Monday, October 28, 2013

Adolescence is a Powerful Force

Carrie
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Three Stars

By Rollan Schott

One of the interesting aspects of Brian De Palma’s “Carrie”, the 1976 horror classic about repressed sexuality and the power of femininity, was that it was written (novel and screenplay) and directed by men. It’s an odd band to be writing a feminist anthem, but what De Palma’s “Carrie” became, amidst the whir of testosterone involved in the production, was a parable about the Darwinian cruelty of high school and, perhaps more importantly, a paranoid allegory of masculine insecurity, of the buried power of the women that a male-centric society dares to subjugate. It worked both as a sardonic revenge fantasy and as a cautionary tale, and felt all the more dangerous and startling for managing both.

Monday, October 21, 2013

White Privilege Around the African Horn

Captain Phillips
Directed by Paul Greengrass
Two and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

Paul Greengrass' "Captain Phillips" is a taught, well-written thriller about a wholesome white cargo ship captain standing strong in the face of ruthless black pirates. I am not sure this is a movie we need. Indeed it is difficult for a film like this not to be about race in at least some capacity, not in an increasingly progressive American society that is paying more and more attention to the casual racism infecting the most visible cadres of popular culture. Greengrass doesn't seem to mind this being the underlying subject here, but his visceral, combative approach doesn't allow space for the principal dichotomies necessaries to give it any weight.

A Tale Told too Quickly

Rush
Directed by Ron Howard
Two Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

Ron Howard’s Rush, a sports drama focusing on the famous rivalry in the 1970s between F1 drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt, is a shiny product that clearly has high production values and an experienced hand behind the camera. Most of the technical aspects of this movie are first rate, including the performances of the two leads by Daniel Bruhl (who, so many years ago, was wonderful in Goodbye Lenin!) and Chris Hemsworth. There are driving sequences aplenty, and for the most part they’re easy to follow and enjoyable, with an added dramatic twist in that we know that F1 racing in the 1970s was far more dangerous than it is today, with the prospect of serious accident or death hanging over the competitors every time they sat behind the wheel.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Money is a Foreign Language

Blue Jasmine
Directed by Woody Allen
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

And so, here at age 77, Woody Allen has made one of the great films of his long career, and has drawn from Cate Blanchett one of the great comic performances by anyone. Allen has always predicated his films on the vast chasm over which people from different circumstances attempt to understand one another. His time has come. With income inequality in America as wide as it has been since the twenties, our public discourse has shifted toward attempts by both the rich and the poor to pigeon-hole and typecast the other. Class warfare has no place for humanity.

The Pantheon (2013)

Citizen Kane, 1942, Dir. by Orson Welles

Retired Entries
- The Third Man (Reed, 49)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 68)

Jon's Picks
Rollie's Picks

1. Citizen Kane (Welles, 42) +2
2. Rear Window (Hitchcock, 54) +3
3. City Lights (Chaplin, 31) +1
4. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 76) +11
5. Goodfellas (Scorsese, 90) +5
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 28) Even
7. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 58) +2
8. Psycho (Hitchcock, 60) -1
9. 12 Angry Men (Lumet, 57) +14
10. Stalker (Tarkovsky, 79) -2 

The Horror of the Endless Quiet

Gravity
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
Four Stars
By Jonathan Fisher

“I hate space.”

So says medical engineer Ryan Stone in Gravity. And well she may. Innately, all humans are. Of course, it’s quite humbling to stand down here on terra firma, watch a few episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and look up at the night sky, the uncountable distant galaxies and far away suns. The reality of existence in space, however, is another thing. Space is empty. Think about that concept. Empty. No atmosphere, no sound, certainly no life apart from what we have flung up there in spacesuits designed to mimic the conditions under which we can survive. No sign, as Sagan once said, of help from elsewhere coming to save us from ourselves.

That innate discomfort humans have with space is what Gravity is about, and we the audience instinctively understand that, which is why this movie is such a white-knuckle experience. This film explores, to coin a phrase by Neil DeGasse Tyson, the many ways in which the universe is trying to kill us. Sandra Bullock is Ryan Stone, who along with astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and a small crew is in orbit around Earth, on a mission to repair the Hubble telescope. Kowalksi and Stone are really the only two characters we get to know in the early going – Kowalski as a playful flirt and experienced astronaut, Stone as an uptight engineer with little experience in the vacuum. Kowalski, Stone and a third astronaut are on a spacewalk when disaster strikes.

A nearby Russian satellite self-destructs, and a storm of space debris (yes, this movie also acts as something of a commentary on the little-understood problem of space junk) flies towards our heroes’ space station. In the initial blitz, the third colleague on the spacewalk is killed, and the space station’s hull is compromised, killing another two crew members. This means Kowalksi and Stone are alone in the emptiness of space, communications with Houston severed, with nothing but malfunctioning human-made technology to help them get home. Oh, how our cleverness and self-proclaimed genius pales when faced with the empty horror of life outside our blue planet.

Gravity is directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who previously directed the excellent Children of Men as well as the third instalment of the Harry Potter series. His is an elegant, unhurried directorial style, and Gravity is better for it. Cuaron is an eminently visual director, and it’s remarkable how engrossing he makes a simple sequence of Stone taking off her space suit when she, at last, reaches an airlock. (there’s also, I think, a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the framing of the final, beautiful shot in that sequence as Stone falls asleep)

The action set pieces are tense and horrifying; Cuaron lingers on just how little control our heroes have in this harsh environment. He also focuses on the shared humanity of these two astronauts, which forms the core of Gravity’s emotional punch. We don’t get to know either character all that well, but we gain a basic understanding of what they’re all about, and when it comes down to it, they’re likable. That’s important in a movie like this – Gravity wouldn’t have worked nearly as well if the last bastions of humanity in this disaster were a pair of jerks.

Gravity is probably the strongest of the science-fiction films of 2013 thus far. It doesn’t present a stylistic and creative vision of a dystopian future. It isn’t wall-to-wall with special effects that call attention to themselves. It allows space for the instinctive fear of what exists outside our tenuous atmosphere, while also airing our sense of humility – when Kowalski is faced with his fate, spinning helplessly in orbit, he – visible to us as a mere speck of a homo sapien set against the vast emptiness of space and the enormity of Earth – remarks on the beautiful sunset over the Ganges.

Gravity is in some ways one of the least showy science fiction movies in recent memory, but also one of the most audacious. It is set essentially in the here and now, focuses on a realistic set of parameters and problems astronauts could be faced with, and seeks to explore a powerful question – outside of a planet that we have become masters of (and are poisoning as fast as we can with a kind of perverse glee), how do we humans reconcile our timidity in the face of a vast, powerful and indifferent universe?