GONE GIRL: Gone in 149 Minutes

In which Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry are both cast in a thriller for the first and last time ever.

Director: David Fincher
Writer: Gillian Flynn
Cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry
Runtime: 149 mins.
2014

David Fincher feeds on twisty structures and mind games. It's his lifeforce. His body of work is one sinister game after another: Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, House of Cards, and the most cheekily named The Game. He thrives on these house-of-mirror thriller structures, generally at the expense of real, convincing, or meaningful characters. Go ahead and try to name one truly memorable character from Fincher's filmography--and before you say Tyler Durden, Frank Underwood, or Mark Zuckerberg, let me add one more caveat: a memorable character who isn't a sociopath. The list runs thin, doesn't it?

Fincher has made a career of taking trashy source materials/ideas and elevating them to the level of Serious Cinema. To be clear, I love trashy stories. They don't have to be mere entertainment, although they can be. They can also be fodder for all sorts of interesting intellectual interpretations. Fincher clearly believes this, and he has always walked the fine line between giving genre fiction the attention of craft that he feels it deserves, and taking it all rather too seriously to the point of losing perspective. His best work tends to be the former, and if it can be said that any of his films have "failed," they belong to the latter category.

Lucky for us, Gone Girl features both a twisty-turny thriller structure, and characters who are designed more to be avatars than believable people--a Fincher special! Double lucky for us, Gone Girl may be a serious affair, but it never mistakes itself for what it's not. This movie is a thriller all the way down.

PRISONERS: Scares and Scars and Cares and Cars

In which we have fun watching twitchy Jake Gyllenhaal twitch.

 

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writer: Aaron Guzikowski
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Terrence Howard, Paul Dano, Viola Davis, Melissa Leo, Maria Bello, David Dastmalchian
Runtime: 153 mins.
2013

Before seeing the movie, there was nothing in particular that enticed me about Prisoners. The promotional posters were dour, the trailers forgettable. The title didn't inspire. Jackman and Gyllenhaal can be strong actors, but have an equal propensity for coasting. Even the premise itself, a dark gritty child abduction thriller, feels been-there-done-that.

It took a very direct and specific recommendation for me to seek the movie out, and I'm glad because most of my preconceptions were askew. As far as thrillers go Prisoners manages to be thrilling for most of its bloated 153 minutes, which is high praise for a genre subject to more cliches than most.

HER: Artificial Emotional Intelligence

In which I am uncharacteristically honest and sensitive.

Director: Spike Jonze
Writer: Spike Jonze
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Chris Pratt, Olivia Wilde
Runtime: 126 mins.
2013

I try to sound smart on my movie blog. I try to identify and engage with what I deem to be the key aspects of any given movie. I talk about things I know a little bit about, like performance or story. I talk about things I really know nothing about, like sound design or editing or cinematography. I try to be honest. But perhaps more than that I try not to sound stupid or inane.

I do this because I'm afraid of being wrong. That has always been my fear. So I try to make ironclad arguments instead of tossing out a bunch of unsystematic sensory impressions. Sometimes, during the act of watching a movie, I am already formulating what sort of points or narrative I want to craft in a potential future post.

That's probably the right tactic for a movie blog, but it's not the conversation I want to have about Her. The golden rule of criticism should be to approach a piece of art or entertainment on its own terms, and evaluate how successful it is within those parameters. As I was watching Her, it became apparent that the right way to talk about the movie would be to share how it impacted me on a personal level.

Top Ten TV Time!

More than any other entertainment medium,* the way we interact with television has changed the most in my lifetime. It used to be that our lives were structured around the TV. If you cared about a show enough to keep up with it, you had three options.

*A good argument could be made for video games. I might respond that even as the games themselves have taken massive leaps, the way we orient ourselves to video games has stayed much the same, with the clear exception of online gaming. Not being an online gamer, I'm not in a position to compare. Though it's interesting that in both cases (online games and streaming television) the new factor is the internet.

1. Make sure your schedule was clear every ___________ night at __ o'clock.
2. Finagle with your VCR with the hopes of recording the episode on a VHS.
3. Hope like hell you could catch the missed episode in a re-run.

Television lent itself to tradition. Families like mine set aside sacred time every week to watch the new episode of Survivor or CSI. People squirreled away tapes of their favorite shows collected over the course of months, like I did with The Simpsons and Spider-Man: The Animated Series. Folks surrendered their fates to unpredictable re-runs, maybe a previously unexperienced morsel of entertainment, maybe a purgatory of that one episode you've seen half a dozen times and then some.

The Netflix model changed everything. Of course it had its precursors in TiVo and other digital recording services, but the sea change happened with Netflix. It killed the video stores.

Netflix, and streaming television in general, gave television viewers what filmgoers had for years: agency. No longer do we have to respect the sacred space-time of a regularly scheduled program. Instead, television bends to our individual humanistic whims. Sneaking bits and pieces of TV on public transportation or binging a show in the middle of the night, we have profaned television with our vulgar desires.

I like it a lot better that way.

NOAH: An Ark of a Different Color

In which the Bible gets weird.

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writers: Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel
Cast: Russell Crowe, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, Jennifer Connelly, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth
Runtime: 138 mins.
2014

Noah could have gone one of two ways.

It could have catered to its Christian audience, presenting a souped up but conservative Noah narrative that would please the religious crowd and hopefully nab the sad group of Russell Crowe fans that remain loyal. In other words, it could have gone the way of God Is Not Dead, a fundamentalist narrative about the triumphs of faith that was released around the same time as Noah, and is of course laughably inept from a filmmaking perspective. But it makes the Christian audience happy. I don't mean to pick on Christian movies, fundamentalism in general makes for bad filmmaking: we need only look at the recently released conclusion to the Atlas Shrugged trilogy, which is apparently one of the most embarrassing excuses for a movie trilogy to ever be ejaculated onto the populace.

Alternately, Noah could have abandoned the Christian (and Jewish, though I can't imagine they would mind nearly as much) audience by taking loads of silly liberal liberties with the Noah narrative, in an attempt to appeal to the sort of folks who get excited about a Hercules movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Fundamentalist Christians would have become this film's enemy, going on crusades about how the Hollywood machine has tainted Truth yet again. Most others would have ignored it as a version of Evan Almighty that didn't pretend to be funny.

I let Noah slip under my radar because I wasn't interested in watching either of those possibilities. I made a mistake. It turns out Noah is a PG-13 action movie that doesn't fall into either of the above categories. It falls into a category of its own. It is like nothing you've ever seen before.

A lot of people called it bad. Everybody called it weird. I call it confusing, exciting, beautiful, and tremendously uneven. I don't understand what it all means, but I have a review to write, so I'm going to pretend.

PROXY: A Dead Baby Joke

In which our protagonists turn out to be antagonists and our antagonists turn out to be antagonists.

Director: Zack Parker
Writers: Kevin Donner, Zack Parker
Cast: Alexia Rasmussen, Alexa Havins, Kristina Klebe, Joe Swanberg
Runtime: 120 mins.
2013

Proxy is fundamentally deceptive. It's the kind of movie that makes you hate everybody, then tricks you into hating them for all new reasons that subsequently turn out not to be true. It tries to be high-minded and succeeds in being low-brow. It's a massive crock of M. Night Shyamalan plot twists, if Shyamalan turned out to be a teenager and also a sadist. It's like wandering through a winding maze full of cupboards, and behind each cupboard is a punch in the face. Proxy is deliberately designed to be a face-punching labyrinth.

So why, instead of just being hateful, is it also boring?

THE LEGO MOVIE: Everything Is Meta

In which we behold Will Ferrell's face with a sense of awe.

Directors: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Writers: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Cast: Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Ferrell, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Will Arnett, Charlie Day, Alison Brie, Nick Offerman
Runtime: 100 mins.
2014

There are three types of movie watchers. (Okay, there are a million types of movie watchers, but I'm trying to construct a framework here.) Thoughtless movie watchers, Thoughtful movie watchers, and Thoughtfilled movie watchers.

There's nothing inherently wrong with Thoughtless movie watchers. Most folks watch movies this way. Passive entertainment to be digested and promptly set aside. They're the kinds of folks who think that another Transformers movie sounds pretty good, why not. Or another Marvel movie. Or another Liam Neeson action thriller. Or another kids' movie based on a familiar property. If it strikes them as good and comfortable, they'll see it. You could get into ethical/political arguments about this type of filmgoer, and whether they should be more thoughtful about the ramifications of their choice of media consumption (the studio system gets screwed up by the popularity of movies like Transformers and ends up churning out more crap like it--not to mention the dangerous sexism and racism and political sentiments those movies espouse, etc. etc.). But that's another argument for another time. Thoughtless movie watchers are fine. They would enjoy a movie like the movie I'm writing about today.

For Thoughtful movie watchers, passive digestion isn't enough. They bring a critical eye to their consumption, and tend to appreciate films more on the level of craft. They're careful about what movies they spend their time and money on, and they want to discuss them after the fact. They go crazy with writing self-important movie reviews to post on a blog nobody reads. They are the kinds of people who would be immediately suspicious about everything surrounding a movie like The Lego Movie, which has Corporate Cash Grab written all over its cylindrical yellow face. They would be primed to dismiss the movie as capitalist tripe and move on to the next Scorsese or Tarantino film. Until they started hearing glowing reviews for The Lego Movie pour in, which would pique their curiosity. They couldn't help but investigate the hype, and they would watch The Lego Movie, wary but cautiously open-minded. And once they acclimated themselves to the strange animation style and gag-heavy energy of the beginning of the film, they would be totally on board.

Thoughtfilled movie watchers are a different matter. They are the folks who are trying to be critical and thoughtful about movies, but are unwilling or unprepared to approach a film on its own terms. Instead, their heads are filled with mountains of preconceptions and assumptions about media that they have not yet digested, and as a result their perspective will often be skewed. Like the Thoughtless movie watchers, they will give you a weird look whenever you talk about a movie that is somehow foreign or off-kilter to their sensibilities (although the look from the Thoughtless movie watchers will contain more confusion, and that of the Thoughtfilled will contain more condescension). Like the Thoughtful movie watchers, these folks will come to the conclusion that The Lego Movie is a Corporate Cash Grab immediately after it enters their radar. They might even look down on the ignorant masses who will no doubt flock to the theaters to throw their money at such a ploy. They will avoid this movie if they can, reviews be damned. And if they happen to see the movie, they will cynically pick it apart as well as they can, because no movie based on a kid's toy property could possibly be an intelligent, unique, energetic, engaging, worthwhile, socially conscious piece of cinema. Right?

RIGHT????

Surprise surprise, The Lego Movie defies all expectations and somehow manages to be all those positive qualities I just mentioned. And you know what? I think my theory might be wrong in this case. Unlike other movies like this, I honestly believe that if you managed to sit a Thoughtfilled movie watcher down in front of this movie, they would be converted by the end. That's the unprecedented power of The Lego Movie.

NEBRASKA: Recollect Your Winnings

In which we learn that it's not important whether you win or lose, but how much you talk about winning.

Director: Alexander Payne

Writer: Bob Nelson

Cast: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Bob Odenkirk

Runtime: 115 mins.

2013

Nebraska is more than the sum of its parts. Part of that is that I'm not partial to parts of its parts. But on whole, the whole of it takes hold of some holes at the center of the "wholesome" American experience, while offering a viewing porthole into ill-represented parts of said experience.

In other words, I like the movie more for what it goes for rather than how it goes.

Nebraska follows everyman David Grant (Will Forte), whose life is settling into a vacant sense of normalcy only interrupted by the escapades of his father, Woody (Bruce Dern). David's mother Kate (June Squibb) repeatedly calls upon him to retrieve Woody, who keeps trying to walk all the way to Nebraska from his home in Montana. He wants to go there because he has received a letter in the mail declaring him the winner of one million dollars! Of course it's a scam, but there is no convincing Woody, who is stubborn and shows early signs of dementia. Eventually David decides that the only way to lay this problem to rest is to take a road trip to Nebraska to claim the false prize. He sees it as an opportunity to spend some time with the father who was often drunk, usually vacant, and always emotionally distant. So they go, and things happen along the way.

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES: The Cone Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree

In which we still don't learn how to spell Synecdoteeodcee, New York.

Director: Derek Cianfrance
Writers: Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, and Darius Marder
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Dane DeHaan, Eva Mendes, Ben Mendelsohn, Ray Liotta, Emory Cohen
Runtime: 140 mins.
2012

The Place Beyond the Pines strives to be epic with every fiber of its being. In a lot of ways, it fails. Yet it remains a textbook case of how much mileage a movie can gain from a strong start. In fact, I have to admit that I was sold from the very first shot:

We open to blackness, with an undercurrent of indistinct noise. As the title cards pass before us, we hear a new sound: a crisp, repetitive clinking noise that is vaguely reminiscent of the clanking of train cars steadily passing by. When we finally cut to our first image, we see the tattooed torso of Luke (Ryan Gosling), his hands expertly snapping a butterfly knife as he paces back and forth in a small trailer. His body language is restless, the click-clacking of the knife metronomic. He suddenly embeds the knife in a wall and leaves the trailer. The continuous shot... continues... as we follow him, a colorful fairground opening out before us, the previously dulled sounds of carnivalesque carousing now raucous and all-encompassing. The camera trails behind Luke, in a manner familiar to anybody who watched The Wrestler, or Breaking Bad. Luke passes fluorescent rides and games, pink and blue lights illuminating the night. He takes a turn into a darker, more subdued part of the fairground and heads for a tent. When he enters the tent, we are met with the sounds of revving engines, cheering fans, and an incomprehensible announcer. He heads for two other motorcyclists, and joins them on a third cycle of his own. The mounting of the cycle is the first moment we see Luke's face, a brief glimpse before he dons his helmet. Then the cyclists enter the steel cage, a metal sphere barely big enough to accommodate the three of them. The crowd erupts as the cyclists each begin circumnavigating the inside of the sphere, weaving in and out of each other's paths in daredevil fashion. The first shot ends.

Everything that is good and right about The Place Beyond the Pines is encompassed in that first shot, from the cycle of violence as represented by the click-clacking butterfly knife, to the visual coupling of Luke's identity with his motorcycle, to the long trailer-to-tent trudge that evokes an inevitable symbolic march towards danger and destruction. It's all there, and it's beautiful.

The movie never stops being beautiful, but it never recaptures the precision and economy of storytelling that the first shot offers.

THE IMPOSSIBLE: It's Tsuna-me, Not Tsuna-you

In which Ewan McGregor kisses things for 50% of his screentime.

Director: J. A. Bayona

Writer: Sergio G. Sánchez

Cast: Naomi Watts, Tom Holland, Ewan McGregor, Samuel Joslin, Oaklee Pendergast

Runtime: 114 mins.

2012

Before I start the review, I should give you a comprehensive recap of this movie. Pay attention, it's going to be complicated:

This "true story" follows a British family vacationing in Thailand during the tsunami of Christmas 2004, and their efforts to find each other in the aftermath of the disaster.

That's about it. Now onto the review!