Lights, Camera, Economics

Hail, Caesar!

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Three and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott
August 13, 2016

The time may come when "Hail Caesar" is poured over by disciples in the cult of the brothers Coen in much the same way that "Barton Fink" has been since its release a quarter century ago. Here is another film about the inner workings of the Hollywood system, where the movie studio becomes an arena for competing ideals about religion, money, and human worth, where its dark contradictions threaten to lurch out of the shadows and devour everything that keeps the tenuous and cynical process afloat.

On Jupiter did Abrasax a Stately Pleasure-Dome Decree

Jupiter Ascending

Directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski

One Star

By Rollan Schott

You've got to hand it to the Wachowski siblings. They've got brass. Lesser filmmakers would merely have made "Jupiter Ascending" a decent motion picture. But that would have been wrong. A failure this spectacular requires vision. It requires reach. The Wachowskis know that a catastrophe of this breadth and magnitude is not to be committed to half-heartedly.

Beyond the Infinite

Interstellar

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Two and One Half Stars

Christopher Nolan is among the most ambitious of our generation's filmmakers. He is also one of the most materialistic. I mean this not as a judgement. Merely a point of reference. If we are going to make sense of Mr. Nolan's sprawling science-fiction spectacle "Interstellar", I think it might behoove us to consider that it has come from the director who revealed the inner workings of a grand magician's illusion to be a convenient machine ("The Prestige"), who manufactured a dream world with all the opacity and peculiarity of a Russian Nesting Doll ("Inception"), and who chose for his superhero saga that most notorious of superheroes who does not possess any superpowers. Indeed, Mr. Nolan has persistently, occasionally even beligerently, made an effort to govern his films by the laws and limitations of the physical world.

Greetings, From the 1%

The Wolf of Wall StreetDirected by Martin Scorsese
Four Stars

By Jon Fisher

Talk about a movie whose time has come. The Wolf of Wall Street is the fifth movie that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have made together, and this end result cements the conclusion that DiCaprio is Scorsese’s new age alter-ego. In the 1970s, the surrogate was Harvey Keitel. In the late ‘70s and ‘80s, it was Robert De Niro. Scorsese flittered around with De Niro, Nicolas Cage, and Daniel Day-Lewis in the 1990s, and since the early 2000s, DiCaprio is his go-to guy. Funnily enough, it seems to have taken five films for the pair to really produce a vintage Martin Scorsese Movie. Not to say that Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed and Shutter Island aren't fine films. The Wolf of Wall Street, though, marks a return to the classic Scorsese themes of sin, temptation, and the dangers of living life without a moral centre.

The subject of the film is Jordan Belfort, based upon his experiences as chronicled in his memoir. Belfort was a stockbroker who dabbled – nay, swam neck-deep – in securities fraud in the 1980s. Scorsese’s movie follows Belfort (DiCaprio) as he starts out on Wall Street, first under the guidance of expert broker Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey – very brief but memorable performance of a drug-addled, unethical bankster) before moving into penny stocks and eventually into massive-scale securities fraud.

Belfort, with his brash arrogance, ambition for wealth, and readiness to succumb to whatever temptation presents itself to him, is a quintessential Scorsese antihero. This film does not lionize him, nor is it reductive to the harm that he caused to so many ‘little people’. There are moments of humour and wit in The Wolf of Wall Street, particularly during those sequences in which Belfort is really going to town with the debauchery. But there is an undercutting appreciation of the vigor with which Belfort approaches life, how our society rewards people with such liveliness and ambition. By the end of the film, Scorsese does make his ultimate value judgments on Belfort, and they aren't pretty. The final shot of the film is exquisite, summarizing all that has come before it, and even hammering home a couple of uncomfortable truths for the audience itself.

There’s plenty more to this film than just Belfort. The cast is replete with characters that riff to the tune of ‘do what you feel like’ that permeates the film. Aside from the brief appearance by Matthew McConaughey, there’s also the performance of Jonah Hill, Oscar nominated as Donnie Azoff, who is so good portraying a man so gutless, so self-involved, so loathsome. He’s the perfect off-sider to Belfort, and the two mistake their shared selfishness for an intimate friendship. Jean Dujardin – the French actor who gave a wonderful Academy Award-winning performance in The Artist – is terrifically entertaining as a vile Swiss banker.

As always with Scorsese, women play a vital role in the overall feel of his film. Belfort discards his wife early in the piece in exchange for the stunningly beautiful Naomi (Margot Robbie), a trophy wife for a man with limitless wealth. Their relationship inevitably sours and fades, primarily because Belfort, like most of Scorsese’s antiheroes, is stricken with a virgin-whore complex. Belfort oscillates between idolizing Naomi for her beauty and grace, to loathing her for her emotional and sexual complexity.

The Wolf of Wall Street is not about a kind person. It follows the deeds of a pack of men (and they are all men here) that have drank the Kool-Aid, succumbed to the pursuit of wealth above all else, and who gleefully and hedonistically enjoy themselves while preying on the weak. This is not a pleasant aspect of human nature, and Martin Scorsese doesn't attempt to bring about a happy ending. He explores it, makes no apology or explanation for it, and acknowledges it as a horrid inevitability of human existence.  

The All-Encompassing Art of the Folk Song

Inside Llewyn DavisDirected by Joel & Ethan Coen
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

The great films begin small and become large. They begin with merely a story and come to see the big picture. The great ones, it has been said, always seem to be about everything. The Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” begins as an evocation of the early tremors in 1961 Greenwich Village that gave rise to the folk music renaissance of the early sixties, permanently shifting the direction of popular music, and graduates into a stunning portrait of the pains and perils of purpose. It is funny and frightening and melancholy, and permeated with moments of deep disquiet and mystery. You know, a little bit like life.

The narrative is circular, ending where it began, which is useful because it is about man who goes so far and yet seems to go nowhere at all. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a struggling folk singer in New York, solo now after his partner Mike (who is only heard and seen on an old vinyl) committed suicide. Llewyn lives on the couches of friends and acquaintances. His manager never seems to have money for him. He’s a fixture at the Gaslight Lounge (A real place, and considered integral to whatever troubling of the waters happened in Greenwich Village at the time) but not a star. His good friend’s wife is pregnant, and the child is possibly his. The early moments recall the Coen’s earlier “A Serious Man”, another film about a man adrift in a universe that seems to harbor designs against him.

Llewyn’s lifestyle denotes an air of temporariness, and we sense that he is quickly drawing near the end of its sustainability. So much of this film is centered on waiting – Llewyn waiting for the music to take off, Llewyn waiting for the royalties to come in, Llewyn waiting for Bud Grossman to get back to him about that gig in Chicago, We as an audience waiting for Llewyn to make a move. He finds himself suspended on a self-imposed knife edge of sorts, towing the line between what he refers to contemptuously as “Careerism” – succeeding as a commercially viable artist, and significance – reaching an audience and provoking a cultural paradigm shift. It is an impossible standard to keep, and it is at times tough to discern to what extent Llewyn realizes that. He does not lack for vision, but perspective may be an issue.

The film seems to change pace for a cryptic interlude that occupies much of the central act, when Llewyn hops a ride with an old jazz musician named Roland Turner (John Goodman) and his valet Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund) on their way to Chicago. Turner is an overweight and sickly blowhard, Johnny an impossibly beautiful, tragic boy with James Dean hair and distant eyes and a cigarette that seems as though it had always been there. He’d used to be an actor but couldn't make it, and had resigned himself to escorting the incapacitated Turner around the country. The two assume the two sides of the precipice upon which Llewyn has placed himself – on one side self-indulgent and pretentious hedonism, on the other broken and defeated meaninglessness, a destructively stubborn persistence chasing a phantom dream.

This a beautiful movie, perhaps the most visually arresting film the Coens have made (which is saying something). They employ a palette of pastel greens and browns and grays. There are the cavernous depths of the Gaslight, where a movement of organic music was born of the soil. There is the way the streets of Greenwich Village seem to disappear into the cold, New York morning sun. There is the perfect silhouette of Llewyn Davis on an Ohio interstate, framed by headlights in the foggy twilight. Every frame assumes a sort of timeless, painterly quality. Llewyn’s dark complexion seems an extension of his landscape.

What begins as a film about folk music becomes something cosmic. Llewyn is a cryptic antihero (dare I say a folk hero?), a cipher for our headlong need for purpose, for misplaced passions, for our futile efforts to refashion the steadfast direction of society as we see it. The final moments reveal a familiar face and a familiar voice, and we sense, in a way, a world that will simultaneously barrel over Llewyn and drag him along. For Llewyn is like anyone else, beholden to the consequences of all of us, contributing, resisting, miniscule. The universe perhaps conspired against him, but he was there, in the right place at the right time, buried within the current, screaming change at a world that was changing anyway. Does this universe vindicate him or cast him aside? Or does he merely exist?

We Love To Be Lied To

American HustleDirected by David O Russell
Three Stars

By Rollan Schott

David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” is a shallow film full of beautiful surfaces, all dressed up for the disco, as it were, with nowhere to go. That may be the heart of the film’s chintzy charm. There’s something cynically gratifying about escapism of this quality, as if an efficient hoarding of accessible hedonism. This tale of con men and women and political corruption in New Jersey in the 70’s doesn't have much to say about anything – strange for as topical as so many elements of its plot are – but satisfies a nostalgic fantasy for classic Hollywood film making. The subject, really, is the lost craft of cinematic pop art.

For that reason it shouldn't be surprising that the main characters of “American Hustle” spend so much of their time putting on an act. Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) begin a romance posing as underground financial consultants who collect on service fees for loans they do not secure for their clients. Irving is overweight and greasy, with a comb-over Sydney refers to affectionately as “elaborate”, but he carries himself with a sure-handed dignity, the kind of confidence that puts him in league with women like Sydney, who is beautiful and graceful but also jaded and misplaced in most social circles, and ruthlessly self-sufficient and determined, equipping her to navigate rooms full of men who obliviously present her with opportunities to survive.

The two are busted by Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), an ambitious FBI agent who offers the two a way out if they’ll help Richie and provide the necessary insight to tackle a larger fish. Irving and Sydney agree, somewhat reluctantly and without options, but Richie can’t keep a lid on his aspirations. He wants to bust another four con artists, then he wants to tackle a politician, a mayor in New Jersey subtly named Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), then more, and then more still. Irving and Sydney are stuck. The ball’s in Richie’s court, but the game changes sharply when Richie begins pursuing Sydney as well.

This may seem like a lot to give away, but “American Hustle” is a whirlwind of plot shifts and realignments. Not mentioned yet is Irving’s wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), an archetypical loose cannon whose drunken imbalance threatens to crash the whole affair into chaos. The setup presents an opportunity for Mr. Russell to suspend the motives of many people in limbo, particular Sydney, who is certainly lying to somebody and Irving, at some point re-positioned to the sideline, who is either winning or losing, not that we even know what the game is.

Mr. Russell keeps his audience at a formidable distance for much of the proceedings. Whether or not you enjoy it will hinge upon whether you feel drug along and toyed with or involved in an intriguing game of cat and mouse, con-artist cliché gamesmanship. This film is drunk on style, heedlessly surface-heavy, one of those Capital-‘M’ “Movie” types. Its all-star cast is pleasantly kitsch and stagy, posing ceaselessly, gliding cool and glamorous through lavish sets awash with saturated colors and punctuated with timely music. For as well executed as it all is, there’s a kind of hedonistic indulgence to absorbing it all in a superficial stupor. This is high-dollar junk food.

Like many a great Dylan song, “American Hustle” seems to be about more than it probably is. It promises depths that are probably not there. At some point around the ninety minute mark I found the sugar rush wearing off prematurely. Mr. Russell spends a bit too much time denying us any real impetus for our embattled heroes. One grows weary of the waiting. Irving and Sydney dawn their poker faces, put on a show, and dare us to buy into it, attempting to fuel a fantasy like the romance and intrigue of the classic Hollywood adventures “American Hustle” is so much designed to resemble. I remember what James Cagney said about the art of performance: “Stand up straight, look ‘em in the eye, and tell the truth.”

Middle Earth as You've Already Seen It

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Directed by Peter Jackson
Two and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

One can call Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”, the second installment in his "Hobbit" trilogy, many things: ‘ambitious’, ‘epic’, ‘bombastic’, ‘cluttered’, ‘listless’… But if there is anything “Desolation” is not, it is ‘Tolkien’. With one book of modest length strained to the breaking point of a trilogy of three-hour movies, and much of the Middle Earth history provided in Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion” off limits to him, Jackson has found a great deal of vacuous space to be filled with his own cinematic hedonism. This includes, most notably, a showdown with the titular dragon that persists for a full hour and recalls, more than its source literature, the climactic final act of Jackson’s earlier “King Kong”. There's more than one reason we feel like we've done this before.

A Familiar Arena

The Hunger Games: Catching FireDirected by Francis Lawrence
Two and One Half Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire envisions a future in which an oligarchy rules with an iron fist, while its poverty-stricken masses are sedated by a cruel and callous ‘sport’ in which competitors are thrust into an arena and forced to fight to the death.

Confronting Our History

12 Years a Slave
Directed by Steve McQueen
Three and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

In 1841, a free black man living in New York by the name of Solomon Northup was lured to Washington D.C. by two white men, promising him some good money to be made quickly with his violin. Northup was drugged, kidnapped, and smuggled south to be sold illegally into the slave trade, where he lived for twelve years before finally being returned to his family. During Northup’s time as a slave in the Antebellum South, he observed, as an educated, erudite and thoughtful man, the ways that empathy and compassion and religion and virtually every other facet of human behavior navigated their ways around the racism innate in their culture, the ways that men could be purchased as property, forced to work without pay, and yet spoken to with respect and dignity, the ways that black men could be spoken to with respect and dignity yet still be addressed as that most execrable slur. To reconcile one’s humanity with the needs of an archaic plantation infrastructure, huge concessions were made where they must not have been made: in the realm of human decency.

Retreating Into Romance

Blue is the Warmest ColorDirected by Abdellatif Kechiche
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color” is a work of disarming emotional intensity. What begins as a coming out tale becomes a coming of age one, and graduates finally into a harsh reminder that we never exhaust the well of hard lessons we've left to learn. A relationship is a two-sided blade, and in our youth we know not how to wield it. Sex appeals to us first as an extravagance of adulthood and quickly becomes a haven from the remaining tumult of adolescence. But that haven becomes a refuge, and that refuge an asylum, an isolating force that no longer offers reprieve but collars and represses our capacity to develop as individuals. We pour all of ourselves into the symbiosis and lose our sense of self. If we’re lucky we endure this cataclysm with time to recover before adulthood strips away the barricades, before it exposes us. It was a lesson I learned the summer before college, I recall. Well, started learning anyway. It’s never a clean break.

Squabbling Over Mommy

Thor: The Dark Age
Directed by Alan Taylor and James Gunn
Three Stars

By Rollan Schott

Alan Taylor’s and James Gunn’s “Thor: The Dark World”, the latest in the Marvel movie ponzi scheme, is the big, dumb comic book movie we deserve. Make of that what you will. I’ve maintained that the first “Thor” was the most turgid and listless of the Marvel superhero movies, and the most emblematic of the Marvel marketing con, wherein each Marvel movie seems to exist merely to sell the next Marvel movie. Marvel, Marvel, Marvel. The machine has been effective, but most individual installments don’t have the foundation to stand independently of the others. Each film is propping up the next, and the system barrels forward with an ever-more perilous pace of bar-raising spectacle. Given the momentum, “The Dark World”, with its bumbling, Shakespearian, Hammer-wielding barbarian, behaves like the proverbial bull in a china shop, and the effect is weirdly satisfying.

The Folly of the Foolish Kingpin

The CounselorDirected by Ridley Scott
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

And so the writer conveys story through the written word, and the filmmaker with the moving image and this is the way it is. Cormac McCarthy must be considered one of the great contemporary American novelists, and it is not insignificant that  he wrote the remarkable “The Counselor”, directed by Ridley Scott, not as a novel but a screenplay, his first in the format to be produced. The writer, confronted directly with the visual medium, has moved his stoic, worldly prose seemlessly from narration to dialog. His characters speak as if outside of themselves, meditating heedlessly about the nature of their own circumstances. They are individualistic, fully-realized and complex characters with unique perspectives, but in each of their monologues can be found a hint of McCarthy’s wry, biblical wit.

Broadcasting His Decline

Alan Partridge: Alpha PapaDirected by Declan Lowney
Three and One Half Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

Alan Partridge, the long-lived character played repeatedly by Steve Coogan in various incarnations over the past 20 or so years, is distinctly unlikable. He’s irresponsible, selfish, at times sleazy. The chronicling of his career since his first appearance in 1991 has essentially been a spectacular fall from grace due to incompetence and a complete lack of self-awareness. Partridge lay dormant for a few years in the middle of last decade, but came back with a vengeance with the publication of the viciously hilarious memoir I, Partridge in 2011 (I strongly recommend the audiobook as read by Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge), and now the feature film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa.

Wild Dogs Everywhere

Mystery RoadDirected by Ivan Sen
Four Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

Mystery Road doesn’t surrender its secrets readily. It is a difficult film to describe and review, because like other great thrillers of its ilk (Wake in Fright, Fargo) it functions on a number of planes. First and foremost, it is a murder mystery – its opening scene makes that clear. A truckie pulls over to the side of a deserted highway, checking his load. Perturbed by the ruffling of wild dogs, the truckie investigates a small underpass, and finds the mutilated body of a teenage Indigenous girl.

Shortly thereafter, we meet the film’s protagonist, Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), who has recently returned to his home town in isolated western Queensland after some time working in the city. He investigates the murder of the aforementioned Indigenous girl. He finds himself up against an intransigent local police force that would prefer to brush the whole thing under the carpet, as well as resentment in the Indigenous community when he questions the locals.

Complicating all of this is Jay’s ethnicity, you see – he is the sole Indigenous officer on the local force, in a community that clearly has a high Indigenous population. There is rancour, tension and of course racism between the whites and blacks in the town, and Jay is caught right in the middle of this. Mystery Road manages to incorporate the issue of race into its tale quietly, and its tone benefits from the fact that this aspect of the story isn’t shouted from the rooftops. It’s clear that racial tensions are fuelling most of the action in the story, and for the most part the movie lets the issue be, appreciating the toll it has taken on Swan and how it affects the choices he makes.  It isn’t overstated, which is often a risk in a film like this.

As the movie gets into the swing of things, it becomes clear that it has aspirations beyond being a straightforward whodunit. As with most modern cinema, it’s almost impossible to watch new movies without thinking about what they remind you of. Oh, that scene was a bit like a Coen Brothers scene; that shot is a bit like the one from the old Scorsese movie; isn’t this all a bit like LA Confidential? Most of modern cinema harks back to things that have come before – we live in the era of the pastiche. This poses a problem for modern cinema’s aesthetics. How can a movie stand on its own two feet if it is constantly reminding its audience of other, presumably better works?

I tried my hardest to draw comparisons between Mystery Road and other movies, but I gradually realised that most comparisons were superficial in nature. Yes, the black humour (and Mystery Road is very funny on occasion) is a little like a Coen Brothers picture. Yes, the overarching plot of a ‘good cop’ trying to beat the corrupt system to preserve justice is a bit like LA Confidential. And yes, many of the shots and sequences reminded me fleetingly of other directors. (interestingly, I found many shots and sequences of Mystery Road to be quite reminiscent of another Australian crime masterpiece from recent years: Animal Kingdom by David Michôd. Australian cinema, so vastly improved in recent years, now seems to be worth imitating)

Mystery Road is its own movie, and while it doesn’t quite maintain its focus and meanders every so often, for the most part it’s a viciously precise and thoughtful thriller. Aaron Pederson is Oscar-worthy as Jay Swan, and a host of supporting actors also inhabit their characters like a second skin. The film benefits from Ivan Sen’s directorial style, which is straightforward and considered. There are plenty of images that leave an imprint on the memory here – the recurring motif of the ‘bird’s eye view’ that intercuts scenes, even images as simple as Jay sitting solemnly in front of his dinner, considering his next move.

Sen is also adept at using simple, powerful signals to demonstrate Swan’s precarious position as an outsider to both the police force and his own community. One of the biggest ones is his car, a sturdy looking Holden. An Australian make, and a fine one – for the most part shiny and clean, a striking symbol of an upwardly mobile citizen. It drives others in the town, who aren’t so lucky, crazy. Swan’s ambivalence towards alcohol (which makes sense due to numerous hints about his prior proclivity to drink before entering the force) sets him apart from his loutish fellow officers. When his boss suggests they go for a drink to escape the bleating heat, Swan looks at his watch suspiciously, before we see him sipping an ice water. The optics of a 60-plus-year-old constable drinking beer in a country pub full of white people while on duty are far less damaging than a young Indigenous officer doing the same thing.

Lovely little moments like these abound in Mystery Road. It’s a smart movie, realistic about race relations, while also being aware of the need for its central murder mystery to work. The investigation is engrossing, and builds up to a finale that, while retaining the elgant and deliberate pacing of the rest of the film, is more visceral and exciting than most big studio cops and robbers movies we typically see. Mystery Road, by most measures, is a quiet masterpiece.

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.

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.

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 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?

Precisely the Jobs You Imagined

Jobs
Directed by Joshua Michael Stern
Two and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

It’s tough not to watch Joshua Michael Stern’s “Jobs”, the messianic biopic of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, without recalling David Fincher’s masterful “The Social Network” from a few years ago. The two films side by side are like an expose on what separates an average film from a great one. Both are about great entrepreneurs in the tech world that revolutionized the ways that people communicate with one another, who themselves were deeply isolated and socially challenged in some way. Fincher’s Mark Zuckerberg was painted as a kind of Charlie Kane, a man who gained it all and felt the hollow fruits of his success. But Stern’s Jobs (Ashton Kutcher, in a surprisingly effecting performance) is a man who had it all figured out, possessed of an almost prophetic knowledge of the world he had yet to witness, grew up a little bit, and existed largely as a siren for the limitless frontier of digital technology.

This is, certainly, a film that loves Steve Jobs deeply. One can almost applaud the bravery in the sparing moments when Stern dares to inject complexity into the Jobs persona, but these moments effectively serve only to punctuate the intervening time when Stern is painting the man with broad strokes of almost obnoxious brilliance. How many speeches can a single man give about ‘having a vision’, or ‘changing the world’, or ‘believing in this idea’? An early moment when Jobs turns away his pregnant girlfriend threatens to be the only moment of humanity he is provided, but a nice redemptive moment later brings both the girl and the daughter back for a moment of pleasant intimacy.

“Jobs” is very much about Apple, the company Jobs founded with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Apple is the current through which Jobs’ vision was channeled. The film details the early days, when Jobs, employed by Atari, discovered the closeted brilliance of his friend Wozniak (Josh Gad), who had casually assembled the rudimentary components of the first personal computer in his living room. Wozniak’s modest invention incited a wave of potential in Jobs, whose drive and vision pushed the two of them first into Jobs’ parents’ garage and then into the forefront of consumer electronics.

The rest of the movie will take place within the Apple campus, frequently within the boardroom after the company had gone public, when Jobs’ perfectionism and ambition clashed with his shareholders, who felt his business model was too risky and preferred a safer, less innovative route.

Wozniak is clearly the eye of morality here, a soft spoken man who sought the modest pleasure of creation and tinkering with his gadgets in the face of  Jobs’ relentless ambition and his own company’s skyrocketing success. He is one of many casualties in Apple’s rise, which slowly left behind many of the men we meet in that garage. Jobs, like this film, has not the time to eulogize their departures. One of the reasons “Jobs” feels a little flat, or packs little punch, is that it fails to adequately feel the weight of Jobs’ losses, or the harsh circumstances of his meteoric rise. Stern does not tell us much we did not already know. Steve Jobs was a great innovator, possessed of an astonishingly forward thinking vision.  That he had little time for a personal life hardly seems like the adequate basis for a drama.