Station to Station

Bullock surviving in Gravity.

«««« Gravity.  Written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. At area theaters.

We've seen better days on the final frontier. The space shuttle is now a museum piece. We can find no national consensus on what NASA's next mission should be. At a time when access to space is essential for national defense, global climate monitoring, and not getting squashed by space rocks, NASA has been downgraded to a "non-essential" service. As of this writing, almost the entire agency is shut down, a pawn in the ongoing budget follies in Washington.

          But all is not lost. Into these dark times comes Alfonso Cuarón's magnificent Gravity, a vivid reminder that leaving the planet still has the potential to blow minds. Budgeted at a fraction of a real space mission—only $100 million—this movie may inspire the most kids to become astronauts since the glory days of the space race.

          Thanks to Star Wars and Star Trek, we tend to think space travel is old hat. Of course, we're wrong: with the sound effects and laser beams and spacecraft zipping around like WW2 fighter planes, neither of these (and Star Wars in particular) have anything to do with the reality of living and working in space. More than any movie since Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Gravity gets the experience right, in all its strange and haunting glory. Space really is, like, another world.

          The script (by Cuarón and his son Jonás) is a concerto for two instruments. Sandra Bullock is rookie astronaut Ryan Stone, on her first shuttle mission to service the Hubble Telescope. She and veteran flyer Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are on a spacewalk when things go terribly, fatally wrong. Nothing more need be said about what happens, except to say that Cuarón (Children of Men, Y Tu Mamá También) has spared no effort in getting the details right. From the seamless simulation of zero gravity to how astronauts "hear" sounds through the vibrations in their suits, it's hard to believe Gravity was not actually shot in orbit.

          Equally important, Cuarón goes into space only with the stuff he needs. This survival story has no extraneous exposition, no spoon-fed sentiment, no manufactured love interest beyond, perhaps, a few hints. We never see guys with pocket-protectors sweating it out back in Mission Control. Like in Children of Men—and unlike the jump-cutting norm--- Cuarón is stingy with montage, preferring to present the action in a series of masterful long takes. We might be tempted to call his approach "minimalist", except that the film never feels like the least Cuarón could do. Sometimes his camera soars, Kubrick-style; sometimes it flits into the character's helmets, literally looking through their eyes. The film is full of details that should reward second and third viewings, on the biggest screen you can find.

          Clooney is Clooney here, the modern incarnation of rough-hewn movie warhorses like Gary Cooper or Burt Lancaster. His appeal is definitely post-feminist, however, as his character is a supporting one only, dedicated to empowering his partner. The star is really Bullock, as she develops her post-ingenue legacy of quirky vulnerability wrapped around an iron core.

          Critics like this one have often complained that the potential of movie CGI is theoretically limitless, but depressing in practice. Though filmmakers can now visualize absolutely anything they want, they too often resort to the same old dragons, hobbits, and terminators. With Gravity, Cuarón has at last given us something truly new. Let's hope that, unlike NASA, he's on the cusp of a beginning, not an end.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Go Speed Racer

Hemsworth and Brühl (right) rev their engines in Rush.

««1/2  Rush.  Written by Peter Morgan. Directed by Ron Howard. At area theaters.

Give the makers of Rush credit for one thing: they know that mere excellence isn't enough to make compelling sports drama. Periods of dominance by any one figure or team are boring. It's rivalries that really sell tickets, from baseball (e.g., Yankees vs. Red Sox), tennis (Federer vs. Nadal), or basketball (Lakers vs. Celtics). Chances are that nobody today dwells too much on who won the Formula One World racing championship way back in 1976. But in Rush, director Ron Howard and Co. bet that you'll will care if you know that the title was contested by two bitter rivals, British prodigy/playboy James Hunt vs. his Austrian frenemy, Niki Lauda. Like Achilles and Hector—or Maverick and Ice Man—it's the struggle for supremacy that makes the story, not the prize.

          Some sports have had their movie classics, but auto racing isn't one of them. Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan hope to defy that history by making a rarity among big-budget Hollywood opuses: an unabashedly character-driven drama. Chris Hemsworth (Thor) plays Hunt pretty much to his reputation: a sunny, likeable guy who was a daredevil on the track and a womanizing booze-hound away from it. That he had any time for racing was a miracle in itself, given that British Airways stewardesses were delivered en masse to his hotel rooms, and he reportedly slept with five thousand different women in his forty-five year lifetime (assuming he started at fifteen years old, that's a brand new lover every other day, sports fans). Of course, this is a Ron "Opie" Howard movie we're speaking of here, so Rush is happy to wink, wink at the sex and drinking, but overlook Hunt's heavy use of weed and blow—sometimes mere moments before he climbed behind the wheel.

          Daniel Brühl's Niki Lauda is actually far more interesting. The scion of a Vienna banking dynasty, the real Lauda defied his family to take up racing. He was notoriously prickly character, brilliant with cars but flummoxed by people. Where Hunt laughed in the face of danger, Lauda got out his slide rule, endeavoring to limit his risk to 20% "and not one percent more". His social skills were questionable, but never his grit: after a fiery crash in Germany that seared him outside and in, he was back in the cockpit a mere six weeks later, racing to hold off Hunt for the world championship. Though this is his first major role, Brühl got the hardest job—making us care about someone even his closest colleagues called an "asshole."

          Rush fails to reach top gear, but it isn't the fault of the leads. From Cocoon to Apollo 13 to The Da Vinci Code, words come to mind to describe the Ron Howard aesthetic, such as competent and workmanlike. This is particularly unfortunate given the gut-wrenching spectacle that auto racing could present, in the right hands. In his classic boxing drama Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese did not just settle for a compelling character, but re-imagined the sport visually, from the inside out. By contrast, Howard never shows us something new. He never even gives us a plain, uninterrupted view of what it's like to steer around a Formula One track for more than four seconds, resorting instead to cliché, MTV-style jump-cutting. Stylistically, there's nothing here that Tony Scott didn't do two decades ago in Days of Thunder.

          It's tempting to think that Ron Howard the director, who grew up before America's eyes acting in shows like The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days, simply can't think his way out of his middle-brow box. Perhaps that's unfair to his intelligence. In any case, Rush doesn't take the checkered flag.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

          

Hellbound

Rachel Mwanza and Serge Kanyinda serve to live in War Witch

«««1/2  War Witch.  Written and directed by Kim Nguyen. Available on Netflix.

         

With the prospect of dying in action, permanent disability, PTSD, depression, and coping with a huge, faceless bureaucracy, being a military veteran from a First World country is daunting enough. Now imagine you are Komona, a girl kidnapped from her village by a rebel army in war-torn Congo. After watching many of your neighbors machine-gunned or hacked to death, the invaders force you to shoot your own parents to spare them an even more painful death. They take you away to a remote base, where you are overworked and underfed. Your captors hook you on a kind of psychotropic tree sap to keep you under control, and program you to love your assault rifle as your new mother and father. You are kept as the private concubine of your commanding officer, who forces you to bear his child. Imagine further that you are only twelve years old.

          Grim as that all sounds, it's just the set-up for Kim Nguyen's searing War Witch (French title: Rebelle). The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2012. While it was passed over for Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, what the Canadian-born Nguyen has done here deserves second place to nothing—and not only because its premise is about as dark as it gets. It's also remarkable for the humane moments that, ironically, give the grim ones even more power.

          It should go without saying this is not just fiction. Many Americans are familiar with the problem of child soldiers in Africa and Asia through the dubious "Kony 2012" tornado that rose and faded on social media last year. As in Nguyen's script, these conflicts are waged not just AK's and machetes, but with the kind of "black ops" that seem more appropriate to the 16^th century, not the 21^st. Here, Komona survives her ordeal partly because she has a supernatural ability to sniff out government ambushes before they're sprung. Her supreme commander (Mizinga Mwinga) hails her as his "war witch"—a rare honor, except that he's killed two of his previous witches for failing to deliver victories.

          As Komona, Rachel Mwanza realizes what any director of this kind of material dreams about: a performance that is as frank and natural as it is free of obvious craft. Having discovered Mwanza living on the streets of Kinshasa, Nguyen cast her as his lead despite the fact that she couldn't read or write. It was an inspired choice. Mwanza commands the screen both by her understated presence and by her spare narration, addressed to the yet-unborn child conceived through her rape. She's not good just in the harrowing parts, either: the film's middle section, where Komona finds a measure of happiness with a young albino boy (Serge Kanyinda), has its own gentle power, in large part due to Mwanza's scabby kind of innocence. To Nguyen's further credit, after the cameras stopped he made arrangements for his star's education until the age of eighteen.

          War Witch isn't pleasant viewing—but it just may be essential to any understanding of how deep "awful" can truly go. All war may be Hell, but even Hell has its levels.

                                                                                             

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro   

Shine On

Danny Lloyd plays forever and ever and ever in The Shining.

«««  Room 237.  Written and directed by Rodney Ascher. http://www.room237movie.com/.

           

Rodney Ascher's Room 237 has to be one of the strangest movies-about-movies in a long while. Not much about it makes sense. The documentary's sole subject, the manifold meanings of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, isn't exactly a live question for most people. Nor do all the interpretations proffered in Ascher's film seem plausible. Though it's about Kubrick's film, most of the visuals are clips from other movies. And yet...it casts an odd spell, in the way that obsessively processing a creepy subject that make it seem deeper and spookier than you ever thought.

          Though not universally admired when it premiered in 1980, The Shining has inspired more than its share of fanatics in the age of the internet. Ascher assembles five of these, including Kubrick biographer Geoffrey Cocks, to float their personal trial balloons. Their theories on The Shining's "hidden" meaning range from the probable (an allegorical meditation on American history, with the giant Overlook Hotel representing the wide open West), to the merely unlikely (the secular-Jewish Kubrick's veiled comment on the Nazi Holocaust), to the outright ridiculous (Kubrick's "confession" that he helped fake the footage for the US moon landings in the 1960's). "Room 237"—a place in the hotel where something awful once happened, and something weird happens to Jack Nicholson—emerges as the veritable "grassy knoll" of Shining speculation.

          Not that there isn't something strange going on in The Shining. Kubrick's attention to detail is legendary, helping to give his films a "replete" feel like no one else's. And yet there are some apparently careless discontinuities in it—such as the typewriter that changes color from one scene to the next, and the chair that vanishes from the background during a tense exchange between Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. It's hard to believe all of this was accidental. More than likely, Kubrick was trying to subtly unhinge his audience with these imperceptible changes. Indeed, he seems to dare "speculation" in the most literal sense of that word, shooting much of the film's action in mirrors.

          On the other hand, the urban legend that Kubrick was hired to fake the Apollo moon footage gets more than its worthy share of attention. Interestingly, protests from the people who actually did put astronauts on the moon in 1969 has forced some denialists to shift ground: now it was just the "footage" that was faked, not the moon landing itself. Why NASA would bother to shoot the landing in a studio when they actually had men on the moon—men who came bearing cameras—is perhaps the greatest mystery of all. But I digress.

          What's most remarkable about all these theories is not necessarily how convincing they are, but that Kubrick's movie is richly detailed enough to make them all have a ring of truth. Like study of the Koran or the Talmud, it's the process of constant re-interpretation, not the particular answers, that keep the text alive.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

The Mother of Reinvention

Cate Blanchett is blue in Blue Jasmine.

«««1/2  Blue Jasmine. Written and directed by Woody Allen. At area theaters.

Fun fact: the last year Woody Allen did not release a film was a generation and a half ago, in 1981. Predictable as Christmas, his movies always start the same—the black screen, the olde-timey jazz, the same typeface for the titles (“Windsor EF-Elongated”). For better or worse, Allen is nothing if not consistent.

A few times—mostly back in the 1970’s and ‘80’s—his formula was the signature of true classics (Annie Hall, Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors, et al). More often that consistency has come across as lack of inspiration, as his string of latter-day disappointments shows (anybody remember Whatever Works? To Rome With Love? Scoop? Anything Else? Melina and Melinda? Or the truly execrable Small Time Crooks?) As soon as this critic has been ready to finally, utterly, completely give up on Woody Allen, he suddenly delivers a flash of the old magic again (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris). Following him is like being in a marriage than has gone stale, in hope of catching some inkling of the person you once fell in love with.

            That person is back again with Allen’s charming, perceptive Blue Jasmine. It might also be called his “San Francisco movie”, for like in Barcelona and Paris, Allen seems to have drawn inspiration from getting away from his beloved Manhattan. Not that this film shows any particular affinity for the Bay Area itself. Aside from using it as a pretty backdrop, Allen is more interested in California’s mythic significance, as a place where easterners go to reinvent themselves. Or at least to try.

Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is a Manhattan socialite whose world imploded after her banker husband (Alec Baldwin) was unmasked as a white-collar criminal. Used to dinners at Le Cirque and yachting off Saint-Tropez, she is now a pauper, forced to move in with her sweet , not-rich, adopted sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). Jasmine’s life is a wreck, but she still has an odor of success about her that many find irresistible. Awkwardly, though she has no money, she can’t stop behaving rich, treating Ginger with the same borderline contempt she did when times were good. Nor is she shy about communicating her disapproval of Ginger’s working-class boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale).

            It would be easy to hate Blanchett’s character for her pretensions and her meddling. Indeed, that seemed to be upshot when Diablo (Juno) Cody sketched a broadly similar character in Young Adult (2011). But Allen has something grander and more romantic in mind for Jasmine—something of the sympathy we reserve for great, self-immolating 19^th century heroines like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. We love her as we pity her, and we pity her as we scorn her foolishness.

Allen finds an able collaborator in Blanchett. Sometimes regal, sometimes pathetic, always magnetic, she delivers the kind of portrait that would be career-making if Blanchett’s career were not already made, over and over again. Her performance is doubly unique here because, unlike many other actors directed by Allen, she refuses to come off as an imitation of Woody himself. She’s neurotic, to be sure, but not with all the nebbishy hand-wringing. To paraphrase Tolstoy, while a certain sameness to all well-adjusted people, the unhappy ones are all miserable in their own ways.

A firm believer that character is destiny, Allen shows a certain skepticism of changing ourselves merely by changing coasts. Jasmine, after all, is a careerist who happens never to have worked a real job. Focused only on the next gainful phase of her life, she never seems to consider typical Left Coast avocations like yoga or Buddhism or para-sailing. One of the pitfalls of change is changing into something even more like yourself.

Maybe that’s why Allen will go on making his one film a year, with the same credits and the same old timey jazz, regardless of whether his critics yawn or cheer. At least this time, they’re applauding.

                                                                                             © 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Are You Not Entertained?

A meeting of minds in Blackfish.

«««1/2  Blackfish.  Written by Gabriela Cowperthwaite & Eli B. Despres. Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite. At select theaters.

           

It's easy to feel morally superior to people in the past. We tend to be less attuned to things we tolerate now that future generations will look upon with horror. Those benighted folks back there in the past, after all, will inevitably become us. Case in point is Gabriela Cowperthwaite's devastating new documentary, Blackfish. 

          The film concerns a particular entertainer at SeaWorld Orlando. A veteran of the theme park's live animal shows, Tilikum is a six ton male orca ("killer whale") who has killed three people in his checkered career. By all evidence he's not a rampaging monster. Like most orcas, he's intelligent, sweet-natured, and eager to please his trainers. In that discrepancy lies Cowperthwaite's problem: what is it about the way Tilikum was procured, housed, and treated that has made him liable to deadly spasms of violence?

          In a sense, the answer is as obvious as the fable about the fox carrying the scorpion across the river ("Why did you sting me?" asks the fox as they both drown. "It's in my nature," replies the scorpion.) Like tigers and lions, orcas are the top hunters in their world, and nobody makes exposes about big cats who turn on their trainers. It's in the nature of apex predators to sometimes kill.

          But Blackfish dives deeper. Bred over millions of years of evolution to range over wide swaths of ocean in tight, socially-cohesive groups, captive orcas are forced to live among strangers in comparatively tiny enclosures. Where female offspring in the wild spend their entire lives beside their mothers, captive-born orcas are regularly (and painfully) separated from their parents. Indeed, Cowperthwaite catches SeaWorld personnel systematically misinforming visitors about orca biology and psychology, maintaining that they live longer in captivity (they don't), and that wild whales regularly mutilate each other (which they seldom do). Their motive is not hard to guess: SeaWorld makes millions of dollars a year on its orca shows, and millions more in putting males like Tilikum out to stud.

          More dismaying is the way the park treats its human employees. Tilikum's trainers in Florida were allegedly kept in the dark about the whale's role in the 1991 death of a young trainer in Victoria, British Columbia. Accidents like the death of Dawn Brancheau in 2010 were blamed on the employees, who were no longer around to defend themselves. Cowperthwaite cuts contemporary interviews with the fatuous "party line" former trainers were paid to deliver in front of audiences. Looking back, the ex-employees cringe. In the end, the film is as much about the rendering of human beings into profit-making commodities as it is about the abuse of animals.

          This film is not so much an expose on its subject as an evisceration. For viewers who care about animals, it's difficult to watch. Anything as effective at wringing emotions from its audience as Blackfish deserves some scrutiny in its own right, and Cowperthwaite does commit some distortions of her own. Though she rightly observes that there are no documented instances of wild orcas killing humans, there have indeed been attacks, including the sinking of a 40-foot yacht off Galapagos in 1972, and a surfer bitten so severely off California he needed 100 stitches. One of her "experts" asserts that wild orcas have language—an extraordinary claim not supported by any reputable linguist or comparative psychologist. That claim is part of a pattern of anthropomorphism in the film—a likening of motives and emotions between humans and a species about as alien to our experience as any mammal can be.

          SeaWorld, after refusing to take part in what they perceived as an exercise heavily biased against them, did issue an eight point rebuttal. They argued that—unlike the impression Blackfish leaves on most viewers—the park doesn't sponsor the capture of wild orcas, and hasn't in thirty years. They claim never to punish their animals (engage in "negative reinforcement")—an impression that, again, a naïve viewer might gather by the casual use of the word "punishment" in the film. Nor was Tilikum's captive life quite as lonely as Cowperthwaite makes out: he had pod-mate named Taima (who died in 2010) with whom he was "friendly", as well as a grandson named Trua who is an occasional companion now.

          Then there's the question of proportion. Blackfish inevitably leaves the impression that the practice of keeping orcas for entertainment is a serious issue—or else why make the movie? Yet out of a worldwide population of 50,000 to 100,000 whales, a grand total of only 45 were in captivity as of June, 2013, with only 32 of those on display. Granted, if the practice is morally wrong, numbers don't matter. But when it comes to mobilizing attention, there are arguably bigger problems (such as the ongoing, wholesale decimation of Africa's elephants) to invest precious public sympathy than a few dozen captive orcas.

          In the background is the larger question of the moral standing of zoos and aquariums. That's too big an issue to cover here, but it would be a shame if the practices of for-profit corporations like SeaWorld got legitimate research institutions painted with the same black brush. SeaWorld itself helped save Keiko, the star of Free Willy, from his dismal prison in a theme park in Mexico City—a story Cowperthwaite doesn't bother to tell.

          To her credit, Cowperthwaite fairly observes that such places were instrumental in getting people to care about creatures like orcas (and elephants, and apes, etc.) in the first place. After all, not everybody can afford to travel to Puget Sound or Iceland to observe wild orcas. Much as their practices are questionable, SeaWorld and other parks have had a role to play in reconciling humans to the other species on this planet. Time will tell if they've done that job well enough to make themselves obsolete.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

To Have and Have Not

This guy gives the most memorable performance in Elysium.

««1/2  Elysium.  Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp. At neighborhood theaters.

"Do you think I like breathing this air?" asks the priggish CEO John Carlyle (William Fichtner) in Neill Blomkamp's Elysium. He objects to the very air on planet Earth because, by the late 21^st century, the entire planet has become a shantytown, a prison/toilet for the teeming billions who represent the vast majority of human beings. One percenters like Carlyle have meanwhile decamped for Elysium, an orbiting gated community where the air is fresh, there is no disease, and the people are diverted by an endless series of cocktail parties.

          The South African director's last film, District 9, was a breath of fresh air when it arrived in 2009. The story of a very different sort of alien invasion, it was witty and topical and perhaps the most effective piece of sci-fi-themed political satire since the original Robocop a generation earlier. Expectations for this follow-up were therefore pretty high. Unfortunately, there turns out to be nothing particularly original about Elysium. Instead of a breath of fresh air, we get something like the air on a jetliner—breathable, but stale.

          The hero is Max (Matt Damon), a small-time criminal lately down by law. He's just trying to go straight, but that's a tall order when he's being profiled by the police, and the police are all robots. The best scenes in Elysium show Damon's dealings with robo-cops and silicon parole officers, struggling to cope with their machine literalness yet keep his cool ("Are you being hostile or abusive? Would you like some drugs?"). Unfortunately, all these scenes were given away in the coming attractions.

          What's left is little more than the usual summer action-salad. Max is irradiated on the job, so he makes a deal with some gangsters to get himself smuggled to Elysium and its miraculous (and apparently cost-free) medical care. Standing in his way is Kruger, a borderline psychotic mercenary (Sharlto Copley) in the employ of Elysium's defense minister (Jodie Foster). Much of the film comes off as a set-up for the inevitable mano y mano clash between Max and Kruger, which is perhaps the least interesting direction Blomkamp could have taken his premise.

          To be sure, the film features some terrific production design. We can only admire the dedication that moved Blomkamp and his crew to breathe human fecal dust for two weeks as they shot in the world's largest landfill, outside Mexico City. Copley—the lead in District 9, and lately seen in Europa Report— speaks in an almost impenetrable Afrikaans accent, coming off as a seriously addled safari guide. He isn't exactly scary, but he is a unique presence.

          Foster, on the other hand, is completely wasted as every Tea Partier's imaginary caricature of Nancy Pelosi. Nor the idea of futuristic economic apartheid exactly original, forming the basis even for young adult epics like The Hunger Games. Blomkamp needed to do something more with it, but opts instead to condescend to the audience, given them a ten-buck theme park ride instead of the intelligent satire of District 9.

          In the end, Elysium comes off like an underwhelming remake of some 70's sci-fi opus we never saw. Like Logan's Run or Rollerball, the original would have been something with way worse special effects, less action, but a lot more substance.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro