final piece of the algorithm, he’ll kill himself rather than let the cancer do its work. When he dies, his fitness monitor will sense the stopping of his heart and automatically trigger a bomb located right where he’s buried the assembled algorithm. This will in turn trigger the algorithm and destroy the present and past—making way for the future to do a 180 and forge backward to pre-global warming times.

Tenet’s operations to thwart Sator are highly convoluted and, in my view, unnecessarily concentrated on Sator’s attractive wife, Kat (Elizabeth Gebicki). To gain Kat’s cooperation as an informant, which is apparently of the utmost importance, the Protagonist and Neil endeavor to steal and destroy a painting that Kat, an art dealer, incorrectly evaluated for her husband as genuine and that he is therefore able to use as blackmail to control her in various ways. The painting is under ungodly heavy security, such that one wonders whether there was perhaps an easier way to solicit Kat’s help. And this notion would only seem to be strengthened when, after the mission ultimately fails due to Sator having already removed the painting, Kat begins working with Tenet anyway, for nothing.

There’s a sense that the Protagonist may have a thing for Kat, but he never makes a move, and nothing comes of it. So Tenet’s laser focus on Kat is, in my opinion, very difficult to understand.

The quixotic episode of the art heist, though, does serve one memorable purpose: it sets the stage for an action sequence in which the Protagonist fights a masked inverted soldier. Later, it’s revealed that this soldier is actually the Protagonist himself, moving backward in time at a different point in the film while on a different mission (to save…yup…Kat).

Like most hand-to-hand combat scenes nowadays, this faceoff is loud and chaotic with quick cuts, so it’s hard to follow what’s happening. This, however, is fortunate, because given the proper scrutiny, what we’re watching makes no sense whatsoever.

Think about it. If I punch someone in the arm, they’ll feel pain. If the other person were to somehow experience that sequence backwards, they’d be feeling the pain at the start, then the impact would happen in reverse and the pain would go away.

But in Tenet, we see a regular and an inverted person in actual combat as though they’re landing blows on one another. This can’t be! What we should see is the forward Protagonist feeling beat up at the start of the fight (and well before), only to have any injuries alleviated by the blows happening in reverse. When we later see the fight a second time, from the view of the inverted Protagonist, he should likewise feel progressively better throughout the fight as the hits come backwards.

Nolan has thought about this much more than I have, and he knows that I’m right. This is why he goes out of his way to accurately show the inverted Protagonist with a knife wound on his arm before engaging in the fight with his previous self. The inverted Protagonist then receives the wound in reverse during the fight, and it goes away. A similarly correct depiction occurs much later, when a dead inverted soldier (soon revealed to be Neil) reanimates upon receiving his fatal wound.

But because filming the fight this way wouldn’t be as dramatic, Nolan won’t take the idea to its logical conclusions, still presenting us with something barely different from a Jason Bourne set piece, with both of the combatants, for example, grunting after being hit, whereas the sting should occur before the impact, because from the opponent’s perspective, that’s after the impact, and he’s the one who landed the punch. Other scenes in the movie confirm that the wound’s direction is determined by the orientation of what caused it; for example, Kat is wounded by an inverted bullet and needs to be inverted herself so that the wound can heal in the right direction.

There’s even one portion of the fight where the inverted protagonist is seen to parry blows from his counterpart. How can he block something that’s going in reverse? How can he block what he has no way of reacting to, because it’s already happened (in his opponent’s direction of time)? This can be argued for both combatants: they’re both inexplicably trying and succeeding to block or dodge attacks that their opponent has already made.

Yet another problem with the fight is that the visuals don’t compute. If the fight were a plausible occurrence, the person moving in our direction of time would appear to have totally normal physics, while the one going backward would, of course, be noticeably off. But in this fight, you’ll notice that several times the non-inverted fighter also displays apparently impossible physics upon being hit by his opponent, as if the two were taking turns obeying each other’s time orientations.

In these instances it looks like the character following our direction of time is being “sucked” into a hit, as from a vacuum cleaner, or levitating up from the floor. You’ll also notice that Nolan spends a large portion of the fight with the two combatants simply grabbing each other at a deadlock; this is because such a position is the only type of combat that can be plausibly played off as mutually occurring in both directions of time.

Having sufficiently picked apart this fight sequence, I’ll spare you similar analyses of even more egregious sequences, such as an inverted Sator somehow conducting a properly ordered conversation with a non-inverted Protagonist and shooting a non-inverted Kat when he doesn’t get the answers he wants (this means, from his viewpoint, Sator shot her before the interrogation even began!). Let’s also mention for, ahem, posterity’s sake, the poorly executed car chase sequence in which inverted characters are somehow driving non-inverted cars, even though they can’t so much as breathe non-inverted air.

Go ahead, accuse me of overthinking. Relax, you say. It’s only supposed to be entertainment!

The problem is that for the reasons I’ve just detailed, it’s not entertaining. We can’t be entertained when we can’t understand what’s happening on the screen. The only entertainment available to us watching situations like these, really, is the amusing realization that we’re incredibly lost. And it’s not our fault. We’re lost because what we’re watching is totally ridiculous.

Plus, many of Tenet‘s biggest fans are its biggest overthinkers: this film was made for Redditors, as proved by fan work like this. So I’m not engaging on a level that’s alien to those who love the film.

Let’s get back to why the future inventor decided not to use the algorithm. It involves something called the “Grandfather Paradox,” which Neil explains for us. Essentially, this is the notorious puzzle of what would happen if you traveled back in time to kill your grandfather as a young man. After all, if your grandfather dies, you’ll never exist to carry out the murder, so the murder would be theoretically impossible. Something would have to stop you from successfully completing the hit.

The Protagonist, even though he’s new to the time travel game, perceives this immediately, wondering to Neil how the future could possibly kill off its own ancestors. But Neil more or less brushes this off:

Neil: But in the future, those in power clearly believe you can kick grandpa downstairs, gouge his eyes out, slit his throat, without consequence.

The Protagonist: Could they be right?

Neil: Doesn’t matter, they believe it. That’s why they’re willing to destroy us.

I’m not sure how this “doesn’t matter,” since the Protagonist is suggesting that, logically, the future leaders’ evil plan has no possibility of succeeding. Also, Neil’s response is odd considering that he himself is the film’s leading proponent of the Grandfather Paradox’s foundational logic: “What happened, happened.” This maxim means that it’s useless trying to change the past, because the events are already set in stone (since they created the circumstances that led you to travel back in the first place), and therefore any attempts to alter the past can only accidentally contribute to the things that happened anyway.

If “what happened, happened,” then people from the future can hardly annihilate everything that ever happened. They may indeed be “willing” to do it, but, for some reason or another, they won’t.

And Neil is proven right about his understanding of time travel on every occasion. The most direct evidence of “what happened, happened” is Kat’s story. Early in the movie she recounts how after a fight with Sator on a boat, she became jealous of the freedom of another woman, presumably a mistress, whom she saw from afar diving off the boat. But later on, Kat travels backward into time, kills Sator on the boat, and dives into the ocean, revealing that the “other woman” was actually herself all along, after killing Sator. This means that Sator was always defeated; Tenet always succeeded in thwarting him. The characters just didn’t know it yet. Time never screws up. What happened, happened.

(This also raises the question of why Sator’s bosses in the future continue to send him stacks of inverted gold bars. Why compensate him when he clearly did not succeed in what they wanted him to do? Time has not reversed by the time his bosses are alive—which means that it will not reverse, since Sator is much earlier in the timeline than they are. What are they hoping will happen?)

The problem with the Grandfather Paradox from the filmmaking point of view is that it negates the entire drama of the story, which is why blockbusters like Back to the Future (1985) and Terminator 2 (1991) have simply ignored it. As the Protagonist correctly suggests, the characters’ mere existence shows that the future won’t succeed in obliterating the past; after all, they’re in the past, and…it’s there. So despite Nolan’s attempts to scare us into caring about Tenet’s operations—for instance, Neil is made to briefly ponder whether “parallel universe theory” may refute his ideas, only to never mention the concept again—the stakes for the finale are minimal.

Even if the stakes for the finale were high, though, it’s doubtful that anyone could have a clue what’s happening while Tenet commences its “temporal pincer” operation to recover the algorithm before Sator detonates it. The temporal pincer idea is actually a pretty cool concept; it consists of an inverted squad being released into battle near the end of the regular squad’s mission, so that the inverted soldiers can experience the mission backwards and collect helpful information—which they can then brief to the forward squad before their mission begins. It’s trippy, but it checks out.

The problem is that visually, the resulting battle is hilariously unintelligible. Nolan has tried to help us by color-coding his soldiers in James Bond fashion, but even so, the spectacle of two teams of soldiers working together in opposite temporal directions can’t be followed by a human brain in real time. Buildings are exploded, un-exploded, re-exploded. People are dying—or are they coming back to life? Is the enemy even on the battlefield? Not only are there no stakes; there’s no graspable game.

Tenet’s forces do recover the algorithm in time, thanks to sacrificial heroics from Neil. This despite Kat deciding to kill Sator for her own satisfaction, even though her job was to keep him alive as long as possible—a curious move, given that all life on the planet was supposedly on the line.

It’s revealed that Neil has been mostly moving backward in time since joining Tenet, compared to the Protagonist’s moving forward, meaning that, essentially, the entire functioning of Tenet has been a temporal pincer operation, with Neil as the inverted information-gatherer, and the Protagonist as the eventual receiver of the intel from Neil. This transfer is the subject of the film, with Neil training the Protagonist with the experience he’s accumulated. Cool stuff.

But nuggets of cool don’t make a film. We come to the theater, first and foremost, for interesting stories, and Tenet, by any important measure, isn’t one. To the contrary, it’s a very cliché story with forgettable characters, and it makes little sense. But can anyone piece it together to discover that? The movie’s bland narrative, like the doomsday algorithm, has been sliced up and scattered every which way, so that its defects take tremendous effort to reconstruct and experience properly. And why would anyone (besides me) embark on such a task?

Nolan can do better. The maker of The Prestige (2006) and even Inception (2010) has shown himself capable of real, character-based drama, but at other times, such as with this effort and with his first major feature, Memento (2002), he’s simply used his powers of invention to obscure the inadequacy of his central story. It’s discouraging to see him repeating early artistic errors that he had seemed to move beyond.

Is he regressing? Or is his whole career…just one big temporal pincer operation??

 

—Jim Andersen

For more movies explained, check out my piece on Inception.

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Movies Explained

A Clockwork Orange Explained

A Clockwork Orange (1971) is disturbing, bizarre, and, like all of Stanley Kubrick’s major films, a directorial masterpiece rife for analysis. In this essay, I’ll explain how it satirizes modern society with panoramic scope, ultimately asserting that our various social structures are nothing more than hypocritical manifestations of the innate human desire to control one another, such that the tame condition of the modern man is an artificial result of the many forces of greed acting on him at all times.

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Kubrick opens with a sickening sequence introducing Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) as the leader of a gang of “droogs” wreaking havoc on future London. In addition to being the leader of the gang, Alex is especially sociopathic among them: whereas the other three complain that their thieving ambitions are too low, revealing that their motivations are mainly material, Alex dismisses such petty concerns, reminding them, “You have all you need!” Apparently, in contrast to his accomplices, Alex simply enjoys violence and rape for their own sake—a truly savage, dangerous individual.

And an episode after the gang’s vicious spree of “ultraviolence” spotlights another unsavory quality of Alex’s that will be important to the film’s thematic core. When his droogs stage a rebellion of sorts against him, Alex responds with ferocity, whacking Georgie in the codpiece and bloodying up his comrade, Dim. He plunges both into the marina and afterward gloats:

Now they knew who was master and leader. Sheep, thought I.

Thus, we see that Alex relishes commanding and ordering his peers, and he’s willing to use brutal means to retain his ability to do so.

This trait foreshadows the behavior of nearly every character he meets from that point forward in the film. For example, once the gang’s subsequent job ends in disaster and Alex is left at the mercy of the London penal system, he’s acquainted with Chief Guard Barnes (Michael Bates), the prison’s exaggeratedly despotic officer. Barnes is constantly barking purposeless orders (“Pick that up and put it down properly!”) just to lord it over the inmates, wielding his institutional authority with dimwitted pleasure. He has the implied power to beat the inmates into submission if he needs to, although he can’t seem to accomplish this with Alex, whose sly sneer stubbornly demonstrates that, predating One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest‘s (1975) R.P. MacMurphy, he hasn’t quite been dominated by routine and regimentation.

The next figure of authority Alex encounters is the chaplain (Godfrey Quigley), who isn’t quite as effective an authoritarian as Barnes, but nevertheless promises dire consequences for the boys if they don’t change their ways. He preaches that in the next life, souls of unrepentant sinners “scream in anguish and unendurable agony…their skin rotting and peeling…a fireball spinning in their screaming guts!” After this wild speech, which doesn’t appear to move the inmates, the chaplain leads a hymn of warning to the boys:

I was a wandering sheep / I did not love the fold / I did not love my shepherd / I would not be controlled.

So while the chaplain’s methods are plenty different from Barnes’, both characters attempt to coerce Alex into submission via the threat of physical punishment. Ironically, then, after the stage demonstration of Alex’s “cure,” the chaplain protests, “Self interest, the fear of physical pain…drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement!” It seems the chaplain has forgotten that his own sermonizing was founded on those very principles, invoking “anguish and unendurable agony” as its sole impetus for reform.

Yet another agent of coercion is the medical team headed by Dr. Brodsky (Carl Duering) and Dr. Branom (Madge Ryan). Serious scientists, they appear to despise the melodramatic, overly officious Barnes. This engenders hope that Alex’s new caretakers will be less tyrannical than the old ones. But when Alex later notes the unpleasantness of his new conditioning, Dr. Branom delivers a speech no less pious or condescending than what Barnes or the chaplain might have given:

Of course it was terrible. Violence is a very terrible thing. … You see, when we’re healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You’re becoming healthy, that’s all.

Once again, the centerpiece of the philosophy is using physical pain or discomfort to force Alex to behave. And this time, it’s not only rhetoric, as the scientists’ Ludovico Technique endows Alex with a physiological aversion to sex and violence: a permanent, inescapable threat of pain.

Notably, when Alex begs that the treatment be stopped, offering a fairly convincing credo against violence (“It’s wrong because it’s like, against society!”), Brodsky dismisses his pleading, preferring the coercive means of correction to the authentic enlightenment of his patient. And when Alex rails against the use of Beethoven in the musical score, Brodsky remarks to Branom, “Here’s the punishment element, perhaps,” apparently oblivious, like the chaplain, to the reality that his entire system of reformation is based on physical punishment. Also similarly to the chaplain, Brodsky pays empty lip service to the value of free choice, telling Alex, “The choice has been all yours!”—while ignoring Alex’s pleas to desist the treatment.

We see Chief Guard Barnes for the last time in the post-treatment demonstration. He’s moody and skeptical at first, because Minister Frederick (Anthony Sharp) denounces his favored institutional methods as ineffective “hypocrisy.” But by the end of the demonstration, he’s clapping profusely, having derived great enjoyment from Alex’s humiliation on stage. It appears, then, that Barnes actually cares little about the institutional methods that he outwardly champions; what he truly values is seeing adversaries like Alex overpowered, their spirits crushed.

And neither do Minister Sharp’s denunciations of prison ward “hypocrisy” carry any moral weight. Sharp’s quiet comments to his peers reveal that he cares only about retaining his political power.

Given the unwelcome influence of these meddlers, there’s a temptation to sympathize with Alex. Indeed, believing that Kubrick aims to lionize his vicious protagonist is the kernel from which the worst reviews of A Clockwork Orange have sprung. Take Roger Ebert’s uncharacteristically bad 2-star review for example, or Pauline Kael’s, well, characteristically bad takedown in the New Yorker.

But make no mistake: if we find ourselves too fond of Alex—a murderer and rapist—then that’s on us. Recall the earlier episode during which Alex violently retakes control over his droogs, afterward comparing them to “sheep.” Crucially, the egomania that he demonstrates in that section of the movie is merely reflected in the aforementioned characters that exert control over him in these later events: just as Alex endeavors to keep his mates in line while he’s top dog, his friends and antagonists in positions of power target him for coercion after his arrest. So there’s no particular reason to sympathize with Alex, other than that we know him well; this movie consists of variations on a theme, and Alex’s early behavior is merely one of the variations.

Another variation that comes into focus later in the film is Alex’s own family. Although his parents are portrayed as doddering buffoons, their actions after he’s released from prison are serious, even sinister. Rather than accept him back into their home after his reformation, they kick him out on to the street with no money or direction, claiming they’ve leased his bedroom to a lodger named Joe. But Joe himself implies that the real reason Alex is no longer welcome is the embarrassment he caused his parents with his crimes.

At the end of the film, Alex’s father expresses regret for denying him a home—but this is only after Alex’s reputation has been rehabilitated through positive press. Thus, Alex’s family is no source of love, but rather yet another entity attempting to force him into submission. When he defies them, they replace him with an obedient surrogate: someone who, unlike Alex, will do as they wish.

In the last third of the movie, Georgie and Dim use their newfound authority as police to nearly drown Alex with impunity (just as he plunged them into the marina), and writer Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee) drives him to suicide with the dreaded Beethoven’s 9th. These characters act primarily for revenge, and, in Alexander’s case, political benefit. Regardless of their motivations, though, it appears that they, too, are guilty of what Barnes, the chaplain, Brodsky, Frederick, Alex’s parents, and Alex himself are also guilty of: attempting to control other people for their own enjoyment and their own selfish benefit.

So what is the end result of these many power grabs? Well, Alex wakes up in a hospital after attempting suicide, and something is…not quite right with him. A psychiatrist provides some picture prompts, and although Alex proves once again able to contemplate sex and violence, his responses are odd and illogical. For example, when shown a picture of a peacock with the easy prompt, “Isn’t the plumage beautiful?” he offers: “Cabbages…knickers…uh…it’s not got…uh, a beak.”

Huh? Alex, laughing childishly after these gibberish non-sequiturs, is a far cry from the wry, conniving young malchick we met at the beginning of the film, an apparent result of the brain surgery to reverse the Ludovico Technique.

When Minister Frederick pays him a visit, the symbolic meaning of this new condition becomes clear. Alex requests that Frederick literally spoon-feed him his meal as Frederick offers him a good salary and a job of his choice in exchange for political cooperation. The imagery is clear: Alex has become infantilized at the hands of the state. No longer freethinking and enterprising, he’s happily dependent on the government to meet his every need.

Kubrick, then, has offered us a vision of the modern man: a blissfully mindless leech. More importantly, he has provided an examination of how we came to be this way: through the effects of the incessant human need to control one another. Alex’s adventures combine to leave him physically incapacitated, babbling like a small child, with the government shoveling food into his willing mouth.

So Alex may pronounce himself “cured”—but is he really? In the final scene, he imagines himself having sex, at first glance a potential triumph of individual freedom. But if we look closer we can observe that this is a relatively tame, proper sex scene, with, importantly, a small crowd of well-dressed people watching in approval. Alex’s journey, it appears, has stamped out his brutality in favor of a tamer sexuality, a libido approved by the well-to-do. A libido, in other words, more familiar to us, the inhabitants of modern society, who are also subject to the many sources of control—religion, the nuclear family, politics, law enforcement—that act on Alex and render him a listless government prop.

Is it a good thing that Alex’s horrific imagination has been watered down to fantasizing about bourgeoisie-approved, happily consensual sex? Is it a bad thing? I think we owe it to ourselves as serious viewers to conclude that Kubrick, as always, is a dispassionate observer. I indicated before, he has neither sympathy nor animus for Alex. His project, rather, is to show us that, for better or worse, the forces that shape our minds from animal clay into civilized human moldings are characterized by hypocrisy, greed, and self-interest.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movies explained, see my piece on Eyes Wide Shut.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: No Way Home

Spider-Man: No Way Home is, above all, a gag. Its purported subject is “the multiverse,” but this mysterious cosmic phenomenon, as it turns out, is really just shorthand for the absurdity of franchise moviemaking. Indeed, studio greed has resulted in several universes of Spider-Mans, causing the character’s traits and motivations to be scrambled nonsensically to the point where he is, truly, a joke. This latest film is the punch line.

Thanks to Dr. Strange and his magic, a cinematic reunion takes place between all three movie-era Spider-Mans, who together must face down old foes including the Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, the Sandman, Electro, and the Lizard. Abra kadabra. This premise is mostly mined for comedic potential, and the targets of the jokes are the earlier films. Why, for instance, could one Spider-Man shoot actual, natural webs from his wrists? Why did another face off against a “rhinoceros guy”? And why was one of the villains named “Otto Octavius”?  These jokes comprise the film. The action scenes merely provide breaks amidst the endless comic riffing.

Of course, no knotty quantum physics are required to understand why three similar but not identical Spider-Mans have graced the screen over the past twenty years. The actual explanation is Sony’s bottom line: both previous Spider-Mans were aborted as soon as they starred in a panned film and thereby damaged the brand. A new cast wiped the slate clean. And why wait around for people to forget the old version, when there was money to be made right away?

Multiverse, indeed.

But this is all well known to the audience. Sony and Marvel aren’t fooling anyone by allegorizing their own money-grubbing as a mind-blowing new paradigm of time and space. If anything, fans know that they’ve played at least an equal part in the tap dance of maximizing studio revenue; after all, if they’ll reliably flock to see a new Spidey only a few years after the last one flopped, then why wouldn’t Sony oblige them?

The jokes about the old Spider-Man films, then, are jokes at the audience’s expense just as much as the studios’. And this, I think, is why people find them so much fun. There’s a kind of self-deriding glee in appreciating jokes that are so obviously dated and bad: the description of the Green Goblin as a “flying green elf” and the speculation that Tobey Maguire might ejaculate webbing, for example, elicit laughs primarily at one’s own self—for caring the slightest bit about the subject matter. Maguire’s Spider-Man, remember, was released in 2002. Why are we so invested?

You’re not supposed to care about the story of No Way Home, which transparently makes no sense, or the stupidity of Dr. Strange, who corrals supervillains in non-soundproof cells so they can chat with one another, or the lack of purpose for any of the villains, some of whom fight on the opposite side of their own stated goals. The film itself is beside the point. The point is that you’re watching it—and that you also watched the others.

This means that inside jokes can be made and understood as if you were hanging out with old friends. You belong: that’s the appeal of No Way Home. Of course, that type of belonging—Marvel’s specialty—has cost you a bit of money and time over the years, hasn’t it?

Self-parody is cheap and forgettable. It’s all the more disappointing in that there are bursts of excellence in this movie that suggest what No Way Home could have been. There’s one excellent scene in particular where MJ is knocked off a ledge, with camerawork recalling Gwen Stacey’s death from Andrew Garfield’s series of movies. Holland’s Spider-Man can’t get to her, so Garfield makes a leap and saves her. He’s overcome with emotion upon landing, apparently feeling redeemed for failing to save Gwen, an event he had cited earlier as a turning point that caused him to be “rageful” and unprincipled. This very moving scene, which takes all of ten seconds, shows that the filmmakers had the ability to capture real character drama if they wanted to.

But they don’t, and they don’t have to. Maybe Dr. Strange will one day take us all to a dimension where superhero films don’t exist, but until then Spider-Man is a rolling snowball with unstoppable momentum. What’s too bad is that we’ll never again see the type of films at the center of that snowball, the films that started the momentum: flawed releases that nevertheless tried to be serious and dramatic—films that aimed for the tone of their comic book source material. With so many layers of parody and self-parody concealing that center now, it’s all a joke, and the joke is on us. People seem to love No Way Home. But I find it a sad place to be.

 

– Jim Andersen

For more superhero commentary, see my essay on the MCU.

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Commentary and Essays

Why the New Batman is the Best Batman

I grew up watching the acclaimed 1990’s television show Batman: The Animated Series. So for me, the version of Batman portrayed in that series is Batman. Voiced by Kevin Conroy, the character is gruff, physical, and has a temper, but his laudable principles remain steady even in the face of many twisted and powerful foes. These foes often overcome Batman initially—only to fall when he employs intellect and quick thinking to exploit a fatal weakness.

The Christopher Nolan trilogy of Batman movies, for all its merits, is totally inconsistent with this vision of the character. Nolan’s Bruce Wayne, played by Christian Bale, isn’t a recluse occasionally posing as a playboy. Rather, he’s an actual playboy: he spends shamelessly, dresses handsomely, and socializes smoothly, like Bale’s previous signature role, Patrick Bateman from American Psycho (2000).

This iteration of Batman triumphs not with trickery or understated gadgetry, but instead rolls up in, basically, a tank, aiming to obliterate his opposition. In the most disappointing moment in the trilogy, when faced against a seemingly unstoppable foe, he uses his resources to commandeer all mobile device data in the city, essentially buying a cheat code to victory. Whereas the animated Batman, taking cues from the comics, outsmarts his villains, Nolan’s Batman outspends them.

There are undeniable appeals to the playboy aura—production value certainly among them. But these appeals come at the expense of the audience’s relationship with the character. Perhaps this is why Nolan’s movies are best remembered for the performances of their antagonists: Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow, Heath Ledger as the Joker, Tom Hardy as Bane.

All of these villains are more likeable than Batman himself because their principles are stronger. While Nolan’s Batman retains the character’s classic rules of not killing anyone or using guns (Ben Affleck’s later rendition would discard even these), he’s hardly gung-ho about them. In the first movie, he finishes off Ra’s al Ghul with the questionable line: “I won’t kill you. But I don’t have to save you.” The impression is that his principles are burdensome requirements, not sincere values.

Of course, Nolan wanted a morally flawed Batman. He wanted avoid a perfect protagonist who wasn’t relatable. The problem is that a hero who isn’t heroic will eventually spawn a villain who is, creating discomfort with the very premise of the franchise.

This came to a head with the release of Joker in 2019. The hit film presented the Joker, Batman’s most formidable enemy, as a mentally ill, downtrodden loser. He’s shunned by the city and in particular the wealthy Waynes, a family of fat cats too busy in their walled off mansion to care about the suffering going on around it. A subverting like this is inevitable when you paint a hero as too much of a jerk: the villains will catch up and surpass him morally. And indeed, after Joker, it’s hard to watch Nolan’s films without wondering about the many Arthur Flecks scraping by in misery while Christian Bale buys restaurants and hosts fundraisers with the uber-wealthy.

The newest Batman film, The Batman, directed by Matt Reeves and starring Robert Pattinson in the title role, understands, by contrast, what the character is all about. The film is the closest Batman has come on the big screen to his original persona: cerebral, stealthy, honorable. A detective, first; a public servant, second. He’s the kind of Bruce Wayne that bigwigs have to ask, again and again: where have you been?

He’s been fighting crime! Because he’s Batman!

The casting of Pattinson was initially met with high skepticism, as many considered it unlikely that an actor best known for hamming it up in the painful teenage fantasy Twilight (2008) was cool enough to embody the Caped Crusader. But here’s the thing: Batman isn’t cool.

Or, he’s not supposed to be. No superheroes are cool, really; they’re all a little nerdy and weird, which is why their comic book source material was originally enjoyed, notoriously, by an audience that related to these traits. Pattinson’s supposed defects are actually strengths when it comes to the role of Bruce Wayne: he shuffles around moodily, hiding mounting bruises and scars (both physical and psychological), a far cry from the strutting dapperness of Christian Bale. We’re so much better off for this: Pattinson’s lack of coolness allows us to rediscover the core of Batman.

His adversary in this film, Riddler (Paul Dano), is an anarchist revolutionary with a philosophy similar to that of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises (2012). But whereas Bane is a scene stealer, oozing charisma and repeatedly outsmarting Batman and his allies—just call the movie Bane Rises, why dontcha—Riddler is pathetic, grating, and not incredibly original: he directly pilfers aesthetics from killers in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Saw (2004), and Halloween (1979). (An obsessive loner, we can imagine him watching and worshipping all of these films.) Therefore, we find ourselves not thrilled by his victories, as with Nolan’s villains, but cursing his success. Damn you, Riddler!

And this isn’t a black and white morality tale, which I hope I haven’t given the impression of advocating for. Riddler undeniably does the service of exposing corruption in Gotham, and Batman on several occasions appears to sympathize with his enemy’s actions, if not condoning them. But then Riddler targets Bruce Wayne himself and later reveals that Batman is the inspiration for his crimes—disturbing developments that necessitate reflection. When a radicalized goon parrots Batman’s own preferred identification late in the film, it’s clear that our hero needs to reexamine his approach to the fight for justice. He appropriately does so, completing a meaningful story arc.

This is how to portray a morally flawed hero: with pure intentions but, perhaps, misguided tactics, which, of course, he vows to modify once they’re shown to be wrong. There won’t be any Joker-type movie that leans on the callousness of this version of Bruce Wayne, because this time, we actually like him. When he prevents ally Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz) from going too far in her quest for revenge against a loathsome mafia sellout, we’re certainly glad that he doesn’t tell the poor sucker: “I won’t kill you. But I don’t have to save you.” Instead, he advises Kyle, like an actual hero, that when you stoop to that level, “You become like him.”

I could go on about the other successes of this movie. The car chase. The rooftop visuals. The acting, especially that of Colin Farrell as one of Batman’s lesser foes and Jeffrey Wright, who grounds the movie with working class steadiness. Sure, The Batman isn’t a masterpiece, becoming a little clunky in particular toward the climax, but we shouldn’t expect a Batman film to be one, whatever Nolan’s fanboys might tell you. I had a great time watching Reeves’ film and connecting with the vision of Batman that drew me to the character as a kid, and I recommend it to anyone who thinks they might respond similarly.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movie commentary, check out my thoughts on Daniel Craig’s James Bond.

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Commentary and Essays

The Problem All Along Was Daniel Craig

**MAJOR SPOILERS HEREIN**

No Time To Die marks the end of Daniel Craig’s tenure playing James Bond. There are some very good things about it, but unfortunately, smack dab in the middle of them is the movie’s worst quality: Craig himself. His version of Bond, we can now safely conclude, is the worst major portrayal on record.

The critics will contort themselves in knots to avoid acknowledging Craig’s aggregate failure despite the mountain of evidence in front of them. To be sure, they’ll have to admit that something is clearly off with this most recent film. It fails to leave any emotional impact whatsoever despite desperately blaring every possible cue to coax its viewers into tears. But the blame will fall anywhere but on Craig’s shoulders. The supporting characters are too thin. Too much action. Too much dialogue. Too confusing. Too generic. Too campy. Too serious.

Craig has accrued immense critical goodwill despite appearing in only one entertaining Bond movie: Casino Royale (2006). This abundance of establishment support stems from his dedication to playing the character as a dark and troubled individual. The narrative goes: whereas most of the gents who preceded Craig emphasized Bond’s suavity or comedic flair, Craig brought realism back to the character. And this, so goes the narrative, saved the franchise.

After all, the same exact about-face was applied successfully to another cinema icon at almost the exact same time for the exact same reasons. I’m referring to Batman. In 2005, the Batman character was rebooted in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins with a noticeably grittier tone compared to his last appearance, the infamously campy disaster Batman and Robin (1997). This change of course proved extremely well judged, initiating a critically and commercially successful trilogy that put Batman back on the map in the 21st century (although I have my gripes).

Just like Batman, James Bond in the mid 00’s was reeling after his previous appearance. Pierce Brosnan’s final film, Die Another Day, was, like Batman and Robin, heavily criticized for its campy tone and goofy set pieces. In fact, the similarities between these two flops run curiously deep. Both movies are remembered for barrages of bad puns, ridiculous action scenes relying on ice as a recurring visual gimmick, and plots that involve villains stealing diamonds to create lasers that terrorize the world. Yeah, they’re that similar.

And like Batman Begins, Daniel Craig’s comparatively dark Bond reboot, Casino Royale, was a critical and commercial hit. But this is where the parallels end. That’s because unlike the subsequent films in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Craig’s ensuing Bond films mostly stumbled. Why the contrasting trajectories?

I think it’s because Batman is different than Bond in a crucial way that makes a dark, brooding style more appropriate to his films: Batman, originally, is fundamentally a loner. He works in secret in a cave. His identity is hidden from the world. He hunts criminals at night, avoiding detection.

Bond, on the other hand, isn’t like this. He can’t be; his job doesn’t allow it. When Sean Connery debuted the character in Dr. No (1962), he understood that an agent whose duties consisted of traveling the world, schmoozing with crooks, infiltrating shady agencies, and rendezvousing with key allies needed to be exuberant and outgoing. Plus, those traits were needed if he were to successfully smooth-talk gorgeous women.

On the other hand, a sad sack Bond can’t function. A prime example of this comes in No Time To Die when Bond must infiltrate a party with a pretty comrade (Ana de Armas).

This should be exactly the type of fun, sharp sequence that has always made Bond so entertaining to watch. And De Armas is up to it, but Craig can’t pull it off. He has placed himself inside such a small box of emotions by scowling through the entire first half of the movie (and all of the previous three movies) that when he inevitably attempts to flirt with de Armas, it comes off as weird: why is he smiling all of the sudden—did he forget his constant misery? And when he tries to make winking, witty quips to enliven the sequence, it’s suspicious: how can he joke around when he’s so tormented by loss and regret?

So while some may fear that criticizing Craig’s Bond implies a criticism of complexity, a vote against realness, in actuality this version feels less real than his predecessors because the character is so inconsistent. Just in this one film alone, Craig goes from attacking a prisoner, a la Jack Bauer; to a stately declaration of love, a la Mr. Darcy; to befuddled parenting, a la Ted Kramer; to a lovey-dovey death scene, a la Captain America. The ending falls eerily flat because it has no clear meaning: who has died? What was his identity? What were his character traits?

Successful character creation, after all, doesn’t require that we believe that the character could actually exist in real life. It only requires that we sense the humanity of the representation. Craig has reached to be more “real” as Bond, but it’s a futile effort; after all, his character is still performing impossible stunts and utilizing ridiculous weaponry. All Craig has done is confuse us.

The other reason critics have avoided and will continue to avoid condemning Craig’s Bond is the thorny issue of political correctness—especially regarding gender roles. The old Bond films are notoriously terrible in this regard. Most of their female leads (“Bond girls”) exist primarily as sex objects and have absurd names like “Pussy Galore” and “Octopussy.” The Craig films break with these traditions. Craig’s Bond can even take a rejection, as he does from de Armas’ character in No Time To Die without missing a beat—a skill Connery’s and Roger Moore’s Bonds never had much need for. Craig’s Bond, in fact, has spent much of his five films being commanded by women, bested by women, shot by women, in love with women, and replaced by women.

So this isn’t your granddad’s Bond. Critics, appropriately, have welcomed the change, but does this mean that Craig himself is above censure? Does bashing Craig’s portrayal equate to endorsing a return to the old ways, to macho womanizing and objectification? Critics seem to worry that they’ll be accused of exactly that.

This quandary has already been explored, actually, by someone who now seems like a sort of unlikely Bond prophet: Mike Myers. The movie Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) is an immensely underrated comedy, ostensibly a straight parody of the Bond franchise. The premise is that a 60’s secret agent and celebrity (Myers) transports forward in time to the 1990’s, where he finds that his preferred methods—especially seducing friends and foes alike and goofing around while the world nears destruction—are none too welcome anymore. As Roger Ebert summarized in his positive review: “Bond meets political correctness.”

Such a premise isn’t some farfetched notion. In fact, it was actually happening at that very moment, because, thanks to the magic of movies, James Bond had in fact been transported in time to the 1990’s, where he was portrayed by Pierce Brosnan for four films. And filmmakers were indeed forced to grapple with how to import the character’s sleazy tendencies into an increasingly hostile cultural and political environment. Consider a seminal 1990’s event: the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

Brosnan’s films (perhaps until the aforementioned Die Another Day) thus predictably downplayed sex, preferring to focus on maniacal, disturbed villains. This element of the Bond formula was, by contrast, 90’s-approved (see: Hannibal Lecter).

Given these modern tweaks of Bond’s familiar shtick, one recalls the shouting-down Austin Powers receives from his offended new coed partner (Elizabeth Hurley) in the 90’s: “You can’t just go around shagging everyone anymore!” Brosnan’s producers, apparently, felt the same way, judging by relatively dry, prudish outputs like Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and The World is Not Enough (1999). And by the time Craig was through with Bond, the character was parting ways with the lovely de Armas with little more than a tip of the cap.

Myers’ premise in International Man of Mystery, then, is funny because it reflects the very real awkwardness of trying to shepherd the Bond moneymaking machine into an era in which the character doesn’t quite fit. The true object of the parody isn’t Connery’s old films, which were congruent to their era. It’s Brosnan’s newer ones, which are the first to reflect a palpable discomfort with some of the character’s qualities, even as the films continued to draw fans and succeed at the box office.

So we want Bond back, but we don’t like some integral features of his personality. I suppose we can’t blame Craig too much, then, for grasping at straws. What, given our collective indecision, is an actor to do? What is a screenwriter to do? One gets the impression, in No Time To Die, of a focus-grouped movie, but the focus group couldn’t make up its mind. Or broke out into a food fight midway through.

The problem is best captured, again, by Myers. At the end of International Man of Mystery, a cornered Dr. Evil makes a surprisingly insidious argument. He taunts Austin Powers by sneakily suggesting that, with the 60’s long gone, Austin has become a menace:

Isn’t it ironic, Mr. Powers, that the very things you stand for: swinging, free love, parties, distrust of authority—are all now, in the 90’s, considered to be…evil?

The problem with Craig’s five Bond films is that none of them have an answer to this challenge. They’re ashamed of their own protagonist: like Dr. Evil, they believe that the essence of the character is a problem in the modern age.

But this needn’t have been the case, as Austin eloquently proves in his retort to Dr. Evil:

No, man, what we swingers were rebelling against were uptight squares like you, whose bag was money and world domination. We were innocent, man! If we’d known the consequences our sexual liberation, we would have done things differently, but spirit would have remained the same. It’s freedom, man!

If only someone from Eon Productions had seen this film, and incorporated this message! If only Bond’s producers, screenwriters, and actors had recognized that the ways of Bond could change without sacrificing the exuberant “spirit” of Bond. Then the character might still be entertaining in the 21st century.

After all, people of all eras like exotic locations, action, roguish wit, and sex. Bond could still have appealed to that in all of us. But instead, for fifteen years Bond hasn’t liked anything. He gets no pleasure out of the fantasy into which he’s supposed to be inviting us.

I don’t know who the next person to portray Bond will be, but I hope it’ll be someone who can incorporate Mike Myers’ solution to “Bond meets political correctness”—embracing the character’s core traits while operating happily within 21st century mores. Daniel Craig and his collaborators weren’t able to strike that balance.

But Craig’s Bond, after all, is dead now: good riddance?

 

–Jim Andersen

For more commentary, see my takedown of the epic disaster, Cats.

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Movie Reviews

2022 Best Picture Nominees Ranked

It’s that time again. Which movie has earned the Movies Up Close top prize of 2022? This year, I’ll put the rankings up front and follow with commentary.

10. Don’t Look Up (Full review)

9. CODA (Full review)

8. King Richard (Full review)

7. Dune (Full review)

6. West Side Story (Full review)

5. Belfast (Full review)

4. Licorice Pizza (Full review)

3. The Power of the Dog (Full review)

2. Nightmare Alley (Full review)

1. Drive My Car (Full review)

 

This was a good year for movies—better than last year, even though on reflection I gave good reviews to five of this year’s ten nominees, compared to five of eight last year. Maybe I’m just getting harsher with my evaluations. But I should also note that perhaps my favorite film of the year, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, wasn’t nominated, an unjustifiable omission given the inclusion of the likes of Don’t Look Up.

The buzz right now is that CODA is going to win Best Picture. This would be highly undeserved but consistent with the Academy’s choices from the past few years, which have almost always run heavily counter to my own. The last rightful winner of the award was Moonlight in 2017, and I’m beginning to wonder whether a film of that level of artistry will ever again be recognized by the Academy.

This year’s Moonlight is Drive My Car, but it hasn’t generated any serious buzz for winning; its champions seem thrilled that it was even nominated. Previously, the favorite for the award had been the reasonably deserving The Power of the Dog, but some critics apparently soured on it when actor Sam Elliot called it “a piece of shit” and complained that it wasn’t a true Western, which is, of course, the point of the movie. That his tirade seems to have swayed critics only shows how ridiculous this process can be.

The top four movies on this list, along with The French Dispatch, constitute five strong recommendations that I would make to anyone who enjoys movies. It’s good to be back at the theater—happy viewing!

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movie rankings, check out last year’s list.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Drive My Car

Originally published January 2022

Drive My Car, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, is the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture. Count me among those who would have it be the first winner of the award, as well.

The film is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, a writer whose style I wouldn’t have described as especially translatable to cinema. But Hamaguchi relates the world of Murakami without compromise, boldly presenting us with the writer’s favorite elements: a confused, adrift man; an inscrutable, darkly erotic woman; the fight for authenticity in an impersonal world; and the grave shadow of Japan’s twentieth century military history. With this confidence in his non-mainstream source, Hamaguchi has given us something that feels rawer and fresher than anything I’ve seen on the screen this year.

Central to the tone of the film is incoherence: events don’t form a comforting narrative; life doesn’t make sense. Protagonist Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) has lost his daughter and his wife (Reika Kirishima) to two separate tragedies and is trying to pick up the pieces—but the pieces just won’t fit. His wife surely loved him, but she cheated on him frequently. He in turn loved her but never confronted her about her infidelity, although he knew about it. Was she hoping that he would call her out on her affairs? Why didn’t he? How much of their relationship was real, and how much a lie?

A possible clue comes in the form of the revealed ending to her last screenplay idea, previously thought to be unfinished. The screenplay in totality suggests a feeling of overwhelming remorse, of having changed the world for the worse and being unable to rectify it. Does this signify that Yusuke’s wife regretted cheating and felt unable to return to the type of innocence she had with her husband before she ever did?

These questions must remain unanswered. This is not a mystery film; rather, it is a film about mysteries, the important kind of mysteries: the ones that are never solved.

Following his daughter’s death at four years old to pneumonia, Yusuke has shifted his career exclusively to theater, focusing in particular, it seems, on existentialist dramas like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which emphasize life’s bleakness and illogic. This is understandable given how, we can assume, Yusuke’s outlook on life changed after that event. But unlike his daughter’s death, his wife’s death (from cerebral hemorrhage) has too many loose ends for him to continue to find solace in renderings of life’s randomness, and he therefore embarks on a strange quest, casting one of his wife’s former lovers (Masaki Okada) in a role that everyone assumed he would play himself.

This seems to convey that Yusuke is and has been living vicariously through the younger actor, rather than grappling seriously with his wife’s infidelity. He’s keeping himself at too far a distance from his experiences to move past them, which may explain why he latches on to a younger man who, contrastingly, lacks control over his emotions.

But there is redemption in Drive My Car, and it comes in the form of Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a young girl hired as Yusuke’s driver, who has a tragic past of her own. Their bond, like everything in this film, is too multifaceted for easy description, although certainly relevant is that she seems to be about the age that Yusuke’s daughter would have been. But for me the turning point in the movie comes when Misaki relates how her abusive mother would at times embody a childishly sweet persona at odds with her usual behavior. Misaki formed a bizarre connection with this persona—“She was my only friend”—but later took no action to save her mother from being crushed in a landslide. Like Yusuke regarding his wife, Misaki can’t explain her actions toward her mother, nor whether the shared moments of love were real or merely a strained farce.

After Misaki’s tale, Yusuke becomes emotional and pines to see his wife again, expressing regret for his detached behavior and attributing it to his fear of losing her. Later, he reclaims the titular role in his play, no longer so removed from his feelings. Something in Misaki’s story of her mother has struck a chord in him. Perhaps it’s Misaki’s gentle tolerance of duplicity and artifice, which she views as a kind of pained authenticity. One thing is clear: Yusuke’s character arc demands a level of focused analysis that requires more than one viewing.

This has become less a review than a meditation on Drive My Car’s themes, which typically happens when I write about my favorite nominee of the year: Roma in 2019, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood in 2020, The Father in 2021. As with my write-ups for all of these great films, there’s so much to Drive My Car that I’ve left untouched. I admit that I found myself wishing that the middle section of this film was condensed, and viewers unused to ponderous three-hour movies will likely relate. But art doesn’t exist to grant our wishes, only to create an effect, and the effect of this film is to focus our attention, dreamlike, on the things we like to avoid: loss, secrets, randomness, and even rage against the ones we love.

Murakami, I’m sure, must be proud.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movie reviews of great movies, check out my review of Nightmare Alley.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley is a movie that stays with you. Maybe I’m a sucker for this sort of material, but I found it profoundly unsettling and meaningful, a frightening glimpse into a shadowy place in our collective national psyche. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro, this unusual work is as difficult to classify as it is to shake off, blending elements of film noir and Grimm’s fairy tale. The final product chronicles the misadventures of a kind of reverse Icarus: the man who dove too deep.

Something about this film is distinctly American, which is all the more impressive given that its director is Mexican and is best known for Spanish language films. Del Toro has grabbed and pulled a thread that weaves through American literary classics like Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West and cinematic masterpieces like Rear Window (1954). These works are about the hidden inner lives of our neighbors. And when those hidden lives are exposed, they don’t answer our questions but instead gesture toward an endless darkness just out of view.

We witness this darkness by way of a road show’s “mentalizing” act, a kitschy hand-waving routine that evokes audience members’ emotional memories. Protagonist Stanley Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a natural showman, grows impatient with his fellow performers’ restraint in using the mentalizing techniques. While they worry that allowing the performance to escalate to a “spook show” will have damaging psychological consequences for everyone, Carlisle sees an opportunity to widen the scope (and revenue) of his act by ratcheting up the emotional stakes. He eventually leaves the road show to launch a successful career of his own in the city without the confines of his friends’ trepidation.

In other words, as in any good fairy tale, Pandora’s box is opened—and, as advertised, there’s evil inside. By the climax, when Carlisle finds himself acting on his own tormenting trauma, the situation has become so out of control that it could legitimately be characterized as (very) dark comedy. Nobody in this film wins: an adversary (Cate Blanchett, doing a passable Faye Dunaway) does get the best of Carlisle, but we can’t even take heart in her triumph, as all she can muster as a victory cry is: “I’ll live.” The spirit of film noir, alive and well!

Del Toro isn’t the master stylist that he was when he made Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and this film could have been elevated higher by that kind of visual wizardry. He summons it only at lulls, such as with dusky faraway shots of the road show. But the relatively functional camerawork succeeds, intentionally or otherwise, in emphasizing the noir components compared to the fantasy ones, strengthening the depressing, deflating tone of the material.

Also helpful to Del Toro’s aims is the performance of Cooper, who, with his rough features and anxious glare, has always seemed a bit out of place on the A-list, always working a bit too hard—the mark of the social climber. Del Toro’s first choice was Leo Dicaprio, who would have brought a different angle entirely. It makes you think: what would The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) have been like with Cooper in the lead?

If only Stanley Carlisle were a salesman. Instead, he has the misfortune of being a “born” performer, and he learns the hard way that at the core of any performance is self-abasement: as Willem Dafoe’s character knowingly advises early on, an ego boost is the purest form of entertainment, and it’s made clear, as our anti-Icarus rises back to the surface for good, that the freak show will never go out of style.

What about us, then, watching these maniacs destroy one another?

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, check out my review of King Richard.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: King Richard

The deck is stacked heavily in favor of King Richard’s protagonist. He’s crowned as the hero in the movie’s title, and his daughters, also key characters, are executive producers. Right from the beginning, then, things don’t sit right with me. I question the value of a “biopic” made with its own subjects’ approval in mind, other than as fan service; the usual purpose of biography is to illuminate truths that the subjects may not want to come to light, in order to supplement, round out, or even contradict the popular image. Since King Richard, as it turns out, is not interested in doing that, there’s little reason to see it.

The film is the latest in a burgeoning and dubious genre, which I call the “celebration” movie. This genre aims not to portray reality but to honor and even promote megastars who surely don’t need the press. The last celebration movie nominated for Best Picture was 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which also solicited creative input from its living characters. The result was at best a genial nostalgia trip for Queen fans—and at worst a two hour commercial for the band. (Sales of their music, of course, skyrocketed following the release.) Notably, Bohemian Rhapsody garnered unexpected award success, especially with Rami Malek winning Best Actor for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury. This year, Will Smith is the overwhelming favorite to win the same prize.

Smith does a fine job as Richard Williams, father of tennis prodigies Venus and Serena Williams, but, as with Malek’s Mercury, something feels missing from the portrayal due to the film’s goal of lionizing his character. In King Richard’s best scene, Richard’s wife Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis) confronts him about his supposed narcissism, accusing him of putting his own needs above his daughters’. She even claims that, if not for Venus and Serena, she would have left him long ago. But this scene belongs in an entirely different, more honest movie. Because we haven’t seen Richard do anything that would warrant this tirade. In fact, he’s been shown to be a loving (if stubborn) husband and a dedicated (if tough) dad.

Oracene’s words, then, are only a glimpse of what director Reinaldo Green has chosen to withhold from us. Without having seen the truth for ourselves, we’re reduced to the position of the girls listening at the top of the stairs: thinking, what is this all about?

There are many similarly false notes in this film that hint at the heavily filtered nature of what we’re seeing. But perhaps the most discordant of all is the persistently smiley reaction of Venus and Serena to their father’s harsh methods. In one scene, he takes them out to hit balls in pouring rain, and both girls laugh and grin throughout. Something’s awry.

And maybe this is beside the point, but I couldn’t help wondering whether some innocent reputations were torched in the quest to promote a few already-great ones. Jennifer Capriati, who would later return from personal troubles to become the top ranked player in the world, is implied to be a flamed-out delinquent. Arantxa Vicario, the first Spanish woman to be inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame, is portrayed as a White Goodmen-esque dirty trickster.

But these issues all come down to the same thing: artistic integrity. When the goal of a film is to “celebrate”—not to illustrate—there are going to be inevitable mistakes and distortions. King Richard is not a great film and, unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, did poorly at the box office. Hopefully that will dampen the enthusiasm for similar future projects, which, I’m sure, celebrities are lining up to lend their names to. Who wouldn’t want to be the subject of a movie like this?

 

-Jim Andersen

For more movie reviews, check out my review of Licorice Pizza.