The Terrifying Sincerity of David Lynch

Over break I tore through Dennis Lim's new book, David Lynch: The Man From Another Place, the
strongest single volume on Lynch I have read. Lim's accomplishment — a vivid yet concise study of Lynch's oeuvre, one that reads like a novel — is most impressive against the excess and, I'd say, stagnation of contemporary Lynch studies. You should read it; it's available on Amazon like everything else.

Lim spends some time elucidating Lynch's treatment of 'the uncanny,' as others have before him. I am one of them, I guess, though barely anyone has read the essay I wrote almost two years ago for Cornell's Kitsch Magazine (certainly not Lim) — which is perhaps as it should be, since it's rough in spots and could use a serious trimming. But I gave it another look, upon finishing Lim's book, and I think I contributed something novel, at least interesting in my analysis of how Mulholland Drive presciently invokes terror, specifically 9/11, a date bookended by the film's premiere and NYC release.

That section of the essay bears the subtitle, "an uncanny connection to 9/11," and can be read by scrolling down a few (5) facile opening paragraphs on Kitsch's Wordpress site, which I never before linked to on this blog. Written for the Spring 2014 issue of Kitsch Magazine, "The Terrifying Sincerity of David Lynch" can be read, warts and all, here.

Pretentiousness With Purpose

I’m not saying I’m pretentious, but I can understand the misperception. All this babble on form, “being” and international art cinema, to what end? Why can’t I just enjoy movies for what they are and end a review with a thumbs up or thumbs down? Why the need for this loose syntax and suspension of decisive judgment? And why am I writing with the assumption that you’ve been following my column up to this point?

I’ll accept the last question as a potential problem of mine, but I know, from website analytics and reader emails (or lack thereof), that my audience is slim and composed mostly of friends who also have the time to ask questions of aesthetics. So if I write in an excessively familiar style, The Daily Sun Arts section will survive to see another day. Ya feel.

But the other questions are game, since shouldn’t criticism seek to clarify and not further obscure? Deconstruction, which I have been lately exposed to yet again, says no, but let’s limit our discussion here to the kind of cultural writing you’d find in newspapers, magazines and blogs, not academic journals. Is a lyrical tendency in criticism allowed, or should a critic’s prose seek to explain, determine and solve?

Accessible criticism, especially the sorts you’ll find online, has sided with the latter camp as of late. Most reviews dish out plot summary, with requisite compliments or swipes at the acting, script and image-prettiness, and perhaps end with a note about the film’s sociopolitical relevance. The pieces that ‘go long’ (as in long-form) trace a film’s symbolism and propose one-to-one meanings for choice shots, objects and character actions.

The films of Christopher Nolan and David Fincher are exhaustively analyzed along these lines, but as much as I’d like to gender this kind of discourse along ‘white male’ lines, it also thrives in popular progressive criticism. Critiques that claim to uncover a racist or sexist subconscious to mainstream films often raise good points but move so far away from the text at hand or zoom in so close on one aspect, sans context, that they overlook a perhaps resolute, invigorating ambiguity. What if a film embodies not just one stance — say, feminist or anti-feminist — but many of them at the same time? Is this not the age of dismantling binaries?

In her 1996 piece on Pulp Fiction, “Cool Cynicism,” bell hooks set the standard, to my limited knowledge at least, for how to write intersectional film criticism. She uses colloquial language to sneak in innovative theses, like when she starts a paragraph saying, “Tarantino’s films are the ultimate in sexy cover-ups of very unsexy mind-fuck.” That sentence may not make sense when you first read it, but it does if you take your time poring over it and, crucially, reading her supporting evidence.

bell hooks practices a form of criticism veering on poetry, and it is that poetic spirit, and with it an amorphous form, that separates intelligent analysis from superlative, risk-taking work. Yet isn’t poetry kind of antithetical to criticism? Poetry keeps its cards close to the chest, only admitting what it aims to say if the reader focuses, contemplates and re-reads. Which brings me to my central question today: Must a piece of criticism be read once to be appreciated, if not understood?

Methinks those who would say no would also be reluctant to revisit a film that has a reputation, in any way, as difficult. I have not had the chance to review Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice yet, but if I did I would definitely see it once more, maybe twice before attempting to unlock it. I am in the midst of an honor’s thesis on cinema, and repeated looks at certain Thai, French and Iranian selections have divulged details, be they plastic or political, that has increased my respect for these filmmakers a thousand fold. But while I hope to offer some coherent insight on these artistic subtleties, I also shy away from ascribing definitive explanations, opting for a twisty-turny style of prose that may be driving you mad on this very page.

A poetic tendency drives practically all the best critics, from bell hooks to Roger Ebert. “The world as processed by the mind, with finally only the bright bits magnetized by emotion remaining to flash against darkness,” is how Geoffrey O’Brien, a published poet in his own right, describes the sieved reality of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which is no stranger to charges of obscurantism. Manny Farber, one of the most distinct and byzantine voices in the history of film criticism, offers the following when praising the “underground films” of such old Hollywood directors as Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks 1918: “In the films of these hard-edged directors can be found the unheralded ripple of physical experience, the tiny morbidly life-worn detail which the visitor to a strange city finds springing out at every step.”

Do these quotes make sense? Not in any clean, easy sense. But they preserve something attractive and — this is most important — intrinsic to the films under scrutiny, and so testify to their merit. In her treatise On Beauty and Being Just, the endearingly esoteric critic Elaine Scarry writes, “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.” Criticism will often fail to match the beauty from which it is inspired, but it should at least keep the wheel of appreciation and close attention ever turning. There is, after all, no community when every critic aims to to have the last word.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun.

87th Academy Awards Breakdown

The Oscars matter insofar as without them, fewer people would have seen or at least have the privilege to consciously ignore small, human-sized movies like Boyhood, Whiplash and Still Alice. Or so the thinking goes; a world where works of art are not pitted against each other in competition, where the long months of campaigning and op-ed defaming makes each final victory feel more than a little pyrrhic, could very well be more egalitarian and receptive to intimate, intrinsic artistry — but that is not the world in which we live.

For better or worse, Sunday’s 87th Academy Awards reflected the conflicted state of things in America today, with every forward-pushing acceptance speech tempered by a nostalgic spectacle or tone-deaf joke. There was, as per usual, no lack of self-congratulation.

Birdman fits the Best Picture profile, given the film’s insular regard for itself, which aligns perfectly with the Academy’s. Along with other recent winners The Artist and Argo, it offered Hollywood the chance to stop, light a smoke and think, “Aren’t we great?” The ceremony’s low points belabored this self-love, stretching the broadcast’s runtime to the longest in eight years, while the brightest moments shined past any one film or celebrity to illuminate, as only an awards show can, a myriad of political issues.

The low points, I am sorry to say, almost always involved the affable, seemingly perfect host, Neil Patrick Harris. He started strong with a song and dance number that ran through movie history and brought Into the Woods star Anna Kendrick on stage for harmonies. A cynical Jack Black jumped on stage to rant, in his own singsongy way, about the omnipresence of superheroes, “formulaic scripts” and, reaching for his smartphone, “screens in our jeans” in movie culture today, to much applause.

Without such an irascible counterpoint for the rest of the show, Harris struck a tone at once overly chipper and flippant. For the whole show, Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer had to go along with a gag where Harris locked his “predictions” in a box that, when revealed, proved how the whole show is predictable, scripted or just ill suited to three-hour joke set-ups. His banter punned on Reese Witherspoon’s name or the furry ball dress of Dana Perry, just after the Best Documentary Short Subject winner opened up about her son’s suicide. His Birdman/Whiplash parody, where he took the stage in tighty whities to Miles Teller’s accompaniment on drums, displayed his most obvious assets without hiding, at least to awards season addicts like me, that Fred Armisen and Kristen Bell made the same joke at the Independent Spirit Awards the night before.

What this show never fails to deliver are the moments of unscripted awkward that, against all the micromanaged rehearsals leading up to it, scramble the evening’s gloss. I should disclose that the so-called disasters, like John Travolta’s garbling of Idina Menzel as “Adele Dazeem” last year, are my favorite parts of any live broadcast — anyone who follows up how embarrassing Travolta was with the decree that “he should never be up there again!” is no fun. Thankfully the show’s producers are fun, and reunited Menzel with Travolta, who after being introduced as “Glom Gazingo” petted the Frozen singer’s cheek as if he were Romeo.

It was the creepiest, most GIF-ready snippet of the night, though equally weird was when Terrence Howard took the stage to introduce Whiplash, The Imitation Game and Selma. Midway through, he paused to say, “Our next film … is amazing. I’m blown away myself right now,” before reading the synopsis not to Selma, but The Imitation Game. Drunk off emotion or some other drug, Howard could barely convey his enthusiasm for the other injustice-themed also-ran in the Best Picture race and not the good one. It felt like anything could have happened during his minute on stage; Imagine if Travolta just wandered, out of focus, in the background.

While Tegan & Sara, The Lonely Island, Questlove, Mark Mothersbaugh and Will Arnett hit peak goofiness during The LEGO Movie’s “Everything Is Awesome,” it was John Legend and Common’s performance of “Glory,” from Selma, that provided the moral center for the night. With lyrics evoking both the march to Montgomery and the Ferguson protests and a grand backdrop of Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, “Glory” struck a chord with the audience, bringing star David Oyelowo and Chris Pine to tears. It’s easy to be cynical about such emotional displays at awards shows, but the way Legend brought Dolby Theatre and viewing parties across America to silence during his final solo cut through all the noise to contemplate the seemingly irreconcilable divide that exists in our country, the Academy most certainly included, to this day. Lady Gaga’s Sound of Music medley, though impressive, felt too sweetly nostalgic after such a conscious musical statement

When “Glory” rightly won Best Original Song after, Common and Legend were one of many to unashamedly marry thank-yous with impassioned political statements. Common pleaded for equality and freedom of expression via mention of the Charlie Hebdo and Hong Kong protests, while Legend stressed the disproportionate amount of incarcerated black men in prison. Best Documentary winner Laura Poitras, with her Edward Snowden-starring Citizenfour, urged awareness of the surveillance state, while Patricia Arquette, who won Best Supporting Actress for Boyhood, stumped for gender equality as Meryl Streep, flanked by a cheering Jennifer Lopez, pointed and hollered in approval. Graham Moore, Best Adapted Screenplay winner for The Imitation Game, seized everyone’s breath as he confessed to attempting suicide 18 years ago. He followed this harrowing anecdote with the hope that his presence on stage will inspire those younger than him, who feel like they do not belong, to “stay weird” and “stay different.” It was a powerful speech.

The thing about Graham Moore winning, though, is that he wrote an awful script. “Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine,” is a line The Imitation Game trailer holds dear and the movie itself repeats, out of the conviction that historical characters speak as if composing their memoirs. Share that quote on the Dolby stage, however, and it naturally, indisputably belongs. The Oscars so rarely award real art because they, themselves, are not art, and they don’t need to be. The most memorable moments are inspirational, rousing and morally good. Great movies are rarely any of those things, and never all three at once, but “the movies,” the mystique of Hollywood that the Academy and theater chains sell, is, always.

It is that feeling of uplift, if oh so fleeting, that jettisons Eddie Redmayne’s light track record and The Theory of Everything’s deadness from my mind when he took the stage for Best Actor. His youth, his recent marriage and his humility made for an infectiously adorable speech, which filled the room I watched from with high-pitched “Awww”s. Julianne Moore deserved Best Actress not just for her work in Still Alice but for her unparalleled career, yet her speech was what we wanted to hear for its focus on love, family and community. The work itself has no hold on the rapture of the Oscar moment — before all the lights and cameras, only gratitude, conviction and a manageable dose of human weakness thrive.

Birdman’s second-half sweep — in Best Cinematography, Original Screenplay, Directing and Picture — introduced the manic, musky humor of the film into the speeches, which did not vibe well with the prevailing Oscar ethos. I have already expressed my unfavorable opinion of the winning film, which I think is little more than clever. Boyhood and The Grand Budapest Hotel were the rare masterpieces to actually make it into Best Picture consideration, which makes their loss more painful, since cinephiles more often than not revere their favorites in closet-sized shrines, without much notice from the outer, louder world.

But Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman’s director, said something that resonated with me during his acceptance speech, which went as follows: “Ego loves competition, because for someone to win, someone has to lose. But the paradox is true art, true individual expression, as all the work of these incredible fellow filmmakers, can’t be compared, can’t be labeled, can’t be defeated, because they exist, and our work will be judged, as always, by time.” I can’t say I think his film, with its Justin Bieber references and inexplicable gender politics, will survive that ultimate test, but I thank him for taming that ego this awards season has fed so well, for just a moment, to remind us of the absurdity of this whole artless enterprise.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun.

Beyond Outrage

It goes without saying that the Sony hack — in all likelihood North Korea’s response to the Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy The Interview — and the Charlie Hebdo massacre vary in the severity of their crimes. But in both cases, strong and articulate progressive voices have countered all the calls to defend “freedom of expression” and #JeSuisCharlie’s by criticizing the content of the debateably satirical works themselves. Adrian Hong wrote a popular piece for The Atlantic titled, “North Korea: Not Funny,” while many on the left, in publications like Vox, Slate and Jacobin, criticized the content and motives of Charlie Hebdo. For The Hooded Utilitarian, Jacob Canfield said Charlie Hebdo’s “cartoons often represent a certain, virulently racist brand of French xenophobia.” These are well-meaning, well-informed lines of argument that raise issues we should be considering in 2015.

While in theory I should consign these critiques, I do not, because theory has no claim on comedy. While watching The Interview, I laughed a good many times, even as the critic in me groaned this has got to be Franco’s worst performance to date. While decoding the seemingly offensive cartoons via the blog Understanding Charlie Hebdo, which provides translation and context, I did not laugh, necessarily, but I understood how the caricaturists effectively put air quotes around their most egregious creations, often lampooning the perspective of their country’s serious and seriously racist National Front party. The politically engaged French citizen, knowing the context, could find these cartoons humorous, because their inherent shock value can catalyze in said person a needed second or two of reflection during his or her average, busy day.

Because if there is one thing art does that political criticisms of it too often forget, it provokes a response from the viewer — an emotional, physical, automatic response that imbues that art, no matter its quality, with an individual significance. So I may laugh at The Interview, a stupid film, and not be considered callous to the suffering of North Koreans or — worse of all! — a bad critic. It is a superficial, irresponsible movie with many many flaws, but it succeeded, for me, as passable entertainment. To judge The Interview as a failure because it does not convince its viewers to “do something to help change this odious regime and bring about human rights for North Koreans,” as Hong does, is to freight it with an Oscar-baiting importance that would induce fatal cases of eye-rolling in its target audience.

But I am grateful Hong wrote that Atlantic piece. While I may disagree with the parameters he chose for critiquing a particular film, he brings a far more significant issue — the plight of innocent North Koreans — to the attention of many. For every thousand Facebook shares fueled by schadenfreude, there has got to be one person who read Hong’s story and felt a pang of profound moral outrage, worth exploring more and taking action against. That positive outcome is something only the popularity, and stupidity, of The Interview made possible. Whether Franco and Rogen respected or trashed their film’s sensitive subject matter, the media will be there, assuming its post-Twitter role as a spontaneous and widely visible corrective to the sins of popular culture.

For better or worse, this chatter only crescendos when the object of passion is a challenging, thrilling piece of bona fide art. It is for this reason that no one is talking about The Theory of Everything or The Imitation Game, with their spectacularly unearned denouements,and why we cannot stop arguing over Selma and American Sniper. Pitted by opportunists as ideological enemies, the latter two films both complicate their heroic narratives through changes of perspective (in Selma, Coretta Scott King rightly accuses her husband of something he does not fess up to) and uncomfortable pauses (as a V.A. psychiatrist questions the historically efficient sniper Chris Kyle, the camera lingers on the soldier’s face as he conclusively denies any feeling of regret). Neither film is totally devoid of sentimentality, but both provoke thought through emotion, ensuring that any moral misgivings will fester and leech.

I know there are some fine, smart people out there who will disagree with my praise for Selma and American Sniper especially, and that they could pursue more productive routes of attack than “Selma gets LBJ wrong!” or “That Chris Kyle was a liar.” That is how these things go, as they should. But it does us little good to go on about what A gets wrong about X or Y, because a great film’s politics should be difficult to reduce to binaries and viral polemic. Find a recruitment poster if you’re looking for a call to action, and go outside if you’re looking for facts. Emotion remains the only barometer of truth, so long as that emotion stubbornly resists translation.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun.

Dear White People Review

Dear White People

Directed by Justin Simien

Released in 2014

The title is what it is just to get you talking, and hopefully paying. Dear White People is a far more diplomatic, unguarded and ideologically adrift movie than its name or the thousands of defensive (and racist) comments below its YouTube trailer may imply.

This movie arrives at a time when issues of social justice, and the intersection of those issues, has finally, it seems, reached the mainstream, and writer-director Justin Simien packs so much of this political zeitgeist into his debut that it can be said to be, sight unseen, The Movie for Our Time. But while some of its strands wobble or else lapse into polemics, Dear White People assumes a freewheeling, even self-effacing pose in the face of this responsibility, for it knows it is a thoroughly college movie, in both subject and style.

In this film, the world entirely exists on the campus of Winchester University, a sprawl of gothic architecture and manicured landscape bound to be familiar to any Ivy League student. The student body is a white one, with exceptions, of course. We follow four of these exceptions: Biracial activist and filmmaker Sam White (Tessa Thompson); Troy (Brandon P. Bell), suave president of the predominantly black Armstrong Parker House and son of the school’s dean (Dennis Haysbert, excellent); Colandera “Coco” Chanders (Teyonah Parris), a South Side girl with an outsize personality she is pitching to a reality TV producer; and budding writer Lionel Higgens (Tyler James Williams), who is timidly gay and sports a gnarly afro that, in his words, doubles as “a black hole for white people’s fingers.”

Sam hosts the titular radio show, where she addresses the pale majority with such proclamations as, “Dating a black person to piss off your parents is a form of racism.” On top of everything else she is doing, like making the whiteface satire “Rebirth of a Nation” for her film major, Sam runs for president of the Armstrong Parker House on the platform to “Bring Black Back,” though she perhaps has ulterior motives because Troy is an old flame. Surprisingly, she wins, and her outspoken, self-segregating reforms exile the bratty Kurt Fletcher (Kyle Gallner), who is naturally the university’s president son, as well as the soft-spoken Lionel and lead to mounting conflict with the administration, her peers and eventually herself.

But enough of plot — Dear White People elaborates itself more through minute human interactions than through its overarching plot, which it only debatably has. All the aforementioned characters have face time with one another, sometimes in lecture halls and other times in bed. In case the poster and trailer have not made it clear, this is a sexy movie, with attractive people filmed under expressive, not necessarily realistic lighting set-ups. Simien has an eye and ear for sensitive interaction, which notably does not survive in the political arena, even on a college campus.

If this film gets at one of its issues with something resembling clarity, it’s not race, though the treatment of it is revealing and often hilarious. (Like when a huddle of black students browbeats a movie theater cashier over Tyler Perry stereotypes, the film sympathizes with their pent-up frustrations but pokes fun at the misdirection of their discourse.) What Dear White People handles with grace is the interrelated question of identity, and how with all the options and tolerance we cherish today, that question remains daunting. Through wardrobe and hairstyle changes, Sam and Coco take pains to present a truthful version of themselves to the world. Troy struggles to find a balance between appeasing his father and honing his own assertive voice, though that tension is quite clichéd, now isn’t it.

It is Lionel where much of the film’s, and undoubtedly Simien’s, sympathies lie, for he is the most resistant to classification. Like a ronin of questionable skill, Lionel wanders from the dean’s office to Armstrong Parker to the campus newspaper to Pastiche, the humor magazine, victim of Kurt’s homophobic hazing at the latter location and receiving little empathy at the rest. The film forfeits points for veracity by presenting each of these locations as walled-off institutions with strict barriers for entry when in actuality, I don’t know, campus institutions are looser than that, I think? (How else did I get in this paper all those years ago?) Institutions can be as lackadaisical as the people working for them, but a stylized film like this has to cut corners somewhere. So against his stuck-up, careerist or else inhumanly confident peers, Lionel stands out as a relatable and unpredictable work in progress.

Because Simien is black and his movie stars a multi-racial ensemble cast and ends with a race riot (here, in response to a student party featuring blackface), the parlor game of influences will draw us to Spike Lee and, specifically, Do the Right Thing. The comparison is apt, since both movies track multiple characters that encounter prejudice, in its many forms, and alternately ignore, laugh at or lash out against it. But as Sam’s boyfriend guilts her into remembering, “Your favorite director is Bergman but you tell everyone Spike Lee.” Indeed, you can see some Ingmar Bergman in the way two lovers’ faces overlap and are draped in shadow during a post-coital scene, as well as some Wes Anderson in the font and shot symmetry and some Kubrick, circa Barry Lyndon, in the painterly frames that capture ennui at Pastiche headquarters.

There are even a few times when the camera zooms in, slowly and during innocuous moments, like when Troy and his girlfriend (Brittany Curran) scale a set of stairs. That’s a move out of the Robert Altman playbook, another director mentioned here by name, and I’m not sure it’s a wise one. In fact, with Satie, Swan Lake and “Für Elise” on the soundtrack, Simien indulges in the kind of on-the-nose music and visual mixtapes you’d expect from a precocious college student. But for some reason I like that approach, because it’s honest and fitting for the setting. Like the characters in his movie, Simien is still working through his influences to emerge with a voice of his own. That voice right now may be more prolix than clear, but it’s exciting for what it’s trying to say as well as how it’s saying it, and in the world of American independent film, you can ask for little more.

3.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Last Days in Vietnam Review

Last Days in Vietnam

Directed by Rory Kennedy

Released in 2014

There is no such thing as a good war, but good people fight in the worst of them. The Vietnam War has never been mistaken for one of the good ones — not then and not now. Yet it is easy to conflate the war’s negative legacies, which include My Lai, Agent Orange and, of course, our country’s defeat, with the worth, or lack thereof, of those who served. Last Days in Vietnam, a clear-eyed and unusually gripping documentary opening at Cinemapolis today, makes the case for the American forces who risked tribunals, not to mention their own lives, in order to evacuate as many South Vietnamese civilians as possible on those last two chaotic days of April 1975.

The film, directed and produced by Rory Kennedy, is a rather straightforward talking heads affair, where you don’t even have time to fumble with a stopwatch before, blah, there’s Kissinger grumbling before his millionth camera. Good thing the film gets him out of the way early on so it can spend the rest of the time with the boots who were on the ground of Saigon when it fell. These men, like Army Colonel Stuart Herrington and Republic of Vietnam Navy Captain Kiem Do, recount the events of the evacuation and little more, which is all it takes for an enlightening narrative of morality during those most liminal hours between war and peace.

Over 16mm footage of the frantic city and maps animating the North Vietnamese Army’s push through Da Nang and toward Saigon, voices of the veterans interviewed frame their “terrible moral dilemma” in stark terms. Would Nixon boost U.S. air power to save them? Could Americans save anyone other than their own? Could they even do that? A target of derision for the first third of this 98-minute film is Graham Martin, the last U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, who was seen as “skittish” and aloof of the imminent defeat, and very real physical peril, his people would soon suffer.

As a sign of Last Days in Vietnam’s disinterest in demonizing, with-us-or-against-us rhetoric, especially against those dead and not present to defend themselves, Ambassador Martin develops a dimension or two. We learn that he lost his only son in the war, which is cause for one acquaintance to observe, “One becomes pretty invested in the country.”

Right before Operation Frequent Wind — the airlift of 7700 Americans and South Vietnamese from the U.S. embassy and other points in Saigon, and the specific focus of this film — commenced, Martin pointed to an old tamarind tree in the embassy’s parking lot and said it was “as steadfast as America’s commitment to Vietnam.” The irony that the tree had to be razed to allow helicopters to land and Americans to flee was not lost on him, since he at first stubbornly refused. But obviously he changed his mind, and not just about one tree: One colleague says, “The evacuation of Vietnamese [as opposed to only Americans] happened because Graham Martin wanted it to happen.”

Ambassador Martin bucked orders from the White House in order to see that those who aided America would escape persecution, and he did so with a valiant and orderly cache of soldiers, pilots and sailors committed to this humanitarian cause. The film tells the oral history with more punch than words here might, but it is imperative to mention the wound Colonel Herrington reopens when arriving at the part of the story where they left behind 420 civilians at the embassy without so much as a goodbye. Like Oskar’s final words in Schindler’s List, Herrington’s remorse for “so serious and deep a betrayal” cuts deep and contrasts the film’s narrative of success against all the loss and failure surrounding.

Last Days in Vietnam demands little from the viewer aside from a willingness to learn. If that sounds in the least bit like eating your vegetables, consider the entertainment value of Argo, apply almost all of that to this film, and then remember that this one is a documentary produced for PBS. So, basically: It’s better than you might think. It unfolds a complicated story in chronological order without much effort figuring out what it all ‘meant,’ and so makes it simple. But that simplicity suits these events well, since unthinking heroism is the only genuine kind.

Final Verdict:

3.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Education Through Exploitation

Courtesy of Nils Axen

If empathy is a sorely lacking human virtue, and if “movies are like a machine that generates empathy,” as Roger Ebert once said, then why does a Hollywood movie diet leave us so empathetically barren?

I long took it at face value that ‘the movies’ — the popular, American ones — reflected life in a truthful fashion, bad parts included. For the ‘bad parts’ find attention and awards at the Oscars, where a certain fusion of trite liberalism and belittling sentimentalism thrives. Every year I watch a number of new films that claim to engage with ongoing issues, racism being number one (because this is America). The Help, for instance, would very much like its bourgeois viewers to think that they now know what true racism is, when really its plot boils down to a binary conflict between good and evil that precipitates a best-selling memoir by Emma Stone.

But can a preachy Oscar-movie do good? If it falls short of subtle artistry, can it wield its cudgel of enlightenment toward open, discursive ends? Last year gave us an abundance of awards-caliber films about black American life, such as Fruitvale Station, The Butler and 12 Years a Slave, which all happen to be helmed by black directors. I’m still arguing with myself over the greatness I saw in The Butler, where the story pits an obsequious but hardy breadwinner — Forest Whitaker’s White House butler Cecil Gaines — against his militant, proudly black son, played by David Oyelowo. That dialectic, and the ennobling and tear-jerking way it resolves at the end, flirts with the profound on its own, and it is the rare melodrama to take a firm stand on politics, only after taking a hard look at the pros and cons to both sides.

Yet I worry if I praise the film because it flatters some white middle-class-ness in me, and then I worry if I should be worrying. I recall my initial reaction, which I shared with a friend after watching it, was that I learned about 1960s civil right history from that film. I had known about sit-ins, Freedom Riders and the Black Panther party since middle school, but I did not grasp their do-or-die importance until seeing three-dimensional characters enact them and quarrel over their implications. Part of this belated education no doubt owes to my largely homogenous areas of residence, yet I imagine that, for some few younger black viewers, too, the film filled an embarrassing gap not of information but of empathy for the brave players in this era of history.

The same can be said of 12 Years a Slave, only more so. It’s not a perfect movie but it is one of the few truly necessary ones, for it renders a pre-cinematic American institution in all its aloof and unceasing savagery. I was angry to find the film such a revelation, for how surprised I felt that slavery was, indeed, this bad and that my public education up to that point had failed to drive that point home on its own. That’s white guilt, I guess, and no doubt the film seeks to wring that out. By tearing a free man, Solomon Northup, from comfortable suburbia, where he kisses his children before bed, and abandoning him, alone, onto a plantation to fend for himself, the script does not force identification with a lifelong slave but with a man whose vague, given notion of freedom reflects that of the viewer, be him black or white or brown.

12 Years a Slave or The Butler should age well, since they already take place in the past, but it can be fascinating to see how Hollywood addressed systemic problems in problematic times. A week ago, Cornell Cinema screened 1968’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, inaugurating a semester-long series on Blaxploitation. In her introduction, Prof. Cheryl Finley, history of art, clarified that this Oscar-winning film directed by Stanley Kramer does not qualify as “Blaxploitation” — it’s too middlebrow, too restrained, too Hollywood for that.

But it’s an incredibly valuable text, more so than its creators likely intended. That is not to dismiss its superficial, Hollywood pleasures: Sidney Poitier’s awkward laugh, Beah Richard’s trenchant monologue, all the expected tears and fire from Katharine Hepburn. It’s good entertainment. But it’s the story of a rich white girl who brings home a black man, so it’s clearly trying to say something. There are some delicious complications: Her shocked parents, Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, raised her a liberal; he is a rich, philanthropic, genius doctor, whose only ‘problem’ appears to be the color of his skin. It is a given that they both love each other very much.

The film builds to a treacly ending where Matt (Tracy), the girl’s father, approves of this interracial union because, as he says, “The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel, for each other.” But with stuck with me is not his words but the way he went about them. By that point, the women in the house (including Poitier’s African-American mother) needed no more convincing; the burden of change lay on the men. It is Matt who sits the two families down, tells them to “Shut up,” and gives them that climactic spiel on the power of love. It’s good writing, but it betrays the patriarchal view that the final, and right, word belongs to the man, and the white man, of course.

I’d get up in arms about this conclusion if not for the fact that it’s true, and that regardless of what Kramer intended, his film offers a remarkably clear-eyed, self-incriminating view of white privilege that is almost Frederick Wiseman-esque. I’m not sure the average viewer would come to this same conclusion — especially with the Wiseman namedrop — and the movie has fallen to legitimate claims that it’s part of the problem, not against it.

Yet there was something to Matt’s arrogance that prohibited me from swooning over his final speech. Due to the film’s construction, my political inclinations or maybe just my useless white guilt, there stood a barrier of empathy between me and this powerful man on-screen. I became aware that, to the end, the simple nuances of Matt’s behavior, not even his words, prevented others from having a voice. I thought of myself. To watch and revere a film that empathizes with the victims of history is one thing; to see the bad guys for who they really are, family men who have no clue of their own aggressions, is another education entirely.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

A Belated Introduction

I find myself in the sixth semester of writing this column, otherwise known as the sixth semester where no one knows what I’m getting at, least of all myself. I’m not one for introductions, which explains why, back in January 2012, I inaugurated this biweekly soapbox not with a “Hello” or an overview of my ideas and interests but with a piece on the divine and cinema’s attempts to depict Him/Her/It. I was proud of its title: “Oh, God.” So intellect, much serious. Wow.

I have since learned that growing up demands a bit of dumbing down. Just because I announce, “Today, I write about GOD!” or “The Kardashians and Facebook are killing America!” (my second column) does not make me a smart or challenging or worldly writer. It just makes me David Brooks — you know, smug.

It’s good to lighten up. As far as movies go, that means I temper expectations equally when seeing a holier-than-thou, Oscar-ready biopic about, say, a rodeo AIDS activist or Transformers 4. Both movies simplify, condescend and manipulate; the difference is that most critics will buy into the former, likely because of its Important subject matter, while stringing together a selection of groan-worthy puns aimed at the latter. Call a spade a spade, but if you have a raging vendetta against Michael Bay, try to think of the last time you disagreed with the Tomatometer.

Independent, self-aware, specific critical thought: That’s what I am getting at here. The enviably levelheaded film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz issued a rallying cry earlier this year with the piece, “Please, Critics, Write About The Filmmaking.” In it, he took a swipe at many of his colleagues for ignoring formal analysis in their writing; blog posts and newspaper reviews alike tend to devote more time to plot summary, box office talk or else cherry-picked sociopolitical tirades against a movie or television episode than careful attention to what makes a movie a movie (camera angles, editing patterns, mise-en-scène). It’s not that you should ignore plot, business and politics; indeed, the most valuable, responsible critics (to name just a few: Seitz, Nick Pinkerton, Tasha Robinson, Mike D’Angelo) intersect them all in vital, nuanced writing that is never just about a movie.

The best critical writing is useful, in some way. It should be entertaining, humble and even poetic, but the word I keep coming back to is “useful.” I know no greater compliment than when a friend or total stranger tells me they learned something from reading a piece of mine. I thought I was just spitting opinions here; how am I teaching anyone anything? Well, when you tether those mercurial value judgments to some notes on style, historical context and life’s Big Questions, your useless opinions begin to take on some weight — so long as you come across with humor and honesty, more human than textbook.

This is all a roundabout way to say that, for my time remaining here, I have a plan for this column. With this entry as an introduction of sorts, I plan to turn this mess of pop culture digressions and Liam Neeson appreciations into a focused, ongoing series about the act and nature of criticism. Some working titles for future columns include “How to Read a Movie,” “In Praise of the Mixed Review” and “The Wrong Way to Like Movies.” Pretty pompous headlines, I’ll admit, but one needs to appeal to the click-bait gods somehow these days. I hope to open up about the way I see things and, in the process, find the words for some personal, maybe even rigorous system of aesthetic and moral judgment. It goes without saying that I’ve yet to pin down this system myself.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about shortcomings of my writing that have thrived in this column space, among them hyperbole, preciousness and even weird bouts of anger. I aspire, now, to sanity. I’ll dig into questions that irk all art obsessives (Marrying formalist criticism with appreciation for a film’s emotional effect is a current thorn in my side) but keep in mind that, in the end, we’re all in this game of opinions together. I respect dissent and I hope you can respect those contrarian streaks of mine, too. I know that I know nothing, etc., though I hope in due time you’d be inclined to disagree.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be found at its original location here.

Snowpiercer Review

Find my review here, at The Ithaca Voice. I talk about the film's fascinating political dimension, which is both dense and inconsistent, but more than anything I try to convey Bong Joon-ho's overpowering synthesis of sound and image. A magical experience that I long to feel again.

Ida Review

I wrote my first piece for The Ithaca Voice, a new online venture founded by my good friend and former Sun colleague Jeff Stein. I am not going to copy-paste what I write there to my blog, for reasons of traffic and professionalism. But I'll provide a link of course - RIGHT HERE - and I hope you all will read it. This is a great film - 4.5/5 star material.

Still Life's Uncanny Distractions

Below is a short blog post I wrote for my Global Cinema II class. I talk about Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life (2006).

Still Life commits to such an elegiac, slow burn style of realism that it shocks us when it does not. A digital video camera pans to the right, capturing passerby against the backdrop of a river. A man drives a sledgehammer into crumbling concrete, over and over. A Brutalist façade rockets into space—wait, what? Jia Zhang-ke throws us off at these moments, when the quiet misery of his characters butts against unplanned bouts of surrealism. He pursues the “uncanny” to alienating, politicized ends.

Almost midway through the film, Jia passes the baton from Sanming, the down-and-out miner looking for his wife, to Hong, the reticent nurse looking for her husband. He does so in about the strangest way possible: Sanming rests by a riverside bannister as the camera pans left, capturing mountains about a mile away in what is now an extreme long shot, save for a bannister chassis at the bottom of the frame. A hollow din is heard on the soundtrack as a heavenly light appears over the mountain, floats over the river and then shoots out the frame. Jia’s slow-moving camera carries the motion to the next shot, where Hong stands downstream, with only river, mountains and some buildings visible in the background, and follows the sight of the UFO. The apparition jets over the mountains, where it is never seen or spoken of again, but we sure remember it. 

This random burst of sci-fi, replete with an ominous, purposeful soundtrack, tears Still Life’s world from its muted reality. Considering that Americans may be the demographic most enchanted with UFOs, this is not a bad thing. We want to make sense of that sequence, which is a productive urge so long as we do not get obsessed with banal, irrelevant topics like plausibility, origins and so on. To me, the UFO signals an environmentalist message, in that an alien creature skirts just by Earth only to disappear because all it sees is decay. If the alien was set on destruction, in keeping with sci-fi genre tradition, it sees that its job is nearly complete without any input at all. The strangeness of its appearance, to us, mirrors the strangeness of what it must be seeing, from above.

And yet the UFO’s symbolism must speak to the characters lives, as well, considering it swaps the narrative perspective in one fell swoop. The camera leaves Sanming out of frame when the UFO first appears, so we are unsure if he actually sees it or registers shock at the sight. The camera rotates around Hong, however, emphasizing that she sees it and finds it intriguing. The juxtaposition between Sanming’s resting posture, with his back to the river, and Hong’s erect, attentive stance stresses the latter’s agency. In that previous masterful, unbroken shot set on a boat, where Sanming holds liquor with outstretched hands to no one’s notice, we notice his utter ineffectiveness. His invisibility becomes almost a surreal device on its own, and so it is fitting that he vanishes from the frame when a moment of life-changing consequence occurs. Hong may be the only human who notices the spaceship, and yet she continues about her day. The matters of extraterrestrial life mean nothing to her, for she has too much, too close to the ground, to fix first. 

The Unknown Known Review

The Unknown Known

Directed by Errol Morris

Released in 2014

Donald Rumsfeld is a genius who found his calling in politics, which explains why he is utterly empty inside. Such is the infuriating thesis at the heart of Errol Morris’ new documentary on the former Secretary of Defense, and Rummy does not break once while staring down the barrel of Morris’ Interrotron. A bunch of times, he does this terrible grin, resembling a skeleton or, as Morris sees it, Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. In a four-part, must-read New York Times series on his research on and time with Rumsfeld, Morris concludes, “I was left with the frightening suspicion that the grin might not be hiding anything. It was a grin of supreme self-satisfaction and behind the grin might be nothing at all.”

The Unknown Known will madden those who think Morris lobbed softballs at his subject. As far as Rumsfeld goes, what you see is what you get. We get a sense of his intelligence and to what shameful ends he put it to use, but not much more. In place of the catharsis Vietnam SecDef Robert McNamara croaked through in Morris’ similar, Oscar-winning The Fog of War, we get an essay on the weaponization of words and the tenuous justifications for modern warfare. To appreciate this film is to unpack it. For that reason it is a far more intellectually demanding film than The Fog of War, and thus a superior one in my view.

Save for an early recounting of the events of 9/11, Morris structures his film around a chronological run-through of Rumsfeld’s career. Set against a black backdrop, Rumsfeld addresses Morris’ camera in his self-described “cool, measured” way. While Morris smothers a photo montage of Rumsfeld and his wife in sappy music, Rummy retells his marriage proposal in laughably clinical terms: “I was correct. It was a good decision. It just wasn’t part of my plan.” He lights up when talking about himself, such as his behind-the-scenes machinations in the Nixon and Ford administrations. In the former’s case, he ducked out soon enough to avoid Watergate while in the latter’s, Rumsfeld criticizes his old boss’ weaknesses in leadership. In tandem with a fellow named Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld resigned in protest as Chief of Staff, spurring the ensuing “Halloween Massacre” where Ford reshuffled his Cabinet. Rumsfeld got a promotion, to Secretary of Defense, out of it all.

The way Morris cuts together the Halloween Massacre sequence clues us into his complex take on his subject. Superimposed over footage of Rumsfeld’s swearing-in ceremony, newspaper headlines whiz by, all praising, through so-called objective language, Rumsfeld’s ruthlessness in getting what he coveted. They all ostensibly fuel his ego as he strides down the red carpet, with honor guard in tow. The media’s love affair with political drama can be held accountable for incubating a man like Rumsfeld, whose indisputable intelligence benefitted only himself, when all is said and done. The jokes he cracks with the press on the lead-up to the Iraq War humanize him, to an extent, but they disturb more than anything else for we notice a collusion between interviewee and interviewer, as frustration with Rumsfeld’s nonsense evasions cools into inappropriate comradery. If this reading needs further evidence, consider that the other time Morris uses this flying newsprint-over-archive footage approach is with Osama bin Laden, when he descends a mountain with his walking stick and headlines express confusion over his whereabouts. They are both boogeymen made stronger by the noise they leave in their wake.

Throughout the film, Rumsfeld reads aloud a handful of the thousands upon thousands of memos, called “snowflakes,” he wrote during his tenure at the Pentagon. “Subject: Terminology,” he begins, before boring into three terms — “unconventional warfare,” “guerrilla,” “insurgency” — with which he sought to define the Iraq War, precisely because they are vague euphemisms. He boasts how he got rid of unwanted words from the conversation, oblivious to how that approaches Orwell’s Newspeak. He clings to his infamous “unknown unknowns” — things “we don’t know we don’t know,” “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” et al — as grounds for invading Iraq, sounding like Fred Leuchter, the Holocaust denier Morris interviewed for Mr. Death. He said, after a trip to Auschwitz, “It’s not what I found that convinced me. It was what I didn’t find.”

Rumsfeld gets it right, once. He reminds Morris how, back in 2008, Obama opposed the Patriot Act, indefinite detention and Guantanamo, yet they remain with us to this day. “That validates the decisions made by George W. Bush,” he says in what may be his most humble statement. The bigger and more connected our world becomes, the more grounds there are for suspicion, for actionable “intelligence.” Rumsfeld may be loathed more than most, but his breed will continue to occupy the highest offices. Morris cannot shake the moral void behind those eyes, like when he exclaims, “Wouldn’t it have been better not to go there [Iraq] at all?” and all he gets back is a smile and “I guess time will tell.” But this film comes short of excoriating Rummy for 106 minutes and that is a wise choice, since such polemics are easy and self-evident at this point. What Morris does do is open up this focused but failed probe of a man to capture the rest of America in silent consent. Rumsfeld acts on our country’s worst tendencies, with more intellectual arrogance than anyone else, but he does so because such violence is kind of part of our deal.

Final Verdict:

3.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Squirming Through the Classics

Over break, I watched 26 feature-length films. Aside from a few mediocre new releases in theaters and on Netflix, these movies were classics, either from the art house tradition or the Golden Age of Hollywood. Before you question my sanity, know that I really enjoy these kinds of movies and I had some company — Sam Bromer ’16 dedicated his column last week to praising the intellectual value of some Criterion Collection films we watched. I agree with him that you feel good after sitting through demanding, “more nutritional,” as he puts it, fare from the olden days. That is, you do until a movie’s age begins to show, and not through cheesy special effects.

If “theme” is the artistic essence of narrative film — a reader of film cares how plot, aesthetics and cinematic form bring out a theme or question — then “representation” is its thorny by-product. A man filmed in a medium shot is more than just a man: He is a character, the actor playing that character and, whether the filmmakers intended him to be or not, a symbol. For what is anyone’s guess, though if that man wears a cowboy hat and talks, walks and looks like John Wayne, you can bet he, the man on-screen, stands in for ideals of honor, chivalry and masculinity. Of course, the same close reading should be applied to female characters as well, and it is there where things get awkward, especially when diving into the classics. 

John Ford was a master of his craft, winner of a record four Oscars for Best Director and a go-to textbook for formal nuance — he told stories through images and saw a script as just a “skeleton.” Being a pioneer of the Western genre, Ford included a lot of American Indians in his films, most of them silent, savage antagonists. That’s the case inStagecoach, the 1939 hit that made a star out of Wayne (and viewable now on Hulu Plus). While he atoned, somewhat, for past racism in his morally gray 1956 masterpiece The Searchers, his depiction of women remains interesting for the notes he struck right as well as those that were off.

In Stagecoach, Wayne’s character falls in love with a “woman of ill repute,” a common archetype in the lawless Old West of myth. There is a moment when Dallas, the prostitute, exposes her leg while climbing into the stagecoach, to the catcall of one old bastard, but for the rest of the film she keeps herself covered, even conservative in appearance. She seems ashamed less of her line of work than the reaction she spurs from others, like the ladies behind the town’s Law and Order League, who are reminiscent of 1920s Temperance activists. Wayne’s Ringo smiles at her and prods his male peers to treat her with the same respect they automatically afford the pregnant aristocrat in their midst. Dallas appreciates Ringo’s kindness but hesitates, at first, at validating his romance. As the film progresses, Dallas acts as compassionate midwife, skilled homemaker and an increasingly vocal presence.

Ford builds sympathy for Dallas by moving her away from her past and toward respectability — he is far from a feminist. He is more a Catholic than a misogynist, subtly coding prostitution as bad, yet he also satirizes the hypocrisy of drunk, stupid men who look down on Dallas and then hope for the flash when she will show some skin. Dallas is an admirable character, though not a very strong or self-made one. We like her because Ringo does, because this Male Gaze finds her appealing. Today, we find Dallas’ characterization flawed but, if we put the film in context, we recognize she, and Ford framing her, oppose prejudice, to an extent.

So it is awkward to fast-forward nearly 30 years to Sergio Leone’s 1968 Once Upon a Time in the West. The film is incredible in many respects, from its tense wordless opening to Henry Fonda’s uncanny bad guy performance. Yet there is a dimension or two missing from Claudia Cardinale’s character, a voluptuous widow who crooks and vigilantes fight to control, both for her land estate and other, obvious assets. She is at the center of the conflict, and yet Leone does not afford her much empathy. She stays tight-lipped through most of the film, not airing her grievances, while falling into positions of increasing undress. Cardinale is a beautiful actress, so the men are probably not complaining, but one wonders why the sole female character is so used and abused throughout this canonical film. Perhaps a degree of irony is lost on me; if so, its subtlety is too refined.

These two films stop short of the pretty shameful “slut shaming,” as we call it today, that can be seen in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Early on, a gregarious psychopath murders the promiscuous wife of our protagonist, who told the killer in confidence how he seeks a divorce. Prior to her death, the killer follows the wife as she giggles, licks an ice cream cone and pulls around anonymous, extramarital lovers. Just before he wraps his hands around her neck, she gives him a seductive glance, as if she wants to fool around with him too. Her subsequent murder strikes us not as awful but deserved — she was asking for it. I do not believe in that conclusion one bit, but I don’t have much choice from how Hitchcock, who never was known for being gracious to women, orders and frames the scene here.

I still take something from Strangers on a Train because, you know, Hitchcock did it. Young filmmakers can learn their craft just from breaking down how he orchestrates any given sequence. Yet I do not disown this film’s politics just because I find them wrong. Critic Peter Labuza wrote last month how “Dated films are vital to our understanding of the past.” Hitchcock is a legend who lives on, but his time has passed. A filmmaker could and should steal from him today, if only to fix where the master failed.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Non-Stop Review

Non-Stop

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

Released in 2014

If you really love movies, you must respect the genre film: the not-quite-blockbusters, shot for $50 million or less, serving time-worn action, horror, sci-fi and Western thrills. To revere Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and Anthony Mann and dismiss those following in their footsteps is a most common hypocrisy amongst film enthusiasts today. Genre films bring home money instead of Oscars, yet the best of them exert intelligence and an impeccable command of cinematic technique. Non-Stop is not the best of the best, but it is up there. While Liam Neeson reprises a more nuanced take on the badass paternal figure he has been playing since 2008’s Taken, director Jaume Collet-Serra situates his actor in a story and setting packed with more post-9/11 commentary than its poster would have you expect.

It all starts pretty Screenwriting 101: In slow motion, a pair of hands tip a flask into a coffee cup, stir the drink with a toothbrush and reach for a wrinkled photo of a little girl. Bill Marks (Neeson) is a grizzled alcoholic with a sad, yet-to-be-explained backstory sitting alone in his car when he receives a call that, yes, he has one last job to do. He works as an air marshal, despite being scared of plane takeoffs, and this flight from New York to London should keep him on his toes. There is a reticent Muslim (Omar Metwally), a non-PC cop (House of Cards’ Corey Stoll) off to see his “fairy brother marry a guy with a British accent,” Julianne Moore yapping in the seat next to him and, worst of all, a giggling supermodel (Bar Paly) cuddled with her beau behind him. It’s all clichés, tropes, been there, done that for the first few minutes.

But you stick with it, because all Liam Neeson movies these days start the same, and this one gets a whole lot better than any of them, save for The Grey. Midway through the flight, over the Atlantic, Bill receives cryptic text messages over his secure network that if he does not wire $150 million to an account in 20 minutes, a passenger will die. Neeson’s Savior Mode activates, as he recruits Moore and a familiar flight attendant (Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery) to look for conspicuous cell phone use. But this is 2014, so everyone is a suspect. The Agatha Christie vibe escalates once 20 minutes elapse and, through Bill’s direct actions, a passenger ends up dead in a bathroom stall. The TSA traces the terrorist’s bank account to Bill Marks’ name, and it looks like our imperfect hero has been framed. People keep on dying; you keep on watching.

At this point, I could describe the fight scenes, which are scarce but claustrophobic, intense and awesome. When reviewing a bad action film, you can adjectivise hand-to-hand combat and fill six paragraphs. Thankfully, Non-Stop is quite good, so there is more going on than Neeson kicking ass and, therefore, much to talk about. In fact, the story’s momentum depends on Bill Marks backing himself up, through tactical miscalculations, into a corner for most of the movie. Targeting the Muslim on-board proves to be a prejudiced and rushed judgment, as does singling out a black man wearing a hoodie for search. The issue of profiling criminals according to race and gender vexes Bill throughout his mission, and the diversity of the flight’s passengers represents a microcosm of America at large. Lupita Nyong’o, the beloved Mexican-Kenyan actress who won fame and an Oscar on Sunday as Patsey in 12 Years a Slave, can be found roaming the aisles as a little-seen flight attendant. Her do-nothing character stands against the provocative questions the film raises, but I mention her because the world is in love with her right now and two minutes of Lupita is better than none, I guess.

The matter of security — its necessities, limits and enforcers — in post-9/11 America also haunts Non-Stop. When the possibility arises that Bill, their avowed protector, may be the terrorist, the passengers fret over what action to take. They know what happened on United 93 and recognize that Hollywood and U.S. history posthumously (and rightly) valorized the civilians aboard it because they took decisive, selfless action. Meanwhile, the irony that a federal agent assigned to defend would turn and hijack a plane proves too appealing for news pundits to ignore. There is a great shot of passengers plugging in their headphones and watching, on those back-of-headrest screens, talking heads accuse Bill of terrorism or worse on live television. The isolation of today’s media — everybody has their own screen — prohibits conversation and connection, for we prefer to take for truth the words of a suited man before a camera than whatever a real, beat-up human being seated next to us might say.

The politics of Non-Stop are difficult to decode, but they are there. Collet-Serra leans Jack Bauer conservative, in that homogenous bureaucracies often distort and lie while flawed but passionate agents wield their dogmatism to best unfavorable odds (Take note of what the omnipresent Shea Whigham, as Agent Marenick, says over the phone at the very end). The script stoops to two sappy, on-the-nose speeches about such themes — grandstanding, from heroes and villains, is sort of a requirement in a movie like this. Take them with a grain of salt, for Collet-Serra embeds his own perspective through camera placement, text message superimposition and other cinematic techniques alone.

Prior to its release, Reverse Shot critic Nick Pinkerton tweeted, “What sort of human garbage gives a poor review to Non-Stop?” I don’t think he was being facetious, and neither am I. Non-Stop follows the book, yet it fills in its margins with questions, patterns and Liam Neeson. The challenge here is to enjoy the superficial thrill of it all while daring to appreciate it as, if not art, then seriously smart entertainment. Balance those two tasks and you may just save America.

Final Verdict:

3.5 Stars out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.