Killing Them Softly

I’m talking about that most arrogant of self-centered people. The guy who cops a dated style but wears it like he invented it. His whole attitude a transparent grab for attention. And when he talks, every subject leads back to him. Sure, you hate him, everyone does. But there’s a small bit of respect for the conviction put into the whole charade. It being hideous may be part of the intent and definitely part of the charm.

I’m not sure I can call Killing Them Softly a good or bad movie. I can say I couldn’t help but stare and appreciate. The main reason I kept watching was that each character felt whole and independent. Instead of characters moving in to press a theme or plot further along, it felt that the narrative gets waylaid by these people. The audience gets a mini-character study while ideas / concepts trace through them. But the power came from each of these people not caring at all what came before them. It became their movie as soon they got the camera. Really, it was so arresting that had I been told how the whole thing ended, I would have kept watching to see these characters.

As for these ideas / concepts / themes, Killing Them Softly comes out really over-the-top. I cringed at the naked stretch towards “art house”. It screams “I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY”, but then leaves the audience alone after that to supply the “what”. Brad Pit has a fun monologue at the end to summarize the one undeniable message of the piece. You know, in case everything that came before was too subtle for you (it won’t be).It’s tough not to see the willful self-destruction of every character and the demonization of corporate America / corporate culture. The idea is fun to turn over in your head, “organized crime has gone to the dogs”. It reminds me a quote from my father (I don’t know where he got it), that  “___ could screw up a dumpster”.  Citing corporate America as the source of all the nation’s ills isn’t new, but tracing it this far down is. Or like the mobster who robs his own games of poker, there’s this wink Killing Them keeps giving out. How serious / self-aware is the movie? Because robbing your own game of poker that is entirely attended by gangsters is both the most clever and dumbest thing a person could do. It’s a mind-game you play with yourself. (I recognize how stupid that sentence can sound. That’s the point)

It’s way too easy to throw this film out based on a surface understanding. The opening invites it, but then the acting is so good. You can take one glance at that self-absorbed person and know everything, maybe, but for me the idea keeps lingering… Is it a play on expectations or just willful blindness?

This film felt no need to justify itself. It simply did what it wanted. I approve. 

Cloud Atlas

Atlas got off to a bad start with me. It spouts off some Junk about how all stories are the same; they express some human commonality blah blah. I was offended both as a person who enjoys stories and one who writes them. Obviously the reverse is true, right? Does it not slight every story, including this one, to think they’re all different dressing on the same idea? Credit to Atlas for slowly winning me over.

At first it seemed like there were a dozen narratives and none of them have anything to do with each other. Then the irresistible thrill and challenge of solving a puzzle took over. When next I reassessed my general like / dislike I found myself engrossed in each little story. The offensive opening acted as the key, and I had to, grudgingly, agree with the claim.

I can see the potential turn off, though. For being all about the human condition, none of the stories feel real. They all take place on Earth, sure, but have a weightlessness to them. The only thing that matters is the Moral. Like a folktale or myth, everything feeds into the final lesson with such a hyper focus that there is nothing else but a condensed nugget of “truth”. And going through multiple climaxes was somewhat grating. Relieved somewhat by nobody being “safe”. The characters are instruments of the end message. So long as that’s served it doesn’t matter what happens to them.

The revealed Mysteries of the Universe aren’t going to astound. This is more touching celebration than breaking news. The connection between disparate narratives invites personal branching of the core idea. How important are stories to actual human loves? Deeply. And examining how personal favorites fit into this much larger Work is the loving send-off to this beautiful piece. 

Star Trek

I think the proper metaphor for this film is some slight of hand card trick. Very slick, with lots of movement, that ultimately doesn’t go far. These reshuffled stories, stories that acknowledge in some post-modern sense that they are stories already told but mean to realign the pieces in a new fashion, hit a deeper nerve than New stories. Expectations are met, challenged, and played with. I’m sitting there feeling like the story is talking to me. But Star Trek just teases at a reshuffle. Big changes are either killed early by other big changes or the “change” remains functionally the same as before. It’s all talk. Early on, Kirk is stripped of his captaincy . All the possibilities that bloom are beautiful to consider. I want to see how Kirk gets his ship back, how he grows under Pike (who is just one of the coolest guys in the film), what the rest of the crew do in his absence. Yet functionally, Spock still calls him captain, he still gives orders, and another big change comes through that knocks this one apart. The big movement in the beginning is a referendum on Kirk’s “go with your gut” style but before that can even get a hold everything switches and Kirk’s “just go” method is the only thing to save everyone.

Spock. He’s broken here. Beaten from one end of the film to the other by every major character, it’s no small wonder. He comes off as arrogant not confident, dismissive not calm, and the puzzlement he’s always had about emotions balloons into a willful ignorance. The Spock that approached problems from inventive new angles? Now he’s simply an asshole. His absence rips out a good chunk of the heart and humor of the series. Honestly, I spent so much time waiting for him to come around I feel I owe the film a second watch to see if I missed anything.

Cumberbatch, the main bad, is horrible. Every line he takes way over-the-top. And every ounce of that bad acting he channels through his mouth, forgetting the rest of his face, and contorting his mouth strangely for each word. His character’s name and associated history carry more weight than any action he takes. Meant to convey an unstoppable threat, it’s up to the rest of the cast talking about how serious he is to make the reputation stick. It doesn’t help he still looks and moves like Sherlock.

I also have to subtract substantially for an ending that anybody, anybody, is going to see coming a mile and a half away. The moving words are drowned out by the audience screaming “get on with it”.

Action-wise it feels very samey. Stunts repeat from the previous film or just seem similar conceptually to each other. How many times is Kirk going to fit one fast moving object into a small section of another, larger, one?  Credit to the computer-effects wizards for making the same tricks feel a little fresh. It’s not boring, just disappointing.

And then it’s over and I wonder what it meant. The villains wanted a war, Kirk wanted a family, and for being the smart guy out there, Spock is still playing catch-up. They take off sure of themselves and lessons learned but I’m not. The film that began reviling in change slots all the pieces back where they’re supposed to go and takes off. Better luck next time Enterprise.

Zero Dark Thirty

The trouble with a reviewing on Zero Dark Thirty is that it wasn’t a movie. What you’ll get here is a series of news articles acted out. Acted well, sure. I don’t mean to be dismissive of the talent and skill on display here, as it’s considerable. But scenes come and go like all they were meant to do is tick off another signpost on the way to bin Laden’s head. Each ends with a “and here’s the general feeling of what just happened”. People were scared, then angry, but then they got really scared again, but then they got really angry. Those are the depths this film plumbs. Each event is just evidence, justification, for the ending everyone knows is coming. How did anyone get upset about the torture? All the film says is that it happened and the public didn’t like it. There is no defense or condemnation. Characters are likewise pushed along a flat progression. How did the same director do this and The Hurt Locker?

There really is no nuance here for me to write more about. The story is as you, no doubt, know it. Nothing new was added. Should a passionless reminder of what the hunt for Osama entailed, this is just the thing. 

Life of Pi

Watching movies way past their theatrical debt entails a management of hype from cultural osmosis. I don’t look for it, I just get it. Shocker here. I’m pretty confident in my own opinions. So I didn’t go into Pi expecting the Moon and all the Stars. Well… then the film itself promises it. The writer who is interviewing adult Pi about his life says (paraphrasing) “your Uncle says this is one of the greatest stories ever told and will make me believe in God”. I tensed a bit when that was said. Why would a film ever do that to itself? Maybe it was meant to disarm the audience. Because even with all the hype surrounding this thing, I felt like it was the underdog right then. The film under its own expectations. Accident or not, I’m rooting for this thing now so bully for Pi.

Such a trick really wasn’t needed. As a matter of fact, the writer character really wasn’t needed. Adult Pi is such a natural talker that something so weakly contrived as a writer needing a story isn’t necessary to get him rolling. Irrfan Khan plays it just right with an understated performance to ground the spectacle that follows. Though the fun stuff takes a while to come around. Up until Pi’s boat sinks it’s mostly sappy, crappy, cliché. Pi trying to connect to the soul of animals by looking into their eyes. I get that it’s about a young Pi growing up. Straddling the adult and child worlds, “is what it is” and “everything’s magical”. I stilled gagged.

Especially since Pi doesn’t fully refute the silly personification of… everything. Every little thing is a lesson sent directly from God to educate our young fella. The film will ask questions about belief or meaning but the answers it provides are shallow, relying on (outstanding) CG work to dazzle the audience and work on their sentimentality. I felt like young Pi when he asked a priest about Jesus and got some gibberish ring-around reply, “that doesn’t make sense!”.

Plus, the CG creates a disconnect. Everything is rendered convincingly, but the singular nature of what’s shown makes it unbelievable. It’s too pretty, too real, too much unlike the gray / brown world I live in. And I mean, I should believe in God because CG tigers and fish look so real? Pi’s journey is so obviously fake / clearly romanticized I can’t apply it to my own life. Or really take his seriously. Whole family dies? Aww. Oh well. Sure was beautiful when they drowned.

As a film: Don’t tell the audience you’re aiming for their heart! They will guard it! One must sneak in… Life of Pi is… nice, but has the impact of a pleasant breeze.

Flight

Flight flipped around how I thought of addiction. There have been precious few films, that I’ve seen, that are able to speak in the language of humanity. Films normally seem strange or robotic to me. They blast this “fill-in-the-blank” style of adlib emotion. A man’s whole family is killed, he feels a sadness that is relatable. It’s emotion without breadth or depth.  We relate to it but fill in the (noticeable) gaps with our own experience to make it work. It functions more like a check. Like when meeting someone new, unless there is instant chemistry, the discussion is crude. General topics or events are swapped, our ratings (sad, crazy, cool) and emotional response are matched, but it’s all a way of saying “I’m a normal person, how about you?”.* That’s authenticating, not talking.

Prior to Flight I thought of addicts as weak people. They had the potential to be great but constantly, and needlessly, fucked up. Think of Christian Bale in The Fighter. He was so fragile mentally and physically. The world was littered with all sorts of triggers that would lead to him having another colossal fuck up. Flight showed me how powerful it really is to manage. To live a life fairly close to normal but deal with a staggering addiction at the same time. Addicts from The Fighter’s view are like people who can’t swim and are put in the middle of the ocean while everyone else just watches from land. Pity is my strongest emotional response, how I relate to them. In Flight, addicts are like heroes of Greek Myth. They’re doing all the same things the normal people do, but with a giant bolder chained to them. It’s awe-inspiring. My thinking shifted from “just put them out of their misery” to “how amazing would they be with no bolder?”.* Addicts seem like stronger people. Stronger people with bigger weaknesses.

The role of normal (everyone not an addict) people gets shifted as well. Fighter’s normals were unlucky but incredibly generous people. They behave and function like blameless parents. Sure, typically the caregivers try to shoulder some of the responsibility in another heroic display of affection but the audience never buys that. Everything wrong in contained, neatly, within the addict. Flight, with their superpeople addicts, tears down that condescending wall. What makes non-addicts so good? Did you not feel that co-pilot’s (Brian Geraghty) wife (Bethany Anne Lind) had some very serious issues? With each normal person Denzel met I felt the take-away message was “who you calling crazy? who you think is weak? You’re lucky courts and lawyers don’t recognize what you do as an illness”. Normal wasn’t “normal”, those people were just undiagnosed. Or maybe managing better. Hiding whatever quirks they had.

It was a line of questioning Denzel kept coming back to. Even though the plane had faulty parts, fell apart on him, and even though he miraculously landed it anyway, the only thing everyone else was hearing and seeing was that he was drunk. His weakness broke the plane and God was the one who saved it. Addicts couldn’t do anything right, only varying degrees of wrong. I never felt that the search for the plane’s problem was an escape route for Denzel. It was more “what’s the bigger prolem?”.* I think Flight moved away from the Freudian notion that all character is built in childhood too, which is more satisfying, and allows addicts to be adults not just big malfunctioning kids. Flight replaced the linear equation so often used as a metric in real life with a grayscale. It never hid or emphasized one aspect over another, just asked you to form an opinion based on the total character.

Too many films corroborate our feelings or thoughts. They work so long and hard to authenticate themselves only. Flight effortlessly spoke with true humanity, carrying it so comfortably it could move beyond and challenge anyone watching to really understand their own notions about it. An absolutely beautiful piece or art.

*I do what I will with punctuation 

ARGO

I could be mistaken but I feel the wrong approach towards making a film with a historical setting is to play the whole thing straight, like nobody knows what’s going to happen. Knowing the ending hurts this film a lot. The first act of Argo, where it’s unknown what plan the CIA is going to go with to rescues the Americans? Waste of time. The tension as the audience wonders if the group will be able to hold together despite the pressure of the situation? Non-existent. The final “chase” where our heroes sit calmly in a plane while their pursuers frantically use every method available to them, notable exception a radio, to stop the plane that everyone knows takes off just fine…?

Mr. Ben Affleck, as the big play maker CIA escape artist, acts by not acting. His performance reminded me of Gary Oldman’s in Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy.  Both men stayed in the background and gave quite simple answers to anything directed towards them. I didn’t feel like he was channeling anxiety, or playing to the seriousness of the situation. He was just quiet.

The group of Americans in need of rescue are all just awful. Both in terms of their role in the story and their performance. The worst line of the film unquestioningly goes to Wife #3 who says “Joe… I’m scared”. YES DEAR. That is what the scene has been trying to convey. That has been your entire objective for the film. Was this the last kick upon that particular dead horse? One among them decides to play the most unlikeable person on Earth. It’s his job to cry and complain about everything that happens. Constantly threatening to go off by himself unless everyone plays the game he wants. So yes, of course he’s the one who surprisingly saves the team from their last hurdle. As for the rest… it was tough mustering my own concern for them as they ate lavish meals in a luxury home. Boredom was their greatest enemy. On that we can relate.

I liked John Goodman and Alan Arkin (Special Effects and Producer guys) despite how weak their jabs at Hollywood were. If there was some angle to make this film worth watching, it was undoubtedly with them. Some intersection of what people of any cultural background are prepared to believe with ideas on where the stage ends and how fake is sometimes real enough.