Days of Future Past

Tom Cruise tends the ruins of planet Teegeeack in Oblivion.

««1/2 Oblivion. Written by Joseph Kosinski, Karl Gajdusek & Michael Arndt, based on the graphic novel by Joseph Kosinski & Arvid Nelson. Directed by Joseph Kosinski. 

         

This is Tom Cruise’s world; you just happen to live on it. That fundamental truth is nowhere more literal than in Joseph Kosinski’s apocalypse salad, Oblivion. For a celebrity of Cruise’s self-styled magnitude, what could be a more appropriate co-star than an entire planet, conveniently emptied of all other faces?

          As you may already know, the script (based on a graphic novel by director Joseph Kosinksi) is set in the late 21^st century, after Earth has been devastated by an interplanetary war between humans and invading “Scavengers”. The remaining radioactive dust-heap is watched over by a fleet of autonomous drones, which in turn are serviced by “Tech 49”, otherwise known as Jack (Cruise). He’s supported by Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) a porcelain-smooth redhead who serves as Jack’s mission controller and, as need arises, his bedmate.

          Jack and Victoria’s posting is lonely, but almost over; in two weeks, they head to humanity’s new home on Titan, the moon of Saturn. She’s stoked to leave. He’s got doubts, however—he has troubling “memories” of life on pre-war Earth, which he supposedly wasn’t alive to see. And then there are the ruins of that era, the wrecked bridges and skyscrapers and stadiums of a lost, golden age. Jack’s got a bad case of what the Germans called ruinenempfindsamkeit—that semi-romantic, semi-perverse attraction to ruined places that often afflicts people who don’t actually have to live in disaster zones.

          Now we don’t necessarily expect technical rigor in Hollywood confections like Oblivion. It doesn’t take Neil deGrasse Tyson, however, to observe that even this radioactive husk of an Earth---which still can boast liquid water and breathable air—is more habitable than cold, poisonous, distant Titan. Kosinski would have us believe that Jack and Victoria oversee a network of huge fusion reactors for turning Earth’s oceans into energy. But of course, water is everywhere in the solar system (e.g. comets, asteroids, moons like Europa and Callisto), so bothering with the conquest of Earth just for the water doesn’t make much sense.

          The film itself isn’t taking its flimsy premise very seriously. Jack soon discovers that the planet isn’t as empty as he assumed: God, appearing in his usual guise of Morgan Freeman, is also there, leading the resistance to the final exodus. The script by Kosinski, Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt ransacks various not-so-old sources, like Independence Day and I Am Legend. But the surface visuals, not the logic, are the appeal here: the drones, for instance, look more like sleek, high-end Swedish washers than plausible killing machines. Riseborough’s character, who has the ultimate stay-at-home job as Jack’s air-traffic controller, still bothers to dress up in tight dress and heels when sweatpants and a pony-tail would do.

          This writer will admit he also has a serious case of ruinenempfindsamkeit. Nice as New York and Washington DC look now, they won’t be truly poignant until their grandeur is moldering and toppled. Special effects technology has come a long way since we saw the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes, or that vine-choked Lincoln Memorial in Logan’s Run. Oblivion works best as a kind of calendar spread of imaginary devastation, the modern descendant of the fake ruins that graced the estates of nobility in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

          There are doctoral theses to be written about the connection of the current zeitgeist, dogged by climate change and doomsday pandemics, and movies like this, which speak of the future in the past tense, and memories as the only measures of our humanity. With more poetic treatment and a less self-satisfied star, Oblivion could have been more than just watchable. The script for Blade Runner, after all, also made no sense. But real heart goes a long way.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Truth and Consequences

Ryan Gosling breaks bad in The Place Beyond the Pines.

«««The Place Beyond the Pines. Written by Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio & Darius Marder. Directed by Derek Cianfrance. 

         

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the impact of gun violence in our society. Unfortunately, much of that talk has been fatuous, dishonest or both. But whatever side of the issue we line up, it’s hard to deny that the debate has been focused primarily on the short term, on what happens “in the moment” and just after. As the current epidemic of suicides among our military veterans shows, much of the psychological impact—and the body count—can strike well after the physical violence ends.

          Flawed though it is, Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines at least deserves credit for adopting a wider, multi-generational perspective. Based on a script by Cianfrance (Blue Valentine), it starts as the story of Luke (Ryan Gosling), a little-speaking loner who does motorcycle stunts for a travelling circus. His act—and the metaphor for his rootless life—involves him speeding in tight little circles inside a steel ball. He yearns for more when he discovers that a woman from his past (Eva Mendes) has given birth to his son. Quitting the circus, he tries to support his new family, but finds his prospects limited in “the place beyond the pines” (as the Mohawk once called the site of Schenectady, NY). Before long he’s using his riding skills to rob banks.

          At the risk of giving away too much, the story abruptly shifts focus to Avery (Bradley Cooper), a rookie cop who earns hero status after being wounded in a shootout with Luke. Being the toast of the department has its own dangers, though, as the hero is tempted to go crooked by a corrupt detective (Ray Liotta). How he handles that challenge has, in turn, devastating effects on his son (Emory Cohen), who comes around to having a strongly coincidental but consequential relationship with Luke’s grown-up son, Jason (Dane DeHaan).

          On the surface, Pines sounds like just one damn thing after another. When it comes to actors with Gosling’s kind of magnetism, it seems foolish to drop him from the story---or perhaps just brave, as Hitchcock once demonstrated by discarding his star Vivian Leigh just an hour into Psycho. There are strong performances here, but no message, no self-conscious moral about the wages of the characters’ bad choices. As in life, there are merely consequences that unfold whether we choose to learn the lessons or not.

          In this, Pines represents the antidote to the romance of the gun epitomized recently by Tarantino’s Django Unchained. In the latter, learning to shoot was tantamount to liberation, and everything in the story seemed to lead to the paroxysm of gunplay where ultimate justice would be served. But in Cianfrance’s world, there is no ultimate justice, the gunplay comes off confused and too soon, and the characters are imprisoned, not liberated, by its consequences.

          No movie ever solved a political argument. But it’s safe to say that until we collectively find Cianfrance’s theme as compelling as Tarantino’s, nothing will change about the problem of guns in America.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro       

Five's Company, Six a Crowd

The girlfriend experience in Evil Dead

«« Evil Dead. Written by Fede Alvarez & Diablo Cody. Directed by Fede Alvarez. 

         

If the effect of Sam Raimi’s 1981 The Evil Dead had to be described in one word, it wouldn’t be “scream”—it will be “hoot”. Like many low-budget cult favorites, it’s memorable not for its technical polish, premise or writing. Instead, it’s more about the goofy energy, the unapologetic, balls-out determination to be the one guy at the party with the lampshade on his head. So when the prospect of a slick, updated remake of a campy, deliberately unpolished cult masterpiece comes up, we have to wonder, “why”?

          Silly question, when the perfume of a lucrative franchise is in the air. Thus we have Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead, a modernized, bigger-budget return to the old haunted bungalow in the woods (the definite article in the original title, alas, seems to have been severed from the rest of the body). As before, five twenty-somethings go up for a weekend at a dilapidated cabin, unaware that the resident demon has other plans for them. To the age-old question, “Why don’t they just get out of there?”, screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno, Young Adult) has a convenient answer: one of the women, Mia (Jane Levy) is an addict, and their weekend is an intervention. No matter what happens, declares brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), they’re not going to let his little sis leave the premises—cat carcasses and spell manuals sheathed in human skin notwithstanding.

          Cody contributes some plausible dialog, and Uruguayian-born Alvarez shoots his mayhem better than a first-timer might be expected. There aren’t many jolts, but there are enough dismemberments and projectile-vomitings to keep the proceedings lively. Trouble is, along with the low-rent special effects of the original (which included, I believe, a corpse gushing actual oatmeal), the update exorcises most of the fun. All the 2013 actors are better, but none have the appeal of the young Bruce Campbell, whose square-jawed mug shouts “camp” as loudly as Leslie Nielsen’s. Where the original has become dated that charming way that big hair and Mom jeans now have, the remake is unimaginatively current. Alvarez and Cody would have done better to keep the story set in the early ‘80’s, where at least they could have derived some period humor.

          Having become bored by the appearance of the third or fourth blood-licking ghoul, it occurred to me that in both this and the original Evil Dead the three females are the first to turn bad. Seems that Diablo Cody missed another opportunity here, as this story can easily be read as a fantasy of male dread of certain womanly bodily functions. “Don’t trust anything that bleeds for three days and doesn’t die,” goes the old saying, which might as well apply to demonic possessions of permanent and monthly types. When it comes to some remakes, even regurgitated oatmeal can look good by comparison.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Shadow of a Context

India (Mia Wasikowska) confronts her past in Stoker.

«« Stoker. Written by Wentworth Miller & Erin Cressida Wilson. Directed by Chan-Wook Park. 

         

Where you come from doesn’t necessarily define who you are, but it helps. Case in point: Chan-Wook Park’s Stoker, a psycho-sexual thriller that follows in the footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). I haven’t seen any of Korean-born Park’s other films, but I’m told they are erotic and stylized, with scissors usually featured as instruments of murder. Sure enough, the shears are unsheathed in Stoker, as are Park’s penchants for fancy, computer-assisted transitions. What’s wrong with this film has less to do with what it has than what it lacks.

          Like Shadow of a Doubt, Stoker is about a young woman (Mia Wasikowska) who is discomfited by the arrival of a long-lost relative. Here, uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) comes to live with India and her mother (Nicole Kidman) after the accidental death of her father (Dermot Mulroney). Charlie comes on as worldly and dripping with erotic menace, like a sexualized version of her missing father. He’s also strangely solicitous of the approval of his niece. India soon discovers that Uncle Charlie isn’t what he seems, though what she does with that knowledge is more bizarre and perverse than Hitchcock could have gotten away with in ‘43.

          One can’t fault Park for his classic inspiration. (According to IMDB, he decided to make films after seeing Vertigo.) Nor is his cast---with Wasikowska and Kidman filling in after Carey Mulligan and Jodie Foster left the project—anything like second-string. He dresses up Wasikowska a bit too much like Wednesday from The Addams Family, or perhaps more to the point, like a Korean schoolgirl. And sure, Goode’s teasing grin is creepy in the wrong way, like a man who is positive he can talk a mother and daughter into a kinky threesome. There’s a tone of indefinite dread that gets monotonous, but at least it’s consistent.

          The problem with Stoker is a general emptiness at its core. Park, who was born and educated in South Korea, has no particular feel for the affluent Connecticut places and people he depicts here. In apparent compensation, he presents it as precious and over-designed, a version of American life much like a Restoration Hardware catalog. I was tempted to watch the credits for the order numbers.

          How could it have been otherwise? Foreign directors are often brought on to Hollywood projects because they’re expected to bring some visionary quality with them. But aside from how to dance Gangnam style, nobody would expect some guy who spent most of his life in Bridgeport or Willimantic to have any insight into the psychosexual mores of Pyeongchang-dong district in Jongno-gu, South Korea. We might expect such a feat only if we see this American life as “default” culture, as something universally accessible. Trouble is, US culture—including US sexual culture—is every bit as idiosyncratic as anyplace else’s. And some things don’t translate easily. 

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

          

Fifty Shades of Wicked

Franco shows Kunis the way in Oz the Great and Powerful.

««« Oz the Great and Powerful. Written by Mitchell Kapner & David Lindsay-Abaire, based on the novels by L. Frank Baum. Directed by Sam Raimi. 

Maybe I need a brain, but I like Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful. And apparently so do audiences, who gave it a crushing victory over Jack the Giant Slayer in last week’s fable-on-fable duel at the box office.

          L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) wrote 17 books set in his fantasy world of Oz, so you’d think his work would be a prime candidate to become a Hollywood franchise. Trouble is, Baum’s books no longer present the definitive version of their own universe. Instead, multiple generations of kids grew up watching the 1939 Victor Fleming adaptation of just one of his books, The Wizard of Oz—on TV, usually around Thanksgiving time. Now Oz is synonymous with Dorothy, ruby slippers and cowardly lions, regardless of the fact that Baum created dozens of other memorable heroines and villains. Try a Baum reboot and you invite the wrath of millions of fanatical fans, ready to lay waste to sacrilege as utterly as a swarm of flying monkeys.

          Until now, the only reimagining of the Baum universe that has seen serious traction is Stephen Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995), the bestselling novel that gave rise to a Broadway musical. Maguire’s decidedly womynish take on the back story of the Wicked Witch, Glinda, and the Wizard seems to have primed some of our feminist sisters to expect something similar of Raimi’s film (see, for instance, here: jezebel.com/5989268). But of course, there was nothing particularly feminist about the 1939 movie. True, L. Frank Baum himself had convincing suffragist credentials. But as we already have established, Oz belongs to Judy Garland now, not Baum.

          Instead, Great and Powerful offers the origin story of the Wizard himself, aka Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs (James Franco). We meet him first here as a two-bit carnival showman in 1905 Kansas, bilking audiences out of coin with his low-rent spectacles. He’s also something of a womanizer, which gets him in trouble with the circus strong man (Tim Holmes). Lighting out for safer pastures, he flies his balloon into the path of a plains twister—and ends up you-know-where.

          He finds an Oz as politically polarized as the 113^th US Congress. The three resident witches, sisters Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and Glinda (Michelle Williams) are locked in a death struggle over control of Emerald City, each accusing the other of poisoning their father. More out of hope than evidence of his magic skills, they take the stranger as a great wizard, savior of the kingdom. After seeing the Emerald City’s treasury (lots of gold but, alas, no emeralds…), Oscar is in no hurry to correct them. Theodora in particular falls pretty hard for Oscar’s smooth carnival patter—with wicked consequences for all.

          With its three powerful women executives aching for a man to come and settle their troubles, this fairy tale is admittedly a disaster from a feminist perspective. No doubt, Great and Powerful plays into certain modern anxieties of the post-feminist culturescape—namely, the fear that women’s empowerment, despite its power suits and sensible shoes, just isn’t satisfying enough. Indeed, how else to explain the continued existence of Cosmopolitan magazine, or the success of Fifty Shades of Grey? If you bet whether many successful women out there—if not witches, exactly—would give it all up for Franco’s kind of handsome, shit-eating grin, you’d win that wager.

          Dig a little deeper, however, and the news isn’t all bad for feminists. After all, if the witches’ attraction to Oscar represents some repressed desire for male control, then it’s a pretty weak version of patriarchal power. Smoke and mirrors, actually—the kind that the heavenly Michelle Williams, as the good witch Glinda, winks at and permits to exist.

          But the most inconvenient truth is that we need Raimi’s phallocentric story now more than we need another Tangled, Brave or similar tale of girls’ empowerment. Newsflash: there’s no shortage of strong, plucky heroines in Hollywood anymore. Quite the opposite, girls kick butt just about every mainstream fantasy these days, big screen or small. Meanwhile, one big question remains unanswered after the feminist revolution: what does it really mean to be a man today, if the traditional models of protector and provider have become not just outmoded, but offensive? In Great and Powerful, we see Oscar learn that becoming a man isn’t about being great and powerful at all, but instead something very basic, yet ultimately more fulfilling. It’s a story that the current generation of young males, who are disconnected and restive and falling behind their sisters in virtually every measure of educational achievement, need to hear.

          Not that kids need to be consciously aware of any of this. Refreshingly, Raimi (Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, Drag Me to Hell) eschews cynical Dreamworks-style triangulation between adults and kids. There’s no smug double entendre in the script by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire, no knowing cultural references meant to bemuse hipsters and sail over the heads of children (aside from allusions to the 1939 movie, of course…). This a kid’s movie that is happy to be just that. And that’s not nothing. 

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Go Forth and Multiply

Terah Maher ad infinitum in Choros.

«««« Choros. Film by Michael Langan & Terah Maher. Available for streaming at http://langanfilms.com/choros.html.

«««« Solipsist. Directed by Andrew Huang. Available for streaming at http://vimeo.com/37848135.

Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Likewise, many film critics complain about the lack of inspiration, the dismaying sameness of mainstream American movies—yet they go on reviewing the same feature product, week after week. Entertaining as they may be, does anybody really believe that The Avengers or Wreck It Ralph represent the very best we can do? Is Jack the Giant Slayer really as imaginative as it gets?

          This week we do something about it. There are two experimental short films available now for online streaming that are well worth checking out, and they don’t even demand ten of your hard-earned bucks. In exchange for twenty-three minutes of your time, these films will 1) blow your mind, and 2) restore your faith that it’s still possible to do something truly visionary with a moving picture camera.

          Michael Langan and Terah Maher’s Choros (2011, 13 minutes) is a seductively hypnotic dance film. Using an advanced video compositing (essentially, combining multiple images into one), Langan captures 32 temporally-offset images of a dancer (Maher) as she moves to Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians”. Though the idea is simple in principle, the results are spectacular: Maher’s movements are ramified in almost sculptural fashion, pouring through postures in a way that suggests some third mode of being between stillness and movement.

          The filmmakers are well- aware of the historical legacy of their project. In the late 19^th century, Eadweard Muybridge used multiple still cameras to capture successive images of moving figures, making the world look at movement in a new way (and, in the process, presaging the new art of cinema). In 1968, Normal McLaren used conventional celluloid superimposition to make his classic Pas de Deux. The technology of McLaren’s time, however, permitted him to shoot his dancers only in black and white, with no pauses in motion, and only against a black background. Modern video compositing freed Choros of these limitations—a liberation the filmmakers wryly celebrate when they describe their film as a pas de trente-deux.

Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase"

          In an important sense, though, this film harkens not to other films, but to modernist landmarks like the Marcel Duchamp painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). Where Muybridge essentially taught his audiences to see cinematically, to give in to an illusion of movement built out of still elements, Langan and Maher follow Duchamp in envisioning a subject that is neither still nor moving, but in a fluidic state that is validly (and entrancingly) its own. As Maher’s body(ies) evoke helices, landscapes, butterflies and a thousand other fleeting forms, we begin to appreciate what she and Langan are on to here: a merging of traditional art and modern technology that multiplies the expressive power of both.

          Equally good is Andrew Huang’s astonishing Solipsist (2012, 10 minutes). A visual symphony in three movements, this combines elements of dance, costume, puppetry, video compositing and old-fashioned physical effects into a wordless poem to growth, evolution, and enlightenment. Movement one presents two dancers swaying in unison as they are gradually enveloped by a riot of vaguely organic detritus, until they become a gently undulating polyp. In movement two, worm-like, feathery organic forms swirl and pulse in an alien ocean, combining into ever more complex, baroque forms. Or are they nerve cells in a developing brain, boot-strapping their way toward consciousness? For the purposes of Huang’s theme, it hardly seems to matter whether these are dendrites in an infant’s cerebrum, or dwellers in the sub-ocean of Europa.

The dance of evolution plays on in Solipsist.

          Movement three gives us two figures on a beach, oddly aloof to each other until they merge in a surprising way (hint: think about the party scene in Donnie Darko). In each of these tableaux, Huang seems to allude to evolution and sex and development—the essential dramas of organic life—but also conjugations and conjunctions more spiritual in nature. In either case, the film seems to belie the isolation implied by its title.

          Perhaps Huang is suggesting the distinction between physicality and spirituality means not much. Or perhaps he’s just messing around with cool imagery. In any case, there’s more to marvel at and more to think about in Solipsist than in all 139 minutes of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.

          One can’t help thinking that visionaries like Langan and Huang are like the bright, quick mammals waiting for their turn during the twilight of the dinosaurs. Choros is in regular rotation on European television, but as described on Langan’s website, it is “not coming to a theater near you.” Solipsist got made after Huang raised a mere $9000 on Kickstarter.com (the budget for Tree of Life: $32 million). The multiplex may be wall-to-wall T. rexes for now, but rest assured, the asteroid is coming. 

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Cycles of Enlightenment

Mild ones on the roof of the world in The Highest Pass.

* * The Highest Pass. Written by Adam Schomer. Directed by Jon Fitzgerald. Available on Netflix.

Anyone interested in India and who enjoys Top Gear-esque road adventures should be up for Jon Fitzgerald’s The Highest Pass.

           The eponymous pass is a road in northern India that boasts the highest stretch of “motorable” pavement in the world. This is above 18,000 feet, accessed first through dizzying Indian traffic, then breathtaking landscapes that seem to threaten avalanche with every switchback. Fitzgerald documents a trip upcountry by a handful of Americans, led by Anand Mehrotra, a 27 year-old Indian guru and avid biker. Awkwardly, most of Anand’s followers hunger not just for spiritual development, but for basic experience on motorcycles. The spectacle this film presents—of two-wheel novices risking their necks in a country where road rules seem optional—raises issues far more basic than spiritual enlightenment. As in, does anybody get killed?

          Largely told through the eyes of Schomer, this adventure is a purely elective affair. No one is delivering life-saving medicine to remote villages here. Instead, the entourage of LA-based model/actors, stunt men and graphic designers seek to find their “higher selves”, to step outside the trap of their constrained, materially comfortable lives. Anand himself suggested the trip, apparently in direct defiance of an astrological “prophecy” that he would die in an accident at the age of 27. Leading his pack of mild ones to elevations usually visited only by airliners, the smooth-talking guru dispenses the equivalent of spiritual comfort food to his followers as they bounce off truck fenders and gasp for oxygen. More than once, Fitzgerald and Schomer hint that Anand is nuts.

          On an obvious level, The Highest Pass seems like a over-produced vacation video. It takes some cynicism—but not much—to make fun of these guys, waxing karmic in their Maui Jim shades. Listening to them go on about “powering through adversity” as virtually the entire population of rural India “powers through” adversity they’ll never imagine is hard to take. But let’s be gracious: stunt men and model/actors are entitled to their shares of enlightenment too. While Schomer and his crew might seem like spiritual tourists, there are far, far worse kinds of tourists to be in this world. It may be painful to hear them talk, but the stunning Himalayan vistas captured by Dean Mitchell would be worth it, even with the sound turned off.

          The Highest Pass strays into questionable territory when the expedition reaches a pass blocked by a June snowstorm. Normally this would entail a two day delay. But Anand, who seems strangely impatient for a guru, insists on traversing the pass immediately, pressuring the Indian road crew to plow farther, faster. The bikers take on a degree of risk in this, which is their prerogative. But nobody seems to have asked whether it’s fair to the road workers, let alone anybody else following them down a prematurely-opened road, to expose them to increased risk of avalanche. Never mind karmic liberation—what about moral hazard?

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro