'Doctor Strange': In which--SPOILER-- I actually liked a comic book movie.

In Doctor Strange, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Dr. Stephen Strange, an arrogant neurosurgeon who cares more about money and prestige than the hippocratic oath. When we first meet Dr. Strange, he’s in the operating room showcasing his knowledge of music trivia while he cavalierly cuts into a patient. Strange’s arrogance stems from the fact that he’s the best of his kind, and thus, he’s earned the right to be a prick. Later, we see him skillfully remove a bullet from the skull of another patient, and it’s a genuinely breathless moment, yet there’s no humanity behind Strange’s almost miraculous skill as a healer. But Strange’s arrogance gets the better of him when he’s severely injured in a car accident (from reckless driving) that threatens to permanently end his career as a surgeon. Then he goes on a quest for healing, to Nepal, where he meets a group of mystics that believe in the power of the mind to overcome the limits of the body. 

Even though Doctor Strange doesn’t break any new ground as a comic book movie, it does succeed in refreshing the old beats we’ve come to expect from them. What are some of the worst things about comic book movies? A tendency toward expositional dialogue, and consequently a lack of visual storytelling; an indulgent, mindless approach to violence and conflict; a debilitating reliance on heavy-handed themes about good and evil, which have been recycled until they’ve worn thin; and a need to raise the stakes as high as they can be raised (the world will end if “X” doesn’t save it), until the stakes no longer matter. Doctor Strange minimizes most of these flaws, and at times even subverts them. 

The film’s sense of humor goes a long way toward this, even if some of the jokes feel a bit lame. Example of a lame joke: When Mordo (one of the mystics, played with charisma by Chiwetel Ejiofor) hands Dr. Strange a card with the word “shamballa” written on it, and explains to a befuddled Strange that it’s the Wifi password. “We’re not savages,” he quips, with a silly grin on his face. But there are other moments of levity that are charming, that truly do lighten the mood. There’s a magical cape, for instance, that takes on a personality of its own, like something out of Harry Potter; or the banter between Strange and Benedict Wong’s character, the taciturn guardian of the library, who never smiles. For a film that focuses so much on big questions about existence and reality, Dr. Strange seldom feels heavy-handed.

Indeed, Doctor Strange actually evokes a sense of wonder about the world and the universe (and the multiverse), a feat I’d long given up hoping for in comic book movies. Strange often clumsily answers its questions with handy bumper-sticker-adages like, “Death is what gives life meaning,” but the fact that it ponders such questions, and the fact that director Scott Derrickson has the restraint to let even some of those questions linger (handy bromides aside), says a lot about his maturity as a filmmaker. Doctor Strange, with all its depictions of matter being bent and manipulated by mental energy and time being looped, recalls Christopher Nolan’s films Inception and Interstellar, but unlike Nolan, Scott Derrickson is content to marvel at the mysteries, where Nolan delights in creating puzzles we can’t solve. 

Derrickson, who co-scripted with Jon Spaiht and C. Robert Cargill (his collaborator on the Sinister films), has always demonstrated a strong interest in the supernatural and in the workings of the metaphysical. His first feature was 2005’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a combination horror movie-courtroom drama that was part The Exorcist and part Inherit the Wind. Emily Rose is an effective horror movie, even if it masquerades (barely) as propaganda for the Catholic Church. (Laura Linney must defend a priest accused of neglecting an alleged possessed girl, and she bases her closing arguments on the possibility of a supernatural realm: belief in things not seen.) And yet, even Emily Rose at times betrayed a certain lucid thinking (except when it was being sensationalistic). But Derrickson was a little more obvious about his religion then; a decade later, he’s perhaps less sure of himself, or perhaps his own views have simply gotten mixed into a much bigger Marvel-sized soup of beliefs.

We get the feeling that Doctor Strange is promulgating some kind of religious dogma, but its views on all things metaphysical feel more elemental: “Humanity longs for the eternal,” and “time is an insult” says the film’s chief villain, Kaecilius, played by Mads Mikkelsen (the eye-patch-wearing heavy in Casino Royale); Tilda Swinton, playing a powerful mystic referred to as the “Ancient One,” talks of “harnessing energy” and “making magic,” and Doctor Strange goes on a quest for physical healing using metaphysical means. That Doctor Strange is a brilliant neurosurgeon who must unlearn all his reliance on the laws of nature, in order to cultivate mystical powers, is a fairly obvious lesson. It's all sort of lingering in the air, incoherently, and thus the film falls somewhere in the middle, emphasizing a “both-and” approach to the ideas of rationality and belief. Doctor Strange embraces pluralism, perhaps without trying to, and feels far less preachy than even something like Superman, which champions ideas about patriotism and capitalism—not to mention the idea of the ubermensch—far more dogmatically. 

Derrickson also has a feel for actors: Whenever possible, he lets them build the tension in a scene—not special effects, nor clunky expositional dialogue. Benedict Cumberbatch, who has such a commanding presence, has chemistry with Rachel McAdams, playing his colleague, Christine Palmer, who’s in love with him. But when she’s had enough of his self-centeredness, Christine threatens to end the relationship, and Strange retorts with something to the effect of, “you weren’t worth my time anyway.” It’s a jaw-dropping moment, one that elicited jeers from the audience, but McAdams gets a triumphant moment out of it: She walks away having rejected even his callousness, and isn’t about to be defined by what some arrogant jerk says about her. In later scenes, McAdams isn’t reduced to being the drag stock female character. (Although her role does diminish.) She’s forced at one point in the movie to save Strange from the brink of death, even while his soul—having temporarily left its body—battles with the soul of Kaecilius. 

The fight scenes smack of familiarity, just like in every comic book movie, but Doctor Strange overcomes most of them too. (For one thing, they aren't as drawn out, and Doctor clocks in at under two hours because of it. Bless you, Scott Derrickson.) And the big showdown, which pits Strange against some super-evil-dark-force-spirit-thing, has a lovely, funny kick to it: Strange wins by using the concept of “looping,” repeating the same sequence indefinitely, until he irritates the thing into submission. (It's just like in Groundhog Day.) Perhaps this scene serves as a bigger comment on the mindless repetition that comic book movies foist on us, exhausting viewers into submission. It's amazing how grateful we can be when one of these movies actually surprises us.

The genre-defying film "A Bigger Splash" works an evocative spell on the viewer.

“The heart takes what it wants, like dynamite,” sings Sandra McCracken in her song “Desire Like Dynamite.” That song has been filtering through my mind as I contemplate the film A Bigger Splash, which is fundamentally a film about desire. The title is misleading, though. ‘A Bigger Splash’ conjures up images of a feel-good summer comedy, even though it’s not really comedic. And Wikipedia describes the film as an erotic thriller, which isn’t altogether correct either.

Truthfully, A Bigger Splash isn’t interested in genres but in people, and as such it flouts conventions as it honestly excavates the hearts of its characters — Marianne, Paul, Harry, and Penelope — who have been pushed together (for reasons explained later) on a small Sicilian island. And while [mild spoiler] the film does end with an act of violence and a death, to call it a thriller would be inaccurate. And even though the film is certainly erotic, it doesn’t wear its eroticism on its sleeve. Director Luca Guadagnino fixates on the balancing act of being human, of toggling between goodness and badness, love and hate, friendship and enmity, of being spurred by our own little tragedies and triumphs and insecurities.

Here’s the plot: An English rock star named Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is recuperating on the Sicilian island of Pantelleria, along with her boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts). Marianne isn’t aloud to speak for several months because her vocal chords have been damaged. But the couple’s idyllic summer alone together is threatened by the unexpected arrival of Harry (Ralph Fiennes), Marianne’s ex, a volatile music producer, who brings along his mopey, bored 22-year-old daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson). Marianne and Harry have maintained a friendship, although it’s obvious from the beginning that Harry is not over her. Quickly we suspect that Harry and Penelope are interlopers with ulterior motives.

Director Luca Guadagnino lets the tension build without revealing too much too soon. He’s also concerned with another priority: feasting our eyes on Pantelleria’s natural beauty. This island is a sun-scorched paradise: it’s dusty and hot but bursting with life, life embroiled in a constant struggle for survival against the heat. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the sights, but there is purpose behind this beautiful yet hard setting. We know when humans have been placed in picturesque little corners of paradise, they are going to wreck it for themselves, and half the fun is in watching them bring about their own destruction. (If that’s your idea of a good time; I can think of worse ways to spend the evening.)

Tilda Swinton has admitted in interviews that the gimmick of not being able to talk appealed to her as an actress. In the hands of a lesser performer, such a contrivance might have been limiting. But Swinton has striking features: she’s always interesting to look at. A Bigger Splash concentrates our focus on her expressions and her body movements. She occasionally does speak, when she’s provoked, or in flashbacks, but the performance is full and commanding without words. As Penelope, Dakota Johnson, whom viewers will remember as the ingenue in 50 Shades of Grey, embodies a certain blasé sexiness: her most effective power is that she’s always bored. Matthias Schoenaerts, playing Paul, delivers the most sympathetic performance. We learn that Paul tried to kill himself — by crashing his car — and according to Harry, “it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever done.” Paul is haunted, vaguely, and we’re never quite sure if he will exorcise his demons. Harry has demons too, but he likes to invite his demons in and party with them, which isn’t really Paul’s style. Marianne finds herself torn between these two men: one of them kind and compassionate and nurturing, the other one wild and unpredictable.

The film takes unexpected turns, partly because these four are such mysteries to us. For a long time, it’s not clear if Harry and Penelope are really father and daughter. Penelope has only just met her dad recently; but their relationship feels downright Oedipal at times. (Harry even admits he finds her attractive.) And even as Penelope half-enjoys the attention of her newfound father, she’s obviously unhappy about being pawned off on him, because he’s erratic and drinks too much and riles people up. It’s also clear that both Harry and Penelope want to infiltrate, even destroy, Marianne and Paul’s peaceful relationship.

Guadagnino’s great skills as a filmmaker are his immersive powers and his restraint. We see Marianne and Paul sleeping on the beach, covered in mud; we’re right in the backseat of their jeep as they tear across the seemingly endless winding roads toward the airport. These scenes give the film texture, they attach us to the world of the movie. And the tensions between the characters unfold gradually, as if bewitched by the island and rendered sluggish. There’s a great little scene in which Penelope is pealing and devouring a fruit (I couldn’t tell you what kind of fruit) as though she's defiling it: everything she does, even this, is sensual and fraught with temptation. It’s as though Harry has only brought her with him to tempt Paul so that he can get Marianne back. Later, when Paul leads Marianne to the beach by way of a dusty trail through the brambles, we sense that it’s Penelope who’s leading him, a Siren in his own midst.

Guadagnino gets a lot of poetry out of Pantelleria, but it’s muted poetry, faded in the blistering sun. Yet under the surface A Bigger Splash is a movie as dramatic as something out of Tennessee Williams, without the hyperbole. This movie works an evocative spell on us, like a purple, dreamy myth. But I could do without that title.

'Hail Caesar' lets a dull plot get in the way of a good time.

Hail, Caesar! takes us back to Old Hollywood, where the movie stars were cattle and the studio executives were kings, where those same executives traded the secret sins of lesser celebrities to protect their more lucrative properties from the scandal-mongering gossip rags. It’s the latest movie by the Coen Brothers, one that many people have been looking forward to because of the trailer, which is terrifically appealing. Sadly, the movie falters for most of its hour-and-forty-five minutes. The film’s biggest problem is its banal film noir-esque plot, which frequently gets in the way of all the interesting things going on around it.

Plots are wonderful things when they work and when they’re arresting. I found the lack of plot-adherence in Inherent Vice maddening, but I think Hail, Caesar! could have profited from that movie’s casual, who-cares attitude. The Coen Brothers never seem to be sure which attitude they want. Most of the time, the movie slavishly grinds through its own plot with little to show for it, and poor Josh Brolin suffers through with as much pluck as he can. But sometimes the movie does let loose enough to simply entertain us, as in a terrific scene recreating a Hollywood musical, in which a bunch of sailors, led by Channing Tatum, tap dance in a bar. The number they sing playfully laments the fact that they’re going off to sea and there won’t be any ladies to keep them company. 

Like so many great musicals from the period Hail, Caesar imitates, this scene is purely entertaining on multiple levels: the skillful dancing and singing is fun to watch, the humor is both clever and sharp, and the choreography is in sync with the jokes, as when Channing Tatum glides across the bar much to the chagrin of the rotund bartender, who frantically grabs beer bottles about to be stepped on. Watching that scene, we’re reminded of the pleasures to be found in the best old movie, movies that work as delightful entertainment (there’s a kind of magic at work here) and as innuendo: it’s pretty clear the sailors have agreed to make do with each other by the end of the number, and we see it in their dance moves. This sexual suggestiveness is funny and a slightly sharper and more pronounced version of the innuendo we see in great musicals of the period like Singin’ in the Rain. It's the best scene in the film.

But then the plot returns. The plot involves Eddie Mannix, an executive for the fictional Capital Studios (played by Josh Brolin), who’s trying to figure out who kidnapped one of his stars, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) off the set of a movie about the Roman Empire and the coming of Christ. Mannix is a harried man, constantly juggling the demands of the talent, the technicians, the press, and his own conscience, because he feels neglectful of his wife and kids. (He frequently goes to confession, where he bemoans his secret smoking habit much to the annoyance of the priest, who’s underwhelmed by Mannix’s “sins.”) Now he's trying to keep this kidnapping a secret, until he can figure out how to get his star back. But this story never carries much weight: it's something to pad the running time and give the movie a sense of singular direction, when what it really needs is more extravagant recklessness. 

The Coen Brothers have created a sort of menagerie of all the types of people we remember from the period: the gruff studio exec, the dutiful secretary, the big star (Clooney), the new star, the sexy ingénue, the trashy journalist, even a terrifying editor (played by Frances McDormand), who sits in her dark room smoking over film prints, and whose scarf gets caught in the editing equipment in a disturbing scene.

Alden Ehrenreich plays Hobie Doyle, the kid who’s made his name in cheap Westerns and whom the studio is grooming for stardom. (He’s earnest and charming as hell and he lassos everything from a rope to a spaghetti noodle, but when Mannix plucks him out of a horse movie and thrusts him into a 19th-century English period piece, he’s all thumbs.) Ehrenreich is terrific in this, and in one scene--another movie recreation--he strums on a guitar and purs out a song about moonlight, like the scene in Rio Bravo where Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing together.

Scarlet Johansson plays DeeAnna Moran, the sexy ingénue, who in her opening scene, in which she’s playing a mermaid leading a bunch of other mermaids in an elaborate aquatic show, looms elegant, almost as bewitching as Grace Kelly was in that first shot of her in Rear Window. But when the cameras aren’t rolling, DeeAnna sheds her elegance, talking like a harried New York waitress and trying to avoid putting her illegitimate child up for adoption.

All these characters fail to add up to anything bigger. It’s as though the Coen Brothers were merely making a documentary about what Hollywood was like seventy years ago. The joke at the heart of the film, which is clever even if it, like everything else in this movie, has been done before, invokes Communism and the role Hollywood plays in sating the masses. But it’s hard to take such a pill from the Coen Brothers, who always seem so contemptuous of their audience even as they take our money and Hollywood's accolades. Parts of this movie are terrifically entertaining, just not enough of them, and by the end, the film’s darker and more existential humor wears thin. Viewers are likely to remember with fondness the lighter recreations of the movie past, and wish the Coens had conjured up a whole feature of such “simple” magic.

With Tilda Swinton in a dual role as sisters who write competing gossip columns; Jonah Hill, Ralph Fiennes, and Dolph Lundgren as a Communist submarine commander (because, why not?). The misplaced, stuffy English narration is provided by Michael Gambon. Written by the Coen Brothers with Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner. Music by Carter Burwell.

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.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Only Lovers Left Alive may be a hard sell for some. It is slow-moving, and its two main characters—a pair of centuries-old vampires named Adam and Eve—are a trifle pretentious. (They sit around reminiscing about days past, when they rubbed arms with Shakespeare and hung out with Byron.) Perhaps it would help any uninitiated viewers to go back and watch a couple movies by the director, Jim Jarmusch, as a primer for this one. I despised his somber 1995 Western Dead Man, but I think it prepared me to respond to this film, which isn’t particularly “exciting” as vampire movies go, and yet it’s a truly beautiful movie, one in which the characters are given the time and space to truly inhabit the screen.

Tom Hiddleston plays Adam, the moody, depressed musician who pisses the night away recording music in his creaky Victorian house in Detroit. That music isn’t supposed to reach an audience, and yet Adam has a coterie of hipster music enthusiasts loitering outside his house from time to time. He has a young friend—a musician-type named Ian (played by Anton Yelchin) who runs errands for him (like tracking down rare and expensive guitars), and who tries to coax some music out of Adam from time to time.

As Adam’s wife Eve, Tilda Swinton exudes a pretty groovy fashion sense; she has beautiful white hair that makes her seem ageless; she’s a book lover; and she lives all the way in Tangier, like the tragic author Jane Bowles did during the last 20 years of her life. But Eve seems a lot more even-keeled than the sad-faced Adam, perhaps because she’s just not the brooding, loner type. She passes most of her time either reading or visiting with her old kindred spirit, the poet Christopher Marlowe (played by John Hurt), who, it turns out, is also a vampire. What’s more, he wrote all those plays for which Shakespeare got the credit.

When Eve packs her bags to leave Tangier and visit Adam, she doesn’t take clothes. She takes books. And as she decides which books, she devours several of them then and there. (It takes her mere seconds to read a page.) They’re dusty volumes of thick yellow husks of paper in various languages, the kind of books that belong in your dream library. (And maybe in the dream someone else can dust them and keep them from deteriorating.) It makes you realize just how wonderful it would be to live hundreds of years if only for the sheer number of books you could read. However, as I pondered the strange and wonderful freedoms these two characters had, I thought: Could vampires travel into deep space? Would they want to? Seeing as such endeavors can take decades or even longer, it stands to reason that immortal beings would be ideal candidates. But then, what if they were gone for 150 years or longer, and came back to a society that had become utterly foreign to them? Perhaps it wouldn’t feel worth it to take such a long break from things, even if they spend their days as outsiders. 

Adam and Eve have of course existed over multiple centuries, but they’ve been present in all of them, not away on some interstellar mission. They’ve been—however marginally—a part of history and culture. We see this in the measured, frustrated contempt they have for the “zombies” (humans) over how much we’ve ruined our own planet and our resources. Their longevity enables them to put the momentary world crises into a pretty awesome perspective. But again, there are moments when these kinds of observations (“Remember the English Civil War?”) feel more than a bit pretentious.

           

Viewers may wonder about the blood. Yes, these vampires do subsist on blood, only they don’t go prowling the streets for fresh victims. They aren’t killers (generally), and prefer to get pure blood from trustworthy sources like blood banks. There are a lot of amusing jokes about the fears of getting contaminated blood, and the dreadful sicknesses that can befall a vampire if this happens. So they have reliable suppliers of clean blood, and this is made all the easier by the fact that both of them seem to have an endless supply of ready cash.

While there are no vampire movies like Only Lovers Left Alive (one of the reasons it’s such an interesting film), there are two that we might call its distant cousins: Bill Gunn’s strange, lost vampire-art film Ganja and Hess (1973) and George A. Romero’s celebrated yet also overlooked Martin (1978). Gunn’s film, which was barely seen upon release and then wasted away in obscurity for years, looks at vampirism through the lens of addiction in the black community. Martin asks the question "Is any of this supernatural stuff actually real, or is it just in the vampire's mind, and the minds of those that oppose him?"

Martin is particularly akin to Jarmusch’s film in that it’s set in a dying factory town (Pittsburgh). There’s something fascinating about this. Why would vampires be attracted to these symbolically rotting cities? Perhaps they can go unnoticed more easily. It certainly aids Adam and Eve when they are forced to dispose of one of Ava’s victims’ bodies. In the dead of night, they drive to an abandoned, unfinished building and dump the body into a pool of acid. They aren’t proud of it, but they’re also not particularly sad either. More likely it's Detroit's music roots that have attracted the loner rock star Adam. 

Only Lovers Left Alive is a lovely night owl of a movie, and the crowning achievement of a director whose films have always been praised/cursed with that word “idiosyncratic.” But what if more directors were able to take something as tried and true as the vampire legend and fashion it into an original work of strange, melancholy genius like this one? It’s rare to find a film that lets you simply enter inside it and walk around. But you have to be open to this kind of viewing to really enjoy it. Otherwise, it will probably tax your patience.

With Mia Wasikowska as Eve's fun-loving vampire sister, who lives in L.A. (and riles the curmudgeonly Adam when she comes unexpectedly for a visit). 

Snowpiercer

In Snowpiercer, which takes place in the near future, the world has entered a new ice age, ushered in by a catastrophically misfired attempt to stop global warming. (By spraying a new kind of gas into the atmosphere to cool the earth: it works, all right.) As a result, the only surviving humans must remain inside a massive train built by a megalomaniac named Wilford, whom we gather fancies himself a modern-day Noah, building his indestructible ark as a safeguard against the coming doom despite widespread disbelief among the public. (The passengers--the ones not being subjected to constant tyranny--regard him as a kind of god, their savior in fact, and they chant his name with the wide-eyed glee of the most devoted Manson follower.)

This train--fortified to withstand the intense cold and supposedly designed to run forever--tugs along a circular track that orbits the earth and takes an entire year to do it. But inside the train, human beings haven't reformed their age-old class struggles, despite the dire circumstances. The haves are ensconced snugly in the front with all the comforts of prosperity, while the have-nots have been relegated to the back of the train where they sleep in dark, crowded cells, and subsist on these brown, gelatinous protein bars that look like Worcestershire Jello. (When we find out what these little slabs of blobby muck are made of, it's truly stomach-turning.) Naturally, there's insurrection afoot, and at the helm of this slowly building rebellion is an aging wise man-type named Gilliam who's played by John Hurt, and a young, strong type--played by Chris Evans--who's named Curtis.

Snowpiercer spends a good thirty minutes wallowing in the grim gloominess of the "coach" passengers as they live in the kind of misanthropic squalor you read about in a Charles Dickens novel. Every day they're lined up in rows by tough-talking soldiers who count them and keep them subservient. Then their nasty protein bars are dispensed. Occasionally they receive visitations from on high, mostly from the pompous "Minister"--one of Wilford's underlings--who is played by Tilda Swinton, ever the trooper. She's never been afraid to look ugly on camera, and not just aesthetically. Here she's a real hag, and especially ominous because her character affects a superficial benevolence that everyone sees through. She's like everyone's worst case scenario of a high school guidance counselor, inept and myopic in her devotion to authority, doing the bidding of the ruling class. Swinton invests a lot in nervous ticks and weird laughs, showing the Minister for the awkward, eccentric, naive phony she is. But other than Swinton's character, we never get to know the other villains. They're just grunts doing grunt work.

And as for the protagonists, Chris Evans makes an impression. He's got the right amount of power as an actor to be a forceful lead. But he doesn't have much to do as an actor, other than play a morally driven action hero leading the malnourished malcontents on their quest to take over the train. (And how is it that he alone looks so healthy? He may be dressed in dark, baggy clothes, but there's no hiding the fact that he's rather svelte for having spent 17 years on this dreary express.) Octavia Spencer also registers, playing another one of the have-nots. She's the tough mama bear whose son was snatched by the master of the train (for reasons that won't be made clear until the end of the movie).

The film is intermittently successful. I have to admit that once the rebels starting making their advance, I was glued to the screen. And yet, there's a darkness, a mean, violent streak, that makes this film unappealing. It's been suggested that the filmmakers were in part paying homage to Terry Gilliam's futuristic film Brazil, which many people seem to be quite fond of. I'm not fond of Brazil, and indeed that movie feels akin to Snowpiercer. This comes out particularly in the way many of the characters on board gleefully perform their assigned roles, totally divorced from the moral implications of keeping one group enslaved while other group eats fresh sushi and parties away in the disco-compartment. (There's also an interesting drug called Kronol, the meth of the future, that everyone's into.)

Snowpiercer does hold one's interest for most of the film, but two hours of watching people act nastily to each other starts to take a toll. There's a bizarre scene, near the end, when the surviving rebels pass through a classroom compartment where the Stepford-ish schoolteacher gives blissed out speeches on the goodness of Wilford and the evils of questioning authority, encouraging the children to repeat back various chants they've memorized. It's funny, but obvious. And it smacks of the familiar. There's a lot in Snowpiercer that has been appropriated from other futuristic movies. The director, Bong Joon-ho, adapted the screenplay (along with Kelly Masterson) from a graphic novel. But it's an amalgam of all the dark dystopian pop literature of the 20th century, from its dreary apocalyptic setting to its inherent distrust of machinery to its indictment of the not-so-invisible class systems at work in society. One of the friends with whom I was seeing the movie joked that the train should be described as a "microcosm of society". That's exactly what many reviewers will probably say--completely without irony--but that's just the trouble. My friend had hit the nail on the head: The film is full of carefully placed metaphors--all of them obvious, none of them particularly meaningful or innovative. You can spot them a mile away and label them like the parts of a skeleton.

And what of the ending? (Spoilers below)

The only surviving characters are people we barely get to know. After Curtis encounters Wilford--who turns out to be kind of charming (he's played by Ed Harris)--the train blows up (thanks to the rebel's efforts, using a bomb fashioned by that toxic drug Kronol) and derails (killing all the have-nots instantly, I might add). The survivors: a teenage girl who spends most of the movie tripped out on the drug, and a little boy who has maybe five minutes of screen time, and barely any lines. They're symbols, not characters, and as such they carry no feeling or genuine sympathy in them from us the audience. They emerge from the train and stomp out into the chilling but bright wintry air, crunching through the snow-capped mountains, and we're supposed to be hopeful. I felt like the movie had pommeled us over the head for two hours, killed off everyone we might have thought we cared about, and then asked us to tear up for the fresh hope for mankind that had been born. Somehow, that just didn't work for me.

(End of spoilers)

But the film has compelling moments, and the action does have a kick to it. A lot of people are quite sure that this is a great movie, or at the very least the next big thing in action-futuristic-science fiction thrillers. But it's really just the latest iteration of the heavy-handed stuff we've been producing for the last ten years. It pushes all your buttons, but there's essentially no humanity behind it. Perhaps some will feel content in arguing that this is the very point of a movie like Snowpiercer, that humanity has sunk to new lows. But simply showing us class inequities isn't humane or redeeming. And if people are so despicable, why are we then supposed to care about their survival at all?

With Jamie Bell, Song-Kang-ho, Go Ah-sung, and Ewen Bremner. Music by Marco Beltrami. Filmed in Austria and South Korea, and completed in 2012.

Moonrise Kingdom

Moonrise Kingdom, the latest from writer-director Wes Anderson, is equal parts lyrical children's fable and quirky misadventure. I found it more enjoyable than The Life Aquatic (the only other Anderson movie I've seen to date), which did not hold my interest; but it's also the kind of movie that you might just as easily sleep through. Moonrise Kingdom feels like a Charlie Brown movie stretched out to feature-length. That's probably because it's set in the mid-60s, like Charlie Brown, and the story involves a group of boy scouts (that seems Charlie Brown-ish too.) Even the music, and the voices of many of the children, captured this sort of cartoon childhood nostalgia. It's cute for a while, but the overall effect is banal. It's forced nostalgia. It looks more retro than most movies that are set in a past time, but it also feels incredibly shallow and disingenuous.

The movie is best not over-thought, because you might start to read a bunch of meaningless symbolism into it that isn't there. At its core, it's about an orphan named Sam (Jared Gilman), the misfit of the boy scout troupe, who abandons his camp entrenched on the New England coast, and takes off with a local girl named Suzy (Kara Hayward) with whom he has fallen in love. The incompetent adults in the movie try and track down their missing kiddos, twice losing them. These include Suzy's parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand, two lawyers who might be a less-interesting version of the characters played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in the 1949 comedy Adam's Rib), the boy scout leader (Edward Norton, who delivers every line with straight-faced aplomb and dedication, just like a boy scout), and the local coast guard Captain (Bruce Willis, who becomes a sort of father figure for the unwanted Sam).

Visually speaking, Moonrise Kingdom has some lovely images, and it seems as though it were pieced together like a storybook. The visual beauty is offset by Anderson's nonchalant, almost recklessly (but not quite) non-serious approach. It's not that he doesn't care about the story or the characters; they're not being pushed onto the screen to be mocked or made fun of, but he doesn't elevate their problems. For these characters, everything is already so elevated in their minds (from the Scout Master's obsession with orderly cabins and strictly adhered-to schedules to Sam and Suzy's determined puppy love), that Anderson is right to reign himself in. The movie would have felt heavy-handed otherwise. This is a portrait of a group of people who are taking everything far more seriously than the movie takes them. Still, Anderson hasn't pulled off anything that great. His inventions are a kind of obvious kitsch charm that he's been working on presumably all the way back to his early films. He's got a following that has embraced his cutesy hipster style. It's not offensive, but not as great as everyone's making it out to be.

With Tilda Swinton (looking stuffy and quite hilarious as the social services lady) and Harvey Keitel as a self-important Scout Master.