Notes from the Underground

Hello again. Excuse me as I begin to wipe the cobwebs off this little corner of the Internet. Today, I have at long last renewed my domain for Panned Review. When the domain lapsed in July, I was unable to renew it because Google’s process is deep and mysterious, like a Christopher Nolan movie. And like Nolan, I would try to explain it to you better, only I don’t fully understand it myself. At any rate, it was not a simple one-click solution. In the midst of this, my feelings about writing movie reviews were all a-flutter, partly due to personal reasons, partly because trying to write movie reviews for fun can be a challenge when you teach English full time, and there are papers to grade and books to read. On the other hand, I’ve gotten to contribute a few pieces to another blog, Filmview, run by my friend Konstantinos Pappis. So the question loomed: Should I continue this long-running blog or not? For now, the answer is yes. I’m also happy to say that a new project is in the works: a podcast. More information about that when it’s available. For now, I’m enclosing some mini-reviews of movies I’ve seen this year but never wrote about.

Atomic Blonde – Those who say a female James Bond is out of the question are quickly proved wrong by this fast-moving, neon-enameled comic book of a movie, in some ways a companion to John Wick. In both films, the action scenes are extremely well-choreographed and the tension is almost always punctuated by some little bit of humor. Atomic Blonde is ultimately a unique and fascinating movie all on its own, even if the premise (an American spy facing off with Russians in Germany during the end of the Cold War) has already been trod endlessly. Charlize Theron delivers a convincing performance as Lorraine, a mysterious woman whose allegiance is never clear to us. Theron’s performance is icy and sharp, yet vulnerable, a combination that few Bond actors have ever been able to master, and James McAvoy makes for a worthy love interest/villain. But what strikes me most about Atomic Blonde is that it’s one of the most visually interesting movies I’ve seen in a long time. I found myself tuning out the dialogue (some of which was too functional and technical at times) because I was so fascinated by the images. And of course, it’s awash in 80s references, from the music to the costumes, and resembles, in its most exciting moments, a music video right out of the the early days of MTV. Directed by David Leitch. Also starring John Goodman.

Kong: Skull Island – Kong: Skull Island feels like it was made by people who obsessively watched Apocalypse Now, mining it for inspiration, but their commitment to showing the audience a good time is such a welcome thing that the film's ostentatious references to Vietnam movies hardly bothered me. Especially when so few movies like this (take note, Jurassic World) feel interesting or have any personality. Skull Island takes place in the 70s, so its strikingly ethnically diverse cast feels almost anachronistic. This motley group of scientists, soldiers, and other hangers-on embarks on a doomed expedition to the ends of the earth: Skull Island. The island is essentially concealed inside a dangerous hurricane-force atmosphere. And it's home to an ancient indigenous tribe and a variety of ghastly prehistoric monsters, not to mention the great King Kong. Kong once again feels like a lovable beast, one we truly care about, and while the film’s overstuffed Vietnam commentary may be somewhat forced and obvious, it sure does make for a colorful entertainment. Samuel L. Jackson plays a bomb-crazy colonel with the usual ideas about colonialism; Brie Larson is a war photographer, Tom Hiddleston a rogue adventurer, and John Goodman a government wonk. With John C. Reilly, who's genuinely touching as a WW2 soldier who's been stranded on Skull Island for 30 years, a godlike prize for the natives. It's a hodgepodge that works. Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts.

Mother! – Darren Aronofksy is not a director after my own heart. I disliked Black Swan immensely, and I found Mother! pretty insufferable too. Jennifer Lawrence plays the young wife of a struggling poet, (Javier Bardem). This once happy couple lives in a beautiful country estate, the home Bardem’s character grew up in, apparently. They’re expecting a baby, and Lawrence’s character is wrapped up in redecorating the whole house, which is a bit of a fixer-upper. That’s when their domestic tranquility is shattered by the appearance of a strange couple, played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer. The movie descends into a kind of domestic nightmare as increasingly bizarre things happen and the wife feels alienated from her husband, whose commitment to hospitality borders on the pathological. It’s a surreal experience, one that may titillate some viewers with all its literary references (to the Bible, Dante’s Inferno, among others, and its more general pap about the artist’s struggle). But Jennifer Lawrence spends the entire film reacting in horror to the admittedly horrible things happening to her; I much prefer Lawrence when she’s strong or funny (like her deliciously arch performance in the otherwise middling American Hustle). Mother! is also a maddeningly ugly film, visually speaking, a far cry from the rapturous beauty of the film below.

Suspiria (1977) – I’ve already reviewed Suspiria, but I must take a moment to rave about the experience of seeing it this October on the big screen, at Jacksonville’s own Sun-Ray Cinema. Before the movie began, we were treated to a brief intro by star Jessica Harper herself, which she recorded as a little gift to the fans. I’ve never considered myself a devotee of Suspiria, because the film’s plot is so haphazard. But seeing its garish colors on that massive screen turned me into a believer. The point of Suspiria is that it’s a chaotic, nightmarish experience, a frenetic symphony of artistic terror. Dario Argento doesn’t have the time, the patience, or the desire to nail every detail of the plot together, and why should he when he’s capturing a film this beautiful and terrifying? The horrifying double murder, minutes after the opening credits, is one of the prime examples: We never know where the threat is coming from, or what the threat is capable of. And the unreal, dazzlingly ornate set designs, which are more like the acid trips of an art major than actual movie sets, reinforce the feeling of otherworldliness. Suspiria has energy and vitality and spookiness to spare, and I’m so happy I got to see it with an audience.

Wind River – A surprisingly effective mystery-thriller, set in a desolate, snow-encased town in the Wyoming wilderness. Elizabeth Olsen plays a hotshot FBI agent who teams up with a somber, intuitive tracker (Jeremy Renner) to investigate a very cold case – the rape and gruesome murder of a young Native American woman, whose body was found deep in the mountains. Wind River becomes less about whodunit and more about the ways a place can be so hard and harsh that its conditions wear on your very soul. And yet, Wind River never feels like an inhuman film. The characters that populate it are interesting and all too human, only they’ve been living in isolation too long. The film takes a surprising turn at the end, revealing to us everything that happened, via flashback. It feels jarring at first, but director Taylor Sheridan’s focus is on the people, not the scintillating, pulpy surface story. That’s what makes Wind River such a satisfying movie. The standoff scene, between Olsen, several other agents, and a handful of methy bad guys, is tense and well-constructed. And Jeremy Renner, as always, lends a certain anchor-like presence. I can never not enjoy him in a movie.

Trainwreck

Redemption is the theme embedded within Judd Apatow’s latest comedy, Trainwreck, which was written by its star, Amy Schumer. Schumer’s character, also named Amy, doesn’t believe in committed relationships. She doesn’t care if her men sleep with other girls. She’s not longing for the one great romance that will result in marriage and children and settling down. Amy has a job for a popular men’s magazine called Snuff (run by a real monster, played to absolute perfection by Tilda Swinton); she has her own apartment in the city; she has friends, and a happily dysfunctional relationship with her ailing father (Colin Quinn) and younger sister (Brie Larson), both of which run on a kind of cynical humor which occasionally boils over into genuine meanness (mostly on Amy’s part). And so, we know from the beginning that Amy is going to need to be saved from herself and from her reckless living. It’s really astonishing how Victorian it all is. Amy is almost a Becky Sharp (Thackeray’s deliciously odious heroine in Vanity Fair), taking down the society around her, except, unlike Sharp, Amy ultimately trades in her social anarchy for conformity.

And here is where I want to parse out something. I found Amy (the character) totally irritating. She was genuinely mean to every guy in her life, even the nice one, the nerdy-but-lovable-orthopedic-surgeon-to-the-stars played by Bill Hader. I wanted him to dump her and let her stew in her own misery. This has nothing to do with Amy’s lifestyle and everything to do with the fact that she is a generally unlikable person with whom we the audience are expected to sympathize. (Again, I mean the character of Amy, not the actress Amy Schumer.) Unlike one of those great Victorian heroines, thumbing her nose at the arbitrary and stodgy conventions of society, Amy aims her middle finger squarely at anyone and everyone who tries to love her. 

Of course, you will say, that’s the whole point. She can’t accept love because she doesn’t love herself. She resorts to snarky criticism of others’ work and choices in order to deflect her own fear of failure. Amy diagnoses these maladies herself, somewhere in the course of the more-than-two-hour-long saga. But I don’t care. It doesn’t make this Ebenezer Scrooge change-of-heart story any less harder to take. In fact, I think Bill Hader would have fared better with Scrooge. 

The movie might have succeeded in its redemption story if it weren’t for the fact that everything about Amy Schumer’s comedy—both in and out of this film—works toward a kind of critique of such things as stock romantic comedies where women are dominated by men and churned through the domesticity factory. Amy doesn’t exactly end up a Stepford wife by the finale of Trainwreck, but she does embrace a kinder, gentler version of herself, one who’s also willing to perform a sexy cheerleader dance with the help of the Knicks City Dancers. What’s so strange about this movie is that Bill Hader’s character is such a good guy that he’s the kind of man you’d want your daughter/sister/ friend to end up with. You want her to stop being such a monster to him. But somehow, her "redemption" is never really that. It's more of a self-policing job. And Hader's character becomes her punching bag, so often that we start to lose respect for him to a degree. 

The monster-heroine plot would probably have been fine on its own, perhaps even as low-camp (especially if this had been about the Tilda Swinton character, whom I absolutely loved), but forcing Amy Schumer’s politically charged humor to conform to the conventions of the romantic comedy works against everything that’s funny in the movie. (And there are a lot of funny moments; I would be lying if I told you otherwise.) Trainwreck ultimately re-affirms everything that every other romantic comedy espouses—the acquiring of spouses. And any smart critique of say, the arbitrary conventions of society, falls apart.

What’s really astonishing is the fact that movies today are surprisingly more conservative and conventional than they’ve ever been, especially in the romantic comedy genre. This month, I watched a terrific Barbara Stanwyck vehicle, Ball of Fire (1941), directed by Howard Hawks and co-starring Gary Cooper, in which Stanwyck moves in with a bunch of bachelor-professors to escape the police and her crimelord boyfriend, quickly and deliberately wooing Cooper out of his academic impotence. Stanwyck, who specialized in playing untamably reckless women, always gets her men to loosen up, and she never has to undergo the kind of moral purification to which Amy is subjected. And what’s more, nobody makes a big thing of it. It’s just entertaining and clever. Stanwyck’s arts were perhaps never put to better use than in the 1941 Preston Sturges screwball comedy The Lady Eve, in which she plays a card shark who cons and then falls for a clueless millionaire snake-handler played by Henry Fonda. Again, she's a "bad" woman right to the end, and there's no sign that she'll become "good" post-nuptials. It seems that, 75 years later, our movies have actually regressed. Amy Schumer is very funny and very talented, and I admire her humor-laced-with-politics. But I wish she and others would take some cues from the Barbara Stanwycks of Old Hollywood, women whose work was always subversive and funny and sexy and complex. 

With LeBron James (who’s very likable, playing himself), John Cena, Jon Glaser, Vanessa Bayer, and Ezra Miller.

The Imitation Game and The Gambler

If you’re homophobic, or you have homophobic friends, please take them to see The Imitation Game. It may be the best defense of gay people ever made, in that it depicts the closeted British mathematician, Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), essentially saving the entire free world from the Nazis. In return, because he’s a homosexual, his government charges him with indecency and forces him to undergo hormone “therapy” that chemically castrates him—to try and curb his homosexual desires. It’s amazing how little the movie has to deviate from the truth and still be both an astonishing tale of human achievement in the face of grave circumstances and a heartbreaking, infuriating look at the ways supposedly civilized creatures treat each other.

The story of Alan Turing is more compelling than this film adaptation of his turbulent life, set specifically during the Second World War when he and several other geniuses began trying to crack Germany’s Enigma machine. The group soon realizes that deciphering Germany’s messages—the codes of which are constantly changing—will take a human millions of years. However, Turing theorizes that a machine could be made to do the work much more quickly. What Turing invents—as the movie very obviously points out in the end—is one of the first computers.

The Imitation Game is an amazingly conventional film considering the unconventional person it portrays. It’s polished in every way, lavishly laying on an Englishness that feels somehow very Hollywoodized, very calculated to fit an American’s idea of England. The screenwriter, Graham Moore, and the director, Morten Tyldum, are working with a lot of big, emotional themes and situations, such as war and human sexuality and, more simply, human understanding. But the most complex emotional themes they touch on are never fully fleshed out. Those being Turing’s secret sexual proclivities and the fact that once the code-breakers finally do crack Enigma, they’re forced to keep it a secret, using their information to help the Allies without letting anyone know that they’ve accomplished their task. (Germany would simply change their codes and all the work would be wasted, the war prolonged, and more lives lost.)

The film doesn’t seem to know how to handle these themes that well. One of the code-breakers, Peter Hilton (Matthew Beard) realizes that his brother is on a ship that’s about to be attacked by German U-Boats, but the others insist that saving the ship would be disastrous, alerting the Germans of their success at cracking the Enigma machine. There’s a fleeting moment where everyone tears up and Peter is later pissed off at Turing, but the movie never mentions this specifically again. It forgets—the way conventional Hollywood movies do—this very complex, rich emotional problem.

Turing’s homosexuality, which is made sympathetic by all means, is also left unexplored. It’s used mainly as a device for the film, which is split into three stretches of time that are woven together intermittently: the late 1920s, when Alan was a teenager at a boys school, the main period of the film, World War II, and then 1951, when Turing, whose work was still classified, was being investigated by the police who thought he might be a Soviet spy and who then accidentally discovered he was gay. Anyone who knows the story of Alan Turing knows that his life takes an exceedingly dark turn after the war, and that so much of this has to do with English purity laws that, frankly, probably made criminals out of a lot of married heterosexual people too. But somehow, as much as the film tries to humanize Alan Turing, it never examines this subject with any freshness or depth. The biggest emotional beats of The Imitation Game feel the shallowest in terms of their realization.

Turing is portrayed as a typical genius, unable to relate to most people and hampered by his lack of social grace. Keira Knightley, as fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke, makes it her mission to humanize Turing to the other men with whom he’s working. Knightley is quite good, a real trooper and a smart, scientific-minded woman making her way in what is still very much a man’s world. Cumberbatch is fine, but his frequent blubbering feels like a sympathy grab for an Oscar. His Alan Turing doesn’t number among his most interesting performances. I have no idea how successfully (or not) he emulates the real Alan Turing, but the performance feels gimmicky, like a textbook portrait of a man with Asperger’s. (Or maybe it’s just a reiteration of his turn as Sherlock Holmes.) He’s like Hollywood’s British version of one of those guys on The Big Bang Theory.

But, the movie is still effective. It has funny moments, powerful moments, a race-against-time plot, and, as I said before, it may soften viewer’s hearts toward the plight of an entire group of people. With Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Charles Dance, Allan Leech, and Rory Kinnear.

The Gambler—Mark Wahlberg’s latest vehicle—isn’t nearly as put together. It’s a slick study of addiction, but it’s also a complete and utter mess, confusing and weird, rambling and hard to follow. Wahlberg plays an English professor who’s secretly addicted to gambling. He gets in some pretty deep debt and then turns to his mother, played by Jessica Lange, as a rich bitch with genuine softness under her toughened-by-the-men-in-her-life exterior. Lange’s brief moments on screen are the brightest, and the movie quickly descends into a land without logical plot points. I did occasionally drift off to sleep, but I think it was still confusing, even if I’d been completely lucid. And there are times when Wahlberg’s dialogue is absolutely incoherent. He talks faster than he’s ever talked, and the stuff he says doesn’t sound all that important anyway. He uses his lecture class to berate his students for being conventional, and then he uses one of them—the star basketball player—to throw a game. (And he gets romantically involved with another student, a girl who works at one of his favorite casinos.) If this had been made by gambling addicts who put the film together in under 48 hours, it might explain some of its labyrinthine confusion. If you see it, let me know if I’m right or if I was just too sleepy to follow it.

Directed by Rupert Wyatt. Written by William Monohan (an adaptation of the 1974 film starring James Caan). With John Goodman, Brie Larson, Michael K. Williams, Anthony Kelley, and George Kennedy, in a cameo as Wahlberg’s dying grandfather.

Don Jon

The people sitting next to my friend and me walked out of Don Jon about thirty minutes into the movie. And why shouldn't they? Don Jon is about a self-absorbed d-bag from New Jerey (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who's a master of hooking up with women, but who admittedly prefers porn to actual physical contact. He and his buddies rate the girls at the club on a scale of one to ten, and when they spot Scarlet Johansson at the bar, all of them agree she's a "dime." Scarlet plays Barbara Sugarman (the name conjures up all kinds of licentious possibilities), a somewhat pampered girl who knows what she wants and how she can manipulate guys into giving it to her. She and Jon eventually become a couple, but he can't stop looking at porn, and when Barbara finds it on his computer, she's disgusted and breaks up with him.

If you're easily offended by crude language or nudity, Don Jon isn't your movie. As Jon describes his daily habit of trolling the internet for new XXX videos, we're met with a constant montage of images of girls from the web (most of the time just their faces, but sometimes more), and it's admittedly uncomfortable to see in a movie theater. (Porn isn't glamorous, and it isn't dignified. There's something shameful about seeing it even under these conditions.)

But Don Jon isn't about titillating the viewer. We're in the head of a guy who has become so detached from reality that he can't "lose himself" with another human being anymore. He has to go to porn. (The movie also makes some coy observations about women losing themselves in romantic comedies, their version of porn.) There are also some deliciously apt observations about the American family today, a family that's been beat into submissive silence by the booming television and the cell phones. (Jon's sister barely utters a word in any scene she's in: she's always texting, and his father has positioned his seat at the dinner table so he can watch football while he eats.)

There's something very unique about the character of Don Jon, and something very typical at the same time. I think he represents the current young American male: aggressively macho, high on his own sent, and too distracted and too hooked--whatever the drug of choice--to know how much he desperately wants real human interaction. The scenes of Jon at confession--being assigned a certain number of Hail Marys and Lord's Prayers depending on the number of times he's given into temptation--manage to be both hilariously and heartbreakingly believable.

In the end, it comes down to that same old story: boy meets girl, boy can't stop looking at porn, girl breaks up with boy, Julianne Moore sleeps with boy so he can find salvation. I do love Julianne Moore, but I feel that she has been doing this kind of thing for quite a long time. Moore plays a woman whom Jon meets at a night class, and with whom he learns to see more in a woman than just the degree of sexual pleasure she can afford him. She's wonderful--a voice of sanity amidst the cacophony.

It's hard to remember the last time an actor has so lost himself inside a character like this. Joseph Gordon-Levitt becomes the ultimate Guido (he also wrote and directed the film, and with a refreshing amount of imagination). It's almost miraculous that you could feel sympathy for him, since he resembles those idiots from the Jersey Shore, but you do. You really do. Gordon-Levitt has fashioned quite an impressive "romantic comedy," especially because it so honestly hits at some of the nerves being ignored almost everywhere else. With Tony Danza, Glenne Headley, Brie Larson, Rob Brown, and Jeremy Luke. Anne Hathaway and Channing Tatum have cameos as the actors in the romantic comedy that Jon and Barbara watch. ★★★

Rampart

Here is a movie that succeeds in suppressing the most appealing thing about Woody Harrelson--his ability to be funny even at his own expense. In return we get a masochistic (at least, you'll feel you've put yourself through something painful by the end) study of an arrogant L.A. cop whose career of corruption, abuse, and cockiness finally catches up with him. The question is, how long will it take before he's aware of it? As a man who's the last one to know that his game is up, Harrelson is quite believable. He's got a knack for playing macho jerks, but without the humorous side, there's not much to endear us to Harrelson's clueless cop.

Rampart (2012) is set in 1999. Officer Brown (Harrelson) has been caught beating a man on tape, and because the police department is already embroiled in a massive, complicated scandal, they decide to feed Brown to the press. He doesn't like the idea of being the rolling head, mostly because he's living in a world of denial, unable to admit to himself or anyone else that he's capable of working outside the parameters of the law. Even the case twelve years earlier in which Brown allegedly killed a serial rapist, emerging a hero, is thrown into question. Meanwhile, Brown's not exactly father or husband of the year, having married two sisters, fathering a daughter with each, and failing to be present in any of their lives in a substantive manner.

James Ellroy, the hyperbolic, ultra-weird mystery novelist who wrote L.A. Confidential, co-wrote the screenplay for this with the director, Oren Moverman, who lacks the kind of skillful imagination to make Rampart very compelling. You can hardly tell that Ellroy had much to do with this, since most of his work is dripping with pulpy dialogue, sometimes wonderful, sometimes ridiculous. Rampart is too cautious to try anything like that, and as such it walks a straight line of mediocrity. It's got a cast of characters who all turn out to be fairly uninteresting, but ultimately we're told that's the whole point: Brown is living in a dream world where he's Bruce Willis from Die Hard, only everyone else is firmly ensconced in reality. But the movie hasn't much else to go on from there, and spending two hours with a deluded cop with too much machismo to make rational decisions isn't all that much of a good time, unless your idea of a good time is watching re-runs of Cops.

With Ben Foster, Robin Wright (as a lawyer who enjoys sleeping with Brown because of his reputation as a guy who kills serial rapists), Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon as the two sisters he married (one after the other, not at the same time, the movie points out to us), Sigourney Weaver as the hard-nosed district attorney, Ice Cub, Brie Larson (who is convincing as Harrelson's estranged teenage daughter, although her disgruntled teenage misfit daughter is cliched in the most obvious, unimaginative way), Steve Buscemi, Jon Foster, and Ned Beatty, as a retired cop who's "helping" Brown make a little money on the side.