The Light Between Oceans

Derek Cianfrance’s more modest adaptation doesn’t have the explosive proportions of his previous films.

the_light_between_oceans_posterDerek Cianfrance’s films have big emotions, sprawling, slow burn narratives and are steeped in conflict, romance, melodrama and more. He takes intimate stories, like a deteriorating marriage in “Blue Valentine,” or a relationship between two fathers on opposite sides of the law in “The Place Beyond the Pines,” and blows them up with Biblical importance and gravity. In the process, he wrings some incredible performances and powerful drama out of movies that might otherwise feel overwrought.

With his latest film “The Light Between Oceans,” he’s bestowed a small-scale character drama and romance with major emotion and conflict all on the surface level, but it hasn’t been expanded to Cianfrance size. It’s a modest tearjerker with spiritual qualities and a compelling story, but it doesn’t have the explosive moments that would make it truly resonate.

“The Light Between Oceans” is based on a novel by M.L. Stedman, unread by me. It’s set in 1918 shortly after World War I. Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) was decorated in the war and now seeks a life of solitude as a lighthouse keeper on an island miles away from civilization. In time he meets and marries Isabel Graysmark (Alicia Vikander) and brings her to live on the island. They’re deeply in love, but twice Isabel suffers a miscarriage. And then suddenly, a boat appears washed up on the island. The man inside is dead, but a baby girl lives. Continue reading “The Light Between Oceans”

Slow West

A Scottish boy teams with a bounty hunter to track down his love in the Old West.

SlowWestPosterLying on the ground in the Old West, a naïve boy and a grizzled bounty hunter look up to the moon and constellations in the night sky. The boy cocks his fingers into a gun and shoots holes in the heavens, and the bounty hunter says that when we finally get to the moon, the first thing we’re likely to do is kill all the natives that live there. Even space is a reflection of their bleak reality.

John Maclean’s “Slow West” is a Western as a fairy tale, an often unusual and quirky independent film with more than a few stylized, surprising moments like those above that buck the conventions of the genre. “Slow West” starts as a coming of age story of overcoming naïveté and insecurities, and it at least seems less interested in the violent, bloody resolution where it inevitably ends up. Maclean’s film tries to be economical and subtle in its storytelling but often feels light on strong narrative if not outright contrived.

Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a young Scottish man come to America to reunite with the love of his life, Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). Lost in the wilderness and in danger, he teams up with a bounty hunter named Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) to get him to his destination in one piece. Except Silas is using Jay to reach Rose first, who has a hefty Dead or Alive bounty on her head, a fact unbeknownst to Jay. Jay is also oblivious to how little Rose actually cares for him. We see in a flashback in Scotland that she thinks of him as “like the little brother I never had” rather than Jay’s true love. When Silas comes to the realization, “You haven’t bedded her yet,” it’s clear just how fruitless Jay’s journey is.

Maclean (who also wrote the screenplay) fills in the gaps of Jay and Silas’s motivation through some clunky voice-over narration. It’d rather tell us that Silas is the ruthless, loner type than actually show us, and surprisingly rarely does Fassbender get to actually perform the stunts and acts of gunslinger heroics that would prove to us just how dangerous he’s supposed to be. Silas even gets sidelined during the film’s unnecessarily bloody ending and even cheesier coda, and his change of heart to protect Jay and his interests comes from nowhere.

It’s the more modest, artistic moments that help “Slow West” stand out as a potential indie darling. In one scene, Jay separates from Silas and happens across an amicable German writer making camp in the middle of an open, desolate swath of desert. The still image cinematography has some otherworldly beauty, and Maclean reaches for more profound ideas of “dreams and toil” that defined the Old West philosophy. In another, Silas and Jay admire a skeleton of a man crushed by a tree he was chopping down. “Natural selection,” Silas crows.

“Slow West” is weirdly stylish and thoughtful in these isolated moments, but they hardly feel baked into a complete whole. It’s a fairy tale without much of an ending.

2 ½ stars

Steve Jobs

Aaron Sorkin’s biopic of the Apple founder is directed by Danny Boyle and stars Michael Fassbender

steve-jobs-movie-poster-800px-800x1259Steve Jobs and Apple didn’t invent the personal computer. They didn’t invent the portable music player, or the smart phone, or the tablet, or most recently wearable tech. What Steve Jobs did was make technology inviting, accessible and fashionable. That was his innovation and his genius. And it’s something of a paradox that the most successful tech giant is not the one with the newest or the best technology, but the one that reaches its users personally.

“Steve Jobs”, the new biopic directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin, expertly plays on the conflict within Jobs’s embattled ideologies. Like Sorkin’s “The Social Network” before it, “Steve Jobs” goes beyond the notion that many great men have to step on others to get to the top. It reckons with the idea of being great and being a good person as two sides of the same coin. It enlists Apple veterans Steve Wozniak, John Sculley and Andy Hertzfeld to take up arms against Jobs’s deceptively flowery rhetoric and his vision of democratization. And yet the film’s style and staging presents a man still in the right, not just an asshole but the only asshole who saw the world in the right way.

Sorkin breaks “Steve Jobs” up into three chapters, each staged in real-time just minutes before the product launch of the Macintosh in 1984, the NeXT launch in the late ‘80s after Jobs was ousted from Apple, and finally in 1998 when he was brought back to unveil the iMac. Not only does the screenplay have an identical setting structure, Sorkin layers the narrative structure in a way that’s rife with narrative callbacks and payoffs. It’s excellent dramatizing, even if it largely stretches the truth of the 30-odd minutes between Jobs taking the stage.

One of the first things we hear Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) say is “Fuck You” when his programmer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) says they can’t get the voice demo of the Macintosh speaking “Hello” to work. Boyle shoots the scene in a hazy, docu-realistic filter, and in this first moment looking down on Jobs from the fish eye of the projection screen above, it places Jobs at odds with the world. Immediately Sorkin makes the observation that though the Macintosh was made for “everybody”, the computer can only be opened up by special tools nowhere to be found in the building.

Both the operating system and the computer itself are closed off, incompatible with other products and unable to be customized, perhaps not unlike Jobs himself. And yet Jobs speaks with a vision of the computer’s personality and its ability to be a computer built around how people actually think. Fassbender has a way of delivering every line with a charismatic, uplifting and reassuring demeanor, even as he’s threatening and condescending. Always the PR mastermind, he expertly deflects his ex-wife’s (Katherine Waterston) question about how he feels about his daughter’s financial state of affairs by saying he believes Apple stock is undervalued. He promises to ruin Hertzfeld’s career if he doesn’t get the voice demo working, and he justifies it by saying with a wry snarl, “God sent his only son on a suicide mission, but we like him because he made trees!”

Each of the three segments involves Jobs coordinating with his weary and overworked micro-manager Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), politely acknowledging the journalist Joel Pforzheimer (John Ortiz) and sparring and talking shop with his colleagues Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) and John Sculley (Jeff Daniels). In each segment he’s running late to the stage, he confuses the names of two Andys who work for him, and he argues with his family before conceding to offer them whatever money they need. Jobs is of the sort who has to argue and get his perspective across, even if he decides to give in anyway.

You can see how “Steve Jobs” could function as a recurring Aaron Sorkin series, with repeating jokes and lines and enough walking and talking to fill an entire season of “The West Wing,” but Boyle places a certain rhythm to everything that allows each segment to flow fluidly.

Like Jobs, Danny Boyle is a showman. Rather than the tight, digital aesthetic that the previously attached David Fincher would’ve surely brought to the film, each of the three time periods looks aesthetically evolved from the next. The first is the gritty documentary-realism look, followed by a more operatic, artistic and colorful flavor, to finally the clean, luminous and familiar look of Apple’s brand today.

Boyle and Sorkin also have a good way of bringing the same gravity to early discussions about corporate and tech jargon to later conversations involving Jobs’s family melodrama. It eventually ups the stakes by taking the backstage conflict and putting it in the forefront, with Jobs and Wozniak screaming over the Apple 2 team right in front of the crowded hall of Apple employees. And for all of Jobs’s ability to quote Bob Dylan or speak the praises of Alan Turing, the film is at its best when a character like Jobs’s daughter can reduce his big ideas to the simplest of metaphors, like that the iMac really just looks like Judy Jetson’s Easy Bake Oven.

“Steve Jobs” is Sorkinesque beyond measure, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with Sorkin sticking to something that works, especially when the ensemble performances are as strong as they are here. Fassbender spars with everyone, and even when he loses his cool he never drops the air of greatness he carries on his shoulders, constantly defending his own greatness to anyone who would question it. Rogen graduates Woz from a playful pushover to a solemn and seasoned accomplice who has put up with Jobs’s insistence too many times. Winslet is another powerhouse, seeing through Jobs’s ideologies even as she looks tired and defeated by loyally and slavishly managing Jobs’s life. And Daniels is perfectly at home in Sorkin’s dialogue, with both he and Fassbender so wonderfully combative and fiery.

Steve Jobs has become such a revered fixture of the 21st Century that “Steve Jobs” has reignited discussions about the nature of accuracy in a biopic. It seemed easier to accept that Mark Zuckerberg might be an asshole, but is now harder to imagine that Jobs was anything of a contentious figure. Wozniak says near the end of the film that being a genius and being a good person is not binary. By bending the truth of Jobs’s personality and heightening a discussion around his ideologies, Sorkin’s script contends that in some ways it is.

4 stars

The Counselor

Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor” is too strange to be sexy, alluring or memorable.

“The Counselor” spoils easily one of the most memorably bizarre scenes in a studio drama this year. In it, Cameron Diaz takes off her panties, clambers onto the hood of Javier Bardem’s Ferrari and proceeds to dry hump the windshield. Bardem refers to the distinct visual he receives from the front passenger seat as “like a catfish.”

Bardem calls it too odd to be sexy, and he’s right, but Director Ridley Scott plays it for laughs because he’s not sure what to do with writer Cormac McCarthy’s scene either.

This is McCarthy’s first original screenplay following multiple film adaptations of his novels including “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road.” He’s written a drug cartel drama in which women, morality, paradoxes and regret take a prominent role while a mysterious, never seen evil pulls the strings in the background.

Scott however shoots “The Counselor” like it’s “American Gangster.” It amounts to a clunky thriller reduced to tedious conversation pieces, a nonsensical plot and unclear motives or forces trying to create suspense. Continue reading “The Counselor”

12 Years a Slave

“12 Years a Slave” is the heaviest, hardest film to watch of the year, but it’s much more than a grim history lesson.

A black woman in tatters is sitting in a cart crying uncontrollably as she pulls up to a luxurious Southern plantation home. A wealthy white woman comes to greet her new “property” and asks her husband why this one is in tears. She’s been separated from her children in the slave trade; it couldn’t be helped, he explains. “Poor woman,” the new master opines, “Your children will soon be forgotten.”

Such coldness despite an occasionally glossy and soothing tone is business as usual in the masterpiece “12 Years a Slave.” Like the stylish but burdensome “Shame” before it, Steve McQueen’s film is by far the heaviest, most difficult film to endure of the year. It should not be taken lightly that this is a film about slavery and all its harsh colors. Such devastating films are usually just about braving it only to learn a history lesson. “12 Years a Slave” is about maintaining your fortitude and still knowing who you are when you come out the other side.

The film is quite simply the story of a free black man living in upstate New York in 1840 who was kidnapped and sold into slavery for 12 years. That the man lived to tell his tale and write the memoir that inspired this film is magnificent enough. But McQueen uses Solomon Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) story to show us what freedom is. It’s not the ability to live in wealth and privilege, to live free of pain or to be allowed to walk where you please. Northup earned his freedom by remembering who he was when the time came. Being strong enough to retain that memory: that’s freedom. Continue reading “12 Years a Slave”

Prometheus

For all of its green computer readouts and drab, ‘70s styling, Ridley Scott’s “Alien” has aged remarkably well. It’s still an absolutely riveting classic because Scott creates such an encompassing feeling of dread in every moment. The movie’s shadows make us afraid not for what we can see but all that we can’t, and even more so for what we can hear.

It’s possible that a horror movie hasn’t been made since that’s quite as good, not because today’s directors are incapable of it but because the kids crave a new kind of queasy spectacle these days.

That’s why my anticipation for “Prometheus” was as high as any movie still to come out this year. To combine the special effects wizardry of the 21st Century with the atmospheric slow burn of one of the greatest horror movies all time would be a marvelous achievement.

To capture that mystique, Scott would have to be ambitious. “Prometheus” then is more than a closed-door horror movie where the characters are picked off one by one. It has lofty aspirations about the questions of life and existence with a glossy sci-fi finish. It’s a breathtaking epic that on a technical level leaves “Alien” in the dust.

And yet in its attempt to get bigger, it actually got smaller. Continue reading “Prometheus”

Haywire

“Haywire” is a no-frills action movie that measures what can be accomplished in a genre film.

Something with as many ass kickings as “Haywire” couldn’t possibly be called an experimental film, can it?

Steven Soderbergh built one around porn star Sasha Grey, so why not for martial arts fighter Gina Carano?

“Haywire” is a no-frills action movie that measures what can be accomplished in a genre film.

It minimizes on sweeping photography or handheld queasy cam effects and produces a stylized, precise and expertly choreographed film. Its simplicity is compelling just in admiring the craft of it all.

Carano plays Mallory Kane, a secret agent betrayed by her private contractor (Ewan McGregor), but the plot too is stripped to its bare bones to the point that the cryptic details are just filler for “Haywire’s” artsy combat set pieces.

Soderbergh gives us full-bodied fights that lovingly make use of space, his rapid editing still delineating clear angles as though he were photographing Carano in the octagon.

The gorgeous Carano makes for an unusual movie star with how at home she is during the film’s many battles.

She’s the key in a film uninterested with her striking sexuality. But Carano demands presence, and although she could serve as a better feminist icon than Fincher’s Lisbeth Salander, Carano is too tough and impressive for anyone to really notice or care.

3 ½ stars

X-Men: First Class

The X-Men are a treasure trove of possibilities. Any superpower you wish you had, one of them has it, thus their immense popularity and enduring capability of this franchise. “X-Men: First Class” is the fifth installment, and fans of the films are very familiar with the names, histories and mutations of every one of them to the point that even Charles Darwin would lose track. So I would expect no less from Marvel than to exploit every miniscule detail as a way of reminding us how respectful they are of their fans and their millions of dollars in revenue.

“X-Men: First Class” is a carefully constructed film that takes no chances in contradicting the franchise that has carried it to this point. If there is a character, mutation, plot point, building, vehicle or costume that was not completely explained in the original three films or the Wolverine prequel, it is here. It is Marvel’s way of ensuring there will be at least a sixth installment, and God knows how many more.

The difference is that director Matthew Vaughn (“Kick-Ass”) is given mild liberties to not take these details strictly seriously. For instance, it has long been a question of why in Bryan Singer’s two films we see little of the classic costume designs the way Stan Lee drew them in the original comic book series. Surely Vaughn is forced to answer the reason behind Lee’s kitschy ‘60s style, but he’s allowed to do so by making his film a psychedelic period piece. Set pieces, dialogue and women’s clothing choices are rightfully emblematic of a comic series that began as campy fun, and split screen montages are goofy departures from a film otherwise focused on the dourness in the Holocaust and Cuban Missile Crisis. Continue reading “X-Men: First Class”

Fish Tank

Andrea Arnold’s tough film “Fish Tank” explores the contradictions between a teenager’s ambitions, emotions, relationships, environment, choices and consequences. Rarely has a film captured as truly the entire roller coaster that is growing up as a bitter, confused 15-year-old girl.

Mia, as played by the unprofessional actress Katie Jarvis, is the jaded and violent British girl living in slummy apartments in London, and as the entire film stems from her perspective, Jarvis is uncompromising in her energy and range as she guides herself through her own urges and uncertainties.

She begins the film in an abandoned blue apartment building. She comes to this refuge as a place to practice her secret ambitions to be a dancer, but when inside, she doesn’t forget her unbridled emotion to the rest of the world. She has no friends, constantly fights to free a horse chained in a parking lot and gets in shouting matches with her mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and her younger sister Keeley (Sarah Bayes). All three frequent the “C” word when referring to one another. Continue reading “Fish Tank”

Jane Eyre

There is a subtle beauty to the latest adaptation of “Jane Eyre.” The cinematography is full of color and light, but often it is somewhat washed out to the point of Gothic bleakness. Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film, like Charlotte Bronte’s novel or the eponymous character herself, can be plain, tragic, haunting and lovely all at once.

“Jane Eyre” is a familiar story, a classic of Victorian Era literature and adapted numerous times dating as far back as 1943 with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine, but this new version is strikingly original. It hits all the right notes of cinematic style, acting poise and elegiac melodrama, and it stands out as one of the first great movies of 2011. Continue reading “Jane Eyre”