The Wolverine We Deserve

The Wolverine
Directed by James Mangold
Two and One Half Stars

By Jon Fisher

James Mangold’s The Wolverine does what it says on the tin – it provides action and special effects on a mostly lavish scale, while attempting to add a touch of humanity to its proceedings. Whether any real enjoyment can be gained from the film outside of those parameters is another question, but rest assured – if you want to plonk yourself down and watch pretty pictures fly across a movie screen, you can do worse than The Wolverine.

A Love Letter to an Old West That Can't Read

The Lone Ranger
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Two Stars

By Rollan Schott

The early shots in Gore Verbinski’s “The Lone Ranger” betray a strange beauty. We see the Golden Gate Bridge, half constructed, which would place us sometime in the mid-thirties. A young boy (Mason Cook) is visiting an amusement park. He stumbles into a tent full of displays of the Old West, a time that exists now only in fantasy and history books. In here, he meets the elderly Native American Tonto (Johnny Depp), working as a live display of the proverbial “Savage”. Through Tonto’s memory is the story told to the boy, and so to us. In this way, Verbinski casts the shadow of mortality over his images of the old west, the romance, the beauty, the vast freedom, the opportunity. It existed only yesterday and only now as a dream, and in his interpretation of the Lone Ranger Verbinski has hung in the air the thick aura of the finite.

The problem, of course, is that Verbinski’s Old West is not romantic. It is not fantastical, and it is not beautiful. It is, instead, a cartoonish playground for a generic odd-couple, ambitious of franchise. It has the stink of a film that was made not for its own sake, but to sell a sequel. The screenplay by Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott is well structured, with clever plot twists and a host of archetypical characters, and the film’s finale, with the Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer) riding his famed horse Silver along the roofs of a runaway train is a satisfying payoff, but Verbinski’s delivery is slack and unfocused, his characters only half-realized, which makes the presence of the white Depp as a Native American – in the Twenty-First Century, mind you – all the more insensitive. They cannot prove he was worth the political incorrectness of his casting.

Though it must be conceded that Depp’s presence as Tonto may play into Tonto’s history as a Comanche outsider, who as a young boy had been tricked by a couple white men into betraying his tribe in exchange for a cheap pocket watch. This backstory supplements that of John Reid (Eventually the Lone Ranger) a New York lawyer returning to Texas to see that the outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) is given a just trial before his public hanging. A local railroad tycoon Cole (Tom Wilkinson) would like to put on a show, demonstrating the wave of justice his Trans-Continental Railroad will bring to the West. But Butch escapes, after a wild train crash, and John and Tonto, who meet on the train, conspire to bring him to justice for independent reasons, and in independent fashions. John is a hopeless ranger, ethically opposed to guns, clinging to a naive value of due process in a place where this value cannot be adequately enforced, ignorant of the ways and means that scores are settled outside his dear law school, an outsider to the lawless West. Much of the action in the film revolves around John needing to be creatively rescued from precarious situations by the formidable and resourceful Tonto.

The early scenes in “The Lone Ranger”, and the occasional interlude between the elderly Tonto and young boy at the amusement park, keep prescient the impact and the innovation that the railroad at the heart of this story had on the very place and idealism that the Lone Ranger had fought to preserve. The themes implied by the film’s structure vastly outweigh Verbinski’s delivery. This is the fifth film that the director has made with Johnny Depp, and one gets the awful sense that their relationship has devolved into the routine. Depp here is so ingratiatingly Depp-like. There is no risk, no invention, no spontaneity. His presence is a pre-determined spark of quirkiness that percolates “The Lone Ranger” like a low drone, present but unsatisfying, unchanging, and finally, unending.

In a late scene, an entire Comanche tribe is slaughtered by the battalion of a corrupt general. Verbinski offers them no remorse, nor feels any weight in this moral defeat. But then, this isn’t a film that stops to feel or regard much at all. Not the majesty of the western countryside, not that receding universe of the Native Americans, not the regrets of its main characters. “The Lone Ranger” begins with a checklist of images and scenarios its storied character demands, and checks them off one by one until there are no more. When it is over, the credits roll. That, in a nutshell, is the experience the story provides.

An Art Movie With an Art Deficiency

Only God Forgives
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
Zero Stars

By Jon Fisher

Some spoilers exist herein

This film is a piece of work. Only God Forgives evoked in me the most visceral disgust that I can recall feeling in a cinema for a number of years. This film obsesses over, yearns for, and savors sadism. When it isn't coming up with abhorrent scenarios to subject its audience to, it commits the even worse cinematic crime of being insufferably boring.

Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn had some success a few years ago with the Ryan Gosling vehicle (pardon the pun) Drive. My impressions of that movie were that Refn was a terrifically talented visual director, with an ear for soundtrack but a worrying tendency to savor violent acts and present them almost lovingly. Boy, I had no idea what was coming in his next feature.

The horrendous violence on display in Only God Forgives is sickening, and serves an artistic purpose that is half-assed and poorly executed. Ryan Gosling plays Julian, an American expatriate who makes a living smuggling drugs out of a Muay Thai boxing center in Bangkok. His brother Billy goes on a violent spree that culminates in him brutally raping and murdering a 16-year-old prostitute. This is brought to the attention of Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), a police officer with shady ethical boundaries, who sanctions Billy’s murder. Julian’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives, determined to assist Julian in seeking vengeance for her son’s death.

Despite its best efforts to distinguish itself from everything else at the multiplex, the structure of the film is actually quite predictable. A few sequences of flat, expressionless dialogue delivered in a manner we've seen done much better in David Lynch movies, followed by an outburst of tremendously detailed violence that would have been passé in a mid-1990s David Cronenburg movie. Most of the violence is usually performed in front of a swathe of bystanders who sit or stand by with blank looks on their faces. Woop-tee-do. The shock of the violence wears off after the first or second instance (although the film’s latter stages are plenty disgusting). The tedium of the presentation is what lived with me.

Only God Forgives is, it would seem, an exploration of the psyche of a man with a particularly powerful and dangerous Oedipal complex. It’s not presented with much subtlety – see, for instance, a conversation in which Julian’s mother claims that Julian couldn't live up to Billy because Billy possessed the larger penis of the two. Refn is on record as confirming that Only God Forgives takes place in a woman’s vagina. I’m not sure if we can decipher this from the evidence in the picture – although there are a lot of long, narrow passages and softly-lit, warm-looking spaces. And there is a moment in which Julian (in slow-motion, of course) further eviscerates his mother’s corpse and reaches into her womb…

Whatever. You’re getting the idea of the pretension on display in this movie. It’s a movie that so badly wants to convince us of its cleverness and brilliance. It gets so caught up in its own genius that it forgets the basics of storytelling – creating compelling characters and believable story arcs. The problem here is not that the characters are all completely psychopathic and unlikable. It’s that they’re uninteresting. Everyone in this movie is uniformly blank. They move in painful-to-watch slow motion. They allow no emotion to pass over their faces. They glide from one disgusting set piece to another. They show no remorse, no grief, no love, nothing. Even the hints at Julian’s ethical code (refusing to allow an innocent young girl to die, for instance) seem to come from some alien, inhumane realm. The characterization in this movie is a boring one-trick pony. Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives is a trick that isn't worth giving the time of day.

Monsters, Robots, and a Blockbuster for the Ages

Pacific Rim
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pacific Rim” is the movie “Transformers” would like to be when it grows up, a wet-dream of comic book, science fiction, action, and monster movie tropes a whirl in a melting pot of hysterical blockbuster equilibrium, the kind of heedless, silly gusto that elicits a fevered “Oh hell yes” when the credits roll. There are a number of “Oh hell yes” moments in “Pacific Rim”, actually. Del Toro is the kind of director that can conjure them effectively. Here he has taken a skirmish between monstrous aliens and skyscraper-sized robots and imbued it with a clever wit and a modest humanity. Startling what that little extra can do to a movie like this.

At some point around present time, a bizarre rift appeared along the ocean floor, deep in the Pacific Ocean. Out of the mysterious opening crawled a giant, monstrous creature we first see trudging into San Francisco Bay, through and over the Golden Gate Bridge as though it were unheeded police tape. Fighter jets and guided missiles were hurled relentlessly at the creature, dubbed the Kaiju, and it was finally brought down several days and several hundred miles after it first reached shore. The moment was memorialized, the fallen heroes lionized, and mankind moved on. But a few months later another appeared, and then another, then another, and it became clear that more sophisticated means of defense would be necessary.

Queue the Jaeger Program, an army of enormous robots manufactured by the international community to combat the Kaiju before they could reach our shores and ransack our cities. The Jaegers are controlled by two pilots, rigged in simulator body-suits within the robots’ heads, piloting the machines by thought and body movement. Because the interface of the system is too complicated for a single human mind to manage, two pilots must synchronize their minds, a process called 'drifting', and train themselves to manage and contain each others’ memories while guiding the machines in unison.

This we are told in an opening scene that is as oversized and gloriously bloated – at around twenty-something minutes – as the whole of the film. This early montage and initial battle are awe-inspiring. It’s a gratifyingly tongue-in-cheek moment when, nearly a half hour into the film and following an epic, almost climactic fight sequence, the title page finally appears, Del Toro’s coy method of suggesting that yes, there’s plenty more where that came from.

When the story proper begins, the Jaeger program has been defunded after the Kaiju, in their evolving state, have become too large and too powerful for the robots to combat reliably. The world governments don’t have any better ideas, and control of the Pacific Rim is slipping away. What remains of the Jaeger program have convened in Hong Kong under the command of General Pentacost (Idris Elba), coordinating an underground resistance effort to take the fight to the Kaiju for a change. This involves digging up retired pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), who’d left the program after his co-pilot and brother was killed in battle, and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), a young upstart under Pentacost’s paternal wing.

The rest is effectively fodder for massive-scale action sequences between the Jaegers and Kaiju, though there is some clever comic relief courtesy of a couple manic scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) working with the program. The reason “Pacific Rim” is such a splendid movie is because these action sequences are inventive, beautifully photographed and coherently composed, and because Del Toro brings enough generic humanity to his characters to lend the action just the right touch of emotional weight.

Should we pretend, this is a grand metaphor? That there is a wealth of subtext? I feel like this would be a disservice to Del Toro’s achievement. Sure, this is a movie about trust, and sure, Dr. Geiszler alludes to greenhouse gasses making the planet more enticing to the Kaiju than it otherwise might have been, but indeed it is the headlong, vacuous simplicity of the narrative that makes this such a puritanical entertainment. “Pacific Rim” has satisfied for me a long unfed appetite for good old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster camp, genuine, original and competent, and on these humble grounds it is one of the best films of the year.

A Superman Movie for Batman Fans

Man of Steel
Directed by Zack Snyder
Three Stars

By Jon Fisher

Superhero movies used to be almost wholly perceived as dead-on-arrival garbage, but no longer are they merely fodder for children and adolescents. Serious-minded adults now look to superhero movies for entertainment, intrigue and even a reflection of the zeitgeist. American society goes through distinct cycles with regards to superhero popularity – “Batman moments” and “Superman moments”. Sure, there is the odd Spider-Man or Iron Man that maintains its own level of steady popularity, but the two juggernauts of superhero lore are indisputably the Caped Crusader and the Man of Tomorrow. And their popularities rise and fall according to the needs of their times.

The Same Ol' Zombies, Only More So

World War Z

Directed by Marc Forster

Three Stars

By Jon Fisher

I imagine that, fifteen years ago, starring in a zombie movie would have been considered a major step back in Brad Pitt’s career. How the popular culture landscape has changed – zombie literature, formerly of an audience of societally fringe-dwelling nerds and goths, has not only become accepted in the mainstream, but arguably the world’s biggest movie star now describes a zombie movie as one of the most fun movies he’s made in a long time. In addition to that, a zombie serial (The Walking Dead) has become one of the most popular television shows around in the more cinematic, post-Sopranos TV landscape. The source material for that show is complex and harsh, with a focus on the human dimension of a zombie apocalypse. The source material for World War Z, written by Max Brooks (who, we must note with a whiff of suspicion, is the son of Mel Brooks), attempts the same level of complexity. I enjoyed the book for its devotion to and interpretation of the zombie mythology, but concluded that Brooks wasn’t much of a writer. All of his characters sound the same, whether they are a blind geriatric rural-dwelling Asian or a pair of American school teachers.

The W.A.I. Family is Growing

I suppose we’ve been working toward this moment for a long time. I’ve known Jon Fisher for many years now, though we’ve never (yet) met in person. Jon and I became acquainted through an Ebert and Roeper Facebook group, and began networking our movie blogs. His delightful website, The Film Brief, has gone through many phases, looks, styles, functions. My own has gone through more. From ‘Go See a Movie’, to ‘Ghost on Screen’, and now as ‘Wide Angle Iris’, we have frequently sampled each others’ reviews, recorded podcasts debating our divergent opinions and convened annually for three years now to compile our Pantheon of the greatest films of all time. We linked to each others work on social media and grew each others’ web presence. We were two college kids on opposite ends of the world with a love of great film and a passion for the conversations they elicit. But over the years life has made the upkeep of our respective sites more difficult and inconvenient. Full time jobs and the burden of adult responsibilities post-graduation have slowed our output. And so it is with great pleasure now, that I announce that Jon and will be combining our efforts to maintain a single site, right here at WAI.