THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS

There is such a great pleasure to be had in being surprised by artists you already expect to be impressed by, and this is a pleasure that A Most Violent Year offers in abundance. It combines the talents of the three of the most interesting new voices in cinema of the 2010s: writer-director J.C. Chandor, leading actor Oscar Isaac, and cinematographer Bradford Young. I hope by now that we're all aware that these are names which should perk up our ears at the very least; and though A Most Violent Year is the greatest work by none of them, it's such a left-field exercise in each case that it's still the most damned delightful thing imaginable, and a tremendously rewarding way to bid adieu to a sometimes frustratingly mediocre movie year.

The year in question is 1981, and we only get to see a chunk of it in the early months: it begins and ends in winter, which sets the mood about the way you'd expect it to. Here, we meet Abel Morales (Isaac), who has, after many years of struggling, begun to construct his empire in supplying heating oil to the New York metropolitan area. This has become a very fraught process: while the city reels under one of the most heavily crime-ridden years in its existence, Abel's business has been targeted by the thugs and enforcers unhappy about seeing a jumped-up immigrant break his way into their game; his tankers are being hijacked and his drivers threatened, and his business adviser Andrew Walsh (Albert Brooks, unrecognisable beneath a straight hairdo) and his wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) are both needling him to pursue slightly more aggressive tactics in shutting down this threat to his business, in violation of the ethical code he committed himself to, that he'd never lower himself to become a gangster. Meanwhile, even though he's not doing anything more illegal than the rest of his industry - which is to say, he's not being completely legal, not by any stretch - he's just come under fire from the D.A.'s office, in the form of prosecutor Lawrence (David Oyelowo), with some indictments that threaten to scuttle his impending deal to purchase an oil storage facility owned by a family of Hasidic Jews. With all this going on, Abel's moral resistance, which had already proven to be at least a little bendy, after all, starts to get flexed very hard indeed.

Something of a self-conscious anti-gangster picture, A Most Violent Year isn't necessarily going to win points for surprising originality, and I wish the ending didn't feel quite so pat. The film's appeal, though, is less in the story than in the storytelling: the low simmer of creepy-crawly tension (aided considerably by Alex Ebert's humming, grim-feeling music, the kind that enters your body through your spine rather than your ears), the mordant sense of ethical pathos in a chilly world where the very best people are still pretty lousy and if everything is going to hell - not that I was around in New York in 1981, but its re-creation of the filthy, run-down city of pre-Giuliani legend is just the fucking bees' knees - there's no real the point in trying to behave decently. Young captures all of this filthy downtrodden life, and its contrast to the sleek newness of the nouveau riche Morales household, with heavily shadow-stained cinematography that suggest that he badly wants to audition to be the new Gordon Willis, and probably could manage that feat if he decided to stick with it. The shadowy winter New York of the film looks tremendous: not reinventing a wheel that has been smoothly rolling since the early 1970s (if sadly underused in later years), but machining it with absolute perfection. It's a far cry from anything the chameleonoid cinematographer has yet done (his stock in trade is lighting brown and dark brown flesh better than anybody else I can name working right now, with a detour in 2013 to flawlessly copying Terrence Malick in Ain't Them Bodies Saints), and pretty close to perfect in its bleakness.

As the animating spirit of this rather chilly movie, Isaac is superb; given how openly the whole movie wants us to think about '70s New York crime films while we're watching it, it's no real shock that he's channeling vintage Al Pacino, in everything from the barking way of speaking to the heavily-lidded eyes and downcast mouth. There are no poor performances in the movie (though the dissonance between Brooks's voice and his unfamiliar look is certainly distracting), but nobody is able to pull focus from him: this is very much a one-man show, and Isaac's performance as that man is wonderful: worn down and sullen, but also coiled up with frustration and anger; presenting a clever man just far enough from sophistication that we can see all the clicks and whirs as he thinks his way through new problems.

It's a terrific center to a damn sturdy film: Chandor, three features into his career, is quickly becoming one of America's best damn sturdy filmmakers, and all without repeating himself. His 2011 debut, Margin Call, was a politically-alert economics procedural; last year's All Is Lost a virtually wordless one-man survival drama, and now this moody, moral thinkpiece wrapped in a period-evoking genre film. All that connects the films are characters who clamp onto a plan like a pit bull and follow it to the end no matter how much needless pain is involved; that, and a confident ability to structure moments and scenes to drag us breathlessly through the story.

A Most Violent Year has bumps along the way: some dialogue that rather too baldly tells us what all this means, and some rocky editing, mostly. There's a persistent problem with conversations between three participants, which are blocked and cut in a way that makes it very nearly impossible to work out the physical relationships between people at all times. But there's a great deal more to the film that's engaging and deep, smart without being all that challenging (Chandor's mood here is much more "let me entertain you with well-acted adult situations in an unadorned urban environment", the most quintessentially '70s thing about it, than "let me make you re-evaluate how you think and interact with art"), and it's a pretty terrific piece of the filmmaking for intelligent adults that supposedly can't get produced anymore.

8/10

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JANUARY 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

Good movies here and there, as will always happen, but let us not mince words: the ending months of 2014 pretty well sucked for cinema. A new year now spreads before us, and it brings with us the promise that things will be better.

Not right away, of course. I mean, January. It's the dead zone.


2.1.2015

So speaking of death, the first movie of the year is a horror picture, as tends to be the case. The pretty much not bad at all The Woman in Black finds itself with a sequel in The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, which is, for one thing, too much damn title. For another, the film has a clever work-around to extend the narrative scope - it's 40 years later, and WWII is on - that suggests at least some effort has been made to avoid the usual sequel needlessness. But seriously, the track record for horror sequels is pretty dire, and winter horror tends to be the worst horror.


9.1.2015

We all have our blindspots, and Liam Neeson punching things is one of mine, and that, children, is why I am actually really excited for Tak3n.


16.1.2015

Okay, so apparently, despite having the actual worst trailer of the whole year, Paddington isn't a heaving piece of shit? Can anyone from the United Kingdom confirm this fact for me? Because I like the thought of children's films with Nicole Kidman as the villain, despite the available evidence.

Moving into darker territory, the Kevin Hart Movie Machine now cranks out The Wedding Ringer, where he plays Josh Gad's fake best man, and the whole thing doesn't seem to have any redeeming characteristics at all.

And then there is the befuddling matter of Blackhat, in which we find a Michael Mann film dumped into the hinterlands without even a courtesy Oscar qualifying run. That has to be the worst possible sign, right? I mean, how disastrous does a movie by a brand-name director have to be for this kind of release pattern?


23.1.2015

Speaking of brand names, Johnny Depp's latest exercise in broad character creation, Mortdecai, is also getting the burn-off treatment. Which is, if anything, even uglier: he used to be a major star, and now he's headlining January comedies. This one is at least as ill-seeming as the Mann thing, but on the other hand, the trailer makes it look so awful that it's much less surprising.

Strange Magic finds Gary Rydstrom making his feature directorial debut with an animated movie "from the mind of George Lucas", and boy, it could not look like more of a worst-case scenario for what that phrase could possibly mean. There's also a thing called The Boy Next Door, which I'm certain I've seen an ad for, and it's like a sexy teen neighbor seducing a woman thing that might, if we're lucky, be fun sudsy junk. If we're not, it's exactly what it sounds like.


30.1.2015

Kevin Costner and Octavia Spencer teach us all a lesson about race relations in Black or White. Okay, so it has to be better than it looks. Mike Binder's not the worst writer in the world. But oh, that trailer makes this look Very Special in the most condescending way.

Teens build a time machine and film themselves using it in Project Almanac, which sounds like a found footage Primer for the illiterate. And swingers investigate a murder in The Loft, so that's like, I don't know, a thing that exists in the world.

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HOUSE OF PAINT

One doesn't get to use the word "exquisite" enough to describe movies, so it gives me great pleasure to declare that Mr. Turner is exactly that. It is, to begin with, stupefyingly beautiful: not another movie in 2014, not another movie since The Tree of Life, in fact, has made me literally stop breathing because I was so flabbergasted by the sheer gorgeousness of so many individual frames - basically every single establishing shot, of which the film indulges itself in many.

By an incomprehensible margin the best of the year’s biopics of a famous British man, Mr. Turner’s title subject is J.M.W. Turner, revolutionary landscape painter of the first half of the 19th Century. Which explains, to begin with, why the film is so god-damned beautiful: cinematographer Dick Pope has here made it his mission to re-create not just the lighting of the paintings of Turner and his contemporaries, but the texture of them as well. My vocabulary deserts me, but this is not a movie that feels like a movie. There’s a chalky, musty quality to its images that goes deeper than that (it is, I think, a film that could only look the way it does thanks to the latitude of digital cinematography, and so for the first time in my whole love, may I say: thank God for digital cameras). It’s not so much a film that recreates the look of period-appropriate paintings, Barry Lyndon-style (it has the wrong aspect ratio, to begin with), but it finds a cinematic equivalent to the play of light and color and curve. It is maybe the most unprecedented work of cinematography I have seen in 2014.

Which is rewarding in and of itself, but Mr. Turner is not a Dick Pope film, but a Mike Leigh film, and like all Mike Leigh films it is driven by characters, not imagery. Which is even more impressive, given how easy it would be for the imagery to drive this film of all films. Instead, the painterly cinematography serves to make the film an extension of the perspective and mind’s eye of Turner, played by Timothy Spall in an absolutely sublime performance: the best work of his career, the best acting by a man or woman in the English language in 2014, whatever hyperbole you want to throw out there. It can stand up to it.

The film is effectively structureless: picking up during the 1820s, in Turner’s early 50s, when he was already established as a major painter, and following till his death in 1851, with no real plot arc to speak of, and often only the fuzziest connection between scenes that sketch out the general content of Turner’s life without providing some rigid unifying schema. The resulting biopic thus does something that biopics usually do not: it resembles, to a meaningful degree, a human life (within the 2014 movie ecosystem, it’s “this happened, and oh now it’s two years later and this is happening instead” flow of moments that express a man without trying to stuff him into movie character boxes makes it a surprisingly ideal pairing with Boyhood). Freed from generic straitjackets, Spall is able to make a more complex and nuanced character than any real-life figure in a movie in recent memory, all within a very limited range of tricks. Spall’s Turner is piggish, sharp, and unpleasant; he communicates mostly in grunts and snorts, with the actor finding a seemingly limitless variety of ways to go “hunh” and have it mean something vastly different every time. But at the same time, even as the movie forthrightly allows him a host of character flaws (everything from free-for-all rudeness to his bored raping of his housekeeper) and Spall makes not the slightest play for our affections, the film has no difficulty in showing the sensitivity and keyed-up awareness of other people that makes a man a gifted artist. It is, as a whole, one of the most nuanced depictions of a human being that the movies have provided in some time, and Mr. Turner would be essential cinema if it did nothing else.

But it does much else! While Turner is the film's vessel and chief focal point, it wouldn't be a Mike Leigh picture if there wasn't a goodly amount of attention paid to the society around him, and the director's best film since 1999's Topsy-Turvy turns out to be an excellent companion piece for it, addressing the mores of early Victorian England while that film did the same for late Victorian England. And to the question of whether a viewer in 2014 should care about Victorian England at all, I can only adopt a confused look and say that, whatever, I happen to, so there.

The point being, Mr. Turner beautifully captures the pace and ideals and behavior of an era, filling every scene with an outsanding cast made from Leigh regulars and others, all of them creating vivid characters in even the smallest appearances. It's the sort of film wherein, every time somebody other than its protagonist acts or speaks, we are left with the strong impression that they all have full, busy lives, as worthy of exploration as Turner's own, and it's only a matter of keeping things manageable that this particular film has selected only one human being as its subject.

Leigh's way of framing all this humanity is wonderful: they are crammed into Suzie Davies's fussy, organic sets in compositions fraught with meaning, whether to reveal social standing, or evoke states of calm, loneliness, busy panic, and everything else. The lessons of fine art have been utilised well in the construction of the film's images: they are psychologically acute on top of being beautiful. And thus we arrive at the construction of a living, functioning world which we are permitted to view in sliced-out moments, some of them impossibly minor (Turner's father, played by Paul Jesson, buying paint supplies), some of them massive (an exhibit featuring all of the important painters in England at the time, a lengthy chain of events that I suppose qualifies as the film's signature sequence), all of them equally captivating and important feeling.

By focusing on individual incidents and beats rather than anything like an overarching plot, Mr. Turner's depiction of life has a chance to feel fuller and more authentic than anything else like it in years. Without any causal linkages, adjacent scenes comment on each other to present a version of the title character who can be likable and then infuriating in the blink of an eye, who experiences sad moments, triumphant moments, moments when he amuses us and moments when he infuriates us, all in a flow that feels natural and rhythmic even though, if one tried to work out how each scene feeds into the next, it would probably feel rather arbitrary. Leigh's directorial naturalism sells it; the visual splendour gives it a certain richness and cinematic brightness that adds just enough pageantry to it that it can't be pegged as a generic exercise in living history; and Spall serves as the immovable bedrock of this sprawling study of life at a certain time and place, while also being its most fascinating single element. I can't pretend that it's perfect - for one thing, it repeats itself narratively and thematically, especially as it gets closer to the end and focuses with increasing closeness on Turner's relationship to the twice-widowed Sophia Booth (Marion Bailey, the standout among the great supporting cast) - but it's as close as it needs to be, and it's certainly the highlight of the 2014 year-end prestige glut.

10/10

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IT TAKES TWO OF US

We take Stephen Sondheim very, very seriously around these parts. One doesn't become objectively the best creator of stage musicals in history without earning the right to have one's work treated with the gravest respect and unbridled love. This has not, to date, been the attitude shared by Hollywood, which has largely manhandled and mistreated Sondheim's musicals in adapting them to cinema. There haven't been very many attempts, of course, but when one of those was the ghastly 1977 version of A Little Night Music, a viewer has the right to be gun shy.

This means, at any rate, that the new film version of Sondheim’s Into the Woods comes laden down with Baggage for the present reviewer. Lots and lots of Baggage, of a sort that makes it virtually impossible to get a handle on it alone. Which is why I'm not going to.

Please join me in welcoming back to the blog Zev Valancy, Chicago theater professional regular commenter, and my occasional co-author of conversations about the thorny world of stage-to-screen adaptations. He and I last joined forces to joylessly gawk at Julie Taymor's film of The Tempest, and the arrival of the first cinematic treatment of Sondheim since Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd in 2007 seemed the ideal opportunity to pick things back up.

And so, let me hand things off to Zev, to sketch out the history of the show and share his own thoughts on the musical before we get into the whole matter of what the movie does with the source material.


ZEV: Thanks so much, Tim! It's a pleasure to come out of my self-imposed blogging retirement to talk with you about Stephen Sondheim!

There are three ways to look at Into the Woods, the fairy tale musical by Stephen Sondheim (score) and James Lapine (book), which premiered on Broadway in 1987 and has been seen in every high school in America every year since: the aesthetic, the historical, and the personal.

The Aesthetic

The musical's plot interweaves several beloved fairy tales (Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, primarily), with the newly invented story of a Baker and his Wife, who are sent on a quest to retrieve four magical items (sing it with me: "the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold") by the witch who has cursed them with infertility. The first act end with every "good" character getting their wishes, while the second explores the ways in which their wishes didn't live up to their hopes, and the unexpected consequences of their at-all-costs pursuits of their desires.

Now here comes the controversial part: I think Into the Woods is a flawed piece. Several of the songs are brilliant (the opening is a remarkable piece of musical theatre storytelling, and I will never not cry upon hearing "No One Is Alone"), and none are outright bad, but the score as a whole doesn't reach the heights of Sondheim's greatest works. Lapine's book is more troubled: the first act feels hectic and jokey, the second overly preachy.

The essential problem, to my mind, is that the fairy tale plot structure means that an awful lot of the show is given over to songs and scenes in which the characters spell out the specific lesson the audience should be learning at that particular moment. Each of the individual moral-presenting songs or scenes works, but the sheer number of them gets a bit wearing, at least to me.

It's still a wonderful show, and an album I listen to once in a while, but when ranking Sondheim shows, I'd place it in the second tier.

The Historical

At 765 performances, Into the Woods had the longest original Broadway run of any Sondheim musical other than A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It won Tonys for its book, score, and Joanna Gleason's performance as The Baker's Wife (losing pretty much everything else to The Phantom of the Opera), went on tour, was produced on the West End, was taped for broadcast on PBS, and has since been revived repeatedly on Broadway, in London, in a wide swath of regional theatres, and in countless educational and amateur productions. The show has been seen everywhere, and I'd posit that its opening marked the tipping point in Sondheim's transformation from "cultishly adored but too complex for the mainstream" to "unquestioned culture hero".

The Personal

The remarkable success of Into the Woods has had another effect: this is a show that matters to people. Nearly every musical theatre lover between the ages of 20 and 35 has seen at least one production, whether the video of the Broadway cast, a professional production, or a high school or community theatre (I'm pretty sure I've seen ten separate productions since I was in third grade or so). Most everyone who acts in musicals has done at least one production. (I played Cinderella's Prince at age 16. I wasn't half-bad.) The chance that the average musical theatre freak can do a significant portion of the score from memory, on demand, is high. The combination of the ubiquity of the show, the age at which people first see it, and the emotional potency of its best moments, make it a treasured piece, and one that carries significant meaning to a lot of people. (It ranks up there with Les Misérables on my anecdotally-compiled list of Musicals That Make Straight Guys Cry.)

I could go on (I assure you, I could go on), but I should really throw things back to our distinguished blogger: Tim, what's your experience with Into the Woods? What do you feel about the musical? And how do you feel about the nominal subject of our review, Rob Marshall's film adaptation?


TIM: I think that we are going to be ripped apart by an angry mob, because as you point out, this is a show that people loooooove. And I'm right with you in thinking that it has some decent-sized problems. In fact, I like it even less than you do: I wouldn't just put it in the bottom half of Sondheim's output, I might even call it my least favorite of his stage musicals (of the ones I know well, which does eliminate some of the likeliest contenders for his worst). It's a little show-offy and pretentious for me, the only one of his shows I'd level that accusation at. The music I find to be willfully complex and difficult for the material, and especially the rather blunt lyrics which, as you say, just out-and-out tell us what the themes are. If I'm going to have that kind of HERE IS THE MORAL BECAUSE THIS IS A FAIRY TALE preachifying, I want it to come in the form of something a bit more toe-tapping and hummable.

Still, low-grade Sondheim is still Sondheim, and there are some wonderful, wonderful moments in the show. Which, to answer your other question, I have previously only known from the 1987 cast recording and the 1991 PBS video with mostly the same cast (for I was not a theater kid in school). As far as the new movie goes, then, the problem for me was always going to be that I have some pretty clear expectations for the performances: it's not just the Witch, it's Bernadette Peters's Witch. It's not just the Baker's Wife, it's Joanna Gleeson's Baker's Wife. Which is probably why Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt, taking over those roles in the film, were the biggest disappointments to me.

Outside of Johnny Depp as the Wolf, of course. That was just awful in every way: the pain in his voice as he sang, the stupid make-up that screamed "theater convention!" in a movie that otherwise made everything take place in a realistic setting, the hairy zoot suit.

But mostly, even the people who let me down still did a really great job with the material: as a collection of musical performances, the Into the Woods film is pretty terrific. The orchestrations are nice and rich without being too runaway "big", or losing the musical thread (I mean, no surprise, it's Jonathan Tunick and he's a genius). The singing is rarely weak - I was a little nervous about Streep during the prologue, but she quickly won me back, and nobody else was even that big of a problem - and it's frequently quite excellent. All the performers nailing their big moments, or multiple big moments, and I was knocked flat at least a couple of times: Streep's despair in "Stay with Me", Anna Kendrick's measured flightiness as Cinderella in "On the Steps of the Palace". Of course, not everybody still had their big moment left intact. But I am sure we'll turn to that.

So that's the good part. The not-as-good part is, unsurprisingly, good ol' Rob Marshall himself, and the filmmaking generally, which is mostly just... fine. Fine and flat. There's a repeated problem, one that threatens to torpedo the very lovely and well-acted prologue especially, of cutting on musical beats in the most literal, obvious way, to make sure we can always see the singer, even when that results in awkward collisions of images. There's a moment in, I think, "It Takes Two" when the film cuts from a two-shot of the Baker (James Corden) and the Baker's Wife, to... a different two-shot of the Baker and the Baker's Wife, and it made my soul cry. I don't know that we can blame Marshall or editor Wyatt Smith for this - the hurricane of shitty cutting that comprised Marshall's 2002 adaptation of Chicago makes me want to throw this at the director’s feet - but it strips the energy from the numbers in a bad way.

And as for the story, well- but I've gone on for a bit. And I think we're going to have a whole lot to talk about story structure. So do you want to take the reigns on that? And do you have any other thoughts on the performances, or things you disagree with me about, before we move too far past that point?


ZEV: For the performances: I would rate them as mostly strong, if rarely spectacular. Nobody exceeded my expectations aside from Chris Pine, of all people (more on that in a moment). Otherwise, I'd rank Blunt, Kendrick, and Christine Baranski (dreadfully underused) near the top. Depp was no worse than I expected, and I'm glad they didn't beef up the part to match his stardom. The biggest disappointment for me was Streep: she was transparently giving a campy "star turn", playing tics and eccentricities rather than a fully realized character. I'd have preferred it if she had actually chosen to dig into the character or, at least, gone full-throttle loony with it. This just felt lazy.

Okay, one more thing on the cast: It's really exhausting, in 2014, that filmmakers still default to all-white casting. It's a fantasy, so there's no "historical realism" to defer to, and it's absurd to contemplate that the most talented person they could find for every single role just so happened to be white. Blunt and Kendrick did strong work, but can you imagine how terrific the film would have been with Audra McDonald as The Baker's Wife or Anika Noni Rose as Cinderella? For a film about the power of stories to use only white people to tell its story is dispiriting, at best.

Now, on to the adaptation (and fair warning, this includes spoilers for both the movie and the play):

One of the great strengths of live theatre is how it allows actors to use their connections to the audience to speak or sing directly to them. There's nothing wrong with an unbroken fourth wall (I wouldn't trade the best of theatrical realism for anything), but narration, soliloquies, and subtle acknowledgements of audience reactions are part of what makes theatre uniquely theatrical and, to me, more engaging than images on a screen could ever be.

And the stage version of Into the Woods has a ton of audience engagement. The Narrator is a very present and active character, who ends up pulled into the story in the second act, and at least half of the songs are delivered more to the audience than to the other characters. It would take a remarkably nimble screenplay and creative director to find a suitably cinematic way to translate this material.

And James Lapine and Rob Marshall's work is... not bad? The adaptation is certainly not the hideous botch that Nine was - few of the choices are wrong - but it's not very creative. The Narrator is gone entirely (with the bare minimum of his lines going to Corden, in voiceover), and a lot of the songs are cut. The soliloquy songs that can't be cut are mostly awkward - what on earth was going on with the shadow puppet stuff during "I Know Things Now" and the random blocking and camera movement during "Giants in the Sky"? The only really creative choice was for "On the Steps of the Palace": setting the entire song inside Cinderella's mind, in one moment as she flees the ball, was a strong choice, and one of the best parts of the movie.

Additionally, the play cleaves quite cleanly into two acts: about a year passes during the intermission, and Act II has a markedly darker tone than Act I. The film removes that elapsed time, which both undercuts the theme (there isn't time for the characters to get disillusioned with their wishes) and makes the tonal change a lot more jarring.

As for all of the choices around the removal of The Mysterious Man, the (wasted) Simon Russell Beale as the memory/ghost of The Baker's Father, and the cutting of "No More", I can only offer a heartfelt shrug of confusion.

Essentially, though, here's my problem with the film, which I found generally respectful, well-made, and well-acted and sung: it didn't feel like it needed to be a movie. The production design and costumes are undistinguished--nothing here can't be seen in the dozen other "dark fairy tales" that have been released this year. There's almost nothing you can get from this movie that you can't get from a decent stage production, and a lot is lost or made awkward in translation.

The was one exception: "Agony". The song, in which Cinderella's Prince (Pine) and Rapunzel's Prince (Billy Magnussen) pine for their unreachable loves, was filmed as a demented parody of romance novel covers and perfume ads, complete with conveniently placed mountain streams and ripped-open shirts. For two and a half minutes, the movie was doing something only movies can do, and it was the best part of the film by far.

Well, except for that musical quote from A Little Night Music. That was a tasty bit of fan service. I'm pretty sure that me, my husband, and our friend were the only ones in the theatre who got it, but we guffawed.

What are your thoughts on the adaptation, Tim? Is there anything you disagree with, or anything I missed? Any other things about the film that must be said before James Lapine puts a curse on us?


TIM: See, now you go and remind me of "Agony" - easily the best part of the film, and Pine in it is the best acting in the movie (and Magnussen does a great job playing off Pine, to be fair) - and all it does is get me all sad that the "Agony" reprise was cut, because how good would that have been?

But then, it sort of had to be cut, didn't it? There might not be a good way to make the second half of Into the Woods happen in a film: the very concept of the show is structured to have two acts with an intermission to allow the audience to step away and recalibrate. With that taken, away, we end up stuck with the confused, madcap pacing of the film's... back half? I don't know what to call it. But the plot gallops and jerks along, and half the cast just sort of fizzles into oblivion. The rewritten Rapunzel conclusion, in particular, not only turns her into a completely pointless character, it robs the Witch of everything that makes her interesting in the second act. The themes are painfully undernourished, since the carefully developed links between the two halves of the show are all ripped to hell, and the closest it has to a mission statement is the gallingly out-of-place Meryl Streep voice-over singing that closes things out on a needlessly minor note.

Incidentally, between this and the 2007 Sweeney Todd, I think I have learned that Sondheim shows have very theatrical, tableaux-like endings rather than actual dramatic conclusions, because that's two films now that have ended by cutting the final ensemble number and as a result basically evaporated their way over the finish line.

I mostly like the first half. But the second half is terrible. The flow is bad, the characters make no sense, and it's ugly, with Marshall and his go-to cinematographer, Dion Beebe, slathering everything in a grimy blue filter that is the most boring thing to watch for what feels like a solid hour of unchanging imagery. And so that brings me back to the filmmaking. A mutual acquaintance of ours, who is welcome to take credit in comments, shared with me his immediate thought about the film: "Rob Marshall is still figuring out why you point cameras in particular directions for specific lengths of time, huh", and that's as concise a description of the problem with the film's directing as I can imagine. It's so cloddish. You called out "Giants in the Sky", which is absolutely the worst of it (which especially upset me, since that song makes a solid claim to being my favorite in the show), but there are so many places where the shot choices do everything in their power to rob the music of its life: the conclusion of "Last Midnight" is confusing and busy, "A Very Nice Prince" is bland and flat. "Agony" and "On the Steps of the Palace" are the only numbers where the filmmakers seemed to even have a visual concept, let alone put it into practice.

"There's almost nothing you can get from this movie that you can't get from a decent stage production", you say, which I think errs on the side of generosity: I think a decent stage production would acquit itself better. The film has been presented with such slack technique that I think it actually ends up looking cheap and thin, with its fake-ass woods and the frequently terrible make-up (it's easy to pick on the Wolf, but he's so bad) and the unnatural crispness of the costumes. It's easy to imagine the whole thing being packed up and rolled away at the end of every night's shooting; there's no sense of an actual reality that we're peeking into.

Anyway, all those problems being very real and very dreary, I did actually kind of like the movie. The material works even with Marshall trying to smother it, and I'm charitable towards the performances, though the farther I get from it, the less I understand why Streep is the one with awards heat, because she's definitely one of the weak links. You know who shocked the hell out of me? Lilla Crawford as Red Riding Hood. After Sweeney Todd, I was a bit hostile to the idea of casting actual children, and Daniel Huddlestone's Jack is definitely rough (the way the film ruins his big number doesn't help), but her super dry staccato singing was, I thought, actually pretty terrific.

So I liked it, -ish. It's not Nine. But it definitely doesn't understand what makes the show work, or find effective cinematic replacements for what can't be ported directly from the stage, and I'm more than a little annoyed that the half-measures of Sweeney Todd are still the best adaptation of Sondheim to screen that we've got.

That's all I've got. Final thoughts, complaints, praise?


ZEV: With all we've just dissected it, I'd still call this one of my favorites of the recent crop of stage musicals adapted to film. "Has a good amount of worthwhile stuff, and doesn't botch anything too horribly" shouldn't place a movie in the top tier of its genre, but...

And the fact that it made nearly $20 million more in its opening weekend than Mamma Mia gives me a little bit of hope for the genre's future. And according to that same article, the opening weekend of the movie had four times the number of attendees as the Broadway run and the revival combined. Exposing all of those audience members, many of them young, to Stephen Sondheim...overall, I'd call it a win for our culture.

Tim’s Rating: 6/10
Zev’s Rating: 7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2014: In which our study of one hundred years of Hollywood filmmaking ends as it began, with a well-heeled amateur directing a dubiously effective adaptation of a hot literary property

The life story of Louis Zamperini is fascinating and wide-ranging, and it shouldn't even be possible to condense it into a movie as all-around misguided as Unbroken. But that's what happens when you throw an enormous non-fiction bestseller at talentless check-cashing hacks like Joel & Ethan Coen. Or something. I suspect that the story of the screenwriting process and WGA arbitration that led to a title card proclaiming this adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's book to be by "Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson" would be fascinating in its own right, though I would not want those four men to be responsible for writing it. Because if their combined skills couldn't do any better than this for poor Zamperini...

Zamperini, played here by Jack O'Connell in what is the highest-profile title of his big "look at me!" coming-out year as a new actor to watch, was an Olympic medalist in 1936 at Berlin, who set a handful of records during his career as a runner. He joined the Army Air Corps in World War II, survived one emergency landing and one crash into the ocean, floated for 47 days with two other men (one of whom died along the way), and spent two years in Japanese POW camps, including a lengthy stretch under the cruel ministrations of notorious war criminal Watanabe Mutsuhiro, "The Bird" (Japanese rock star Miyavi). After the war's end, Zamperini struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder which only started to recede when he converted to evangelical Christianity thanks to the preaching of Billy Graham, and his newly reinvigorated religion led him back to Japan, in order to offer his forgiveness to all the guards that had abused him during his time as a prisoner. After a lifetime as an inspirational figure, he was one of the runners carrying the Olympic torch near the end of its journey to Nagano, Japan for the 1998 Winter Olympics. And after all that, he passed away in 2014 at the age of 97.

That's a hell of a lot of living, and choices had to be made about what to focus on. But Unbroken finds the whole mess of writers making the very worst ones, alongside director Angelina Jolie, movie star, humanitarian, and most importantly for our present needs, helmer of the rather dreadful 2011 Bosnian War romance In the Land of Blood and Honey. Unbroken is certainly the better of her two films as director, though it's not much of an achievement, and more than it teaches us anything about the nobility of the human spirit or inner strength or anything else, the film teaches us that not every actor can automatically make the leap to directing, and that simply because one has the clout and access and moral fervor to make movies, that doesn't mean that one has the talent.

The film does not want to be a decade-spanning biopic, which is a thoroughly respectable impulse. In theory, then, it focuses all its energy on Zamperini’s time during the war, taking place across three narrative chunks: the failure of his first bomber under a barrage of enemy fire, done as a little mini-thriller to open the film, the crash of his second bomber and the 47 days floating on a pair of life-rafts, a much longer stretch of narrative, and at last his two years as a prisoner of war being singled out for his Olympic fame to receive the nastiest abuse at the hands of his captors. Good enough, but there are two gaping problems, entirely unrelated, and they collaborate to make what could have been a nerve-wracking study of desperate survival into the most tedious drudgery. For one thing, though it attempts to not be a stock biopic, this is exactly what Unbroken ends up transforming into, thanks to its self-destructive over-reliance on flashbacks. They start early, and they start heavy: during that same assault that opens the movie, while focusing on Zamperini’s stressed-out face, the film snaps its fingers and BOOM we’re in his childhood, watching a potted history of his early passion for racing as a way of funneling all his rage against the racist bullies maltreating him into something active and construction, on to his Olympic glory. I will say about this that C.J. Valleroy, playing Zamperini as a child, is inspired casting: he’s a dead ringer of O’Connell and has the acting chops to sell the character.

On the other hand, this is a terrible, terrible digression, right off the bat: teasing us with story momentum and stakes that are instantly shelved in favor of a capsule biography that speeds by too fast to do much more than communicate information artlessly. And this is information we’ll receive later through dialogue, anyway. Of all the ways in which it beggars believe that the Coens were supposedly the last screenwriters to take a whack at this script, the puffy flashback structure (they’re threaded all through the first two chunks, drying up for the most part after he’s captured by the Japanese) is the one that seems most obviously dysfunctional and beneath the talents and accumulated wisdom of any of the credited writers.

This bone-headed mismanagement of structure rears its head in a different and maybe even uglier form at the very end: the main action concludes with the V-J Day, and the rest of Zamperini’s life story is told in the form of title cards with photographs of the actual people involved, as well as some footage from 1998 of the man trotting along with the Olympic torch. Standard biopic procedure, but the enormous volume of the closing text, spinning out for minute after minute, is indescribably crude: besides being an admission that there was a whole lot more story to tell, it strongly implies that the untold story was the more important bit, and that the material the film was able to cover was maybe not done in an efficient way.

No, make that definitely not done in an efficient way. The other gaping problem is that Unbroken, for a whole hour of its running time, is nothing but a repetitive catalogue of suffering, all done with a bloodlessly refined classiness that keeps cozily within the limits of a PG-13 rating. So it’s not just torture porn, it’s torture porn with no cumshot. Never has the endless suffering of a man who refuses to give in to his tormenters felt so goddamn boring: Jolie and her team never switch things up in any way, or structure things to feel like the stakes and tension are rising: you could isolate all the scenes for that second hour and re-arrange them any way you wanted, and the film would basically flow the exact same way: the Bird wanted to hurt Zamperini in some creative way, did it, Zamperini stayed strong.

What the film lacks is any insight into the mind of the sufferer or the torturer: after its last good scene, in which Zamperini and fellow survivor Phil (Domhnall Gleeson) are stripped in the jungle and force to the ground, where they expect to be executed and Zamperini breaks down, there’s not a single beat of the movie that focuses on the psychological impact any of this has. We are done spending time inside Zamperini’s head, where the first hour and its litany of flashbacks was so eager to position us: from here on, it’s just watching brutality. The only connective tissue between Jolie’s two films as a director thus far is an overweening interest in violence, shot with a clinical detachment that removes the human-scale cost of that violence; it’s not a lovely trend, and though absolutely nothing about Jolie’s very public private life suggests that she’s full of bloodlust, her directorial style has a nasty way of lingering on suffering for no reason other than the joy of lingering. The idea is that this is an inspiration testament to human endurance - “If I can take it, I can make it” chants Zamperini with poster-reader sincerity - but despite the clear evidence that plenty of viewers have walked away from it duly inspired, I don’t see a molecule of that in the film’s eager, documentarian interest in capturing all the nuances of how prisoners get beaten.

Jolie’s not incapable of making good cinema: the entirety of the raft sequence is generally great, a more severe, realistic version of Life of Pi with noticeably crummier CGI, or a three-handed successor to All Is Lost. If we think of Unbroken as three films stitched together (something the writing and editing and visual styles all encourage us to do), this one is above reproach, one of the best sustained passages of filmmaking of the (anemic, to be sure) 2014 prestige movie season.. But the ghastly structure of the first filmlet and the just plain ghastliness of the third hold the whole thing back.

The film is, on top of everything else, slackly made: the editing by William Goldenberg and Tim Squyres, is satisfactorily functional without being clever, surprising, or insightful, and the cinematography is a bit over-attractive when it’s not blandly reducing everything to a generic mixture of nostalgically-tinged brownish-greens. For living legend Roger Deakins to have overseen this tremendously uninteresting-looking film is even more shocking than thinking that his regular directors the Coens could have helped effect the script: it’s basically just a third-tier knockoff of John Schwartzman’s style executed without Schwartzman’s conviction, and with no complexity to the lighting. I can think of a handful of individual frames that really worked tremendously well, some despite themselves (the idea to visually represent Zamperini as a Christ figure was a terrible one, but Deakins executes it beautifully), but this is as thoroughly routine as anything he’s shot in over a decade. It’s heartbreakingly adequate. So to is the score by Alexandre Desplat, which is far less surprising - it’s a rare year that goes by without him producing at least slightly treacly, schlocky score, and after surprisingly dodging that bullet in The Imitation Game, he was due.

It is unfair and inappropriate to ask Unbroken to stand in as the sacrificial lamb for an entire movie year, as I have sort of done by making it the finale to this series. If anything, it feels like the embodiment of the movie year 15 years ago or so (it has been eleven years since Seabiscuit, also adapted from a Hillenbrand book, and the aesthetic similarities between this film and that are hard to ignore: they have virtually identical color schemes, for one). This kind of pseudo-inspirational Oscarbait-by-numbers filmmaking is almost quaint in 2014. And yet its dogged commitment to making something that tells us exactly what to feel in its pushy score and its dabbled images, to shamelessly courting emotions even though it’s sort of really bad in a lot of ways - well that is Hollywood, is it not, and even if Unbroken seems fated to be a (possibly Oscar-nominated) footnote in cinema history, it is exactly the sort of thing that the American film industry has always made to prove how damn-ass dignified and serious and artistic it can be. The firmly mediocre polish and surface-level thematic messaging that go into this film are, for better or worse - worse, definitely worse - the life’s blood of Hollywood filmmaking, now and forever.

5/10

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2014
-Darren Aronofsky's distinctly non-traditional Noah is the biggest hit in an unexpected surge of religious and Bible-themed movies
-The government of North Korea and President of the United States Barack Obama both take a keen interest in the release pattern of innocuous dudebro comedy The Interview
-Guardians of the Galaxy is the only film to break $300 million during one of the financially weakest summers of the modern era

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2014
-Crabby old icon Jean-Luc Godard says Goodbye to Language with the help of avant-garde 3-D
-Australia's Jennifer Kent makes the scariest pop-up book in history the center of her directorial debut, The Babadook
-Lisandro Alonso's Jauja, an oblique philosophical drama, is among the better-received of the year's Argentine-Danish co-productions

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: IN THE JAILHOUSE NOW

Whatever else can be said, surely Starred Up is the year's rawest English-language film. Merciless shorn of everything that minutely resembles dross, it's a lean, muscly film about lean, muscly psychologies, eschewing needlessly embellishing details or even any reasonable exposition in its goal to present the tension and physical of life inside prison. The film's great sin is its lack of originality - it's the kind of movie that one almost inevitably can't help but to compare to a whole host of precursors - but with the intensity of its two central performances, and director David Mackenzie's savage, unpolished camerawork reinforcing that intensity, originality maybe isn't the most important thing in the wide world.

The title, which like much of the film's prison-system argot, is left for us to figure out rather than nicely explained, is a reference to a juvenile offender graduating into the adult prison system, and the young man who gets starred up as the film begins is Eric Love (Jack O'Connell), 19 years old and already a clear veteran of the system. In the virtually wordless opening sequence, we watch him being processed into his new home, flawlessly enacting the choreography required as he steps through security checks and is strip-searched, while keeping an empty expression locked onto his face. In some ways, Starred Up never improves on this moment and never has to: the long-take, wide-angle detachment of Mackenzie and cinematographer Michael McDonough's shot set-ups, coupled with O'Connell's coiled body language, tells us everything about the way that this young man thinks and feels, and the way that life as a prisoner has amplified whatever de-humanised elements landed him in prison to begin with (we never find out what his crime was, because we never need to - it's very much that kind of film, and God bless it).

The remainder of the 105-minute film doesn't go any of the places that one might anticipate: it's not about Eric finding his footing (he pretty much understands the score from day 1), nor is it about him leaning tricks from older, more hardened criminals, nor is it a story of how he found his soul in the darkness. Basically, it's just about how his brain works in this heightened environment, made worse by the presence his father, Neville (Ben Mendelsohn, wonderful as a brute with a deeply buried and fairly undernourished sense of familial affection), an inmate in the same prison. The men have not, clearly, had a terribly close relationship, and here they are, trying in the most tormented way possible to patch things up. In the absence of a conventionally-defined plot, watching the Loves fence with each other, acrimoniously and angrily, gives Starred Up its spine; that, and a side plot with Eric being adopted as the project of the prison counselor, Oliver (Ruper Friend), who badly wants to redeem the boy, though the boy himself patently does not want to be redeemed.

Oliver is an analogue for the film's writer, Jonathan Asser, who held the same position in a prison facility, and with that we start to understand why Starred Up takes the particular shape it does. This is a psychological drama wedded to a docu-realist study of the experience of being a prisoner, exactly the blend that one would expect to come from the mind of a man whose "I was there" testimony would come in the form of psychological study of inmates. Oliver isn't over-stressed in the narrative, though he is one of the only people to anchor a scene that takes place entirely outside of Eric's perspective; but it's unsurprising that the film's author shares his position. This film centers on a cold, bleak figure, one who has shot down any possibility of being reached or rehabilitated, but it still tries very hard to wriggle into his brain and understand him. Without any sentiment or special narrative pleading that he isn't that bad - the events depicted, including multiple vicious beatings in self-defense, suggest that he certainly isn't that good, either - Starred Up presents Eric as being inherently worthy of study simply because he is a human being, one who has been placed into an extreme situation and behaves extremely as a result.

With O'Connell giving an outstanding star-is-born performance in the film's center, it proves to be an extremely good piece of observational cinema. If we never quite understand why Eric acts as he does, the exploration of what still makes for an excellent, complex, and frequently unconventional piece of filmmaking. The film expects us to do a lot of work: entering this world requires paying close attention to small cues to perceive how the prisoners interact, and the filmmakers rely entirely on a limited color palette and flat camera set-ups to imply the emotional circumscription of the world and its inhabitants. It is a film that only ever shows, telling almost exclusively in the sequences surrounding Oliver's treatment program, and that having more to do with bureaucracy than mollifying the audience. Grappling with Starred Up is rough, but because of the attention and effort it takes to engage with it, it proves to be more engaging and vivid in its depictions than most of the prison movies all throughout history.

The one place where the film perhaps comes up short is in answering the age-old question: why am I watching this? In some ways, it feels like a cross between 2008's Hunger and 2009's A Prophet, which between them cover most of the aesthetic and narrative concerns that Starred Up ends up exploring, and both of them come with a broader sense of the implications of what they depict. The psychological fullness of Starred Up is dense and affective, but the film as a whole feels a touch familiar. Still, it's extremely good at what it's doing, with a wiry realism that suggests Sam Fuller and the Dardenne brothers making a film together, and two of the year's best male performances giving depth to the film's fascinating character study. Top-notch prison movies don't come by but every couple of years, and this is a pretty great one: lithe and mean and full of humanity.

8/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2013: In which, oh my God you guys, women like movies

There's a nifty piece of advice for screenwriters trying to solve the apparently intractable problem of Strong Female Characters; I think it was originally said by Geena Davis. In a nutshell, the trick to writing a Strong Female Character is thus: write a Strong Male Character. Then give him a girl's name and make him a woman. Done.

Obviously, in the best of all possible worlds, there's a bit more nuance to it than that. But it has the benefit of being pithy and tremendously easy to put into practice (as an experiment, I once took a half-written screenplay I had lying around, and tried it out. Other than personal pronouns, I had to change a grand total of one line). And while it's demonstrably not literally what happened when screenwriter Katie Dippold cranked out The Heat, which was conceived as a vehicle for Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock, that's the spirit animating the project. Here is a buddy cop movie, as beholden to the formulas as it's possible to be: this mirthless, by-the-books FBI agent and that loudmouthed Boston police officer butt heads over every possible issue, only to find themselves inseparable friends by the time they're done hacking through the hierarchy of the local drug cartel. Plus, they're women. Just like that.

So, it matters that they're women: there are gags and entire scenes that would never, ever play if the characters were two men. But it's heartening to see how much of Lethal Weapon and its ilk could be re-gendered without even the slightest effort, and without compromising its bona fides as a buddy cop movie first and above all. It's the kind of movie that has a little something for everybody without bragging about it, and while it is flawed (severely flawed, in some ways), the fact that it can take one of the most quintessentially masculine of film genres and make it about women without sacrificing any of its generic elements, well, that's something we need more of. And it was received that way as well, earning a nice spiffy pile at the box-office and serving as the trigger for the 2013 edition of the evergreen "what the hell is this bizarre market sector that flocks to movies with lady protagonists? Should we make more movies for those viewers?" theme that has dominated most of the 21st Century alongside "criticism is dying" and "where are the movies for grown-up audiences?" in the hearts and minds of lazy culture critics.

Like most buddy cop movies, The Heat thrives not on the basis of its negligible crime plot, which as mentioned involves a cocaine cartel (the details can be tweaked in a thousand insubstantial ways, but it's always a cocaine cartel), but on the interplay of its leads. Bullock is Sarah Ashburn, the bossy FBI agent angling for a big promotion and prone to caustic, patronising treatment of everyone she meets; McCarthy is Shanon Mullins, a burly, mean, abrasive cop with a tendency to lash out violently and spew curse words like it's going out of style. They're thrown together when Ashburn's boss (Demian Bichir) nudges her towards playing nice with the local PD rather than just shouting about jurisdictional issues and alienating everybody, and they clash instantly. Ashburn's pacific, condescending, squeaky-clean approach is no match for Mullins's "wave a gun around and terrify people into cooperating" mentality, and oh! how much Ashburn does hate the profane little Tasmanian devil she's partnered with. The feeling is, naturally mutual.

Tediously overfamiliar material, given ebullient life by the flawlessly-matched leads. Bullock and McCarthy, first and above all, fulfill the single greatest requirement of comedy teams: one is tall and lean, one is short and fat. That's three-quarters of the battle right there, and the actors carry it the rest of the way with their heavily contrasted line deliveries (Bullock glides across her words, McCarthy sputters improvisationally) and physical acting (Bullock holds herself straight and still, McCarthy is constantly moving and gesturing). Their timing is balletically matched: every volley of angry banter is as cleanly executed as the best vaudeville training every could have taught a comedian. It is the kind of tight, flawlessly choreographed interplay of two crisply-defined personalities that's enjoyable to watch completely without any reference to what the hell they're doing together; it's a crime movie here, but the Bullock/McCarthy show could be transplanted to any setting and retooled only minutely for equally terrific comic effect. Whole careers used to be founded on that principal.

So, basically, The Heat is a terrific little character comedy, and a definite step up from Bridesmaids, McCarthy's prior collaboration with director Paul Feig, which was funny as all hell when it wasn't lumpy and misshapen and stuck on scenes that could not find a natural ending. The Heat still halls all the hallmarks of comic filmmaking from 2005 onwards, with some rather confused editing that tries to shape untamed performances rather than funnel them into something clean and focused, and which abandons plot development for enormous stretches, leading to some puffiness and air: right in the middle of the rising action, there's a wandering sideplot involving Mullins's comically Boston-Irish family, which doesn't offer nearly enough strong gags to compensate for how bloated it leaves the film. Unless you maintain that Bullock being confused by people saying "nahk" when they mean "narc" is priceless top-tier comedy, in which case, um, okay. Rock on.

But anyway, the film has good momentum and it's not actively unpleasant to look at, which sets it well on the right side of the bell curve of modern American comedy.

There is, however, a whole other thing that the movie has going on, and it's certainly not limited to The Heat: it is the original sin of all cop comedies, in fact. Basically, it's pro-police brutality - explicitly so. The conflict between Ashburn and Mullins is precisely the conflict between "let's move slow, follow the rules, and respect the dignity of our witnesses and suspects" and "punch the fucker in the nuts, he'll talk". And there is not one occasion in the movie when Mullins's approach doesn't prove to be the right one, and Ashburn's concern for due process and not, for example, having an abusive episode recorded and thus rendering all their police work rendered inadmissible, is uniformly shown to be a byproduct of her stick-up-the-ass priggishness (though The Heat, like so many cop movies, appears to exist in a universe in which the judicial branch simply doesn't exist). This, again, happens in a lot of movies. But some movies at least seem to be aware that there might be a problem there, and The Heat is not one of those. It requires, for its comedy to function properly, that the audience never confront the possibility that Mullins's thuggish behavior is an actual social problem, and not just reflective of her playfully obnoxious personality. And so there is not so much as a tip of the head to the moral underpinnings of the film.

What a stark difference a year makes! In 2013, I'd have probably had the same concerns, but felt a bit schoolmarmish for it, because, I mean, it's just a comedy. In 2014, police brutality is seriously the least-funny thing imaginable. The Heat is pretty terrific in a lot of ways, and there's an easy argument to be made that it's the funniest major American film of its year purely on the merits of its joke construction and action. But there's some ugliness to it, a painful reminder as we reach the end of this tour of a century of Hollywood filmmaking, that one of the things Hollywood has always done best is to prevent you from thinking about the implications of the art you're consuming.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2013
-Alfonso Cuarón, Emmanuel Lubezki, and the best CGI team in recent years make space look awfully big, awfully terrifying, and awfully three-dimensional in Gravity
-A weird-ass fantasy version of 47 Ronin is lovingly ushered to theaters just in time for Christmas, because apparently just setting $150 million on fucking fire was too easy
-Veritable armies of girlchildren from an attachment to Disney's Frozen and refuse to "Let It Go", if you see what I did there. What I did is, I punned on the name of a popular and well-known song. I am clever.

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2013
-Edgar Wright blends mid-life crises and alien action in The World's End, capping of a trilogy of genre-comedy experiments
-A straight man directs two straight women in a kaleidoscopic study of the lesbian experience in Blue Is the Warmest Color
-Rithy Panh, survivor of the 1975-'79 killings in Cambodia, makes The Missing Picture, a filmed memoir of his experiences told in clay figurines

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ANTS, ANTS, OTHERWISE WE ARE LOST

My journey through animated movies that most of you will never have a chance to see continues at the Film Experience with a look at the Franco-Belgian Minuscule: Valley of the Lost Ants. It's a real dilly, as they say, assuming they are as fond of 90-year-old slang as I am.

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WALK THIS WAY

I'll tell you what, there's a lot of pleasure to be had in watching a real movie-movie. The kind that's totally drunk on the expressive potential of cinema and does not give a shit about what it's saying, as long as it says it with visual fervor. That's the spirit that animated the French New Wave, encouraged its generations of imitators, and finds excellent embodiment in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the first and I pray not the last feature written and directed by British-born Iranian-American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour.

The film is a grab-bag of notions, and there are probably as many ways to describe it as there are viewers, so I'll simply tell it the way it describes itself: "the first Iranian vampire Western". And two of those words are already a big shaky - it's Iranian in that it is in Farsi and set in a desolate fictitious town of Bad City in Iran, but it was shot in rural California and the iconography is strictly that of small-town America in a neverwhen time that's as much the 1950s as the 2010s. And while it is aware of Westerns and steals from them, this is not the only or even primary genre that goes into its bones.

But it does have a vampire, a nameless woman with kohl-rimmed eyes played with appropriate distance and emptiness by Sheila Vand. We are told that Amirpour struck upon the idea of the film when wearing a chador and feeling that it made her look like a bat, and that's absolutely the vibe that the movie wallows in. As the vampire stalks through the city, sometimes on foot and sometimes on a skateboard, she registers first and foremost as an inky black presence, the darkest thing in every shot that contains her, even with the plethora of hard blacks provided by Lyle Vincent's unrelentingly gorgeous high-contrast monochrome cinematography. The film never does anything that would clearly define it as "horror", but there's still gloomy atmosphere to spare thanks constant nighttime presence of the vampire and her chador, a fluid and solid black shape dominating frames even when she's kept back in the very corner of the image.

That repeated visual motif is a fine anchor for a movie that's far more interested in what images make you feel than doing anything that hits at a deeper intellectual level (it is, in fact, almost conspicuously disinterested in following through on what appear to be obvious sociological readings of its content). Amirpour reveals herself to be something of an aesthetic sensualist with this film, and a robust, voracious cinephile, openly referencing a range of movies from Godard to Point Break, and falling in line with a tradition of wry formalism stretching back through Aki Kaurismäki (particularly in the music during its opening scene, a giddy circus-like motif that winds down and dies off) and Jim Jarmusch (the film's deadpan non-comedy and use of music are dead ringers for his work, and the fact that we even had a Jarmusch vampire picture in 2014, with Only Lovers Left Alive, makes the comparison even more irresistible). The shots are beautiful in the abstract, but they also tell keen little stories about the vampire, her victims (boorish, unpleasant men, for the most part), the run-down, sand-blasted world of Bad City. It's a mood piece, and the mood it creates is acerbic and desolate but also ironic enough that the movie ends up being rather a great deal of fun.

What the film does not have, admittedly, is much of any investment in storytelling or theme or psychology. While, eventually, a kind of narrative throughline reveals itself, mostly by not going away after it seems like it should have otherwise - it involves the vampire's kind of romantic-like relationship with Arash (Arash Marandi), whom she meets when he's coming home, stoned, from a costume party where he dressed as Dracula - A Girl Walked Home Alone at Night is primarily made up of incidents in which some unworthy soul crosses the vampire's path and pisses her off pretty good. The images don't recycle, but the same general kind of shots are used to make the same general kind of points, and it is ultimately the case that, while any ten-minute slice of the film is extraordinarily good stuff, it also pretty closely feels like any other ten-minute slice: particularly in the film's first two-thirds.100 minutes proves to be a lot more than the movie requires, and it's easy to get- well, I don't want to say "it's easy to get bored with it", because that means the wrong thing. But it's easy to feel like it's hit a point of being a little too much the same thing, in terms of plot, in terms of the girl, in terms of the cinematography.

Oh, but how great its strengths are! Whether the haunting creepiness of the stalking scenes or the detached humor of the vampire's home life, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night racks up a very large number of memorable moments. Bad City certainly proves to be one of the year's great movie locations: a wasteland of ex-civilisation, with old buildings standing in mute stolidity as the emptiness outside threatens to crush everything, while the low-rent inhabitants muddle through. There's personality oozing out of every lovingly detailed frame of the place, a strong sense of attitude and feeling that perfectly accompany the film's askance treatment of vampire lore. I don't know that the film says much about how people live and I don't know that Bad City evokes anything outside Amirpour's head, but it's captivating to watch and exploring through the vampire meandering through an endlessly fascinating experience. This is the kind of promising first feature that almost can't help but implying that its creator can't help but do better next time, but even as a stand-alone, this is a pretty one-of-a-kind experience, and well worth hunting down.

8/10

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THE NOT SO GREAT DICTATOR

It's kind of fascinating to know in advance that The Interview is going to be one of the most historically important movies of 2014. Who knows what happens in the future? Could be that everybody's enthusiasm for The Grand Budapest Hotel evaporates the instant that it gets a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. Five years from now, Guardians of the Galaxy might look like the beginning of the end for Marvel. In a decade, Boyhood may well be regarded as a clumsily assembled experiment whose gimmickry impressed everybody more than its merits earned. And while all that's going on, maybe the celebrated, iconic action-horror movie Dracula Untold will be fêted as the year's clear standout, its inability to win any major awards viewed by one and all as proof of how they always, always, always get it wrong.

But there will always only be one film that was central to a month-long act of computer terrorism maybe but maybe not originating with the North Korean government, a film that was dropped by theaters and repressed by the studio that paid for it when violence was threatened, until they were shamed by everybody up to and including the President of the United States of America into finally jerry-rigging a desperate last-minute new release scheme. It will either go down in history as one of the most legendarily weird stories in the history of film distribution, or the first time in the soon-to-be common trend of movies getting targeted by terror tactics and bomb threats. But it will go down in history. Not a bad fate for a totally undistinguished juvenile comedy with the nubbiest of satirical teeth.

Written and directed by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg, lifelong friends and dick joke enthusiasts, the movie stars Rogen as Aaron Rapaport, the producer of a fluffy junk news show starring the charismatic and idiotic Dave Skylark, as played by James Franco, one of the key players in the Rogen/Goldberg sandbox (which at some point when I wasn't looking suddenly went to feeling like it's not an exact subset of the Judd Apatow Friends Circle anymore). On the occasion of his 1000th show packaging Dave's moronic celebrity rumor-rmongering, Aaron is about ready to throw in the towel and try to become a decent human being, when the bombshell hits: North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) loves Dave's show and wants to do an interview with him. This is hugely exciting to the crew of Skylark Tonight, and it's even more exciting to the Central Intelligence Agency, which immediately shows up in the form of Agent Lacey (Lizzy Caplan) to lean on Aaron and Dave a little bit until they're willing to agree to assassinate Kim during the interview. This is complicated by two things: first is the supreme incompetence of the newsmen for the task of being international spy-assassins, second is the immediate kinship Dave strikes up with the affable, emotionally fragile Kim, despite Aaron's agitated insistence that this is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect the crazy dictator to do.

There are at least three targets the film sets up, in about this order: the vacuous self-importance of the infotainment industry, the famine-scarred economic wasteland and personality cult of North Korea, and the CIA's infamous history of bungled regime changes. It is perhaps inappropriate to expect a probing satire from the minds behind Superbad and This Is the End, especially when the film makes so little effort to position itself as a satire (like all of the Rogen/Goldberg hootenannies, the twin gods of The Interview are jokes about sex organs and jokes about straight man acting and talking like they enjoy homosexual acts). But it is also perhaps inappropriate to pick subject matter like this and then not act like you've just made a political movie. Of course The Interview is political. It calls out a specific world leader by name in the context of a story that unmistakably proposes that the problem with the United States unilaterally killing foreign leaders and fomenting revolution isn't that it's an immoral war crime to do those things, but that the CIA just isn't all that good at it. Pretending like that's apoliticism is indefensible. Ten years ago, Trey Parker & Matt Stone proved that you could have overt political engagement and dick jokes in Team America: World Police, a movie that I do not honestly care for all that much. But it is noble and ambitious, and The Interview, to its damnable shame, is neither.

Failing at satire or intellectual commitment to the implications of one's premise is bad enough: being a crummy comedy is worse, and The Interview simply isn't very funny. It's an exquisitely perfect example of a movie that dumped nearly all of its best jokes in the ad campaign, and even those are less enjoyable within the context of the film's lazy editing and lax pacing, sucking all the energy out of the goings-on. The film is at its best in the very beginning, when it's easily parodying fatuous celebrity media, and then again once Park's erratic, weird little boy version of Kim Jong-un shows up. But he doesn't appear until virtually halfway through the film, which leaves an enormous black hole of incredibly obvious jokes that frequently run out of inspiration once they've placed the word "ass" in Rogen's mouth. And then at the end, when the film finally gets around to realising the ramifications of the scenario it has built, in at least a limited way, it stops bother to have jokes at all, just violence with enough exaggeration that the filmmakers can maybe hope and pray that they've made it funny.

It's all very draggy, and it feels far longer than an already unnecessarily indulgent 112-minute running time. All films involving these creators have a shaggy, improvised feel, but The Interview is a bit of a shambles: Rogen's snappishness keeps things moving forward, but Franco is close to a disaster, making his enthusiastic schmuck character much more of a smug asshole than the plot requires, and relying on line deliveries with weird inflections that bury jokes. Park and Diana Bang, as Kim's head propagandist, both put a bit of sparkle into the movie, but there's not nearly enough of either of them to justify yet another trip down the Seth & Friends Riffing tunnel, not when the riffing feels as aimless and forced as it does here.

There are many reasons to feel dubious thoughts about The Interview, but its limitations as comedy, particularly in the wake of the much-better-than-it-had-a-right-to-be This Is the End, are the most unforgivable. This is a movie that almost triggered, like, a war, or whatever. It should be possessed of a savage, merciless comic sensibility. Instead, it feels like the outtakes from a film that hopefully was a lot funnier and more energised, because this is just some snoozy, paint-by-numbers shit.

5/10

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NIGHT MUST FALL

Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, the third and final chapter in the second most beloved series of children’s movies starring Ben Stiller and involving African mammals running wild, is better than 2009’s Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Let’s allow it to have that. God knows it doesn’t have anything else, and God knows as well that Battle of the Smithsonian represents a pretty eminently surmountable peak of quality. You know what else is better than Battle of the Smithsonian? Slamming you hand in a car door. Let’s not get carried away here.

The new film picks up in real time, some eight years after the first Night at the Museum established that New York’s Museum of Natural History possesses a magical tablet from ancient Egypt that brings inanimate representations of living beings to life, and every night the museum runs amok with dinosaur bones, wax mannequins, stuffed animals, and Easter Island statues having all sorts of wacky scrapes. Larry Daley (Stiller) has been the night security guard all these years, and along with museum director Dr. McPhee (Ricky Gervais), has established an entire programming slate of edutaining activities allowing civilians to interact with these magical creatures, under the official story that they are high-end animatronics or some such thing. But alas! the center cannot hold, and the magical tablet is corroding with some manner of greenish patina, forcing the living exhibits to behave in bizarre and unpredictable ways. The tablet’s owner, sometime mummy Ahkmenrah (Rami Malek), can’t explain how to fix it, but he knows who can: his father, who Larry finds (after some pointless business that extends the running time while serving up cameos from Dick Van Dyke, Bill Cobbs, and the late Mickey Rooney, one of the films dedicatees) is now being exhibited in the British Museum. So begins a journey across the Atlantic, to crack the secrets of the Egyptian magic and save the day.

I just came up up with a fun think piece somebody needs to write: right now we have in theaters, one the one hand, a film about ancient Egypt that casts white people in brownface. On the other, a film starring an ethnically Egyptian actor as an ancient pharaoh, that blithely traffics in nonsense about magic tablets and includes lines like “bake like a scarab beetle in the Sinai”. Which is the greater offense against decency and human dignity? And “burn the film industry to the ground and start over” isn’t an answer.

So Larry ends up in London with exactly the blend of celebrity figures you could predict if you saw either of the originals: U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (Robin Williams, the other dedicatee), Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck), Attila the Hun (Patrick Gallagher), and miniature diorama cowboy Jedediah (Owen Wilson) and diorama centurion Octavius (Steve Coogan), whom this film has decided is gay, but lacks the commitment to actually clarify that fact. Also the beloved incontinent capuchin monkey Dexter. And a new character, the neanderthal Laaa, who is played by Stiller in a thick pile of latex and invites all sorts of comments about how much he looks like Larry, even though he actually doesn’t much at all, because we have here a rare example of the make-up effects artists doing their job too well. Oh, and Larry’s teenage son Nick (Skyler Gisondo), so that the film can introduce a spurious subplot about fathers letting go of their college-aged son when those sons would prefer to take a gap year working as club DJ in Ibiza. If I had to pick a specific reason that Secret of the Tomb shifted from “this isn’t good” to “ this is awful horseshit and I hate it”, that subplot would be way the hell near the top of that list.

In London, the whole crew encounters new characters both human (Rebel Wilson as a security guard with no verbal filter) and otherwise (a clueless Lancelot, played by Dan Stevens; Ahkmenrah’s parents, played by Anjali Jay and a very serious and grounded Sir Ben Kingsley), and there’s a game cameo late in the film late in the film that I wouldn’t dare to spoil. The plot, such as it is, has the benefit of being straightforward, something that was entirely untrue of the chaotic Battle of the Smithsonian (a film in no way acknowledged by this one), with highly functional story beats following upon each other in a clear order, sometimes intercutting between moments of heightened stakes as the characters break into groups to hunt through the museum. It is, in all ways, very much like a movie, which is an impressive achievement for a Shawn Levy project.

But it is also very much like a poor movie, putting all its emotional eggs in the basket of Larry’s difficulties with being the father of a soon-to-be high school graduate, and this is a terrible thing for it to do (it also weirdly parallels Night at the Museum 1, which was obsessively fascinated with the drama of a divorced dad trying to be a good presence in his son’s life). Nominally, the appeal of these movies comes in the form of their high fantasy, as we watch all kinds of delightful museum displays doing silly things; secondarily, they smuggle in facts about natural history and natural history museums. These are both very much downplayed in Secret of the Tomb, which doesn’t do much in the way of educating its audience besides sadly noting that the Camelot legend is not scrupulously historical accurate, and that in the context of forcing the spectacularly non-funny Lancelot through Buzz Lightyear’s arc from the original Toy Story. Meanwhile, the big “oooh” moments are limited to a fight with a giant stone snake statue, and… nope, that’s the only one. There’s a sequence with giant lion statues that lasts no longer than the footage shown in the film’s trailers, that’s pretty good. And at one point, some of the characters fall into M.C. Escher’s Relativity, and they look like animated wood carvings, in the film’s one and only moment where it decides to do something with its visuals.

And so, this grand finale is a tepid, sedate, snoozy affair, giving none of its famous people in the supporting cast much to do at all: Williams’s final big studio film finds him virtually drifting off the screen, as taciturn as ever in what has, thrice now, been the least-interesting role of his career; Coogan and Owen Wilson fare only slightly better. Stiller’s level straight-man routine is interesting only when he’s playing it against himself, and he openly gives up on trying to make the father-son subplot land with anything but the softest of thuds (he’s far more emotionally present when saying goodbye to one of the regular characters near the end - surprisingly, there’s some actual permanence to this finale - than he ever is with his onscreen son, though it’s not like Gisondo provides all that much to work with). There is a grand total of one good joke - a resurrected Pharaoh excitedly talking about the ancient Jews he used to own, and Stiller’s strained responses, a sequence that has wandered in from a very different movie. There are a grand total of no real emotions. And while the film isn’t acutely horrible the way that its most recent predecessor, it’s also slacker, duller, and infinitely less inspired than the already mild competence found in the first film. It never seemed like the audience was clamoring for a third entry in this unnecessarily durable series; the nasty secret is that the filmmakers and actors clearly wanted it even less.

4/10

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ON THE JOB

It's solely a reflection of the kind of films that Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne usually make that the obvious first response to Two Days, One Night, their newest film of suffocating poverty and human disconnection, made in a viscerally anti-beautiful style with a cast made up almost entirely of shabby-looking unknowns, is that it's their sell-out, mainstream, "Hollyood" film. Which means, in this case, almost nothing beyond "it has a clear plot, and that plot is frequently exciting", and "one of the people in the cast is famous and pretty". Namely, Marion Cotillard, I believe only the second full-on movie star the Dardennes have ever worked with (Cecile de France co-starred in The Kid with a Bike, their last project, from 2011), and the first around whom they've built an entire film.

I should undoubtedly feel bad about this, but I think as a direct function of its relatively movie-like qualities, Two Days, One Night has instantly become my favorite of their films. Admitting that makes one feel a bit unpleasantly bourgeois in one's tastes. But the po-faced realism of all their most important mid-career work has paid, I've found, awfully few dividends, owing not least to how uninteresting the films are to look at, or in the case of Le fils and L'enfant, how actively unpleasant. Two Days is still shot in the harshly-lit, mostly handheld style of their earlier work, though the simple fact of putting someone as movie-star beautiful as Cotillard in that setting already changes the nature of how the film's visuals can function quite a bit; it has a kind of sustained, narrative-driven shape to its images that I haven't clearly seen in any of the Dardennes' films since Rosetta.

The big shift, though, comes from structuring the story not as a closely-observed slice of life with only a bit of dramatic spine, but as a full-on thriller, something that requires a complete overhaul of how the film is made and how the characteristic acting style in the film works. And this shift, I think, enormously benefits the movie, which still boasts the brothers' signature skills at finding the links between economics and personal psychology, and depicting with non-judgmental clarity the worn-down places where normal people live their lives in the everyday world, but now expresses those things in a framework that's not nearly so medicinal. It is probably not their "best" film, which I imagine still has to be Rosetta if only for the game-changing impact that film made in 1999. On the other hand, Two Days is very much their most watchable film, and it gets there without having to sacrifice much or any of the severe truthfulness that has always been the brothers' primary motivation as filmmakers.

Cotillard plays Sandra, who finds herself in the midst of a situation that is, to be fair, just a little bit movie-contrived. The company at which she has till lately worked, a manufacturer of solar panels, has been feeling a financial pinch lately, and during Sandra's leave of absence to deal with an acute depressive episode, the managers determined that it would be possible to restructure the workloads so that it would be possible to lay her off. In a sneaky bid for democracy, they couched this in the form of a vote: Sandra's position could be kept, but it means no year-end bonuses. Her 16 co-workers naturally voted to take the €1,000 bonus, leaving her and her family (she is - was, that is to say - the primary breadwinner - in a terrible position, but the managers made one mistake: they let the rumor slip that they'd influenced the vote. To avoid the appearance of chicanery, the boss man has agreed to hold a new vote on Monday morning, giving Sandra just Saturday and Sunday (or, if you will, two days and one night) to visit each of her former colleagues to convince them to vote in favor of the greater good and not having a bit of extra money, though for most of them, that extra money is itself the difference between barely scraping by and having a precious bit of financial breathing room.

There's no missing the symbolism at the film's heart: the bosses make the workers fight each other instead of unifying over shared suffering and need. There's no room for villains in the Dardennes' worldview; the workers Sandra needs to negotiate with and beg all have their own reasons for fucking her over, and none of them (except kind of one guy) are doing it for the sheer joy of being a petty dick. It's because they are all desperate, just as much as she is; the film's panoramic view of how every sort of person is thrown into the same wastebasket by the crushing tide of economic suffering makes it one of the great documents of the modern international recession, both because of its generosity towards all of its working class characters, the ones who sympathise with Sandra and those who are chilly towards her alike. The terrific ensemble cast, mostly made out of the amateurs and semi-amateurs favored by the Dardennes in all their work, brings this cavalcade of human experiences to life with a richness and depth that allows even the characters with the smallest time onscreen (and that's a lot of people to get to in not much running time) to make a fully realised impression.

For all its excellence as a fable of working class life in the 2010s - and this is the film's primary focus and its best strength - Two Days, One Night doubles as an excellent study of depression. The open secret hiding right underneath the plot is that, from their perspective, the managers are making the right decision: Sandra has revealed herself to be unsteady and unreliable, and throughout her weekend ordeal, her depression flares up multiple times, including a thwarted suicide attempt. This adds a sharp edge to the film's economic theme, since it makes the personal stakes more intense even then "how will we eat?": it's clear enough without anybody saying it that Sandra doesn't just need the money, she needs the structure and sense of personal value imparted by having a job, and being deprived that will make it harder for her to continue functioning emotionally. It also gives Cotillard a great deal more to play than simply the noble-spirited, indefatigable working class hero of social realism. Sandra is hella fatigable, in fact. And the steady march from adrenaline-driven passion towards burned-out desperation that the character goes through over the weekend gives the actor room to build a character of excellent complexity and emotional range, leaving in her wake the best performance of her career.

Alongside its character study and economic analysis, the film is surprisingly enjoyable to watch: the ticking clock scenario gives it an urgency unknown in the Dardennes' deliberately anti-sensational filmography, and the depth that the writing and acting bring to Sandra gives the film a chance to play around with emotional registers that aren't just "everything is sad and suffering". As Sandra experiences highs and lows, so does the movie; we have here, among other surprises, a Dardenne film with a musical interlude set to the 1964 rock anthem "Gloria" by Them, with Sandra singing along in a car in a rare moment of enthusiasm and freedom.

Two Days, One Night isn't "fun" - let's not be daft - but it is unexpectedly exciting to go along with how enraging and how moving it is. If it's the most mainstream film its directors have made, so be it: there's nothing wrong with being mainstream when one can be this intellectually and thematically dense in doing so. This is, readily, one of the year's best films, and a career high for everybody involved in its creation.

9/10 (increased from 8/10 in October)

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