The Long Goodbye

Robert Altman updated Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe for his comedy noir classic “The Long Goodbye”.

TheLongGoodbyePosterReleased a year before “Chinatown”, Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” is the other dense masterpiece of mystery and contemporary noir with a plot so layered it may demand a second viewing to keep it all straight.

But Altman is a director of character and dialogue. For as complicated as the story gets, we never lose track of the people and the moods at its core. If “The Long Goodbye” has earned comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice”, it’s because Thomas Pynchon’s prose matches Altman’s attention to detail in the richness of his characters that color every moment. Altman’s signature conversational style and his theatrical cast of characters feel right at home with the thorny, pulpy stuff of a Raymond Chandler novel, as the menagerie of free-loving nudists, Jewish mobsters, Hemingway-grade drunkards, sinister psychiatrists and play-acting toll booth attendants wonderfully wrap us in Chandler’s twisted yarn.

In order to appropriately convey a place and a time Altman knew so well, he had to update the iconic character Philip Marlowe into the 1970s, transforming him from a hard-nosed detective played by the likes of Humphrey Bogart into a smart-talking loser whose body language and dress sense couldn’t be more out of place in this more modern world.

Altman enlisted Leigh Brackett to write the screenplay, who previously had a hand with another Raymond Chandler novel, 1946’s “The Big Sleep”. And Elliott Gould steps into Marlowe’s shoes and suit, a brilliantly pathetic and smarmy performance that finds Marlowe pitifully attempting to pass off a different brand of cat food to his cat.

For a while, “The Long Goodbye” is a lark. Topless women are making brownies next door to Marlowe’s apartment. When cops come and ask him about his friend who has disappeared, Marlowe is an utter smart-ass. When he gets pulled in for questioning, he sees the grocery clerk who insulted him at the store because he has a girlfriend and doesn’t need a cat. The two exchange quick words, and it’s another sign of how fully developed these characters are, however momentary they appear on screen. And when the detectives question Marlowe, he’s managed to put on a healthy coating of black face just to further play the fool.

In that moment, things get serious on a dime. In a few overlapping words and a jumble of point of view shots, Marlowe’s friend Terry, whom he just drove to Mexico to avoid suspicion, is dead. The stakes and suspicions have been raised. Someone is dead, the cops think it’s a suicide, but characters that we’ve met only in passing or not at all have enough depth to make us believe not all is right.

Altman is well known as a wonderful storyteller, but “The Long Goodbye” is good evidence of Altman as the brilliant visual stylist. When the reveal of Terry’s death is made clear, we get it from behind one-way glass, a coldly effective way to up the dramatic tension. When he’s calling Terry’s neighbor to follow his suspicions, the camera tracks in on Marlowe ever so slowly. The pace is measured and laid back, befitting of a comedy, but the urgency and curiosity is there. And when Marlowe first questions Terry’s neighbor Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt), Altman elegantly illustrates in one unbroken shot and no dialogue what another director would make all too obvious. Marlowe turns Eileen’s face toward the camera, revealing the bruised, drunken abuse of her husband Roger (Sterling Hayden), all without an additional close-up or point to call attention to it.

So much of “The Long Goodbye” is filled with these modest thrills and twists. Moments of great conflict, like when a mobster smashes a Coke bottle across his girlfriend’s face, or when Eileen spies Roger walking out into the ocean, are remarkably memorable. But all of them are executed minimally in the way that Altman does best. The latter doesn’t even utilize John Williams’s recurring “Long Goodbye” score motif. It’s not slow cinema waiting for a surprise or action cinema building tension. Altman has allowed his characters to stew in a pot, bubbling with humor, emotion, peculiarities and finally excitement, and what their actions mean in the grander scheme of a “plot” is almost beside the point.

That’s not to say “The Long Goodbye” doesn’t have an incredible story and a perfectly summed up finale. But its charms are in how it breaks apart the rigid confines of the mystery genre and makes a movie that’s equal parts funny and fascinating. It’s like the cat food Marlowe’s trying to pass off to his cat: what’s inside feels different and strange for those who haven’t tried noir or Altman, but the label surrounding it still makes a wonderful package.

Into the Woods

Rob Marshall adapted Stephen Sondheim’s 1987 musical in this mash-up of classic fairy tales.

Into the Woods PosterDo we really need another movie or show that reimagines old fairy tales? How many different ways can we tell the story of Cinderella? Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Into the Woods” first premiered in 1987, but since then the spirit of taking beloved childhood properties and twisting their meanings to play up the dark imagery and fables at their core has exploded into pop culture. It hardly seems new to suggest that the Little Red Riding Hood story has gross undertones of, perhaps, pedophilia or otherwise. Ooh, how sinister.

And yet here we have Rob Marshall’s live action film adaptation of “Into the Woods”, which reimagines the fairy tales yet again but has defanged them even further. Marshall’s film is hardly as subversive or as slyly perverse as its subject matter, either by Sondheim or Brother Grimm, suggests. And like all the worst film adaptations of Broadway stage musicals, it pays more lip service to the theater than it does to cinema. “Into the Woods” often looks cheap and visually uninteresting, stimulated only by some above average singing.

Sondheim’s story is a mash-up of several popular childhood fables, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel, all brought together by a baker and his wife (James Corden and Emily Blunt) who cannot conceive a child. They’ve been cursed by a witch (Meryl Streep) and can only break the spell by collecting four items, one belonging to each of the fairy tale characters. Their paths intersect in one of those frustrating cast numbers that look great when everyone is participating and moving on stage, but meander and jump around as a result of incessant film editing.

Streep is really the star of the show, going big and broad and bold in the way only she can and owning her songs. Constantly she’s stalking and hunching over with a grimace and dominating the screen. She’s only matched in hammy overacting by Chris Pine as Prince Charming, who may be both the best and worst part of the film. He has a so-dumb-it’s-amazing number called “Agony” in which Sondheim’s composition itself is dripping in self-aware swells, only enhanced by Pine nonchalantly brandishing his chest and tossing around his golden locks as though he were blissfully unaware of his masculinity.

Marshall however plays it mostly (ahem) close to the chest, allowing the actors to do all the heavy lifting. Say what you will about 2013’s ugly looking “Les Miserables,” but the film at the very least had a style. Some of the sets look flat out cheap, and by the film’s climax involving giants descending from the beanstalk, Marshall tries to pay homage to the original production by hiding them within the scenery, but it looks more like the budget simply ran short.

Only by “Into the Woods’s” end do the characters start to get a sense of depth as flawed figures. One song points the finger at every character and their intersecting mishaps, and it reveals themes of parenting, family, abandonment and more.

Surely Sondheim’s original production has its ardent supporters for this very reason, but Marshall just wants to put the musical on the big screen again. Hollywood has lamented the loss of popularity for the movie musical, but part of that decline might stem from only making films that can have a slavish devotion to a beloved source material. Put an original property in Marshall’s hands, and he’s talented enough to do more with what he’s done to Sondheim.

2 ½ stars

The Imitation Game

Morten Tyldum tells the life story of Alan Turing and his important work creating the first computer during World War II to win the war.

Imitation-Game-PosterNo one goes into making a movie trying to make an “Oscar movie”, which with eight nominations and Best Picture frontrunner status, “The Imitation Game” has easily been for some time. But a director will go into a film trying to convey a person’s importance. Those fawning biopic qualities of genius in Morten Tyldum’s film overshadow the crafty genre picture of numbers and intellect waiting to be decoded.

“The Imitation Game” depicts the life work of Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), a British mathematician who invented a machine designed to break the Nazi code Enigma during World War II. Thousands of messages were sent via this decryption machine during wartime, crippling Allied intelligence in the process. The machine was so sophisticated that it was thought unbreakable.

When Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) conveys to Turing the stakes of not being able to crack this code, “The Imitation Game” shines. “Do you know how many people have died at the hands of Enigma? Three. While we’ve been having this conversation.” He gives Turing the impossible odds, and Tyldum appeals to the audience’s gamesmanship. It’s a riddle, and by explaining how code breaking works and how Turing learned to decipher codes as a child, we feel a little smarter watching it.

In something like “A Beautiful Mind”, that was almost enough. The logic behind John Nash’s theories and cryptography made for compelling filmmaking. But Tyldum tries to tie all of Turing’s number crunching into work befitting Mozart or Steve Jobs. “Think of it as an Electrical Brain. A Digital Computer,” he explains in laymen’s terms and putting the careful emphasis on “computer” to his colleague and sort of love interest Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley). You see, not only did Turing single handedly win World War II by breaking an unbreakable Nazi code, but he also single handedly invented the one tool that defines every aspect of modern society. Isn’t he great?

Most traditional biopics have only determined two personality types for people of unspeakable genius: the overconfident and smug visionary or the awkward, anti-social nerd. Both end up being assholes in one way or another. Much like Russell Crowe’s work as John Nash, Cumberbatch’s performance places him into the latter category, sputtering through dialogue, looking fervently at his shoes, avoiding eye contact, missing social cues and acting generally blunt, deadpan and slyly witty.

It’s admirable work, and Cumberbatch’s chemistry with Knightley brings out the film’s understated social politics. She was forced to work in secret on Turing’s team because it was deemed inappropriate for a woman to be in the company of men on the job, and he was forced to mask his homosexuality, two details that give the film an added layer of dramatic tension.

Beyond that, “The Imitation Game” somewhat lacks in creating real drama. Cooped up inside offices and missing any war footage, the stakes aren’t truly obvious for Turing and his team until late in the film when they finally crack one, torn between how this new intelligence and their new power can shape the war. Tyldum then amps up the personal melodrama of Turing’s childhood and the “importance of what he’s doing here” in a way that screams prestige.

As a British period drama about a genius, “The Imitation Game” has perhaps wrongly been compared to “The Theory of Everything.” But Tyldum’s film views his genius with more depth than James Marsh does, and even if in the grand scheme of history Turing is less important than Stephen Hawking, he puts enough weight and excitement into the film to convince otherwise.

3 stars

Goodbye to Language 3D

Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D visual experiment is ambitious and groundbreaking, but he’s found himself on the wrong side of history.

Goodbye to Language PosterJean-Luc Godard has been innovating and testing the limits of cinema for over 50 years. This is the man who effectively invented the jump cut decades ahead of its time. His vision and his legacy are unspeakable. With his latest film “Goodbye to Language 3-D” he has found himself ahead of history yet again and this time possibly on the wrong side of it.

Using new 3-D to shatter rules of composition and clarity and break down his audience’s comprehension of cinema, “Goodbye to Language” becomes an excruciatingly nonsensical experiment. A narrative is nonexistent. Concrete themes and philosophies are beside the point. Watching it is physically painful, as Godard stages a visual and aural assault on your senses with his cinematography and sound mixing. There is a dog, poop and naked people.

The title “Goodbye to Language” is certainly apt, as Godard has done away with the traditional tools and building blocks we use to communicate. These expectations and rules are constructs that muddle our interpretation of the world; they demand to be broken. But he’s also discarded emotions that would allow us to feel anything while watching his latest avant-garde opus.

Less a movie and more a visual essay, “Goodbye to Language” combines the lives of two couples, one introduced through the subtitle “Nature”, the other through “Metaphor”. The two mirror each other closely to the point of repetition, and the barrage of images toy with our mood at every moment. Students discuss Hitler and literature while operating their smartphones backwards. Over saturated bursts of color adorn babbling brooks and children wandering a prairie. Flashes of Old Hollywood relics interrupt the contemporary. Later, a couple will wander their home in the nude. While the man of the house defecates, he explains that pooping is the only true form of human equality. The woman is not amused, and she’s seen holding a plate of fruit in what A.O. Scott calls “a moment of naturalistic surrealism” in which two major genres of painting have been combined.

Thus judging all this as a movie as we know it betrays the spirit of the work, and Scott again quotes Susan Sontag in arguing “Against Interpretation” and the need to derive a cogent meaning from something constructed out of broken tools.

And yet the film’s most telling shot, one that has been championed as the shot of the year, also highlights “Goodbye to Language’s” failing as visual art on par with Godard’s more charming or emotionally fraught forays into art film over the course of his career.

Godard’s Director of Photography Fabrice Aragno found a way to separate the two images that make up a 3-D image and then rejoin them later in the take. In context of the film, a woman is talking with an older man, but she is then violently pulled away from the conversation and affronted with a gun. The image however rests on both scenes at once, with the overlapping images produced by both the right and left cameras in conflict with one another. The shot is designed such that by closing one eye and opening the other, you can choose which image to view. Taken together, the effect is physically jarring and painful to view, obfuscating anything coherent within the frame. Godard even pulls the same trick again later, this time with a man’s genitals and a woman’s.

In the short time that 3-D has been an available tool for filmmaking and something more than just a gimmick, rules have been put in place designed to simulate how the human eye functions and how to create an illusion of depth. In every use of 3-D during the film, Godard deliberately goes against these norms. Why recreate something you can already see with your eye when you have the technology to imagine something new? There’s texture and depth in the frame but we’re forced to adjust our POV, and nothing on screen is made to look naturalistic to how our eyes would perceive the world.

Using 3-D the way he has, Godard has made a brilliant point, and he’s accomplished something no filmmaker has yet dreamed to attempt technologically. But the way he’s chosen to make this point feels like a direct affront on the viewer. These images are designed to be painful, they’re made to wreck everything we think we know about cinema. With a less high brow, pretentious work of art, we might call that trolling.

Part of me feels like a curmudgeon, casting scorn on something I simply don’t understand and am under prepared for. Many a critic looked like a fool years after they laughed “Breathless” out of the room. They despised Godard’s rapid editing and guerrilla visual style because it went against years of traditional filmmaking that worked just fine. Is it possible that “Goodbye to Language” represents a next wave of filmmaking we can’t yet predict? Will 3-D find a way into a film’s narrative fabric in a way Godard has laid the groundwork for here?

The difference between “Goodbye to Language” and “Breathless” is that with his first film Godard started a New Wave. He and his French peers saw style in certain American films and sought to reinvent their ideas and aesthetic in a way that could accelerate and push film forward. “Goodbye to Language” arrives as part of a technological New Wave, and with Godard’s apparent rejection of the ideas already established, he now seems determined to hold the movies back.

1 star

56 Up

Michael Apted’s touching portrait of life continues with all the subjects now at age 56.

56 UpThough Michael Apted’s series of “Up” documentaries typically get pegged as pinnacle achievements in documentary film, they’re actually landmarks of television. This was reality TV before the genre was a thing, and for possibly the only time in the genre’s history, the subjects were somewhat reluctant and unwilling participants.

“I have this ridiculous sense of loyalty to [this series] even though I hate it,” says a now 56-year-old Suzy to Apted. “56 Up” is simply yet another installment in the longest running franchise in history. It reacquaints us with characters we’ve already met and grown to admire, and they’re now at an age and a point in history when they finally seem to get it. This is TV, and like any program, you want to see what happens next and how it will all end.

But also like television, contemporary streaming services have made it possible to binge watch over 50 years of a person’s life in a couple of days, cutting down the wait time of seven years that has followed the most loyal patrons of the program. Having come to the series in this way, it becomes clear why the “Up” series is typically classified as a set of films: each installment is about something new. My assessment of all the films looked at how the overall theme of “21 Up” was not the same as what we see by “49 Up.” The characters have grown mentally and physically, the line of questioning has changed, their ideas have evolved, and Apted finds a new thing to say about people in this point of their lives.

“56 Up” is a film about looking back fondly on what’s come before. Many of the subjects this time around are optimistic, have no regrets (even though they surely have before), they’re humble about their successes in life and at ease with the moments of pain. In “49 Up”, Apted asked them all a question about what they think of the program as a whole, and all 14 treated it as something of a “pill of poison” every seven years. Now at 56, they finally seem to get the point.

“It’s a picture of everyone, of any person and how they change,” says Nick, one of the series’ most interesting and humorous subjects. Meeting with Suzy for the purposes of doing a joint interview (just one more of Apted’s pleasant surprises and developments that he still manages to find time after time), they share how when they watch the finished product, essentially a 15 minute clip, they react by saying, “That’s all there is to me?”

Though the “Up” documentaries give us insight into the lives of these 14 individuals, fan favorite Neil is quick to point out that people don’t really know him, and that their avatars make up a better picture of “someone”. We don’t know these people in particular, but we know people like them, and we see ourselves in one, if not all of them.

Just as with any film in the series, some of the patrons have had some tough times, revealing depth, struggle and pain going on behind the scenes. For Jackie in just the span of the last seven years, her ex-husband was killed in a car wreck while suffering through cancer, all days before their first child was born. Now she’s begging David Cameron to find her a job in her condition after losing her benefits.

Others like Peter, who left the franchise after age 21, announces plainly that he’s back to promote his band The Good Intentions. His life has not been full of tragedy, but his trajectory that led to this time in his life and the poignant reason as to why he left the series in the first place, is not completely unlike Jackie’s more tragic story.

Apted has again found touching surprises upon his latest visit, some more impressive than the others, and though the film alone is not mind-blowingly different from all the ones that have come before, it’s a reminder of how important the collective whole is.

Writing now two years after the filming and release of “56 Up”, we’ve learned that Lynn Johnson has passed away, the first of the series. If we do get a “63 Up”, Apted will face yet another new challenge, but looking at the quality of this latest film, this portrait can only get richer.

4 stars

Lucy

Luc Besson’s action/sci-fi “Lucy” is a film about no limits, and this wacky film seems to have none.

Lucy PosterLuc Besson’s “Lucy” is a mad genius mash-up of “The Tree of Life”, “The Matrix” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Its script, concept and sheer disdain for rules or accurate science make it laugh out loud ridiculous, but in doing so it becomes purely inventive and cinematic. “Lucy” is about no limits via the power of your mind, and this film seems to have none. It’s a wacky blast of an action/sci-fi that in just 90 minutes simply doesn’t stop.

Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, and her performance matches the alien precision, depth and control she brought to this year’s seriously weird “Under the Skin”. In it, Lucy is a clueless blonde tourist bullied by her new boyfriend into delivering a briefcase into a hotel. As she reaches the front desk, the boyfriend is killed, and she’s taken upstairs to a group of Japanese mobsters. They pressure her to open the case, fearing it may explode, and all the while, all too on-the-nose images of cheetahs stalking their prey intercut between the action. It’s obvious, overwrought symbolism but builds powerful energy into every moment.

Like Lucy, we’re totally in the dark. Besson makes it feel as though anything can happen next, and it does. After the case is opened, Lucy finds four packets of blue crystals that turn out to be a new drug. A junkie is forced to try the drug, he throws his head back in a conniption, laughs in Lucy’s face and subsequently has his head blown off. Lucy is then transformed into an unwilling drug mule, forced to carry the bag of drugs surgically placed in her intestines. Nothing’s happened yet and all ready this movie is bananas.

Cut to Morgan Freeman giving a lecture about how we only use 10 percent of our brain’s capacity. It seems completely random, and a seemingly odd moment to lay out the film’s bizarre premise and pseudo science. The natural images flashed during his presentation bring to mind some Terrence Malick movie in awe of the possibilities of the universe. It’s all token stock footage, but it’s made all the more unusual by their placement.

And in no time at all, Lucy is on the friggin’ ceiling. The bag of drugs gets released into Lucy’s bloodstream, unlocking additional parts of her brain that give her increasingly limitless telekinetic power. In a flash, she grabs a gun and murders her captors, inhales food and pulls a bullet out of her shoulder; she didn’t even notice it hit her.

As her brain capacity grows, so do her abilities and the movie’s zany possibilities. She can read Japanese, hear conversations from a mile away, absorb all the information of the Internet in minutes, recall fleeting memories of her time as a baby, take control of phones, TVs and computers, shape shift her hair and body and render an entire room helpless with a flick of her wrist.

Besson doesn’t stop to put rules in place on what Lucy can and can’t do. She just does. In the process Besson amasses a gigantic body count and has all the fun in the world doing whatever he pleases. It’s cathartic and exciting to see just how outrageous “Lucy” can get.

But Besson also doesn’t bother with a genuine backstory, melodrama or morality for Lucy that might slow the film down or muddle the ideas and possibilities he’s trying to explore. Besson instead relies on Johansson to convey a trace of humanity within her heightened state of mind. She plants a sudden kiss on a helpful detective, she musters a feeble smile to an old friend, and she finds a brief moment to call her parents and say how much she loves them.

“Lucy” actually charts similar territory as Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”. They both make big nods to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” in their visuals and themes, but “Lucy” does away with Nolan’s stodgy plotting and rules and conveys a sense of infinite possibility and a higher human understanding by actually showing us instead of telling us. This is what cinema is supposed to do, stoke the imagination through images and wonder. And not despite the goofy plot but because of it, “Lucy” is a gorgeous feast to watch, but you would’ve never guessed it would come in such an unusual package.

4 stars

Inherent Vice

“Inherent Vice” is a movie you simply inhale, so rich with characters and humor as to live inside it.

Inherent Vice PosterPaul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of “Inherent Vice,” Thomas Pynchon’s classic pulp crime novel, isn’t so much about drugs as it is the idea of drugs. It’s quite easy to say the whole thing is a trip, but then there’s an unspoken nuance to all the little details that make it feel like a hallucination. The plot is so dense you couldn’t map it with a flow chart, but the subtle humor behind PTA’s rich and ever growing cast of characters puts a satirical edge on the whole cloak and dagger ordeal. You don’t unravel “Inherent Vice’s” plot; rather, to perpetuate the drug analogy, you just inhale.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc Sportello, a ‘70s private investigator with a mutton chop beard sitting in a hazy blue bungalow, marijuana smoke drifting in from the frames. Like a sudden beacon of light in his calm world of Gordita Beach, Cali comes Shasta (Katherine Waterston), donning an orange, curvy sundress and “looking like she always said she wouldn’t”. Shasta’s an old ex of Doc’s, so she asks for his help. Her latest boyfriend is the wealthy real estate mogul Mickey Wolfman (Eric Roberts), and his wife and her fling want to commit Wolfman to a mental institution and steal his fortune.

Meanwhile, Doc gets a visit from the Black Panther Tariq Khalil (Michael Kenneth Williams) asking him to locate one of Wolfman’s associates, an Aryan Brotherhood biker named Glen Charlock. When Glen turns up dead, with Doc’s passed out body lying right beside him, Doc is hauled in by Lt. Detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). Bigfoot has a flat top hair cut and the hardened features of a man’s man who could find his place in just about any decade. He suspects Doc could help lead him to Wolfman and Shasta, who have now disappeared, and that Doc, stoned as he perpetually is, may know more than he actually knows.

That’s only the crust of all “Inherent Vice” has to offer, but this story and these characters alone feel so well drawn that you’ll follow it down just about any rabbit hole. The dialogue and narration by Joanna Newsom is all Pynchon, and in mere sentences he conveys personalities that seem fuller than anything in literature. Like “The Godfather”, these characters even have names that sink in even if you can’t place who they are. When they speak, they’re all business, but on closer scrutiny it’s pure screwball. At one point, Doc is attempting to track down The Golden Fang, which may be a boat, a gang, a company, or all three. How that makes any sense is anyone’s guess.

Very much like Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye”, whom Anderson owes a big debt in several of his films and especially this one, “Inherent Vice” is essentially a big pot for this rich cast of characters to stew. The film never stays put, but as Anderson follows Doc from place to place, there’s a sense of humor, sex appeal and sinister undertones that he carries along. We see it as Wolfman’s “sexy chicana” house keeper bends languidly in front of Doc as she serves his drink, or as Mrs. Wolfman’s hulking mass of a squeeze is introduced to us from the neck down.

But where Altman was potentially uninterested in the plot details of Raymond Chandler, Anderson is in deep with Pynchon’s mystery. At any point the film seems to be deceiving you, whether it’s a TV commercial beginning to talk directly to Doc, a group of troopers suddenly sneaking up on a remote building and disappearing behind brush, or perhaps most hilariously of all, a sudden outburst of “pussy eating”.

Did we really just see all that? Is any of this really happening? That Anderson plays with that perception constantly and still finds a way to cobble together all the pieces in ambiguous, uncertain ways, is part of “Inherent Vice’s” appeal to watch it not just once, but again and again, forever getting lost in its hazy, drug addled fever dream.

3 ½ stars

Selma

Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” is the rare biopic that feels modern, raw and yet still powerfully emotional and rousing.

SelmaPosterThe marches at Selma, Alabama, the boycotting of buses in Montgomery, the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, the protests in New York: these aren’t just part of a “cause”. All this isn’t just “activism”. These are people’s lives at stake, and regardless of which side of the line you stand, blood has been shed both then and now.

Lyndon B. Johnson called Martin Luther King Jr. just an “activist”, as it is depicted in Ava DuVernay’s “Selma”, saying he has one cause while the Presidential administration has 101. Much unnecessary controversy has been made over the accuracy of President Johnson’s relationship with Dr. King, but LBJ as he is seen here serves as a powerful symbol for why racial unrest in this country persists and why change continues to drag its feet.

“Selma” is a raw, emotional, and most of all modern drama that with modesty and dignity proclaims that injustice can’t be treated as just another issue on the table. Unlike other prestige biopics, DuVernay doesn’t for a minute allow melodrama into her film that would pretend that racism and violence are gone from this world. Her film is a poignant reminder of what was and how these people’s influences, both noble and ugly, still linger.

“Selma” focuses in on a small portion of Dr. King’s life work and is all the greater for it. DuVernay is able to dig into the thorny nuance of this particular event and draw modern parallels that ripple throughout the film. King (David Oyelowo) opens the film receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, and after a meeting with President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), determines that help from the White House will not come soon enough. Their plan is to organize a rally in Selma and march all the way to the capital of Montgomery, nearly 50 miles away, in order to protest voting rights in the state.

King delivers a modest, yet powerful explanation of why voting rights for African Americans is so critical. Through fear and corruption of the courts, only two percent of blacks in Selma are registered to vote. Hundreds are then killed by the brutality of white cops and racist white residents, and all white juries led by a white judge fail to convict the killers of crimes because blacks cannot vote for the judge nor serve on the juries because they are not registered. This train of logic is crucial because a lack of convictions will certainly strike a chord with modern audiences.

And on the other side of the coin, we see repulsive logic that has most definitely carried its way through to 2015. George Wallace (Tim Roth), the then Governor of Alabama, explains to President Johnson that if blacks got the right to vote, they’d then want jobs, then schools, “then it’s distribution of wealth without work.” “Moochers” was not a term likely used in 1964, but DuVernay subtly makes her point about the way blacks are perceived today through this shocking lens to the past.

Civil Rights movies from period pieces (“The Help”) to the contemporary (“The Blind Side”) have framed their discussion of race through white people evolving, and it breeds melodrama and an assumption that things are for the better now. DuVernay doesn’t presuppose anything, and the politicking from King, Johnson and Wallace all remind of Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and the long, joint effort that went into creating change. She dodges the melodrama, keeps the film modest in scope and doesn’t lose any of King’s rousing words or messages.

DuVernay comes from the indie realm of filmmaking, and even “Selma’s” many moments of violence are visceral, in your face, raw, aggressive and all beautifully lensed by DP Bradford Young. There are fewer shots or moments of the movie dwelling on truly monstrous racists, and instead the bursts of violence throughout the film make all of “Selma” feel volatile. You can feel the tension as Dr. King begins to march thousands over Selma’s bridge out of town, and you can feel it as he or his cohorts sit in their homes, always in some form of danger from the hatred that surrounds them.

2014 was a year of great conflict, and of the movies the Academy Awards sought to recognize this year, many were biopics that focused on the heroics and struggles of the historians at the center. Of all of them, only “Selma” has captured the pulse of the nation yesterday and today.

4 stars

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

The “epic” conclusion to Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” trilogy is hardly as epic as it purports.

TheHobbitPosterIt’s all come down to this. We’ve arrived There and Back Again in the most epic trilogy ever put to film, yes? “The Hobbit” is such a dense and important story that it absolutely had to be spread out across three films. Surely one movie is not good enough for one book? If so, is “The Battle of the Five Armies” the monumental finale you’ve been waiting for? Are you not entertained?

Peter Jackson’s “Hobbit” franchise has been the most lumbering, ponderous, self-important and at the same time eye-rollingly lame collection of films. “An Unexpected Journey” was laughably cartoonish, featuring dwarf singing, trolls scratching their asses and a goblin with a scrotum dangling from his chin. “The Desolation of Smaug” was frustratingly pointless, both so over-plotted in exposition and yet under-plotted in creating a story with actual substance. And each film, shot in 3D and high frequency 48 Frames Per Second, has looked awful: fake, too bright, and plain un-cinematic.

Was there a question that “The Battle of the Five Armies” would turn this around? This third entry may be the least bad in the franchise, but now it is drowning in portentous overtones of war, conflict and impending doom on the horizon. Jackson continues to underutilize his main character, i.e. the actual Hobbit in “The Hobbit”, and loses focus on elves, orcs, dwarves and weasel humans who won’t die or disappear. It’s as overstuffed a film as any of the previous, and it’s oh so long.

“The Desolation of Smaug” ended on an unfortunate cliffhanger, with the dragon Smaug being unleashed from his mountain lair by the clan of dwarves, only to be set loose upon the simple human city of Laketown. That’s where “The Battle of the Five Armies” picks up, but it’s a perplexing way to start the film. Not only does the abrupt opening lose its suspense and excitement, Jackson can’t pull himself away from the many human characters making their escape, including the insufferable comic relief Alfrid, the snively coward of a human always inserting himself into otherwise serious sequences.

Even once the dragon is slayed things don’t quite get moving. Jackson then jumps away to provide a teaser to the original “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, a distraction that’s little more than fan service in which Gandalf (Ian McKellen), Galadriel and Saurumon battle holograms of I’m not sure what.

What their meeting does explain is that now that Smaug has been slayed, all of Middle Earth will be coming to the mountain to claim the riches inside and its militaristically strategic location. As a result, the dwarves have barricaded themselves inside, still looking for the priceless stone that serves as a symbol for a leader’s rise to power. Bilbo (Martin Freeman) found it at the end of “The Desolation of Smaug” but now is reluctant to turn it over to Thorin (Richard Armitage) after seeing how the pursuit of it has driven him mad with power.

But the bluster Jackson musters seems misplaced. Thorin is king of nothing and these dozen dwarves amid five armies of thousands of elves, humans, and orcs seem to amount to a hill of beans. Yet still they chatter on endlessly about war, and only Bilbo avoids speaking his dialogue with an air of self-importance. One still wishes the film were about Bilbo and his growth more so than the MacGuffins and the gigantic battles.

Just like his plot exposition, Jackson has taken orchestrating CGI mayhem to a new level. Legolas (Orlando Bloom) executes a stunt here so laughably impossible that it’s plain brilliant on Jackson’s part. Legolas has knocked over a tower to create a makeshift bridge positioned perfectly between two mountain cliffs. In a fight with an orc leader atop it, it all starts to slowly collapse. Legolas then bounds (or perhaps glides is more accurate) up one stone at a time, each falling in a stepping stone pattern, which gives him enough time to jump on top of his opponent, then to safety, leading the orc to fall to his doom.

An isolated sequence like that, however absurd, is an example of the creativity Jackson still has and his ability to create a memorable moment of action filmmaking. I attest that out of all nine hours of footage across three movies, there is one truly great “Hobbit” film to be seen here. For how bloated and long this last installment continues to grow, “The Battle of the Five Armies” is not it.

2 ½ stars

Big Eyes

Tim Burton’s ‘Big Eyes’ is missing the gender politics and humor that would vitalize Margaret Keane’s story.

BigEyesPosterA woman is carefully studying one of Margaret Keane’s paintings of a waif like child with big eyes in a state of poverty and despair. She says, “It’s creepy, maudlin and amateurish. And I love it.”

Tim Burton’s “Big Eyes” tells the story of Margaret Keane, but his film only meets the last two criteria of Margaret’s paintings. “Big Eyes” feels like a standard biopic placed in a maudlin setting, but it lacks the surreal, absurd, cartoonish character that has defined even some of Burton’s worst films. In the process, he loses the humor, wit and even political point of view necessary to make good on Margaret’s story.

Margaret Keane (Amy Adams) was a painter in the ‘50s and ‘60s who attained enormous success with her “Big Eye” paintings. All portraits of children, the moody sketches were pure kitsch and possibly art, but regardless, they sold like hotcakes. Reproduced countless times over, it became possible to buy a Keane at your local grocery store.

The only problem was that Margaret saw none of the attention for her work. Her husband Walter (Christoph Waltz) convinced her that the work would sell better if people thought that it came from a man, so he took credit for himself and eventually became an established artist hobnobbing with Andy Warhol and being torn to shreds in the New York Times. Once the lie and Big Eye empire were established, Walter convinced Margaret that if she were to ever reveal the truth, the whole enterprise would come crashing down. Margaret remained silent for years until a circus of a legal battle in which Walter still claimed he was the sole painter of the Big Eyes.

Immediately Margaret’s story brings to mind women’s rights and what it means to be a female artist either in 1960 or 2015. Burton however doesn’t seem to have a political bone in his body, and he comments as little about the present as he does the past, seeking only to tell Margaret’s story in traditional terms.

Burton also misses an opportunity to take the courtroom material and make it truly outrageous. At one point Walter acts as both his own prosecutor and witness, leaping up and down from the stand with aplomb and play-acting the stereotypes he’s seen on old Perry Masons. Waltz executes the scene with charm, but he’s an actor who can go further, and Burton doesn’t ask him to, playing the moment mostly straight and not technically for laughs. The historical details of Margaret’s story are seedier and more outrageous than Burton even thinks to portray, something that seems peculiar given just how kooky and dark Burton can make established properties like Batman, Alice in Wonderland or the soap opera Dark Shadows.

Even bigger questions of truth, forgery and art seem to linger as untouched subjects. Something like “American Hustle” worked the idea of forgery into the very fabric of its storytelling. Even one of Burton’s best films, “Ed Wood”, explored the idea of whether even the worst art can still be called genius. Why can’t “Big Eyes” make a bigger claim about the nature of art, and how even kitsch and sentimental pap can still move people in a way that makes it art?

Keane’s art was all of those things but seemed weird enough to suggest there was an artist under those layers of canvas. “Big Eyes” amounts to little more than its surface level appeal.

2 ½ stars