Miss OS

Joaquin Phoenix mopes as Samantha installs in Her.

««½ Her.  Written and directed by Spike Jonze. At area theaters.         

          

Folks "love" their iPhones, and they "love" their Teslas, but what if they literally fell in love with an object, like a computer? That's the question behind Spike Jonze's silicon-based romance, Her. Sound strange? Jonze directed even odder material in Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, so you'd figure he'd propel this boy-meets-computer story in some wildly interesting directions.

          In this case, you'd figure wrongly.

          Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a still-waters-run-deep kind of guy. His sensitivity makes him perfect for his job, ghost-writing heartfelt personal letters for clients for a website called "HandwrittenLetters.com". Convincing as his fake letters are, his own emotional life is a struggle: he's still in love with the wife who's divorcing him (Rooney Mara), and he won't permit himself to get serious about anyone else. Mostly we see him moping around a near-futuristic version of Los Angeles, surfing the web, scarfing instant noodles, and feeling sorry for himself.

          Into this wasteland comes "Samantha" (voiced by Scarlett Johannson), an "artificially intelligent operating system" that Theodore installs on his computer. Needless to say, Samantha is not just an upgraded version of Siri. She's curious, she's personable, and she's adaptable, rapidly becoming the ideal mate that Theodore could never find in real life. Miraculously (or creepiest) of all, she falls for him too, and yearns for a physical body with which to consummate their relationship. Where the story goes from there had the potential to truly boggle any mind, organic or not.

          The boy-meets-girl, boy-maybe-loses-girl aspect of Her is well-handled. Phoenix finds an appealing spot between vulnerability and hope, his neediness never sliding into mush. When he falls for a disembodied voice, we believe it. Nor is it hard to imagine falling in love with Johansson's smolderingly raspy tones. If the technology ever gets good enough to produce something like Samantha, it's a good bet most straight males would find better uses for her than sorting their emails. As an offbeat sort of Valentine's Day date movie, Her is perfectly fine.

          Unfortunately, Jonze seems to have no further ambition for this story. For instance, there's the looming question of whether any artificial intelligence, no matter how cleverly programmed, can have real (as in "genuine") feelings. Jonze raises the issue in his script, and indeed takes a liberal point of view on it, by making Theodore a composer of fake emotions at his job. A computer may not have real feelings, but humans fake them pretty well too, and pretty regularly. So what's the fundamental difference?, Jonze seems to ask. Human is as human does.

          But for the most part, Jonze barely dips a toe into these deep philosophical waters. The question of Samantha's humanity is less a existential crisis than a bump in the romantic road, like discovering your supposedly perfect lover once killed a man. Meanwhile, other questions scream to be answered: if a human user is emotionally harmed in a relationship with an AI, is the software company liable for damages? Would a product recall amount to emotional abandonment? What's the agenda of a company that dares unleash such potentially "loveable" products on the market? What if it tried to use the AI to influence the behavior of their human companions (sort of the way marketers use children to sell products to their parents today)? If things go sour in your relationship with your operating system, can't you just reboot it and start over? Should you?

          Sure, even a greeting-card writer like Theodore Twombly deserves his share of happiness. But there were more interesting directions to take this idea. Jake Schreier's Robot & Frank is another recent film that covered similar ground, though it was less about love than memory and the loss of self. Of the two, Schreier's seems the less ambitious, yet it ended up going deeper into its premise than Her. Unless it's date night around Valentine's Day, I'd stay in and stream Robot & Frank instead.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

The Guy Before Dylan

Winter is coming for Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis.

««« Inside Llewyn Davis. Written by Joel & Ethan Coen. Directed by Ethan & Joel Coen. At select theaters.        

In America, artists succeed wholesale but fail retail. While the winners are more or less public property—the "break-out stars" and the "sleeper hits" and the celebrities on the road to "inevitable" stardom—we more or less only encounter failure on an individual basis. On one hand, we all squeal and adore Taylor Swift, and on the other we vaguely recall that cousin who almost made it onto American Idol but didn't, or the former classmate who washed out of film school, or that uncle who quit his job to write a novel that never found a publisher. Depending on your level of cynicism, it's either charming or delusionary that, in our minds, the successes of people we don't know outweigh the failures of people we do.

          Hand it to the Coen Brothers to wring poetry out of the spectacle of artistic failure. Their Inside Llewyn Davis isn't just the story of a struggling folk singer (Oscar Issac) in and around Greenwich Village in 1961. It's a odyssey of hard luck in every guise it can visit a poor, talented schmuck with a guitar. In a society that's convinced it's "got talent", this is a pretty rare choice, to give a showcase to a character whose sole distinction is his failure to earn distinction.

          Fair warning: Llewyn Davis is bleak stuff. We're talking about Fassbinderish, Ken Loachian levels of dreariness here—the kind of story that seems like it was shot in stark black and white even though it's actually in color. As such, it is not recommended for those with affect disorders, who have suffered a recent breakup, or are looking for something to watch on a frigid winter night.

          The script finds Llewyn bumping along the trough of a personal low that doesn't seem to end. The rump end of a folk duo whose lead man jumped off the George Washington Bridge, he plays gigs at a few venues that keep him in pocket money but not much more. To his ex-lover (Carey Mulligan), his given name is "asshole". Making his rent is a remote dream, so he makes the rounds of his friends' couches. It's winter in NYC, and he doesn't own a warm coat. And it pretty much goes downhill from there.

          For those looking for "that Coen Brothers feeling" they got from Fargo, Barton Fink, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Davis will come off too dry by half. In tone and purpose, it most resembles their 2009 serio-comedy A Serious Man, which was also about a character with the temerity to believe he'd suffered all he could suffer.

          What makes this film better than A Serious Man, though, is the fact that Llewyn is not just some nebbishy loser, but a guy who can actually sing and play the guitar. As hauntingly played by Isaac (Agora), he's a genuine artist with a sweet, heart-felt style that makes people sorry they can't reward him more. The difference between him and Bob Dylan isn't really musical talent, and it isn't how much pain they've suffered. The difference is actually not much: a point the Coens drive home when they have Llewyn finish his last set at the Gaslight Café just as the young Dylan comes on to do his first.

          This is the story of the guy who went on just before Bob Dylan. Between greatness and obscurity, just a few ticks of the clock. And in that dark, narrow gap, there's a kind of poetry winners' stories rarely touch.    

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Once Again Into the Smaug

Dragon meets hobbit (Martin Freeman) in Desolation of Smaug.

«« The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.  Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson & Guillermo del Toro , based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. Directed by Peter Jackson. At area theaters.         

          

According to the chronicles of Middle Earth, Bilbo Baggins' journey to Mt. Erebor takes place 3,063 years after the Fall of the kingdom of Númenor and 1,340 years after the foundation of the Shire. These are eternities of time. Yet they feel like nothing compared to having to sit through Peter Jackson's interminable trilogy of spectacles based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.

          The problems with opus #2, The Desolation of Smaug, are pretty much the same I described for #1 (An Unexpected Journey, 2012, see review here). This is essentially a heist story—a caper wherein a band of semi-silly dwarves and their hairy-footed companion attempt to steal a precious jewel from Smaug, an avaricious dragon. Far from the sprawling, Manichean struggle of Lord of the Rings, events of The Hobbit were never meant to have cosmic stakes. But instead of giving the story its own tone and look, Jackson adopts the same portentous approach to he took for his Rings movies. He's like a chef who serves the appetizer after the main dish, and finding you liked the pasta sauce on the entrée, ladles it on your salad too.

          And then he repeats the mistake, in triplicate.

          The new trilogy at least benefits from another decade of development in CGI. The set-piece for this episode, the encounter with the eponymous dragon, is splendidly realized, with the giant sauropod appearing from beneath what looks like a landfill of treasure. The beast is voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, who seems as ubiquitous as Sauron these days but characterizes him with all the silky menace envisioned by Tolkien.
          Strangely, the figure of Bilbo (Martin Freeman) seems lost here, as if Jackson, in 161 minutes of running time, couldn't find time for him. No surprise, considering that Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro are busy rationalizing the return of Legolas (Orlando Bloom), one of the most popular characters in the Rings movies. What Bloom (or his distaff sidekick Evangeline Lilly) are doing here is a mystery, given that they are neither in the book nor anything but peripheral to the script. It's a mystery, unless mowing down legions of hapless, disposable orcs is reason enough. (Wanna bet we'll see Viggo Mortensen in the next episode?)

          Jackson also invests much time in the shoe-horning material presaging the return of the bad guy, Sauron, from those other movies you saw already. It shouldn't be a spoiler by now to reveal that Sauron will be defeated. So what's the point of breaking the momentum from Bilbo's quest—which (for all we know) still hangs in the balance—in favor of a battle for which we already know the outcome?

          The answer, of course, is that the question is irrelevant. The Hobbit is less a story now than the latest productions of a media franchise that exists for no other sake than to keep going. Indeed, it's a franchise in the same sense as Harry Potter or The Olive Garden—an experience that fulfills certain expectations regardless of whether they are "good" or "bad". Let the critics carp, say the fans—we're off for the Middle Earth equivalent of unlimited bread sticks.         

@ 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Flyover Redemption

Forte and Dern are cold in Nebraska.

««« Nebraska.  Written by Bob Nelson. Directed by Alexander Payne. At selected theaters.      

          

Sixteen years ago the Coen Brothers made Fargo, an off-beat, serio-comic thriller set in you-know-where, North Dakota. Though Hollywood elites loved it, awarding it Oscars for Best Picture and Best Actress, it drew criticism for how it portrayed the good folks of the upper Midwest. Namely, it made them into cartoony, hapless rubes. Settling in to Alexander Payne's Nebraska, I got the feeling I was in for something similar—that is, for Fargo-style regional caricature, albeit without the Coen's wit.

          The script by newcomer Bob Nelson concerns Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), an ornery, tactiturn 70 year-old who believes he's come into a million dollars when a sham magazine sweepstakes offer comes in the mail. No longer permitted to drive, he sets off on foot from his home in Billings to collect his "fortune" in Lincoln, Nebraska. He's rescued from the side of the interstate by his youngest son, David (Will Forte). After Woody's third or fourth escape attempt, the latter decides to drive him there, figuring at least he can spend some quality alone time with his dad.

          David gets more than he bargained for when they stop in Woody's old home town. The story of his imminent fortune gets around quickly, making Woody a local hero among his distant family and childhood buddies. Things go sour when the inevitable demands for payback on old "loans" start coming, and David, like many adult children, learns how broad an undiscovered country his parent's life is to him.

          Payne, by using the title Nebraska, is promising to deliver something folksy, gritty, unvarnished—in other words, the cinematic equivalent of Bruce Springsteen's sound in the classic album of the same name. Phedon Papamichael's sparse black and white cinematography befits those expectations. Yet (and notwithstanding Payne's own Midwestern roots) there's a whiff of bicoastal condescension in how the film presents people and places hollowed out by economic irrelevance. The old folks here behave exactly as every urban hipster expects on a visit with his flyover grandparents—conversations conducted in monosyllables, the idiot cousins left behind (Tim Discoll and Devin Ratray), the old men dozing in front of football games as Grandma bastes the turkey in the kitchen. Were Nebraska presented with the smells appropriate to its story, we would get the odors of moth-balls and soiled Depends. If people really lived in a state of such hopelessness, walking seven hundred miles to get a million bucks doesn't sound so crazy after all.

          But then something surprising happens. First, June Squibb turns in a feisty, appealing performance as Woody's long-suffering spouse. Second, and more profoundly, Payne slowly erects a touching father-son story on Will Forte's boyish ingenuousness. While Woody is a constant disappointment, Forte portrays David's need to build a relationship with him with such sweet subtlety that he redeems the whole film, clichés and all. Forte's performance is all the more impressive that he was a SNL cast member for ten years, but Payne never lets him be funny.

          Bruce Dern's acerbic, unsentimental performance is getting the lion's share of praise for this film, but don't be fooled. It comes off as under-realized because it is a character actor's performance in a lead role. So how exactly is Woody, a coarse, cynical man who seems to value nothing but booze, supposed to be fooled by a obviously bogus sweepstakes offer? Word is that Bryan Cranston was up for the role of Woody, but Payne chose Dern instead. He's fine, but it's frightening to think how good Nebraska could have been with a truly commanding actor like Cranston in the lead.

          Even on its own, quieter terms, this film is not as successful as Payne's Sideways, which was more touching and, incidentally, hilarious. But it does fashion something true out of what seems like unpromising material. For those willing to risk dozing off in their armchairs, Nebraska ends up a fine place to go.

@ 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

The Ninnies Strike Back

All hail the rule of the ninnies in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

««½ The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.  Written by Simon Beaufoy & Michael Arndt, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins. At area theaters.

Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series is a lot like Mount Rushmore. For its prominence on the planetary cultural scene, its triumph of impact over art, it's something one remotely admires instead of loves. Missing the movie based on the sequel, Catching Fire, just wasn't an option for a father of an eleven year-old daughter. Having liked the first movie—more or less—this critic resigned himself to the sequel with a prayer: Dear Lord, how bad could it be?

          Fortunately, prayers were unnecessary. Catching Fire has many of the same flaws as the first movie, but also a minor surprise: a faint hint of world-weariness, of consciousness that winning, at games or otherwise, can have costs almost as great as losing. The villains in Collins' book have truly awful classical-inspired names like "Claudius Templesmith" and "Plutarch Heavensbee", but she missed an obvious Romanism for her title: Hunger Games: Pyrrhic Victory.

          The sequel finds Collins' heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) living in a big, state-provided mansion after her survival in the 74^th Hunger Games, a gladiatorial contest between the subjects of the tyrannical rule of the Capital. Katniss, though embarrassed by her special treatment, has become a folk hero to the proles. With an aversion to sharing the stage verging on the Putinesque, President Snow (Donald Sutherland) wants her dead. To that end, he enlists Plutarch (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to engineer her on-camera demise in the 75^th anniversary Games—a special "all-star" edition pitting previous winners against each other.

          Once again, Jennifer Lawrence brings more authenticity to the character of Katniss than any big-budget, tent-pole movie like this really deserves. Whether going it alone, as she did in the first movie, or juggling allies Survivor-style here, she's rarely not compelling, rarely standing safely outside the somewhat contrived, half-baked dystopia Collins has conjured.

          Trouble is, that contrivance is still there, and doesn't improve with familiarity. Somehow, we're supposed to be afraid of a regime populated by pouffed ninnies like Elfie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks in pancake make-up) and "Caesar Flickermann" (Stanley Tucci with radioactively brilliant teeth). Somehow, everybody is supposed to travel around the Capital's continent-sized domain in Obama's high-speed trains, with aircraft kept oddly beyond consideration. Collins can't decide if her dystopia is ancient Rome without the glory, or pre-Revolutionary France without the culottes.

          Like The Empire Strikes Back, Catching Fire doesn't end as much as set up the first scene in the next movie. Judging from the audience's reaction, they seem more than willing to follow Katniss anywhere. How bad it could it be?

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro       

The Shipwreck Kid

The old man (Redford) and the sea in All Is Lost.

««« All Is Lost.  Written and directed by J.C. Chandor. At select theaters.   

          

When it comes to dire adversity, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who scream fuck! right away, and people who do it later—or maybe never. In J.C. Chandor's chamber work All Is Lost, Robert Redford plays a nameless man on a solo voyage across the Indian Ocean. He's not only all alone on his little yacht, he's the only human being in the film. There's barely any dialog (or even monolog). When his boat is crippled in a collision with a stray shipping container, does he ever get around to uttering that choice four-letter word? Since that's one of the pleasures of this strange little film, I won't spoil it here.

          At a time when less is not more at the movies, Lost is a refreshing return to minimalism. Mostly, the "action" is comprised of Redford peering ruefully at his damaged vessel, breaking out various tools, and laboriously making repairs. But Nature—which one supposes qualifies as the only other character here—undoes his patient efforts every time, until this resourceful man is stripped of all his comforts, his tools, and his hope.

          The advertising for the film shrieks about "pulse-pounding suspense", but don't believe it. The suspense in All Is Lost isn't the "pulse-pounding" kind. Instead, it's of a more cerebral variety—the kind where there's an unexpected noise, and Redford (and we) are left to ponder what else has gone wrong. The lack of dialog will inspire some—alas, wrongly—to call Lost a silent film. On the contrary, Chandor depends heavily on sound effects—the wind, the patter of raindrops, the tell-tale rip of a sail off-screen—to tell his story. There have been few films in recent memory that have depended on sound so completely. (So much the worse for most of us, then, that we'll see All Is Lost in a multiplex, with the bass-lines from Thor and The Hunger Games pounding through the walls.)

          If rebirth through adversity is more or less unavoidable in this life, then the real theme of this film is solitude. Here, even more so than in Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, the filmmaker prefers to pare down his story to essentials—and what he regards as "essential" is the lone individual. There's no cutting away to the wife/husband/kids/mission-control, sweating out the ordeal from long distance, as we'd see in more conventional thrillers.

          On the surface, the convention seems reasonable, to see individuals as significant only in relation to other people. As Chandor and Cuarón suggest, though, framing the struggle that way shifts the emphasis from another, equally-important connection: how the individual sees him- or herself. As the planet becomes more noisy and crowded, with friends and relatives never more than a status update away, that internal report may be the most endangered relationship of all.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Beautiful Creatures

«««1/2  Dallas Buyer's Club.  Written by Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. At selected theaters. 

Leto and McConaughey survive in Dallas Buyer's Club

To paraphrase the guy mentioned in that Maroon 5 song, we don't always get what we want, but sometimes we get what we need. In the middle of the debate over Obamacare, America has gotten a health care drama--- Jean-Marc Vallée's Dallas Buyer's Club. Safe to say there have rarely been movies this strong about a guy just trying to fill his prescriptions.

          The script by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack is based on the true story of Ron Woodroof—an electrician, part-time rodeo cowboy, recreational drug user and all-around party animal. In the summer of 1985 he gets the news that he is HIV-positive, with only a month to live. But instead of taking this as a death-sentence, Woofroff takes his diagnosis in the spirit of a barroom dare, swearing that no "faggot" disease is going to end him.

          Trouble is, the only drug shown to have any effectiveness against the virus is AZT, and that is only available in clinical trials. Forced to seek treatment in Mexico, Woodroof discovers there's a world full of anti-viral drugs that are not FDA-approved. Getting illegal drugs over the border has never been a problem for determined entrepreneurs, of course, and the dying Ron is very determined indeed. 

          Dallas Buyer's Club is a pet project of Matthew McConaughey, who has been fighting for years to get it made with various others in the lead. It's fortunate that he took the role himself, because it may be his strongest yet. Though a gifted survivor, McConaughey's Woodroof was little more than a two-bit hustler before misfortune elevated him to a sort of folk-hero. His fellow AIDs sufferers were never more than "fruits" and "tinkerbells" to him; his pursuit of casual sex with women after getting his diagnosis verged on the criminal. Though he establishes a "buyer's club" to import medications for himself and hundreds of other desperate patients, his motives were never strictly philanthropic. It was always about the money. McConaughey sugar-coats none of that, but in his hands we don't care. Whether for the greater good or sadly misspent, Woodroof's life was lived to the fullest while he had it. In a year that has already seen great performances by the likes of Robert Redford (All is Lost) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave), this may be the performance of the year.

          Almost as memorable is Jared Leto as "Rayon", a transvestite Ron meets in the hospital and—despite his flamboyance—befriends. Oozing glamor even as he wastes away, Leto may single-handedly bring back the glam-rock esthetic with this performance, albeit with a shabby edge.

          If there's anything to object to about Dallas Buyer's Club, it's the way it buys into the sort of casual contempt for government that is too common recently. Those of us of a certain age remember the height of the HIV epidemic in the eighties, when activists like Larry Kramer would appear on TV, hair on fire and screaming about the "murderers" in the FDA. That uncorking a stream of quack drugs on a population of desperate people would likely kill them faster, and make others unconscionably richer, seemed lost on these guys. Instead of a public health crisis, they saw it as a Manichean struggle between angels and devils, with the federal agency staffed by little Eichmanns just yearning to keep miracle cures from the people. Sound familiar?

          On another level, it's more than ironic that a lifelong homophobe like Ron Woodroof gets to be the hero of the AIDs crisis. There's a long, sad tradition of similar "cause" movies, where some terrible wrong only gets fixed when the white (or in this, case, the straight) guy gets involved. Would we have cared as much for Ron Woodroof if he was actually gay? Would his crusade have seemed as appealingly muscular without the gay-bashing? Though there's much to like in Dallas Buyer's Club, you won't find the answers to those questions there.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro