aserdcerebral's Reviews

The Killer (2023)

7/10

11 November 2023

It's confounding to observe the pure compositional and editorial precision David Fincher dedicates to the realization of a screenplay that's.... just okay.

This excellently executed feat of sensory engineering is the equivalent of watching Rembrandt refine to perfection a random screenshot of a night-shot, noise-washed tiktok; it'd be a perfecting painting of, what-exactly.

The actors, and even background extras inhabit their roles beyond question.

There's a feeling I often--or rather rarely--refer to as true suspense; you're watching a heartstopping sequence from an episode of Planet Earth; a pride of lions stalks dappled through the shadows of a grassland, a menu of buffalo marches unwitting across the horizon. When the scene cuts to the inevitable closeup of a lion's salivating visage; you're not adjudging the emotional efficiency of a performance, you know it's death on the other side of that camera.

Few actors ever manage this level of truth. To truly become and strike the audience at the brainstem.

So comes a scene in The Killer. A character assured of his survival, attempts to negotiate his way out of certain demise; logos, defining the illogicality in killing him, is his choice of rhetoric.

As he fashions himself an armor of well-worded reasoning, Fincher cuts to a medium shot of Fassbender as the Killer. Facial muscles frozen and eyes unblinking, the vaguest ripple of emotion buried several thousand feet deep. Watching that brief drama unfold evokes the dread of looking on tied up while a stick of dynamite swallows the final spark on long string of fired up suspense.

But, to what end. The Killer is so emotionally barren that during a late fight sequence, and this is coming from a guy that rooted for the Pharoah in Moses, a happier ending seemed to be the Killer getting a little killing of himself done. Why? His antagonist was more alive than him to begin with; death for the Killer seemed less like the extinguishing of an entire existence, and more like turning off the shallow buzzing of a dim radio to trade static for silence.

His nihilistic voice-over reads like the dull ramblings of a clever 12-year-old edge-lord that just closed his first episode of The Sopranos, saw Fight Club and learned how to pronounce Nietzsche. Weak.

The Killer was the first and ultimately only graphic novel I ever read in its entirety, upon hearing of Fincher's planned adaptation. The appeal was immediately apparent. The spatial flow between panels felt captured from a 3D vision of the scenes, as opposed to the generic two-dimensional flat graphical progression of lesser comics. The only comparable outings, whose completion I might find one day, are Watchmen and All-Star Superman, both grander in reputation than the Killer. Fincher took it, made it his own, in the process erasing the magic that must've drawn him to it in the first place.

The original comic is composed of 10 chapters, each phasing swiftly between locations, plots, dramas, characters and action set-pieces.

Locations in particular, felt alive and burning. Action scenes leaped off the page like motion operas.

Fincher picked it apart and assembled material insufficient for a chapter, and diluted it to a 2 hour runtime, making the rest up in filmmaking. Locations are presented as nearly-generic Movie Spaces framed perfectly, like insta-ready portraits of an everyman. This is the same master filmmaker that made a police precinct feel like a cosmic moral interface plucked out of Dante during a crucial scene in Se7en. His Paper Street house (Fight Club) is arguably the most memorable modern interior in all visual media.

That warehouse, somewhere, in which the Narrator finds the husk of a burnt-out vehicle, bears infinitely more personality than anything seen here.

Here, he blunders into banality.

Action scenes become utilitarian suspense exercises - the boundlessly operatic simplified to dread-then-dead instances of buildups to brutal resolution.

"Look how flawlessly I can stitch any 2 shots together through composition and movement," he seems to say with each cut.

Nonetheless, The Killer is undeniably the second-best made film of 2023, behind Nolan's Oppenheimer.

If only there was a film to make.

(Across the Spider-Verse perches distant above the rest its own monoitemic category as a multiformat experience. To define it as a movie would be to understate what it is.)

Recently, a question weighed existential on me; what makes a story substantial enough for David Fincher to make it into a movie?

Apparently, today, a beginning, middle and ending.

The new David Fincher masterpiece, isn't.

It's just, a piece.

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The White Lotus (2021–2025)

8/10

The Best Acted show since Chernobyl. Writing does the job, then stops.

29 August 2022

If you look under the hood of most acting performances, in spite of how emotionally well-rendered they may be, they are ultimately a single-point expression of a broader sense of humanity with very few specifying factors. A great example of this phenomenon is the TV show Severance, superior to The White Lotus in every aspect of filmmaking, save the acting.

The performances in Severance, or The Morning Show, or Watchmen, are of types of human beings: a four-word summative description of the characters can be generated which then applies to every single scene they shall be a part of. The specifics of their behavior can be predicted because of an emotional simplicity and a narrowness in behavioral variation. Even when they change over time, it's only the externalities prescribed by the world around them that define these changes.

For example, Adam Scott's character in Severance is never not a solemn wallflower, John Turturro's character is never not a purehearted nerd; it's not a deficiency in writing or acting, but a failure in merging both into a cohesive whole. The depth these characters posses is not in layers of emotion, but in multiplicity of screenplay adjectives; it's not that actable.

None of these issues plague the characters of The White Lotus, who always feel at least four separate ways about any of the situations they find themselves in; the character work was focused inside-out. The actors perform the behavior of their characters based on an intimate and unambiguous knowledge of their complexly layered emotion, and not simple cues of what they need to "look" like externally.

The writing itself in terms of scene construction and dialog is above functional. It keeps you unwaveringly engaged.

The cinematography is "good" if you're not very visually conscious, but I found the compositions to be lacking. Images are pretty sunsets and orange-hued firelights, but there's not a specific sense of order of elements in relation to camera.

A remarkable aspect of the technical filmmaking is the editing of the final episode, which uses interruption of narrative momentum and rhythmic matches in behavior (head down to head up etc) to seamlessly weave and tighten the knots of suspense to a morbidly sharp climax.

The second season ranks even superior. The behavioral rendering and characterization is deep enough to warrant exploration by shoddily-constructed submarine. Loved the central couples.

Soundtrack is unique and immersive.

Speaking of immersion, the underwater shots of both seasons feel not like cinematographic showboating, but interments into the private psychic coffins these characters walk socially entombed within.

Show would be a perfect 10 - weren't the characters so vapid; as people, not as characters.

As that they're incomparably infinite.

8/10.

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The Rehearsal (2022– )

10/10

A Grand Tragedy of the Quotidian 10/10

22 August 2022

That's what the show is.

Now with the title alone, I have already communicated everything I have to say about how I feel about the emotional nature of show.

Still, I must add more lines to avoid seeming complacent in my self-perceived capacity to narrow down complex concepts into simple expressions.

But really, all I'm going to do is obfuscate my true position further and further in a quest for externalized clarity.

There are two major subsets of readers to this review; those who did extrapolate everything from the title; those that didn't, and stand to know even less of what I have to say about the show by reading more of it; and the sliver of intersection.

The Rehearsal unfolds in a similar fashion, wherein overintellectualizing commonplace experiences results in an infinite emotional loop deeper and tighter into oneself with the laps growing paradoxically longer: trying to revise the future before it happens, and trying to correct an immutable past that's already been set in permanence.

When it comes down to it, we can only assume potential outcomes of events provided they occur with significant structural similarity to our reference data, and we can only very vaguely estimate the emotions of others based on our own deeply personal distorted perception of how they have previously elected or been compelled to express them; While we can improve efficiency in the context of events, by expanding the reference datasets and accounting for the weighted impact of more variables, to approach humans the same way would only lead to corruption of the initial results; most people can't predict their own emotions within the real-time throes of future events, as they are a composite reaction to the present situation and an externally inaccessible section of their subjective perception of previous experiences that unfolded similarly or triggered identical internal states; as the congruent emotional memory, sometimes decades-old, is superimposed over the present, the invisible internal conflict becomes to relive, or relieve oneself of it.

There's always more past than we can account for or readily observe. Pasts lived and vivid, pasts learned and vicarious, and pasts only dreamed.

As Nathan further deconstructs the unknowable interiorities of the people he encounters using externally observed data as a reference; recent-past behavior in elaborately staged replications of realities as a predictor of future behavior, he more and more corrupts his own sophisticated behavioral experiment with an ever-narrowing perspective; the more he sees of the endless irrationality in these humans, the further he attempts to expand the ruleset of the rational system he applies to account for all the emotional possibilities they might present with.

As the show progresses, Nathan seems to realize he's contending not with the dark vagaries of unpredictable, inexplicably self-inconsistent human beings swirling around him, but with his own inability to accept that there's no internal consistency within humans as a logical framework: not within the one, even less within the many.

That the external world is an everfluxing chaos than shall never align with the rigid grid of his inner world.

And maybe he can accept that.

But probably not.

Therein lies the grand tragedy.

A masterpiece of one man's human condition.

Hell. That might've been a better title. More broadly-appealing. But I can't go for broad appeal. I did that with my Jibaro review, edited it for digestibility and people hated it because it made just enough sense to not make sense to them. An intellectual uncanny valley.

I'll leave this as is.

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Supernatural: No Exit (2006)

Season 2, Episode 6

5/10

Well-directed, some awful dialogue.

12 July 2022

Kim Manners is incredible in his use of camera to communicate drama, both interpersonal and internal. He choreographs his camera to circle his characters and always be in the perfect position to convey how they feel or what they're thinking, their reaction and what they're reacting to, all within the same frame; A lot of the best episodes of Supernatural are directed by him.

This episode contains 2 well-executed set pieces about claustrophobia that take place in angular and cylindrical mazes respectively. They're tense and memorable.

What is also memorable is, to this point, the worst dialogue the show has had.

Restating obvious things and filtered through a cringe-generator, one character keeps spewing these out like a spigot; "Pure iron you creepy-as* son of a bi**h!" "Scream all you want you di*k you'll never step over that salt!"

Meryl Streep would make those work perhaps, but they aren't being read by Meryl Streep, but an actor that maximizes their cringe factor. Yeesh.

Casting for television is a high wire act; you miscast a movie, it's a fling gone wrong.

You miscast a recurring role in a television show, that's a bad, joy-draining marriage, which is what fails this episode; too much screen time for an actor that can't carry it.

Resect the cringe like a tumor and it's 8/10 With the cancer intact, 5/10.

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Gravity Falls (2012–2016)

9/10

I watched the first 4 episodes of this show and had 3 beautiful dreams within the same sleep

28 June 2022

The first dream was about a communal camaraderie. The context was faded from memory when I woke up, but the pleasantry and feeling of cohesion persisted as I rose from bed when my 90 minute alarm went off.

The second dream was about an omniscient overview of a happy couple, which might have been myself and a past or future partner. I watched them meet and with their initial locking of eyes formed an empathy so deep, clean and evergreen that they never knew conflict in the love that lasted them the rest of their lives.

The third dream was.. that which my 90 minute alarm interrupted, so most of it evaporated with the shock of the sudden journey out of that oneiric utopia, but the calming pleasantness persisted.

The show itself, so far, isn't about any of those subjects. But it is, at least in the Mabel character, about giving strangers as much chance to be good human beings as you permit yourself, and to withhold judgment as long as can be.

I shan't attempt to intellectualize it any more than that.

Now I'm not a particularly, or let's be honest, a measurably at all, passive person. My social style mostly consists of telling people what to do, because they trust that I do know. It's worked for me since I was a little prodigy, and I'm not about to change it up now.

Consequently, 100% of my dreams are about control; the happy 90% where I have it in totality. The uncomfortable 8% where I share it. And the rest; nightmares.

This sort of happy-go-lucky, passive dream was an unprecedented experience, and the most any work has ever communicated its message, I should hope, with purity and indelible truth to me.

In technical terms, I shall say Gravity Falls uses its "camera" as a storytelling tool more precisely than most, if not all other comedy and animated shows; short decisive pans/tilts define the punchline. Telephoto compression underlines the humor beneath the frenetic action of a chase sequence, and such like.

It's a very frame-by-frame kind of show, meaning each cut brings new meaning and each shot is consciously designed from the mise-en-scene (in this case, shapes, sizes, color and positioning choices) to the light to lensing choice, to precisely elicit a calibrated emotional response.

It's a most perfectly-made work of art.

But what matters even more is the beauty beneath and between the frames.

As I haven't seen the whole thing yet, and parsed its overall meaning, I rate it 9/10.

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The Seed (III) (2021)

8/10

Emotionally Coherent, Narratively Taut short film

27 June 2022

"There was once a forest," we hear, over images of a deserted desertscape.

I came upon this short film by way of a tortuous road. Searching for an insightful video essay I saw years ago on the center-framed cinematography of Mad Max Fury Road, I ended up browsing its creator's YouTube channel.

Vashi Nedomansky works as a film editor, colorist and work flow specialist on various projects, his credits include Deadpool and House of Cards. Among the few dozen videos on his channel, was the telling of the journey of this short film, as well as the work itself.

I saw the short film last, beginning with the Behind the Scenes retellings of how he, with a crew of 3 (himself and the 2 actors), shot the film over 2 days in the Mohave desert, capturing about 100 setups; an impressive feat.

He then augmented the footage he captured with shots of virtual environments created in Unreal Engine 5, purchased various 3D assets such as spaceships, hires-textured rock formations, foliage and more.

A character model of his main actor, in full costume, with props and outfitted with an easily animatable skeleton was then commissioned from a freelance 3D character creator, and animated using MoCap data separately sourced to serve the intended shots.

It was a monumental task aggregating all the necessary resources and creating a cohesive final product.

But as I watched the film, I was fully prepared to regard it with due dispassion. Every film, even the worst out there, is a herculean production effort, and only the final result bears meaning.

The film is notably beautiful, not only visually, as could be determined from the BTS shots, but in its writing. This second part was unexpected. A soulless sci-fi short would have been my prediction.

But from the first lines of voice over; "There was once a forest," we hear, over images of a deserted desertscape.

"The story of this forest tells of a flower at its center, that kept it alive. Like the thread that holds the seam; all of its experiences, and all of its memories."

You can possibly intuit, though not necessarily predict, the line the story will tow for the next 10 minutes. It explores both inward, into the character, and outward, into his world, before arriving at a beautiful, cohesive unifying conclusion, driving us to both the circumference and center of its emotional tapestry.

It does not devolve into sentimentality; there simply isn't the time for that, what you've got here is beauty, simplicity and efficiency.

8/10.

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The Tinder Swindler (2022)

7/10

Competently Made Documentary about Two Sides of the Same Coin

30 May 2022

I am neither a fraudulent man nor a defrauded woman, so I approached the watching of this Netflix documentary with, I would say, an objective eye.

A reasonably goodlooking man in his late twenties seduces well-employed older women with the illusion of a grand lifestyle and the promise of a conjoined future. He takes them on extravagant first dates, flies them around Europe on private jets with amenities they can't believe and orders the whole menu at restaurants. They're smitten.

It becomes apparent he's funding this galavanting excess in an inverted Ponzi scheme; he convinces women, like the ones currently on his rented jet or his exclusive hotel suite, to send him cash or lift the limits on their credit cards under the ruse of dangerous enemies making it impossible for him to access his own unlimited funds; he's gotta spend money to spend money.

He is after all, "heir to the Leviev diamond fortune." Diamonds are a dangerous business.

Rather than pay back these previous lovers their borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's on to the next one; they did, the Police everywhere tell them, after all, send him their money willingly.

Ultimately, what he does is identically what they themselves expected to do; to fund a lifestyle beyond their earning capacity with someone else's money; he does it by pretending to be the heir to a billion-dollar fortune; they would've done so with whatever social and sexual tools they had with them. In fact, he does throw in sex and social excess as a bonus, too.

"A man being rich is like a girl being pretty," so divines Marilyn Monroe in a referenced film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953);

Think of the elaborate efforts at faking a fortune as his own massive blonde wig.

The Tinder Swindler - Or - Ladies Prefer Levievs to Hayuts.

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Love, Death & Robots: Jibaro (2022)

Season 3, Episode 9

10/10

The Most Unsettling Animated Film Ever Made

22 May 2022

There's scarcely a single shot captured with a normal lens in the 17 breathlessly intense minutes of Jibaro.

There's even less "normal" diegetic audio, as would be heard from within the environment--voices, footsteps, hoof-gallops and winds are low-pass filtered, distorted and otherwise processed to a subjective signature--and fittingly, all the music is vulgar and dissonant.

The story is straightforward enough, a consummately bejeweled Siren--picture a young woman seemingly nude except for body-enveloping ornamentation--in a heart-shaped lake calls to Conquistadors that come from far lands to defile her dwelling and strip her of her riches. They're consumed by a lust far greater than their own greed they unwittingly slice each other to bits in their mad dash toward her, like capacitated sperm to a mature oocyte, rapidly depolarizing the egg to keep the others out with such vicious craving and cupidity that there emerges no victor.

She lures them, in a reversal of fishing custom, into the Lake with a song, and a dance.. And it's this second seduction that stands out boldest in the context of pure animation. There's a degree of nuance and contradiction you shan't find even in the best of outings from the masters of the craft at Pixar and Disney (DreamWorks is not eligible in this regard).

Her dance is at once graceful and garish, regal and ravishing, queenlike yet vampish, balletic and refined yet awkward and unassured.. Knowing and seeking. Whatever level of curiosity you brought with you, it'll be stirred and sustained.

Then there's the protagonist, a man immune to her aural charms for reasons that would spoil the surprise of the experience... suffice to say the seductress becomes the seduced, and embarks on a pursuit of her own, sacrificing her very safety and abandoning self-interest, trading it for the worst treasure of them all; that which even at the end of a most-fierce hunt, can only be given or denied.

What follows then, in the stalwart silent film tradition, is a tragedy of self-discovery and self-ruin, and moral restoration, played out as a sequence of unforgettable images and uncustomary situations.

It's the unrelenting deviation from ordinariness of filmmaking that elevates this short film into something of immediacy and, at least within an hour of watching it, a promise of timelessness. Every choice made is unique and unnatural in its capture and the speed with which it unfolds, and cuts to the next unnatural setup.

But even with all this challenge to convention, what grounds the work is the fact at its core, Jibaro asks a question that'll never have an answer as we're, as a species, too frightened to utter it; Is monsterhood born, or is it cultivated.

And if it's both, then which is worse?

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10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

7/10

A Confident feature-debut; Trachtenberg understands Misdirection as a firm tenet for visual horror...

13 June 2016

At the beginning of the movie, our heroine gets involved in a CGI car crash. Those are bad for the makeup. She could have avoided this, but see, she was listening to this guy, Caller ID Ben. He exposits to her how "they've had a fight, and couples fight." Yeah Ben, teach her stuff. Because he's giving the worst voice performance since Ahmed Best (Binks J. J.), despite being Bradley Cooper, she'll cut him off. Because the plot doesn't like that at all, he'll redial...

She wakes up in Strange Room, Horror Film. We subsequently learn that, in preparation for the synopsis of the movie (chemical attack contaminates air above bunker..), John Goodman built a vast movie set. He equipped it with all the necessary props...food, DVDs, pop songs for montages, chains and handcuffs for Mary Elizabeth Winstead (heroine), etc. That almost got intriguing.

The handcuffs are only jewelry; he'll come in, give her the key, she'll try to stab him, he'll let her out of her room, and take the key away. Outside the room, she'll meet a generic middle-aged filler-character, Emmett, wearing a bushy beard. Because he's utterly bland, she'll instinctively trust him, the way you do a mirror. He extends a stabilizing man-hand toward her when she girl-stumbles (cued by Screenwriter's Instructions); "Keep your hands to your self!" growls John Goodman. Uh, oh; He Knows Something We Don't.

Not that John Goodman is a model bunker-mate either; "I'd like to watch you pee," he informs her, without the clean dialogue. "I can't with you standing there." Somebody watched Death Proof. "This is for my own safety," he counters. Oh, all the right retorts. He has the best line in the movie; "Crazy is building your ark after the flood's already come." But, by the time he says it, it's too late after the toilet standoff, so the spark of context has long waned from it.

"Stay hydrated, and behave," sound advice to Winstead. If she'd heeded it, the whole movie would be a loop of the above paragraph, so she misbehaves and tries to........ never mind; like you might have predicted she would, naughty girl.

If you're going to trap the audience with a quarter-dozen characters, it's not enough that we just stand them; we need to love to hear their dialogue, to watch dramatic friction between them heat up the room, to love watching them move in space. (Jack Torrance, Danny, Tony, Joy Newsome, Daisy Domergue..) So what characterizations does Dan Trachtenberg accord his actors? Well, Winstead as Michelle (otherwise delightful) has a tendency to sound like a low-battery speech synthesizer...but, this is motivated; she's sedated, so, there's smart writing. She does come with a great fake laugh. That's what a reasonable actress does, upon reading a screenplay with (intentionally) bad humor and MICHELLE LAUGHS written under all the jokes. John Goodman has the uncanny ability to show up....just off-screen so the cam grip can whip-pan to him; "Boo! I Was Listening The Whole Time." That's usually the Xenomorph's part, but Goodman'll do.

Thinking I was being over-picky, I paid close attention to Goodman in his close-ups and medium shots; he can't keep himself from looking into the lens, The Office-style, twitching close to laughter at the edgeless expository dialogue he's been given. Maybe that's a long-term side effect of all that tasty Coen-brothers' dialogue... Or, maybe he's heard some spoilers about his character; it's both.

Because the movie deviates from the Horror Formula, feeding off the personas of Goodman and Winstead (hungry feeding there), it sidesteps a lot of the clichés we'd expect, but it's still cumbered by the ones we could have guessed; Winstead Reminds Goodman of His "Daughter" (smiling, a stock memory, in a photo, ...and in a tee-shirt); Emmett Blew His Chance at a Good College (scared of them smart kids!); They All Bond Over A Pop Song Montage; Etc. This stuff is supposed to deepen the characters, give them an existential edge; it just reminds us of the last movie we heard and saw this stuff in.

So, what's the film about? "We'll get attacked by South Korea.." "You mean; North Korea.." "Is that the crazy one?" The very best way, like Billy Wilder once instructed us, to tell the audience a truth that'll taste bitter is to make them laugh; you didn't see Paramount emails leaking for this. So while the movie isn't hauling any speciesist or nationalist agendas, it certainly has undertones of rigoristic preparedness and apocalyptic paranoia. It is, after all, a Cloverfield Movie. Does it have anything new to say about what it's about? It doesn't have to; you don't watch Jaws for some fishing lessons.

For a guy, using fifteen million dollars to make a Studio Movie that didn't need to be any good, Trachtenberg did no wrongs. Excluding the crash sequence, his movie doesn't contain a single terrible cut, a claim only one in a thousand movies can make. Horror films tend to work toward disorientation through poor mishmash editing and obscure lighting. Trachtenberg goes the other way, using the spare amount of true drama his film has to offer to misdirect our suspicions. He keeps on setting up situations, inherently shaky, and showing the audience he's aware of this by his intelligent choice of resolution. A lot of actual trope subversion happens here, as opposed to trope shout-outs (like Deadpool). Because the film is rooted in unalloyed realism unless it's forced not to, it's extremely terrifying whenever it's forced not to. 7/10 for unadulterated competence. There's a point, when Winstead has to choose between driving to safety, or to a sequel.... I'd have made the same choice.

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13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)

3/10

A movie that exists outside of filmmaking grammar, A potent story denied its rightful telling...

5 June 2016

There are some real dramatic images at the beginning of Michael Bay's Benghazi tale. The shots involve two or more objects of interest, and their emotional and spatial relationships are established in well-defined frames. This is cellphone footage from people who were outrunning bullets and hopscotching landmines at the moment, but still had an idea that drama only exists when we aren't distracted by superficial artifice. You want subscribers to know you were 1)dying from 2)bomb-inflicted 3)lesions after you upload this on YouTube, not that you started out directing music videos. I would have much preferred a feature composed of a thoughtful montage of these clips.

There's a scene in which A Blonde Lady handles a half-eaten apple. She holds it like it's her first meeting with a pome. Perhaps, because Bay couldn't convince her the character she's playing could ever savor an apple at lunchtime; she's not a Character before, during or after lunchtime. No individuality, no quirks, no venom or charm; she and the apple both are only props on the set, although the apple's career unfairly ends in the wastebin much faster than hers, in spite of its more intriguing performance. And to think, she was created out of a real person, into thin air. At one point, another cast member itemizes her neatly, "I need your eyes and your ears, not your mouth." Hmm......fitting? Or indeliberate irony.

Then comes a brief moment in which the "dialogue" to be exchanged between castmates is, "hey Prop5, how are the twins?" And oh, wouldn't you know as much, since the only characterizations Prop5 has are a beard and a photo of Military Backstory toddlers, he's wearing his beard, AND, fondling the said kid pic. Oh, man. "Crazy cute." "Cute."

For humorous ends, a cast member recalls Ranger School, how once, to express alpha-virility, they rubbed their penises using a superior officer's hat. This is the setup for a joke, and since the joke is about the officer's personality, not dick-wiping, the payoff should be his personal reaction to the nose-wrinkling whiffs of smegma. We never learn this information... wiping's the climax of the joke; Bay demands your laughs without knowing the punchline. Later he'll want tears. Without the...pepper spray, I'm guessing.

That's not to say the movie isn't funny; a guy walks out of a car into an Arab market, and instead of ornate tablecloths, like in Casablanca, he's offered some RPG warheads, and stuff. If you're questioning the sales wisdom of the Libyan vendors, well, it's clearer to them than it is to a silly thinker-person that out here on an Arab street is where a Caucasian guy in a denim shirt would stroll to buy up some high explosive anti-tank munitions. Might be he's on vacation, but, who knows what whims you can stir after flashing the goods.

There are an unforgivable number of incidences of Bay panning across the room, cutting mid-pan, to a static shot on a different side of the room from where the initial rotation would have ended. Why aren't there Razzies for Worst Editing? Perhaps because everyone can easily tell what a bad performance is, but not what is/isn't good editing. So even under Bay, none of the actors are winning so much as Razzies, they stiff their way through what they can, but the editing would out-rasp BvS.

Emotion, Story, Rhythm, Eye-trace, Two-dimensional plane of screen, Three-dimensional space of action; none of that classical nonsense has a place here. Perhaps Michael Bay has only watched music videos and TV ads, and his only-begotten objective for movie-making is to make you maybe buy stuff, even with nothing to sell. More than perhaps.

One way sheepheaded filmmakers always fail us, is failing to understand that an actor on the battlefield having a wife(-and-kids) in flashbacks/cutaways/off-screen isn't yet another dimension. Only honest characterization and uniquely believable drama, arsenic and affection that taste equally real to us existing between them, justifies this device, or tanks it. Could Bay spell drama? That wouldn't explain the tepid video-Chat Scenes between BlackBerrys and MacBook Pros, held by central cast members and throwaway extras representing their sports-ad-girlfriends-cum-wives reading cornfields of clichés to them with passionless investment on either side. "The girls need you, not a tree house." If he didn't know that already, miss, he belongs in a caged institution.

There's a cutaway, in which one of these non-figurative young ladies is weep-reading melodramatic exposition (more tree houses!) sideways to a drive-through operator selling her stuff-to-eat from outside a car window. There is no operator, selling, or edible stuff seen in the shots provided by Michael Bay. That's when this evidenced itself as a 0/10 movie.

The plot of the movie: things blowed and grass growed, because some real-life private-military assets had to protect some Special Agents (American) from equally-real-life Libyan cheap-gun-shooting assets. Wikipedia says.

So, does the movie contain an incisive geopolitical argumentum, constructed out of provable premises and cogent conclusions? Is the Pope Persian?

I did enjoy one scene, involving an American ambassador played by Matt Letscher; he walks up to a podium ready to give the Libyans a Big Speech, and says; "America.....{suspense}....is here for....{suspense}....you!!" They know to clap, real climactic, for this is his speech. Way to evaporate rhetoric down to its essence.

This is certainly a story worth telling, by someone with adult-minded storytelling devices. Bay's approach on the other hand, can be summarized by a brief 90s-MTV low-angle shot of a classified document being shredded; "Read n Destroy," contentedly reflects Cast Member #2. It's safe to surmise his screenwriter read the source material, then came to Read n Destroy as a mantra. If only he'd had a half-good memory, a worthwhile movie might have come of it. 3/10. Overly generous, for such execrable film-direction. But hey, Bay does use some practical special effects, and, let's see, David Costabile gives a non-rotten one-chord performance.

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Zootopia (2016)

8/10

A Magical Feat that isn't Just an Illusion..

23 May 2016

The litmus test to confirm art and disconfirm zero-calorie entertainment is a comparison between the elements that can be found in both. There's a moment, early in Zootopia, in which our heroine is making a pop-song-backed montage-trip to her destination; the kind of scene that would otherwise typify hollowheaded Furious-7/Rom-Com style movies--yet how does Zootopia leave that sequence feeling closer to Potemkin than Pootie Tang? The montage cuts between establishing shots that are traveling closer to the center of Zootopia, but a crucial difference between this and the Cliché is, one visual element is shared by all subsequent shots; the Heroine's Vessel. The train defines the narrative purpose of each shot as taking the hero closer to their destination, instead of just showing how the second unit had virtual cameras running everywhere along the way to the city. The train will also turn out to be part of a Chekhov's armory for a resolution later in the movie.

The plot of the movie, once you untangle the Noirish vines it wraps itself in, is a plucky young bunny heroine becomes a cop and flies to the Big City with a buoying air of idealism under her wings; she's here to Change the World. Make it a better place than she thinks it is. It's worse. She'll meet a shifty fox who'll challenge and disillusion her as much she'll amuse and enamor him. They'll earn from each other a reciprocal respect and more, and together, they'll make an indomitable, unlikely duo. It's the plot of a thousand movies, The Silence of the Lambs is the best of the kilo, and Zootopia runs a few paces behind it.

The animation in the film is great enough to meet the greatest expectations, with an added layer most of the time missing; the characters are allowed to have nonverbal (and we guess off-screen) dramatic reactions to the proceedings, and every revisiting of the feature deepens them farther; they have an existence of their own, and aren't just saying their dialogue because wisecracks would be funny in a family movie. They own their platitudes. A rare feat. One aspect I loved even further is the Rainforest District, a rain-beaten Neo-noir Verde-vista which the characters unwisely visit and are met with a feline misadventure. It's a bold step for an animated/otherwise-Disney film to have a section in its World that isn't colored like fruit drops...and has fierce Carnivora that leap at us to equalize our interspecific excitements.

Most of the humor in the movie is generic; it's all the usual high-speed-chase falling-from-a-bridge humor that drew its last laughs in the 90s. By now it should be plagiarism. Yet, because it's character-centered here, and the movie lets us warm to its characters, it's like a friend telling you an old joke, you laugh not because it's funny again, but you're glad you're having the time together.

There is a substantial flaw however. The narrative bears an over-reliance on off-screen events and obscurant camera placement; the only way the screenplay knows how to resolve an urgency is pulling a resolvent carrot out of a hat; you didn't see us hide this! It wears itself into contrivance. There's also an overstatement of visual information using reiterative flashbacks. Kids should use their memories even at the movies.

One of the few scenes that have wrought the teaspoonful of half-negative reviews the film has gotten is the Sloth sequence at a DMV office. If the movie is against stereotyping, then oh, why are all the sloths with jobs and speaking roles in it lethargic, as if constrained by their biological limitations even in a family film? Those who complain about this scene didn't stay for the epilogue to see the setup subverted. It's what marks the difference between good satire and generic parody; satire sets up the tropes again within its own story's context to demolish them with focus, yet parody just gobbles up the setups made in other works and belches lazy punchlines. The sloth sequence was necessary to prove a counterpoint, instead of simply stating one.

"We may be evolved, but deep down, we're still Animales.." so observes a Mr. Big in the film. He's paraphrasing a compagno of his, from an earlier version of himself, who said about black folks, "They're Animals anyway. So let them lose their souls." Of course, his compagno, in spite of being a Sabre-toothed ligature-toting predator, excluded himself from the Animales subcategory; he didn't even presume to be the gamekeeper. I know, I'm annoying you, comparing a 'kiddie movie' to a god-daddie movie, but one thing the confronto illustrates, even the dimmest film characters are evolving, at least on the top shelf of the art form.

In this era where movies are blighted by on-the-nose dialogue (even very good ones like Interstellar) and fortune-cookie messages, sometimes with very sour fortune cookies, we seldom open the valves of our hearts to them.

A lifetime's worth of product-line-assembled mediocrities has given us constrictive pericarditis.

Zootopia is like a pericardiectomy that peels away that hardened pericardium, and lets our hearts expand with joy again...if only for 108 minutes and 32 seconds. Until we walk out of the screening and are assaulted by the Batman v Superman posters outstaying their welcome on the cinema walls, that fill our ventricles with venom again; not a result of the counterfeit product they're marketing being powerful enough, or powerful at all, to make us feel anything by itself; all it does and can do is steer backwards (and blindly) from every paragraph in this review. No half-good movie would ever do that.

I love movies more than most things (anything?), but, I prefer to hate them; it's much more fun to frame-by-frame them, and deconstruct their technique than to futilely mine them for oft-nonexistent Deeper Meaning. Zootopia earns a high grade on both levels; it's the rare big movie you actually root for at the movies.

8/10

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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

2/10

A Dark Knight Capsizes, his fans with him

4 April 2016

Warning: Spoilers

Yes, Alfred does get some dialogue. Unfortunately, it's nothing quite as oracular or quotable as "some men just want to watch the world burn" or even humanly quizzical as "you could tell me the Russian for 'apply your own bloody suntan lotion'." Jeremy Irons conveys ripe wisdom like, "Thermal imaging is showing me two-dozen hostiles on the third floor" and, "batman you can't win this war!" "Oh Alfred, Siri could've told me all that!" should-have replied Batman. Butt-head has made more profound observations to Beavis.

Christopher Nolan understood, for the film experience to be rewarding on repeat viewings, you can't transplant the cultured-in archives of affection for comic book characters off the panels into the frame, they need to be portrayed with disarming humanity on the screen. Snyder doesn't uphold this, and on a second viewing, I'd have been comatose to care less what happens or doesn't really to Kal-El. All I see is Henry Cavill, and all he shows is a doll-like, plastic lack of thespian talent. Not even good plastic, more like, Thermosetting Bakelite, which won't so much as re-mold itself to temperature changes. What kind of Super-man are you if your acting can't cut it in a Little-kids' play?

It is the least-witted super-screenplay in and on either side of written-history: On top of all the gangrenous Basic English impersonal dialogue, actions are galvanized by gummy extrinsic motives...when the eventual Batman/Superman showdown comes along, it's not driven by an irreconcilable disaccord between the characters' elemental attributes, but, Snyder explores, a gross mutual misunderstanding of their quantum-probabilistic similarities; if they had known their grand-mommies had both been fingering along the same page of the same Baby-Girl Name Book, they wouldn't-a even gone (along) and done all that CGI uber-vandalism.

The screenplay is indefensibly dumb even on a non-thematic level, Bruce Wayne doesn't comprehend apriorisms like "an absolute certainty", and Lois Lane says a prototype-bullet isn't sold Anywhere-In-The-World(!)..."even black market". "You see, Loi, the raison d'être of the Black Market is so no one with a fully-formed cerebrum can ever confess such naïveté out loud," nobody offered.

Superman flies-off-to-Mexico, and he...saves-a-little-girl, out-of-a-building-burning-so-hot.. it's-collapsing-under-its-own-weight. Does he then swoosh-her-off-to-a-nearby-hospital, owing to a provisional diagnosis of pulmonary-alveolar damage from smoke inhalation? Nah, he just sets her down at the hypo-oxygenated center of a crowd so they can feel up his costume, designed by Michael Wilkinson. Ya know, maybe these meta-humans (and screenwriters) ought to earn at least a paramedic's license before flying-around-doing-stuff. That would be my Bat-beef.

A bad screenplay doesn't even have to yield a worse movie; when your moronically-written characters throw-up such fecal lines as "the world only makes sense if you force it to!!"..you don't track into their faces to corroborate their fascistic whims, you show it in a wide shot (better; off-screen) and indicate the film has a larger perspective than their crack-narrow minds. A post-pubescent director knows when to assure his smart audience about on-screen psychopaths; "...I'm not with these guys!"

Exempting Affleck, you want to hold your nose away from the acting. When Jesse Eisenberg yips on about "bat of Gotham man vs god blood of my blood this is your doomsday!", he sounds like a nut that's tripped out of a cult, like a fly you ought to swat. Oh, he's getting a Razzie for that. Even his browbeating-braggadocio trailer-famous line: "The Red Capes are coming", just slathers out of nowhere and for no reason except he's got a mouth.

Snyder was last seen wallowing in the Superhero/God dual-theism with Watchmen, "god exists and he's American." Dr. Manhattan, compared to Cavill's superman, was an infinitely complex character (and a damn-right pitch for God), one that we found ourselves caring deeply for, perhaps because he was portrayed by Billy Crudup..who's an actual Grade-B+ actor, not a perfectly-muscled blow-up doll that's been pumped with words such as; "Find..Him..Save..M.A.R.T.H.A!!" "Waz tat mean?", wonders Snyder's Batman upon its deflation.

Regarding spectacle, one thing actual filmmakers--not explosarios--understand is, to create iconic imagery in your action scenes, and not shouter-fodder for Multiplex-screwballs, the amount of flash has to be rationed. In the Super-vs-Super and Super-vs-Doom fight scenes, he has dome-shaped energy surges and sojourns to Outer Space..and he glosses over improbabilities like they were day-to-day quotidia...rather than do what Kurosawa or Spielberg or Cameron would do; employ visual-scaling to emphasize the mystic absurdity of it and invoke awe rather than elicit yawns.

I don't subscribe to the DC/Marvel oil-wrestle, I only require that a movie be good cinema. If I leaned more towards DC, it'd owe to The Dark Knight, and one of the pillars that elevates it into art is its ergo-hermetic sense of narrative: Virtually every line in the first half pays off in the second; "I hear they have a different name for me down at M.C.U", "You either die a hero. . . . .". These-and-more lines are given an ironic knife-twist by the film's end that leaves you in an adiabatic mood of contemplation; you've just witnessed a Chekhovian masterpiece. In Synder's feature-video (no, it's not a movie), you get unwoven strings-of-words like, "Things fall..things on..Earth. What falls...is, uh,...fallen?" "It's HIS mother's name, x2!!" Reductio ad absurdum; the screwy writing implies Batman--if Ma Kent was instead a "Molly"--would let a collateral hostage die.

The experience is such a mechanist vacuity that when Diane Lane comes on-screen to take out the garbage at night...we're aware it's not because of the human need to do house chores, it's just, the plot needs her to be violently kidnapped, then to wail and squirm. She got more dignity unwrapped, propped high-up to the toilet-wall in Unfaithful. She earned an emotion/two then.

A perfect meta-metaphor for the whole mess; in Watchmen, Nite Owl saves Bruce Wayne's parents from getting murdered. In this putrid muddle, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, once The Comedian, plays Thomas Wayne, only to get gunned down. Way to undo your own work, and everyone else's.

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Deadpool (2016)

6/10

Where exactly does Deadpool stand in the History of Cinema?

30 March 2016

If you could image your subconscious thoughts during a movie, you'd come up with a leather-bound thesis after watching The Godfather and Pulp Fiction, an exuberant treatise after La Dolce Vita, a double-retrograde flowchart after Memento and a dialectic paperback after The Dark Knight. After Deadpool..you can relay such thoughts using a binary alphabet;

"Ha. Haa. Ha ha. Ah! AHH!! Hah. AAAH." It humors in its own laughability. That's something, if you'll go for anything.

Ryan Reynolds is inviolably cast as Deadpool (not-so-much as Wade), and Ed Skrein as "A British Villain", whose invulnerable machismo would have sipped the tension out of Game of Thrones, is appropriate here, sneezing at impalements-by-sword like they were fly-bites. Morena Baccarin looks good naked and is a good actress. The movie kindly lets her reveal one of those things as Vanessa.

Up on the technical floor, does Deadpool have a unique cinematic vocabulary, in the way of Battleship Potemkin or even Un Chien Andalou...? The opening tableau vivant was more imaginatively rendered in Days of Future Past...and the concept was more provocatively employed in Cashback (2006), objectively; it's a tired, haggard dog of a trick. In its defense, there IS that ass-to-ass match cut, and...that's it. Other than that it speaks in the same bromidic visual clichés our optic ears are numb from hearing, it might as well be (and is) a competently made romantic comedy about a guy whose uprooted penis can grow back, each time with a "boing!!"

Yet it's billed as an "action" movie. Violence is a delicious promise from the trailers. Do its cartoonishly (the script admits as much) over-choreographed dance/fight scenes contain anything 1/10th as visceral as Morsov's Leap from Fury Road, or even Buster Keaton's locomotive hypercrobatics from The General (1926)? It fartin-wishes. More like those burn-worthy Kung Fu D-movies circa 1995, whose poster is the hero walking away from a 'blown-up' matchstick explosion.

Down on the fundamental story level, there's only a string of 30 seconds during its 108-minute unspooling time during which Deadpool acquires the illusion of depth; stalking his girlfriend Vanessa and shamed by his burnt-sausage looks, strangers on the street throw censoriously disgusted stares at Wade Wilson; "get a mask!". This scene earned an echo of thought about the human condition; "Yeah, they all do that." A non-teenage film would use this development as a launchpad into balancing laughs and meditation on societal vanity versus individual dysmorphic syndrome. But hey, the movie tells me....meditation is for the temple, NOT the multiplex. Touche and ha ha. Safer to take the crowd's advice..and please them.

So much for being a "popcorn movie"--and only a passable one at that--Age of Ultron features one timelessly ponderable moment: "What is This?", wonders Ultron in basso elettrico upon awakening and achieving self-awareness. It's a bit of writing that invoked the same feeling of primal, dread-filled fascination in me as The Genesis of the Robot and the subsequent Birth of False Maria in Metropolis (1927). It also made me wonder, on an embryonic cogitative level...if that same thought had occupied my inchoate fetal mind at a point during my gestation. All this during an ultimately disappointing Superboys' Day-out Comedy.

You see a different kind of self-awareness in Deadpool...Wade knows he's a comic book character in a Fox movie with an audience watching it. Only problem is this--apart from pandering to fan-men and fan-women (but ..fanboys, mostly)--does not serve the story at all. The existential disequilibrium between Deadpool and Ultron is; Ultron will always have achieved self-awareness, duplicated it and attempted to destroy all those who preceded him to it, while Deadpool ends up talking to himself if you go for a snack and leave the BluRay playing. Even he can't laugh at how kooky-ridiculous he looks doing that.

Detractors of Deadpool cite how it only shuffles the deck without adding any fresh cards; breaking the fourth wall has been popular since The Tramp winked at us in Charlie Chaplin's films...die-hard fans bark at that, "it's the first time it's been done in a comic book adaptation!" Alrighty then. I suppose the next time a kid splits his knee open, and some Superloon licks the wound..it'll be heralded as novelty too.

As one blasphemer--who hasn't been in the game much between 1994 and now--put it, Deadpool is the freshest script he's encountered since Pulp Fiction...except Tarantino's Film is a deconstruction, a subversion and a re-invention of the Hollywood Gangster Genre. Deadpool on the other pole isn't one cent more than a sardonic riff. The kind of insights Deadpool brings to the superhero-cash-cow genre are the sort you throw-away with pothead bar-acquaintances on a lazy Saturday afternoon (ouchie! superhero landings are hard on your knees!), or lying awake on the operating table..(the camera's the only thing that's pulling out tonight!)..waiting for the second half of your lobotomy. Apparently, say the fans, that's more than good enough for a Comic Book Movie. Ah.

Am I a pedant-on-stilts who can't have fun at the (real silly) movies? Ha ha ha ha. "Nah", I'm just an adult who was thinking when I watched the movie. That's why, it earns a 6/10.

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The Hateful Eight (2015)

8/10

A Period Piece .... Ahead of its Hour; Psychosexual Inhibition vs. Quietistic Racial Prejudice

30 January 2016

I've read just about every 1 star review of this film. Beside noting that most of them are from accounts less than a month old (as of January 2016), even more notable is their dearth of insight whatsoever. "Absolute garbage" they exclaim. "Smelly garbage" they bellow from behind thumbed noses in single-paragraph adolescence.

Even if you can't appreciate the subtler aspects of cinema, such as composition and use of color (no please, not the n****r word), surely these surly reviewers must've noted Tarantino's use of on-screen space, his blocking of actors, and the invisible in-character reactions they have to each small development. Easily more apparent; Quentin's film may be set at a single set, but it has more compositional variety than 19/20 movies made. Bar editing, composition is the most psychically evocative element of emotive visual storytelling. Quentin is a virtuoso in this department, never more palpably than with this film.

Most drone on about how the smart introspective dialogue drones on. They must prefer the ear-drilling tunes of clunk like "Directly under enemy scrotum" from Transformers X, or perhaps even "I like the way you die, boy" from Tarantino's precedent masterpiece, which they can quote the next day at work even without context.

Consider the verse "Considering all the things I done for money, I ain't one to judge but...don't you feel just the least little bad about hangin' a woman?" Chris Mannix. OR " Ain't you got mixed emotions about bringin' a woman to a rope?" Major Warren.

Those two lines betray the deep, multi-layered irony in the final shot of the film.

It's Tarantino inviting us to inspect the apparent misogyny the film is deceptively wrapped in. The responses to both characters, from two others (Ruth and Mobray) relay the head and tail of the same misogynistic beast; To Ruth, Domergue's lack of grace disqualifies her femininity as an emotive, self-restrictive tool. To Mobray, womanhood has no bearing on the gravity of an atrocity. She isn't a woman to Ruth, and Mobray couldn't care that she is. Mobray is the dispassionate of the two. But then again...there is no Mobray.

The "dispassion is the very essence of justice" monologue is another twist of the contemplative knife; it's the verbal setup for eventual situational irony, a reciprocal of Pulp Fiction's "Marsellus Wallace don't like to be fu*ked by anybody, except Mrs. Wallace." It's a continuation of the subtle thematic lifeline that runs through Quentin's filmography: He creates the characters, they write themselves a plot, he writes the Story--and the three elements never align, into a contrived Third-Act eclipse.

When a character gets his head bloodily brecciated, it's not only over-the-top Quentinry, it's a story-point. That's how elaborate the scheme is. The characters talk and talk and poeticize their pasts. Sure, it isn't as electric as Tarantino's former poesy (Come on, give the 1870s characters a break; they haven't heard 'Like a Virgin', been to Amsterdam or been in a pilot of Fox Force Five yet) but the film reaches a new laid back, naturalistic real-time feel to it. It's Quentin's coziest film yet.

The "beggin' for his life" monologue by Major Warren, too, is full of ingenious touches; "I grabbed me a handful of that black hair at the back of his head" is double-edged. General Smithers as objectively observed has a (genetic or geriatric) white head of hair, so it's a two-way bet on whether his son would be or wouldn't be black-haired. Then, phenotypically, most male, Black humans don't have a handful of hair at the back of their heads, so that dips the icy pin further in some thematic racial poison. Plus, it's full of the fanciful tautologies Tarantino is famous for: "When I knew me I had the son.....I knew me I was gon' have some fun." Smile.

To earn this monologue (and its aftermath), Smithers romanticizes his racism saying; "I don't know that n*g*er, but I know he's a n*g*er; and that's all I need to know." How many writers, from any epoch, in any medium, can pack so much character and so much of a character's world-view into such a neat, pithy epigram? A shortlist, with Tarantino close to its helm.

Basterds and Django were satisfying, even at first-watch, because of how exuberantly executed they were. Second-watch proved the films more ruminative. With The Hateful Eight....its most thought-provoking meta-aspect is witnessing all the under-observed wrawling of witling naysayers: "Ooh, it gave me crucifix-nightmares! Ultra-talky! Made me THROW UP! It's a snuff film!" They've accrued a blunting critical irony now. To quote Major Warren: "Hahaahahahaha, Whooo!"

It's a sad moment for filmmaking that this masterly mood piece gets vituperated not out of objective outrage, but because The 8th film by Quentin Tarantino doesn't have the epic chic nor end with a fiery explosion in the tradition of his 6th and 7th. When my grandkids ask I'll tell them.... I'll tell them the story of how Grande Cinema died. It wasn't due to dumb directors telling silly effects-stories, no. It was a murder committed by impatient audiences.

A warm kiss, and a loving 8/10 for The Hateful Eight.

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The Revenant (I) (2015)

7/10

+Technical Mastery, -Synthetic Spirituality = Memorable Mediocrity

21 December 2015

My popcorn tin was heavier when I binned it than when I collected it. Why did I throw up when watching The Revenant? There isn't that much gore to speak of.. What's worth a loud unflattering speech is the wooden spoon of pseudo-philosophical pretensions AG Iñárritu gags the audience with for 2 hours and 26 minutes. I sat with that warm tin on my lap even through the 10 minute credits, contemplating.

Consider that Glass' chief motivation for returning from the grave (gravely wounded really) is his love for his Pawnee son, with whom the only memorable scene shared is patting him down from an outburst against Fitzgerald's (Hardy) ferociously racist taunts. He only becomes that much close to him after Fitzgerald coats his rusty knife with the teenager's gastric juice, in a powerfully screamed-out scene.

Consider how much running time we spend watching Glass wander wistfully into the afterlife, despite knowing full well he'll overcome his bear wounds for a showdown or the film wouldn't be funded. He eavesdrops on whispers by his murdered wife's wraith, only to wake up and cauterize his torn-open neck with gunpowder; Iñárritu wants to both have his bison liver and eat it. How much can you cheat the narrative?

Most redundant of its sophistry is the Darwinian symbolism, as Glass evolves from being bruised and buried, to a crawling creature, to a one-legged limper, to a biped man to a horseback riding gunfighter... In Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, evolutionary symbolism at the end served a purpose of literalizing how survival is a prerequisite for evolution; we wouldn't be writing reviews on IMDb if Neanderthals hadn't scrambled Mousterian tools 300,000 years ago. Here, Glass gets wounded and persists only to become the same man again.... not even a wiser fellow.

Above everything, the over-ballyhooed bear attack is dampeningly underwhelming. Not-to-spoil anything, but you remember it, how you give a cat a bowl of milk, the bowl gets swirled around a bit with only a few licks of milk spilling over the edges.. Yeah. Oh, it's not even all in one long continuous take as it's been touted to be, there's a very visible cut soon after Glass arms himself with a knife. What it isn't is even 1/10th as visceral as the jaguar-mauling from Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. What it is is ten times more pointlessly protracted and thusly expensive.

On the other hand, The Revenant is filmed with such hypnotic beauty. Lubezki's camera floats around inordinately, (pans more than it tracks) and he seems to find heavenly imagery in every 360° plane. Nature has never looked better in a Hollywood production. There's a grim fairytale (& Ron Fricke-esque) edge to the proceedings. The wide-screen frames are filled with towering forestry, snowmelt and dew drops dripping off the damp lushly colored leaves in close-up. Negatively charged oxygen reaches for your lungs off the screen. When the film slackens to luxuriate in wonder, never is it boring; it's only catching its breath.

The editing is often fabulous. From flame-to-flame match cuts in the snow, and most memorably, Glass' labored breath fogs the lens, dissolves into clouds floating in the mountain ranges which are then viciously consumed by Fitzgerald's pipe smoke.

But Ho! there... characters' lives are risked for this virtuosity. There's a scene in which Jim Bridger, the story's most conflicted entity, when finding their way to camp with Fitzgerald, happens upon a massacred Native village, huts still smoking. Him and us, (but not Fitzgerald) see a surviving lady, for whom Bridger leaves a parcel whose contents neither we nor her know to be; she's seen Fitzgerald stomp around and cuss, she's surmised his inclination towards violence. She has to choose between 1) staying safely alive by hiding a little longer, or 2) bowing to the logistical limitation of Iñárritu needing to pan around, show her to the audience discovering bread in the parcel and pinching off mouthfuls, then urgently cut to the next scene. Does she play it safe? Not if The Revenant is going to strike a balance between manipulative and masterful.

Still, despite the objectionable, emetic and offensively on-the-nose endeavour, Iñárritu deserves an Oscar again, if only for the scene in which Glass eviscerates a dead horse he's ridden off a cliff, and the camera smoothly sails around from the horse's back as its viscera are scooped out, travels in a long take, timed to the action, to find Glass snuggling into its steaming 'womb' then conclude with a close-up of his face. Wow!! (No matter how many takes and fired crew members it took)

The most human performance is by Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald, consistently flawed and gleaming with gallows humor. Don't be surprised if during the final snowy showdown, you're rooting for him to cut down pretentious.

DiCaprio, well, he..... works the hardest. You know that clip they play at the Oscars, your most electrifying moment during a performance, DiCaprio's here is effectively a grisly series of those. My two favorite are him trying-to-not-blink to save his life, and him crawling out of a shallow snow grave, and mortared between his teeth, equal parts spit and grit. Despite my reservations, I'll cheer a lung out for either clip.

You can almost hear the voices in his head (his Birdman?) yell in Calvin Candie rhetoric; "Eddie Redmayne, that new kid, he gimped hisself out last yur, won that Oscar for it.. What are you gonna do, Huh!?!"

Such a troubled production, he ate real raw bison liver, yet still he required 5 stunt doubles and 3 photo doubles... that there is a metaphor for the whole movie.

While the film is never boring, calling it entertaining would be flattering it. No exhilaration derives from watching a man ride a horse off a cliff; the experience is very akin to staring into an open wound, waiting patiently for it to a cicatrize into a scar. 7/10.

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Rang De Basanti (2006)

7/10

Sharply Distilled, Bit Lumpy.

6 December 2015

"One leg in the past, one leg in the future, this is why we're pissing on the present."

So observes a character in Rang De Basanti. Of course, this is predicated on the assumption that it's men doing all the damage. In a Patriarchal country like the beautiful India, it's more than an implication. There's a cognitive dissonance, a man-made conflict of interests. It's a closed system with two interacting elements; the patriotic and the pecuniary.

The film tells its story, one of mistakably dimming relevance, in a very calculated and inviting fashion. The fight for independence from the British, as a historical documentary being made on a zero(denied)-budget by an ambitious British post-adolescent woman, that needs re-enactments, which shall be done by the boisterously youthful protagonists. (They jump drunkenly off bridges where the original young revolutionaries jumped on moving trains.) This dissonance spills out of the narrative and into the film making craft itself; about 75% of the cuts in the film are truly cinematic, impressively invisible, and serve emotion and storytelling, the rest are so hip-hoppy you think Honey Singh is going to burst into the frame. The Dance Numbers are derivatively progressive.

A subplot of external conflict, with a clique of militant dogmatists who are offended deeply (and paid heftily to take deep offence) by the 'Western-wannabeism' of the protagonists is inflated and paraded for us to notice, then buried for virtually the rest of the film.

A key character crosses over from their side (a big key too, considering he's the one getting the money), gets a role in the documentary, and then only serves as a pair of fists and knees in a plot-hinging fight scene. After that, he's just a diffident extra in the documentary. Anyone paying attention to the story at this point will tell you he has more conflict, both internal and external, than all the other characters aggregated.

That wouldn't leave running time for Aamir Khan's comic relief though, would it? But is this a story that needs relief, from what? The premise itself is a tricky compromise enough. I don't know whether it's the New Bollywood way of tickling the audience's ribs, but there's a whole lot of standing-up-and-stomping-around going on, it gets on your nerves, then bites down and gnaws on them.

Still, the film is very dramatically effective, and there are enough 'realistic' performances from the core cast to sour-down and hair-up the cutesy syrupy moments. Consider, how the director sets up an in-joke about a television that reacts better to a well-timed slap than a turn of the knob. Without repeating the joke too many times, he hurtles the movie forward swiftly and smartly, and right before the intermission, supplies a Soap Opera proposal we don't want to see.

The sly disconnect with which he uses the punchline of the T.V. joke to cut down silly romanticism with grim foreclosure is not only tragi-darkly-comic, it understates one of the movies running themes; "Put your life on the line for your country in this new world, you're not a revolutionary, you're Nuts."

Safer to make movies and documentaries about stuff. Apropos, did Tropic Thunder steal its premise from this, strip away idealism and purpose?

The message seems to be that, inherently oppressive, colonialism (ancestral to anti-nationalism in a way) is an indelible stain that only permeates wider and changes color with time. I heartily agree. However, wherever you stand on this contemplative time curve, you leave a puddle. Blood, tears, or likely, pxss.

Overall, the film is an efficiently constructed, cleverly told and expertly presented crucial bit of overarching history, worth the demand of its running time.

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