The Butler Review

The Butler
Directed by Lee Daniels
Released in 2013

For a review of a movie like this, it is best to get right to the point: Lee Daniels’ The Butler is excellent. Typing those words, pairing this kind of perennial, distractingly star-studded Oscar bait with a word like “excellent” surprises me still. But if a review is anything, it must be honest, so I will be just that. The Butler not only moved me more than any other film this year (save for, perhaps, Fruitvale Station); it brought to life one of the most turbulent and inspiring periods in our country’s history while psychologically, socially and politically picking it apart.

That period is, of course, the civil rights movement, as seen from the vantage point of Cecil Gaines (Forest Whittaker), a black White House butler who served Presidents Eisenhower to Reagan, and who screenwriter Danny Strong based loosely on the little-known Eugene Allen. Cecil learns early in his career that the room should feel empty when he’s in it, and that the white men (and occasional woman) who fill these spaces of privilege expect faultless service and Uncle Tom-ism. “We have no tolerance for politics at the White House,” says the building’s black maître d’, with a mild smile. Cecil Gaines must wear two different faces: one stoic yet grateful, in front of the white man; another entirely before his wife (Oprah Winfrey, of all people) and two sons.

This clash of personae tears Cecil apart over the span of 34 years and makes for some incisive social commentary, but The Butler succeeds as drama and art (yes, I used that word) because Cecil’s eldest son, Louis (David Oyelowo), takes notice. Louis grows up ashamed of his father and what he sees as his demeaning line of work, even as Cecil puts more than enough bread on the table, including starched polo shirts for his sons. At Fisk University, Louis finds his calling in the Freedom Riders and perseveres through the beatings, obscenities and, most harrowingly, firebombs hurled his way.

Louis’ militancy should inspire any conscious viewer, yet Strong and director Lee Daniels coax some crucial moral ambiguity, not to mention over two hours of narrative tension, by pitting Louis and Cecil against one another and allowing things to get, well, ugly. While history has deemed Louis’ sit-ins across the South as a watershed moment in non-violent activism, the jury is still out on the Black Panther party, which Louis dives into with an anarchic zeal, much to the dismay of his father. Cecil may have stood against progress by discouraging Louis from getting involved in any of the political affairs that he himself carefully avoided all his life, but he valued the cogency and safety of his family more than anything else, which no father could blame him for. They scuffle and bare their teeth at one another, each believing with all their might in a code of conduct that the assimilation of their era soon enough deems irrelevant.  Whereas most civil rights films make time for the suffering of their black characters only to bestow the ultimate agency onto sympathetic white characters (see The Help), The Butler keeps the struggle within the black family unit, where the oppositions were often more trenchant and deep-seated than most of us, at least I, could ever believe.

Let us not forget that this a movie about a butler serving the Oval Office, where Daniels unleashes a drove of character actors and former A-list talent to fill the President’s seat. James Marsden may sound more like Mayor Quimby than JFK, but he brings smooth style to spare. John Cusack plays Nixon straight, with little makeup and surprising generosity, while Robin Williams, Liev Schreiber and Alan Rickman throw on bald caps, witch noses and a greasy toupee as Ike, LBJ and the Gipper, respectively. Those last three performances veer into camp, which Daniels, as the director of The Paperboy, can handle, tonal inconsistencies be damned.

There are about a million other actors to mention, including Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan (there seems to be no ulterior motive in her firm yet warm portrayal) and Cuba Gooding Jr. and Lenny Kravitz as Cecil’s genial co-workers. Many of these roles are paper thin, although none is as troubling as the plantation owner played by Alex Pettyfer (Magic Mike). In one of the earliest scenes, this brute of a man rapes Cecil’s mother (Mariah Carey, actually) and blows out her husband’s brains, all in front of a (understandably) traumatized young Cecil. Now, I don’t doubt events like these occurred, but as one of the gateways into this film’s world, it proves especially jarring. Such plantation killings bring to mind the 19th century and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; 1920s hate crime is more often associated with lynching, a motif Daniels also employs. This is a nitpick, in a way, but it simplifies Cecil’s conflict into some binary of white versus black, whereas the rest of the film opts for more internalized and relatable struggles.

Movies like The Butler — the sentimental, decades-spanning Academy-Award-for-Best-Makeup-Oscar-hopefuls “inspired by true events” — are flawed creatures. As much as you cried throughout Forrest Gump, doesn’t that one look funny the more you inspect it? What was its theme, its purpose? The Butler holds up to scrutiny because Strong and Daniels had the clear mind to keep the family dynamic at its core, where history bleeds into their lives and not the other way around. Cecil may win over the hearts of the world’s most powerful men, and Louis may help topple Jim Crow, but they only got there because of the other, whether they like it or not.

Final Verdict:

4 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Hollywood's Super (Violent) Heroes

*Minor spoilers for Man of Steel, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Iron Man 3 ahead*

No phenomenon fascinates me more than violence, and no medium of art enthralls me more than film, so I am, naturally, very interested in violent films. That is not to say I like bloody, gory movies — your Hostel’s and Human Centipede’s. In fact, I really loathe that kind of queasy, exploitative fare, but not as much as the modern model of the Hollywood blockbuster, with its far more troubling, almost subliminal degree of violence that needs to stop … now.

If you saw Man of Steel, Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, White House Down, World War Z or The Wolverine over the summer, you might have an idea as to what I’m getting at. Former Indiewire critic Matt Singer called it this summer’s crop of movies’ “PG-13 Problem,” while other critics, from Vulture’s Kyle Buchanan to The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, decried the stain of 9/11 on this year’s action movies. The sanitation of violence and the evocation of 21st century terrorism go hand-in-hand — look at Man of Steel. At the end of that film, Superman and General Zod face off for like 30 minutes and take down about half of Metropolis with them, totaling, according to Watson Technical Consulting, around $750 billion in property damage and 129,000 civilian deaths. That’s more than 9/11 right there — closer to Hiroshima. But the real problem is that all this death goes unacknowledged under Zack Snyder’s direction. Without the disfigurements and falling, flailing bodies such destruction entails, or even a reflective moment where Superman acknowledges the losses he partially caused, Man of Steel earns a cozy PG-13 rating. Bring the whole family.

These “implied deaths” — to borrow Matt Singer’s phrase — have no emotional impact on me, no matter how long I think about it. That’s the problem. When the loss of life in a movie boils down to unquantifiable statistics and Joseph Stalin references, we are losing something. Man of Steel was especially awful, but even the half-decent offerings from the summer staged similar bloodless bloodbaths: Khan razing San Francisco with the U.S.S. Enterprise in Star Trek Into Darkness; Tony Stark, in a borderline patriotic display, ordering all 42 of his suits to kill the Extremis mutants in Iron Man 3; the side of a plane blowing open mid-flight, sending all the zombies on-board flying out like rag dolls in World War Z. At least World War Z showed these zombies hurtling toward their death, though the decision to end all trailers of the film with this shot — a spot reserved for a blockbuster’s “money shot” — suggests a more callous, “Doesn’t that look awesome?!” intent. The budgets for these large-scale flicks has ballooned year after year, with more money dedicated to constantly improving special effects technology. These filmmakers want to make sure you see what they are paying for, and almost all have come to the conclusion that the best approach is to kill a hell of a lot of (fictional) people, in the coolest way possible. We have arrived at a very depressing place, where incomprehensible massacres serve as nothing more than set dressing.

For all the trash talk hurled at The Lone Ranger, some of it deserved, I will defend its grotesque, off-the-wall scene where the bad guy stabs a dude in his sternum, carves out his heart and proceeds to eat it. It was definitely at odds, tonally, with the rest of its Disney production, but at least it shook me, inspiring a WTF or two, even if director Gore Verbinski concealed the real gore off-screen. I do not care if filmmakers think violence is an inherent fact of life or a horrible disturbance in the otherwise positive human experience, but they have to provoke us with it and, most importantly, comment on its existence.

Of all Hollywood movies this summer, I cannot think of any that truly justified its use of violence. Rely on the independents, then, to bring brains and a sense of morality to the cinema, perhaps none more than Fruitvale Station. With Oscar Grant, a 23-year-old who was killed by a BART police officer in the early hours of New Years Day, 2009, as its protagonist, this film dodges the gangsta scenery that Hollywood loves to trot out whenever a young African-American male assumes a lead role. Instead, director-writer Ryan Coogler lets us live with Oscar for his final 24 hours. He plays with his daughter; loves his girlfriend, despite their fights; cooks for his mother’s birthday; lies to his family about losing his job. Oscar is like anyone else, with flaws to spare. Coogler stages a harrowing, protracted sequence at the end, when Oscar is shot and grasping for life, that communicates a painful message: No one deserves this. The chaos descends from nowhere, ensnaring him and his loved ones in a pain that Coogler captures through shaky cam and agonizing close-ups. The death of one man is a tragedy, indeed.

Fruitvale Station reportedly cost somewhere around $1 million in production expenses — that’s like a day’s worth of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine protein supplements. After watching Lawrence of Arabia this past Sunday at Cornell Cinema, I long for the challenging, mature spectacles Hollywood so rarely produces anymore. In that 1962 epic, cinematographer Freddie Young fills the screen with legendary shots of Middle Eastern landscapes and architecture. Yet director David Lean balances all that with some wrenching close-ups of Peter O’Toole’s face as he, as T.E. Lawrence, hesitates and then orders the massacre — “No prisoners!” — of hundreds of fleeing Turkish soldiers. It’s one of the most disturbing things you’ll ever see, because Lean forces you to think about, and literally look at, the blood on this man’s hands — he’s the hero, for god’s sake, of this whole movie! But I guess he was no superhero, who don’t got the time for sissy introspection, and whatnot — they have an explosion quota to meet.

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Only God Forgives Review

Only God Forgives
Directed by Nicolas
Winding Refn
Released in 2013

Are you in the mood for some graphic violence? In some circles, the default masculine answer is “yes,” but let me reiterate: With all the terror attacks, mass murders and ghastly accidents you read about and increasingly watch on the news on a daily basis, are you in the mood for some graphic violence? If you’re still wavering, I wonder if you would take to the type of story where the only clear-cut moments of character action are acts of extreme, graphic violence — gougings, amputations, blunt force trauma, etc. — that thus perpetuate an endless cycle of vengeance from which there is no chance for escape, aside from death? For you Saw and Hostel enthusiasts still standing, what if I was to say that all this occurs through a most pretentious mode of “art cinema”? Indeed, the only thing more elusive than the point of Only God Forgives is who its intended audience is supposed to be.

After his mesmerizing, if thematically shallow, slow-burn thriller Drive, there’s little surprise the film world wanted to see what director Nicolas Winding Refn brewed up next. With Ryan Gosling once again in tow, I don’t think anyone expected something like this. In Only God Forgives, Refn focuses his significant talents for lighting, setting and mood on an ultra-violent creepshow that lacks a coherent metaphorical grounding or wider purpose. It’s blood and guts with some puerile art cinema interludes — shots of Gosling’s hands; a raised samurai sword; blood pouring from a sink; pitch-blank, Lynchian doorways. There’s a laughably literal nod to Freud’s regression theory that deserves to be taught in film school on how not to employ symbolism. You can scrutinize the moody color schemes and ham-fisted Oedipus references all you want, but I’d say you’re missing the scorched forest for the pretty embers on the trees.

Set in Bangkok, the film only takes a minute or two until Billy (Tom Burke) offers a pimp $15,000 to ‘use’ his teenage daughter. If that doesn’t send your stomach churning, Billy’s subsequent rape and murder of a Thai prostitute should do the trick. From there, retired cop Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) locks Billy and the father of the dead girl in the bloodstained scene of the crime, arming the grieving parent with a baseball bat. The horrible and inevitable ensues, and Julian (Gosling), Billy’s brother, seeks out vengeance all anew. Upon learning of what his brother did to deserve such a fate, Julian spares the man, only to face to the wrath of his mother (Kristin Scott Thomas). When Julian tells her of Billy’s crime, she sneers, “I’m sure he had his reasons.” It’s a flippant turn of that haunting quote, “The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons,” from Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. Whereas Renoir opened the frightening possibility of empathy for our enemies, Refn makes that impossible, given the events described above and the only creepier revelations that arrive by the film’s end. At the very least, it’s a line that gets one of those stunned, one-breath laughs (huh!).

From there, the script writes itself: Somebody kills someone, and then someone close to the deceased in turn seeks vengeance. You could say that Only God Forgives is about the power of friendship and family, though that’s like saying The Shining is about the downsides of being a father. As horrible the violence sounds, the characters affected could hardly be called human. The actors mug and stare with about the same vigor as the corpses most of them soon become. Gosling amplifies the man-of-few-words part he played in Drive to deafening levels of apathy and inaction; he only holds the screen for the obvious aesthetic reasons, particularly when fitted in a sweet suit. As his mother Crystal, Scott Thomas hurls some of the nastiest insults you’ll hear from anybody, man or woman, so she sort of rules above the cast by default, particularly when taking into consideration the classy English roles she’s played in the past.

Pansringarm poses the biggest question mark as Chang, the “Angel of Vengeance,” a murderous practitioner who moonlights as a nightclub crooner. In the most drawn-out, agonizing scene out of a collection of many, Chang impales some poor chap with chopsticks and knives before a group of Thai female entertainers lined up on stage. He tells the women to close their eyes while imploring the men to watch. They obey, and he proceeds. You may recall a similar scene in Drive, when Gosling’s character held a hammer to the head of some thug in the back room of a strip club where topless ladies stared at them and didn’t do a thing. There is a relentless drive to deface, humiliate and rob the agency from the female characters in Only God Forgives, even more so than Drive, and I can offer no reasons as to why. Perhaps I am not scraping the broad religious metaphor the title intends to provoke, or maybe I am just overly nauseous. In any case, after the third minute clocked in during Chang’s extended torture scene, I asked myself: Why am I watching a vision of the world so depraved, cold and meaningless, and removed from my own?

Final Verdict:
1.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Pacific Rim Review

Pacific Rim
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Released in 2013

Pacific Rim reminds us that special effects, high-concept plots and international audience optimization — in a word: money — are not inherently bad things. This aliens-versus-robots monster movie shares a similar log line and $200 million budget with Michael Bay’s Transformers films, which deserve their reputations as the go-to punching bags for blockbuster tonelessness. But where all of Bay’s characters seem to have or appeal to a spoiled 15-year-old boy’s brain — hypersexual, needlessly loud, casually racist — director Guillermo Del Toro affords us a little decency with a likable, comfortably diverse cast that holds family, chivalry and teamwork above, let’s say, more gratuitous pleasures. Del Toro manages to do this while assembling some of the most colossal fight scenes ever put to film, like one where a giant robot (called a “Jaeger”) drags a cargo ship through the streets of Hong Kong before cracking it over a Kaiju’s (Japanese for “giant beast”) whale-sized skull. If there is one movie this year that deserves the most overused of words, “awesome,” it is Pacific Rim.

Cinema needs extravaganzas like Pacific Rim every so often. For one, the scale of the Jaeger-on-Kaiju action requires nothing less than a 20, 40, if not 70-foot (IMAX size) screen for full impact. Aside from mile-back extreme long shots, a single frame can hardly contain these beasts, and Del Toro wisely employs a lot of close-ups (which are still around 50-feet across, to scale) to capture the scaly aliens and unpolished mechs in all their gnarly glory. The editors, Peter Amundson and John Gilroy, cut the action into remarkably fluid montages that move briskly but not as to slay the epileptics in the crowd. Each pair of Jaeger pilots must sync with one another’s brain in what the movie refers to as a “neural handshake” — there’s a subplot regarding the invasion of memory and fantasy into the present (a la Inception), but this Eastern-influenced touch lends a nice, deliberate strategy to what could be just Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots chaos (a la Transformers). And make no mistake: Some of the action looks beautiful, particularly when the creatures leave the ocean and duke it out in the city. From the front rows, the blur of metropolitan neon and intermingling of organic and inorganic forms resembles the kaleidoscopic symphony of a Stan Brakhage film (a pretentious reference I make only partly in jest). It all looks very cool, and very expensive, and there’s no way your home theater or your iPad could do it justice.


The size of these battles does, however, rob the film of its human element, which is what, in the end, cinema is all about. Del Toro foresaw this issue and takes a cue from Jurassic Park, throwing in a baby Kaiju (just smaller than a T-Rex) to terrorize a few dozen people instead of multiple millions. That scene is a one-off, though, and the non-action stretches often do exactly that: stretch. You may be forgiven for finding the robots and supposedly minor characters more interesting than the lofty lead three. The main player, Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy), fills a Channing Tatum-type role with about the same gravity Tatum would bring: not much, but he’s charming. Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) plays a highly skilled but inexperienced pilot under Officer Pentecost’s (Idris Elba, unremittingly badass) tight leash. The inevitable chemistry between Hunnam and Kikuchi plays it too safe, though we should all take notice at the presence of an Asian woman in a high-profile American production such as this (Freida Pinto in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes was the last, I recall). The wildcard role goes to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Charlie Day, who steals his every scene as a scientist with a more-than-healthy interest in Kaijus. His high-pitched, fast-talking, smart aleck riffs are equal parts Paul Giamatti and Groucho Marx, and Del Toro knows he’s the real heart of the film, allotting him nearly equal screen time to the protagonists. His partner (Burn Gorman) shamelessly entertains as a genteel, twitchy British scientist, and then there’s a cameo by a Del Toro favorite. I’ll refrain from naming the latter actor, but he makes a grand entrance, holding Day’s nostril hostage with the tip of a butterfly knife in what must be a shout-out to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. Del Toro lets the humor and delirium of his supporting cast rule for a surprising wealth of time, which almost makes you forget that the main story of Hunnam, Kikuchi and Elba leaves you cold.

If the numerous references above haven’t already made it clear, this is not exactly an original production: The climax rips off Independence Day, the flashback structure borrows from Inception, the robot design nods to Japanese anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Iron Man, King Kong, Godzilla and, of course, Transformers deserve mention. But Del Toro, as great a director as he is, has never been a brain-bending innovator like, say, Charlie Kaufman or the Coen Brothers. In his best film, Pan’s Labyrinth, he took a simple fairy tale, draped it in politically charged gothic horror and emerged with a work that few will take to task its merits as serious cinema. While Pacific Rim lacks the humanity of that film and Hellboy, there’s a bit more to it than robots kicking ass. Not a lot, maybe, but Del Toro injects a rare zen and beauty into this often stale genre. He may be playing with toys instead of redressing his nightmares, but it’s not like he forgot how to put on a show.

 

Final Verdict:

3.5 Stars Out of 5

 

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Man of Steel Review

Man of Steel
Directed by Zack Snyder
Released in 2013

Man of Steel’s failures — as art, as drama or even as just mindless entertainment — pale in comparison to what its success (a $125 million opening weekend, as of press time) says about the current state and future trajectory of Hollywood cinema. Director Zack Snyder, producer Christopher Nolan and screenwriter David S. Goyer did not make a movie so much as a two-hour, 20-minute highlight reel — a joyless, soulless composite of the last 15 years of blockbusters, from the Star Wars prequels and Independence Day to Avatar and The Avengers. There is not one modicum of originality in Man of Steel’s plot, themes or aesthetics, yet here we all are, pitching this as the Movie To Beat this summer, buying, quite literally, into the hype and the grotesque Gillette/Wal-Mart/National Guard-marketing scheme some freshly promoted PR team drummed up. It’s all really depressing, if also fascinating when you stop and think about it.

Let’s get formalities out of the way. Like last year’s The Amazing Spider-Man, Man of Steel is the latest summer-superhero-reboot-of-a-franchise-that-was-only-rebooted-like-less-than-10-years-ago. Bryan Singer directed Superman Returns in 2006, with Brandon Routh as the titular man in tights. That film dragged, overlong and histrionic, but you could sense a real, almost operatic ambition throughout, particularly whenever Superman and supervillain Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) shared the screen. Now, Snyder and Goyer play the Superman, a.k.a. Clark Kent, a.k.a. Kal-El origin story once more, this time without almost any feeling at all. Sure, Henry Cavill dons the spandex with a real winning smile. Too bad he has to fight the dull, lumbering military-industrial complex that is General Zod (played by Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Shannon, who is unforgettable in that show but not here) and has not the least supply of wit or charisma to get him through the by-the-numbers plot.

Said plot never materializes as one passionate struggle, whether external or, more crucially, internal, for Clark Kent to overcome, which partly explains Kent’s bland on-screen personality. This problem can, in turn, be credited to how poorly structured the whole film is, or, more specifically, how often the point of view does not belong to Kent. We follow Jor-El (Russell Crowe), Kent’s father, for the first 15-20 minutes of the film, as he shoots his way through generic sci-fi baddies in order to send his newly born son into space before Krypton, their home planet, implodes. Snyder pads what should have been a quick prologue with aerial dogfights and acrobatic flights that unmistakably resemble scenes from Star Wars III and Avatar, respectively. The whole slog could stand as its own act, one where the film’s protagonist (at least in his grown, communicative state) has yet to be introduced.

Soon after, we see Kent as a buff, superhuman miracle worker drifting across America, and just as scenes start to drop hints as to what makes him tick, out of left field comes the love interest, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lois Lane (Amy Adams). We follow her around for a bit, as she investigates Kent’s shirtless heroism for obviously, strictly professional reasons. One could say, “Hey, by diverting attention to Lois Lane alone, the filmmakers prop her up as an independent, feminized lead capable of her own brand of heroism.” Reading into comic book gender politics never ends well, so, to that end, it is worth noting that any hopes for a strong, (post)modern Lois Lane might as well be checked at the door. Her introductory scenes only serve to further distract from the de facto protagonist, Clark Kent, and each following scene affords her fewer lines than the last, to the point where her sole purpose is to trot (and “trot” is the right word, as the sound mixer makes sure the clacky-clack of her heels can be heard over the surrounding bedlam) onto the battlefield and embrace Kent’s battle-worn bod.

Perhaps that’s all for the best, because as Man of Steel devolves into gratuitous slam-bang action scenes, the few times Lane or Kent open their mouths remind us why they shouldn’t. “You know they say it’s all downhill after the first kiss,” Lane (actually) says, to which Kent responds, “I think that’s true only about kissing humans.” A few winners from General Zod: “Release the World Engine!” “I was bred to be a warrior. Where did you train? A farm?” and, my favorite, “There’s only one way this ends, Kal: Either you die, or I do.” The dialogue is so bad that you begin to question the abilities of these proven, gifted actors. But it’s so much easier to blame Zack Snyder and be done with it.

Those lines only sample the festival of clichés that is Man of Steel, and Snyder one-ups Goyer’s clunky screenplay by transplanting shots and images from a drove of recent successful films. Beyond Avatar and Star Wars (and J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek), Snyder rips off Spider-Man 2 (see the clawed, Doc Ock tentacles chasing Superman through Metropolis), Thor (the nondescript, Midwestern Main Street where Superman fights Faora-Ul, resembling where Thor battles the Destroyer), Independence Day/2012/any Roland Emmerich film (crumbling skyscrapers, of which the new Star Trek and Iron Man also stand guilty) and Transformers 1-3 (the last third, particularly whenever more than one flaming/explosive projectile bombards the same shot). For a change of taste, there’s even an unearned Terrence Malickian montage of a nine-year-old, caped Kent frolicking before a wheat field, where the soundtrack drops to silence and Snyder expects us to absorb this awkward moment as something profound and nostalgic. I will admit I dug the Apocalypse Now shout-out, where aircrafts soar before a massive, blood orange Kryptonian sun, but for the rest, Snyder approaches something more like plagiarism.

This all may sound like miniscule nitpicking, but let’s put this into context: New Hollywood directors — Scorsese, Altman, Friedkin, et al — often paid homage or “tipped the hat” to prior films and cinematic styles. One of the greatest examples is the stairwell scene in The Untouchables, where Brian De Palma recreated the baby carriage’s dramatic descent in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin for a Prohibition setting. That 1987 film starred Kevin Costner — who I have neglected to mention brings the only real gravitas to Man of Steel as Kent’s adopted father — and De Palma maneuvered Costner through the scene, as he simultaneously shoots gangsters and tries to save that falling baby. There was no character like Costner in Battleship Potemkin, so De Palma both 1) paid tribute to the Soviet cinematic great and 2) updated his scene to fit a different tone, era, story, etc. What Snyder has done in Man of Steel does not abide by such parameters of respect, knowledge or innovation. His is a style of “Oh, that worked there, so let’s put it here.” Man of Steel cannibalizes not the classics from film school but the record-setting blockbusters still filling studio ledgers. It is an unsustainable mindset motivated by profit and removed from the forces that met to make Christopher Reeve a star.

Final Verdict:

1 Star Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Star Trek Into Darkness Review

Star Trek Into Darkness
Directed by J.J. Abrams
Released in 2013

Is Star Trek Into Darkness too cool not to like?

It’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it? Credit the young and handsome cast or director J.J. Abrams’ handheld, lens flare-happy style, because Trekkie fan service is not filling millions of seats around the world. Abrams and the trio of screenwriters (Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof) know hard sci-fi — with its obsessive fandom and, you know, darn philosophical questions — doesn’t sell but action-adventure with a sleek space coating does. The result entertains a diverse swath of moviegoers and appeals enough to critics: At press time, Star Trek Into Darkness sits atop a very positive 87 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and a (drastically inflated) 8.3 on the Internet Movie Database, which ranks it at No. 157 on the site’s “Top 250 Movies” list.

So, it must be good, right? By blockbuster standards, sure — it beats Iron Man 3 and The Great Gatsby. From the opening scene, where hero Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and the wise-cracking Leonard “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban) sprint through a red, spiny forest chased by black-eyed, albino natives (who look an awful like the aliens in last year’s Prometheus, also co-written by Lindelof), the film declares allegiance more with Star Wars and, rather blatantly, Raiders of the Lost Ark than with its slower source material. That’s all well and good, really, even if it raises the question of how Abrams will differentiate between this franchise and the upcoming Star Wars sequels he will direct.

But Star Trek Into Darkness, with its silly title (“Trek” is a verb now? Like Fire Walk With Me?), just goes through the motions. Orci, Kurtzman and Lindelof structure their script competently enough but don’t know how to bring it to life. The action barrels forward, scene-to-scene, without building suspense or much sympathy for the characters. Sure, Spock (Zachary Quinto) will tell Kirk of the statistical impossibility of launching some attack and Kirk will wink and do it anyway, but what about the larger stakes regarding the maniacal Übermensch, John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch)? Actually, Harrison narrates his life story and the reason for the terrorist attacks that set into motion the events of the film to Kirk, all from behind the glass pane of one classy looking jail cell. He even cries. When you break it down, the plot is an interchangeable parade of Starfleet officers — Bones, Spock, Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood), Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) — yelling at Kirk about how unwise, hotheaded, thoughtlessly daring, etc., he is. Each shred of advice reflects the ‘specialty’ of the character giving it (Uhura worries about Kirk, Pike scolds him like a son), but they all communicate conflict that could have been incorporated into the CGI set pieces or some other non-verbal, less heavy-handed means.

The dialogue, often shouted in red-faced fits, at least allows for the actors to steal the show. Once again, Chris Pine cushions a painful Shatner impression with a fast-talking drawl more likened to Christian Slater. Kirk must own up to the reckless reputation he has built for himself, so what appears like flimsy acting in a scene where he barks at John Harrison from outside of that jail cell makes sense when you realize that Pine is playing a guy who is only coming to terms with the power his position holds. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do; I only know what I can do,” he declares. Like George W. Bush, he rules by the gut (now there's a Slate blog post I'd like to see).

Peter Weller finds himself on screen for a surprising wealth of time, growling at Kirk as a seedy Starfleet Admiral who makes up for a lack of depth by being played by Weller, a.k.a. Robocop, a.k.a. Buckaroo Banzai. His daughter (Alice Eve), a Starfleet weapons specialist, does little besides stirring sexual tension that goes nowhere. In one scene, Abrams places her in the background, out-of-focus, where she just stands there and bites her lip while Kirk and Scotty inspect a powerful WMD. They never notice her, either, which makes the whole pose that much better, and awkward. Chekov (Anton Yelchin) and Sulu (John Cho) barely speak at all, save for the latter’s menacing words of warning to Harrison, which prompts Bones to deadpan, “Sulu, remind me to never piss you off.” Karl Urban should enact Dredd-like justice for his character’s insignificance this time around, considering how perfectly he channels DeForest Kelley. The filmmakers presume you already know these characters from the 2009 installment and keep most of them static because, goddammit, there are sequels to be made and a franchise has no room for change.

Benedict Cumberbatch chews the scenery as Harrison, an old-school bad guy with new parallels to Kirk and 21st century terrorism. At one point, he levels dozens of skyscrapers with a huge spaceship. Like Shane Black in Iron Man 3, Abrams co-opts 9/11 imagery to exploit existing audience emotions while refusing to elaborate on them further. But Star Trek Into Darkness does not stoop to Iron Man 3’s level of offense because the theme of terrorism holds no more weight than those of health care, eugenics and Faustian pacts. You can detect them all, but they are threadbare — divorced from most, if not all, of the characters, action scenes and funny jokes. Basically, what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a bad script. As for the movie, with its pretty actors, relentless pacing and 23rd century lighting, it does its job well enough. It’s cool, man. Just turn off your mind for the duration, which must be sad advice for Trekkies indeed.

Final Verdict:

3 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

To the Wonder Review

To the Wonder
Directed by Terrence Malick
Released in 2013

Great films only become “great” by surviving multiple viewings and emerging stronger after each one. The inverse also holds true, which is why rewatching a movie like Avatar, which relies on visual effects more than vision or character, draws diminishing returns. Watch a Terrence Malick film for a second or third time, however, and you will grasp its themes, symbols and, well, point with surprising ease. I did not fall in love with The Tree of Life, Malick’s divisive 2011 opus, until my second viewing, and it took a third to cement it as one of my all-time favorites. Still, the first time I felt something, something special and quite awe-inspiring that I knew would take another go-around to put a finger on. It is the absence of that sinking-stomach feeling and itch to dive right back in that worries me after seeing To the Wonder.

If it’s not already obvious, those unmoved by or even disdainful of Malick’s style should avoid To the Wonder. All the usual Malickian devices — jump cuts, cutaways to nature and philosophical voiceovers — return, and their initial jarring effects take on a sensible, impressionistic logic, if you’re willing to just go with the flow. The majesty of Emmanuel Lubezski’s cinematography and the classical soundtrack (with emphasis, as usual, on Wagner) makes surrendering to the film easy enough, though its experimental approach keeps the core love story — between an American, Neil (Ben Affleck), and a Russian, Marina (Olga Kurylenko) — at arms length. To quote Affleck at last year’s Telluride Film Festival, “To the Wonder makes The Tree of Life look like Transformers.”

Cheap Michael Bay comparisons aside, this might as well be Malick’s most confounding film, which is all the more disconcerting because the plot is pretty simple. We meet Marina and Neil at the start, and peak, of their love in Paris. One second, they’re caressing each other on the Pont Alexandre III; the next, they’re gunning a convertible to Mont Saint-Michel. They are moving so fast that reality threatens to “pull [them] down toward the Earth,” as foreshadowed by the quicksand that surprises them along the castle’s shore. After moving to Oklahoma (“The Romance State,” as no one calls it) to live with Neil, Marina and her daughter, Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline), despair at how boring and static their lives have become. What follows is a series of betrayals, reunions, farewells, passions, flare-ups and wanderings about the Oklahoma landscape, where Malick and Lubezski find beauty in wheat fields, bison herds and the fracking plants where Neil works.

Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) meanders along a separate subplot for about two-thirds of the film before encountering Marina and Neil on separate occasions. His story is one of sadness and desperation, and Malick affords the Catholic priest a level of intellectual curiosity not seen since the days of Ingmar Bergman. Only terminal patients, drug addicts and criminals seek Quintana’s guidance; the comfortable, fortunate masses live without faith, or adopt it for days or hours at a time. After wedding a young couple, the priest finds not one friend or family member outside his church willing to talk with him about the experience they just shared. If The Tree of Life could be interpreted through a pantheistic lens, then To the Wonder reads more as an ode to Christianity, and its precarious place in our modern, dispassionate world.

Whether intentionally so or not, Neil and Marina possess little of the humanity that makes Father Quintana such a compelling character. Malick has long telegraphed conflict and feeling through non-verbal means, like the way Neil circles around and brushes against Jane (McAdams), a childhood friend with whom he shares a brief, tumultuous tryst. In the cinematic language of Malick, such blocking suggests a disconnect between the two characters and negates the need for melodramatic confrontations. Even by this logic, however, it is hard to justify how Marina frolics and prances about — all the time, everywhere, in city squares and supermarkets. Marina’s dancing ties into the aforementioned idea that movement equates to life, but it also comes across as quite silly when she barely does anything else. That she turns to God and Father Quintana later in the film almost hints at some inherent instability on her part, when considering the nature of his other parishioners. At the very least, it makes her sort of unpleasant. I never want to laugh at a serious work of art, but come on, Terry, you’re pushing it.

These criticisms must sound fairly imprecise and somewhat petty. Just because I did not relate to the two main characters does not mean they are two-dimensional or without meaning. After 40 years of masterpieces, Malick deserves the benefit of the doubt. The images in To the Wonder are works of art on their own, in a way that a shot of Jane tossing a bale of hay means a whole lot more than Jane just tossing a bale of hay. What does it mean? I’m not so sure. I have no problem with embracing not only the beauty but also the ambiguity in that I do not understand. Besides, that is why we see these kinds of movies again, a prospect I have taken a sudden liking to, now that I think about it …

Final Verdict:

3.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.