Political Animals

Another open-carry patriot in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

«««  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  Written by Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, & Amanda Silver. Directed by Matt Reeves. At area theaters.

I’m confused: why is the latest installment in the Planet of the Apes franchise (for convenience, POTA) called the Dawn, when the last one presented the Rise of POTA? Shouldn’t the Dawn always come first? And will future episodes sow similar confusion? Will the Decline of the POTA precede the Day? Will the Gloaming of the Planet of the Apes come before the Noon? And will any of us still be around when Hollywood gets tired of bringing us to the POTA? Probably not, as long as we well-trained primates keep returning the box office for more simian treats.

          Snark aside, Matt Reeves’ apish opus is far from the worst of the series. In fact, it rectifies some of the problems with the past installments. Where Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 Rise was entertaining, it failed to replicate the urgent topicality of the best of the Apes films, the Rod Serling-inspired dread of the perilous delicacy of civilization. While it was visually light-years ahead of Roddy McDowell in a latex mask, it was decades behind in the maturity of its themes. The original Planet of the Apes (1968) was made at a time when grown-ups went to the movies to see stories relevant to adults. The rebooted versions are fundamentally for adolescents—or adults so juvenilized by a diet of adolescent fare they don’t know the difference.

          Reeves’ Dawn at least has a few Serling-esque social anxieties on its mind. The story opens with humanity decimated by a virus unleashed by the anti-Alzheimer’s drug James Franco concocted in Rise. The super-intelligent apes that emerged from that research have built a city-state for themselves in Muir Woods, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. Being super-intelligent, they’ve evolved a cultural style that combines the handy rusticity of Swiss Family Robinson with the comradery of Burning Man. “Ape no kill ape,” the resident sage, an orangutan named Maurice, teaches the kids. He and the apes’ leader, Caesar (Andy Serkis in a motion-capture suit) wonder whether their human creators are finally extinct.

          But people aren’t gone. In fact, if Caesar looked across the bay he’d see one of their settlements—a vaguely medieval keep in the ruins of the big city. Unlike the remnants of humanity in The Matrix, these folks are too busy scratching and surviving to host subterranean raves. Instead, their leader (Gary Oldman) sends out a team of scouts (including Jason Clarke and Keri Russell) to activate an old hydroelectric station. Alas, the dam is on ape territory.

          The resulting clash seems inspired by the worst of the old Apes’ series, Battle for the POTA, but informed by a couple of generations’ worth of intractable ethnic strife. Like the Israelis and the Palestinians, or Sunnis and Shiites, the apes and humans share an interest in peaceful coexistence, if only the debate wasn't hijacked by extremists on both sides. Caesar would just as soon let the humans have their cushy electric gadgets, but he’s opposed by Koba (Toby Kebbell), a former inmate at a chimp research lab with a grudge against his old tormentors. Meanwhile, across the Bay, Clarke seeks a meeting of minds while Oldman sees Caesar’s crew as nothing more than animals. No credit for predicting where that attitude gets him.

          In short, Dawn is much, much better than Battle, and more intellectually ambitious than Rise. Where global nuclear annihilation was a live nightmare in 1968, Reeves’ movie has downsized its themes for an age of asymmetrical conflict between mutually uncomprehending tribes. For maybe the first time since Charlton Heston shook his fist at the Statue of Liberty, an ape film takes seriously its role to reflect the anxieties of its age.

          But there’s not much deeper than that. Like a smart tenth grader who knows how to get an A from a prickly teacher, Reeves and Co. do what’s required and no more. So how exactly do a few hundred apes in a town hewn from logs take over the entire Earth? How is it that writers Bomback, Jaffa and Silver did their research on social hierarchy  and reconciliation among real apes, but somehow believe chimps and gorillas brachiate limb-to-limb through the trees (which is a gibbon-ish thing to do, actually)?

          Maybe the most depressing thing about this primate-on-primate conflict is that so much depends on the Gandhi-esque character of Caesar. Where “great men” can cut through the knots lesser ones tie around themselves, in most ethnic blood-feuds the necessary MLKs, Lincolns and Mandelas stubbornly refuse to show up. In that sense, movies and history are the same: if we’re have to wait for individual greatness, the haul is sure to be a long one.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

The Sushi Bar at the End of the World

Tilda Swinton assigns the proles their station in Snowpiercer.

«««1/2  Snowpiercer.  Written by Joon Ho-Bong & Kelly Masterson. Based on Le Transperceneige, by Jacques Lob & Jean-Marc Rochette. Directed by Joon Ho-Bong. At selected theaters.

It’s not hard to see the appeal of the premise behind the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige (“Snowpiercer”) by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette.  It features not one but two of our favorite cultural themes: the end of the world, and the gulf between rich and poor (e.g. The Hunger Games, Elysium, and a seemingly endless number of other pop epics). In the French version, after the climate is wrecked by a failed attempt to reverse global warming, the remnants of humanity survive aboard a 1,000 car-long train that performs an endless loop of the continents. Why a train, you ask? Well, the story is French, and as George Will recently complained in a widely-read, widely derided op-ed in Newsweek, don’t those Eurosocialists love their trains?

          The movie version turns out not to be French, but the handiwork of Joon Ho-Bong, the visionary South Korean who gave us the post-modern monster epic, The Host. It also happens to be one of the craziest summer movies in recent memory—a rat-bag of action, spectacle, and trenchant social commentary that somehow—like Amtrak—manages to get somewhere.

          Bong wisely trims the novel’s train of 1,000 cars to a few dozen, and the action to a rising of the steerage class against their betters up front. For on this polar express, your station in life is measured by your proximity to the source of all sustenance—the Engine, which is perpetual and—not without reason—seen as divinely powered. Insurgent leader Curtis (Captain America Chris Evans) is pure tail section, where people survive in squalid, cramped quarters eating nothing but protein paste. (In other words, like customers on Spirit Airlines.) The proles are kept at bay by Tilda Swinton, who is wigged and dentured like the worst librarian in the world. As she oppresses the masses, she dispenses choice bits of rail-derived religious ideology, admonishing them to “keep their station.” Snowpiercer may be a rare summer movie with a political edge, but the edge isn’t exactly keen. In fact, it’s more like a bludgeon.

          The movie is little more than a decent actioner as Curtis’ rebels start their march toward the head of the train. Where Bong really hits his stride is how he visualizes the contrast between steerage and first class. The insurgents pass through increasingly opulent, baroque surroundings (a car full of hot tubs; an aquarium car complete with sushi bar) that look vaguely Kubrickian, the bastard spawn of Clockwork Orange and the last twenty minutes of The Shining.  At its best, the thing feels like freewheeling satire where literally anything can happen.

          Snowpiercer doesn’t sustain this level of craziness. In the end, it devolves into the kind of conspiratorial hand-waving of too many modern political thrillers, where the idea of a genuine uprising against injustice just isn’t believable to most viewers.  After leading his people from bondage, the modern Moses won’t be idolized—he’ll be subpoenaed.

          Still, Bong deserves credit for at least suggesting that evil can be not just a personal quality embodied in villains, but an aspect of a system. In the middle of the summer stupid season, that almost qualifies as genius.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Truth, But No Reconciliation

The Agatas ask a lot of questions in Ida.

«««½ Ida. Written by Pawel Pawlikowski  & Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. At selected theaters. (In Polish w/ English subtitles)

Things are looking up in Poland recently. Of all the former Soviet satellites, Poland is widely regarded as a success story. Its economic and political example is one of the biggest (and under-reported) reasons why the people of Western Ukraine threw out their Kremlin puppet and aligned with Europe. For Poland—a nation that vanished from the map more than once in the last few centuries—to serve as inspiration to anyone is faintly miraculous.

          But as Pawel Pawlikowski 's lovely Ida shows, the ghosts of the nation's recent past aren't so easily left behind. The script by Pawlikowski  and Rebecca Lenkiewicz focuses on the original sin of 20^th century Poland: the German occupation during WWII, when the nation's Jews were all but annihilated by the Nazis, sometimes (but not always) with the connivance of the Poles themselves.

          A generation after the war, under the Communists, young Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a novice about to take her vows as a nun. Before taking that momentous step, she is instructed by her mother superior to visit Wanda, her aunt and only living relative. Wanda (Agata Kulesza) is a court judge with a hanging reputation and a habit of partying hard and drinking harder. She pointedly refused to take custody of Ida as a child, which makes for some awkwardness as her adult niece makes contact with her for the first time. But that's nothing compared to what Wanda blurts just a few minutes after their meeting: Ida, the aspiring nun, is actually Jewish. Her parents—including Wanda's sister—disappeared under mysterious circumstances during the war.

          As Pawlikowski  and Lenkiewicz show, there was little taste for digging up recent history in Poland during the Communist era. Commemorating the crimes of the Fascists had a certain propaganda value, but of recalling Polish complicity—let alone Soviet war crimes—there was not much of an upside. Wanda, suppressing her first instinct to send her niece packing, helps her learn the whereabouts of her parents. They're a very odd couple indeed, the worldly judge and the beatific novice, as they travel the countryside, asking questions the locals would prefer not to hear.

          Ida is a practically perfect piece of work. Shot in limpid black and white, it is a concerto for two instruments suggesting great depth beneath its spare surface. The Agatas are from different halves of the universe, Trzebuchowska with a dignity livened by an Eve-like sensual curiosity, Kulesza with a moral despair Roman Polanski would appreciate, and sigh over.

          It's only practically perfect because it bites off more than it can chew about an era much more ambitious films have failed to rationalize. Pawlikowski raises questions about the Poles who initially helped Ida's family hide from the Nazis that he never bothers to answer. In a film where the words "Nazi" and "German" are barely uttered, that's a heavy burden of guilt to place on the Poles, if only by default. With the film running only eighty minutes, there seems to have been plenty of time for it to make its moral case clearer.

          Pawlikowski gets one big thing right, however: for too long, it served the purposes of both the Communists and certain anti-Semitic Poles to make Poland seem like nothing more than a Jewish graveyard. His Ida is a fictional reflection of a real phenomenon among young Poles, thousands of whom are rediscovering their hidden or forgotten Jewish roots. For them, the Holocaust is becoming something that happened not to a distant and extinct "them", but to a living, breathing "us".

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Cuisine Art

Emjay Anthony and Jon Favreau aren't selling cigars in Chef.

««« Chef. Written and directed by Jon Favreau. At selected theaters.

While you've been busy living your life, cable TV has reordered certain things in  your world. The "weather"—which was formerly just background noise, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and scores of teams you don't follow---is now 24-hour news. "Sports" is merely a variety of content. And "food", thanks to shows like Iron Chef and Chopped and Cutthroat Kitchen, is now sports.

          If you missed all that, don't worry: 47 year-old Jon Favreau (Swingers, Iron Man) also didn't get the memo. The result is Chef, a surprisingly tasty amuse-bouche that is predicated on the idea that cooking is actually an imaginative endeavor, its practitioners subject to inspiration, creative doldrums, sublimating their sexuality through their craft, etc. In short, he somehow believes chefs are artists, not gladiators in aprons.

          Favreau plays Carl Casper, a once-upon-a-time rising star on the LA restaurant scene. Once a cauldron of creativity, he's lately fallen into a rut created by his own success, as his boss (Dustin Hoffman, in a small role) doesn't want him deviate from the culinary "hits" that made his reputation. He's just treading water, and even that keeps him too busy for a meaningful relationship with the son (Emjay Anthony) from his failed (but amicably ended) marriage to Inez (Sofía Vergara). A scathing review from a smug blogger (Oliver Platt) sends Carl's precarious life into a tailspin. "I just want to cook," he complains, as the business of his business sucks all the pleasure from his craft. Finding the fun again—and a shared life with his son—ultimately leads him to a grease-spattered taco truck in Miami, where there's always room for a another decent Cuban sandwich.

          Favreau's script could easily have gone another way. Personal redemption stories aren't rare in Hollywood, and they usually involve some kind of mano y mano, some sort pissing contest. If Chef were a typical vehicle for Tom Cruise (who is actually four years older than Favreau), it would have been more about flashy knife skills and the endearing foibles that make "the Kid" hard to beat. Chef Cruise might have ended up matched against his stuffy nemesis (say, Tom Hiddleston) on an episode of Iron Chef, where the hero would fall way behind, but then pull out the win with some bewildering stroke of culinary genius. Cut to The Girl in the audience—lubed with adoration—and then the closing shot of fist-pumping Cruise, immortalized in freeze-frame.

          But Favreau's guy doesn't want to be on Iron Chef, or be a reality TV star. He just wants to cook. In Favreau's script, that's just what he does, trying to rebuild his self-esteem and his personal life one crafty sandwich at a time. Like John Turturro's Fading Gigolo, there's a maturity in this film's proportioning of story and stakes. In both, there's a sense that heroism need not be manifested in triumph, but in plugging away consistently at something you're good at.

          True, Favreau had his career breakthrough with Iron Man, a $200 million superhero opus. He's got more appeal working on the scale of Swingers and Chef, though. Here's to small plates.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Our Big Fat Health Crisis

Got a life? Then you won't exercise your way to health in Fed Up.

«««½ Fed Up. Written by Mark Monroe & Stephanie Soechtig. Directed by Stephanie Soechtig. Narrated by Katie Couric. At selected theaters.

There's a popular theory that the Roman Empire inadvertently poisoned itself with water from lead pipes. If Stephanie Soechtig's alarming documentary Fed Up is even half-true, then modern Americans are in the process of doing the Romans one better: we're poisoning ourselves too—but on purpose.

          By pure statistics, there's no worse health crisis than the explosion of childhood obesity in America. The human cost, including heart disease, early-onset diabetes, joint problems, cancer, et al, is a time bomb waiting to go off in our economy, for the drain of caring for a sick generation for decades into the future is sure to be vast. "We know how to help diabetics who are fifty or sixty years old," declares one doctor in Soechtig's film. "But caring for a ten year-old diabetic who's sick their entire life? I don't know how to do that." The problem has gotten to the point where the World Health Organization has declared obesity a "global epidemic".

          There's little doubt of one proximal cause. Americans consume, day in and day out, many times the recommended daily dose of sugar. Over the course of a year we eat the equivalent of our body weight of the stuff. Sugar is not only high in calories, and not only added to virtually every kind of processed food we eat (including ketchup, bread, salad dressing, etc.). It's also highly addictive, rewiring the reward centers of the brain in a way very much like cocaine.

          Soechtig (among many others) further argues that there's an ongoing campaign to 1) enhance corporate profits by keeping Americans hooked on sugar, and 2) systematically misinform consumers about its effects—or at least muddy the waters enough to prevent meaningful regulation. The notion that managing weight is merely a matter of balancing calories in vs. calories out—either by portion control or exercise—is, alas, mainly bullshit, because a calorie from sugar does not have the same effect in the body as a calorie from, say, an egg. (The sugar is more likely to end up going directly to body fat). Nor can we simply jog, jazzercise or bike our way out of this problem. As Soechtig notes, burning off just a single 12-ounce can of Coke demands more than an hour of strenuous exercise. Working off that Big Gulp? You do the math.

          As for muddying the waters—one has only to turn to the depressing public discourse over Mayor Mike Bloomberg's proposal to limit the size of soft drinks sold in New York City. Restaurant servings of soft drinks—prime offenders in the over-sugaring of America—have risen from an average of 7 ounces in 1950 to a brobdingnagian 42 ounces today. Yet instead of talking about corporate motives for pushing us to consume so much sugar, the discussion tends to devolve to complaints about "the nanny state" and "taking away personal responsibility".

          What can calls for "personal responsibility" possibly mean in the context of a highly addictive substance like sugar? As Soechtig rightly notes, a taste for Mississippi marching powder isn't just a matter of rational choice. It's a consequence of brains that are, in essence, wired to over-consume, often from early childhood. Everything about the way the products are sold, from the marketing to the nutritional misinformation to placement in stores to portion sizes, is engineered to override rational choice. As one of Soechtig's witnesses observes, if a recovering alcoholic were placed in a home where booze is everywhere, would it be any surprise he would go back to drinking?

          In short, Fed Up presents a devastating case. Soechtig's choices aren't particularly creative, to be sure—this isn't inventive filmmaking, or remotely witty in the way Michael Moore might tackle this subject. It mostly resembles the kind of informational documentary you'd see on CNN or PBS, right before Anderson Cooper. But that doesn't make it any less alarming—and infuriating.

          The prophets of personal responsibility are right, but not in the sense they intend. Another way to take responsibility is to collectively demand some regulation of those profiting from making our kids sick. Soechtig cites the example of how Big Tobacco was eventually tamed, despite decades of propaganda, denial, and deliberate misinformation. The struggle against Big Sugar is likely to be even tougher. For our pancreas' sake, is there any time to lose?

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Leviathan

Something scaly this way comes in Godzilla.

«« Godzilla. Written by Max Borenstein & Dave Callaham. Directed by Gareth Edwards. At area theaters.

Godzilla is no purple dinosaur. He has a very particular set of skills, which includes trampling, roaring, and spewing his atomic breath. Since his first appearance (Godzilla, 1954), he's done some evolving, from a rampaging symbol of nuclear technology run amok, to planetary guardian, to eco-warrior, back to rampaging monster (e.g. Roland Emmerich's much-maligned 1998 reboot). As the fandom has collectively decided that Emmerich didn't do the big green guy justice, he's been awoken from his slumbers once again in Gareth Edward's Godzilla.

          Full disclosure: after seeing the trailers for this movie I wanted to like it. First, because it stars Bryan Cranston, who still dwells in the afterglow of Breaking Bad. The trailer also showed a canny awareness that the less we see of the mega-reptile, the more he teases us from the smoke and rubble, the less a joke he seems. As Edwards' special forces guys free-fall on the wrecked shell of San Francisco to the otherworldly tones of György Ligeti's  Requiem (famously used in 2001: A Space Odyssey), there was a refreshing lack of irony to be seen or heard. There seemed the possibility that Edwards—a director on his sophomore outing—might actually make some unexpected choices.

          Turns out there are unexpected developments in Godzilla, but not always of the best kind. In the interest of not spoiling it, suffice it to say that neither Cranston nor Juliette Binoche are as much of a presence in the film as the previews would suggest. The real hero turns out to be Aaron Taylor-Johnson, otherwise known from the Kick-Ass movies. Nor is Godzilla necessarily the villain.

          Edwards indeed does keep Godzilla under wraps for much of the film, sometimes as a mere bump in the ocean, sometimes with his bony crest splitting the water like a Kraken-sized shark. Other times the film just seems to lose track of him—which is a neat trick, given that he's a 400-foot behemoth. Coming so soon after Guillermo Del Toro's gonzo Pacific Rim, this Godzilla just seems like less—as in less action, less involvement, lower stakes. It's as if Del Toro managed to get the parody of a movie out before the original got a chance to raise its scaly head.

          Maybe the most interesting thing about this Godzilla is he's not so much a monster as the Hobbesian Leviathan, the only force powerful enough to overshadow the state of nature that is "a war of all against all". In this, writers Max Borenstein and Dave (not "David") Callaham are inspired by the evolution of the Toho Studios Godzilla, whose meaning has, over the decades, acquired as many layers (plague, hero, father, outcast, monarch, equalizer) as there are hues of "beckoning cats" in Japanese souvenir shops. As in virtually every superhero opus, there are colossal forces at work in the world, and humans can only scurry out of the way.

          Construing humans as mere spectators is tempting because it lets us off the hook. Climate science denialists place their faith in that very idea, that the collective acts of seven billion human beings "couldn't possibly" have consequences on a planetary scale. ("Jesus won't let it happen," some declare.) Alas, that bump in the ocean isn't Godzilla coming, but something far worse.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Transparent Eyeball

««« Finding Vivian Maier. Written and directed by John Maloof & Charlie Siskel. At selected theaters.

Vivian Maier, woman on the street.

There's a long list of major artists who died in obscurity. Vincent van Gogh, El Greco, and Franz Kafka eventually earned their champions, but the process took years, with full appreciation coming generations later. In all these cases, it was the influence of experts—critics, exhibitors, historians—who led the way for an indifferent public.

          By this measure, the photographer Vivian Maier has been spectacularly lucky. Her rise to fame began the very year she died, when her street photographs began appearing on the internet. Popular acclaim, not expert opinion, prompted more postings, and more interest, until today she's where it took Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe decades to reach. Now she's the subject of Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary by John Maloof, the historian who first lucked into a cache of her negatives in 2007.

          Maier (born 1926) was indeed a strange figure. She worked virtually her entire life as a nanny. She pursued her hobby—photography—in plain sight of her employers, yet never showed her work to anyone. She had no family of her own, and made few friends outside the children she cared for. She never threw anything away, from the most worn-out pair of shoes to the most minor of dry-cleaning receipts. She may have sported a phony French accent. When she died she left some 150,000 negatives behind, the vast majority of which she neither developed nor printed. According to Maloof, she once made what seems like a half-hearted attempt to exhibit her work in France, but nothing came of it. She died from complications of falling on some ice in 2009.

          Of her talent there's no doubt. Shooting from waist-level with a Rolleiflex camera, she captured images of street life that pulse with compassion, intimacy and humor. People seem unguarded in Maier's work in a way they rarely are in period photos. She accomplished this for the same reason she went through her personal life virtually unnoticed: by being something of a ghost, no more of a presence than she needed to be. Like Emerson's "transparent eyeball", she "[stood] on the bare ground…head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, all mean egotism vanished…I am nothing; I see all."

          Though her life was undistinguished, Maier is fortunate to have Maloof as the custodian of her legacy. Boyishly earnest, persistent, and energetic, he has couched his documentary as a burning mystery, as in "Why did such a towering talent lay hidden for so long?" One big reason—the reticent strangeness of Maier herself—is obvious, but there's a sense here that that's not enough, as if talent has some inherent right to be appreciated.

           The "mystery" angle on Maier's life is unnecessarily ginned-up. Even if, as Maloof argues, she was aware her work was good, there's a long way between being good to being confident enough to expose yourself to the world. Indeed, anonymity may have been Maier's best way of preserving her belief in her talent. For anyone struggling with an addiction to making art, there's nothing about Vivian Maier that's mysterious at all.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro