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?

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.

Dull Instruments

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
Directed by Harold Zwart
Two Stars

By Jon Fisher

My experience of Mortal Instruments: City of Bones began almost ideally. I knew nothing about it. Hadn’t seen a trailer, hadn’t read a plot synopsis. I’d barely even seen a cast list (and was – at first – pleasantly surprised to see Robert Sheehan from the witty British show Misfits show up).

Keep Your Eye on the Ball that Never Was

Now You See MeDirected by Louis Leterrier
Two Stars

By Jon Fisher

Films about magic walk a perilous line. These usually go down one of two roads –they try to flummox the viewer by pretending to be a magic trick in and of itself (thereby trying to gain some ‘art’ cred), or they settle for being disposable, (hopefully) enjoyable ‘light’ options for the weekend trip to the movies.

Now You See Me is certainly fits into one of those categories. It’s unashamedly popcorn. It becomes clear after the opening scene or two that Now You See Me will have nothing underneath the surface. The camera swoops, swirls and dances. Pretty images of buildings and crowds are displayed on the cinema wall. A series of sarcastic, fast-talking, smug characters are introduced to us. They’re all excellent at fooling people. We catch on pretty quick that this movie will be about them trying, in increasingly ‘wow!’ing ways, fooling their hapless pursuant. It isn’t initially clear if this movie is trying to go the route of the vastly superior The Prestige in trying to one-up us as viewers, but as long as the shiny swooping images of city skylines and attractive cast members continue, we don’t much care.

The plot is stock-standard stuff for a studio heist/action flick – a group of illusionists and mentalists are brought together by an unknown figure. They are tasked with creating general mischief (stealing from banks, draining the bank account of a well-known Evil One-Percenter) via a series of glossy, slightly irritating magic shows. After they rob a French bank ‘during’ a show in Las Vegas (quotation marks very deliberate), police officer Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo in full “archetypical surly cop” mode) and Interpol agent Alma Drey (the luminous Melanie Laurent) pick up the case to nab these crooks. They find it difficult to manage because the perps appear to genuinely have magical powers etc etc.

Now You See Me has a tendency to be irritating, although it should be said that large swathes of the movie washed passed me harmlessly. As always with these movies, it’s fine for its protagonists and the events surrounding them to be completely vacuous and to fail to hold up to any kind of rational scrutiny – as long as the characters are likable and/or interesting. They are neither. They have irritating, contrived names like “J. Daniel Atlas” and “Merritt McKinney”. They speak unnaturally, consistently sounding like lines from the trailer for the movie they are in rather than real human beings.

Jesse Eisenberg takes the smug persona he invoked in The Social Network and ramps it up to ten, while the script he is given drains the character of any complexity. Morgan Freeman pops up in a bizarre, jarring role that only exists so that he can explain what is happening in the movie in his deep, sombre baritone.

The film’s female characters are routinely humiliated and degraded by the men around them. Their response seems to be to grovel more deeply, fall in love more madly, and to accept their roles as the sidekicks. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Now You See Me hates women, but it certainly doesn’t go out of its way to make them as intelligent, crafty and resilient as their male counterparts. Then again, Now You See Me presents everyone in it as a cardboard cut-out bereft of any real humanity, so best to go a little easy on the misogyny accusations.

As it turns out, Now You See Me is one of those magic movies that tries to turn itself into a magic trick. The finale, the big reveal, is… completely nonsensical.

Now You See Me is 'well shot' by director Louis Leterrier (who previously made the less-than-stupendous Clash of the Titans, but also made the benignly enjoyable Transporter films). Meaning that, even if the characters aren’t worth a minute of our time and the plot doesn’t add up, most of this film looks and sounds good technically. Some might say that’s reason enough to venture out to see it – it looks good, and when no thought is applied, even has a couple of satisfying twists and turns. But to concede that Now You See Me is a good movie is to concede that you only like movies to watch nice images projected onto a screen… and I can’t go for that.

A World a Little Too Much Like Ours

Elysium
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Two Stars

By Rollan Schott

The metaphors and allegory of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium” may just as effectively be conveyed in summary. In 2154, the earth is ‘overpopulated’ and ‘polluted’, overrun by the ‘poor’ and ‘impoverished’, while the ‘wealthy’ live on a Halo-style, Utopian space station just outside of our atmosphere, still plainly visible to those on earth. They literally live “above” the poor. A large underground market emerges to smuggle ‘undocumented’ citizens onto Elysium because of the quality of their ‘healthcare’, a sophisticated scanning bed that diagnoses and heals every ailment (this includes a man whose head is blown off by a grenade). This film is topical to the point of madness. Imagine a large, cardboard picketing sign that reads “Current Events!” rolled up tightly. Now imagine Blomkamp clubbing you with it relentlessly for 109 minutes. Hollywood liberalism is certainly not always noble.

Matt Damon in the lead role is Max, a citizen of earth who lives in a dilapidated mortar shack and had survived for some time as a formidable car thief. Now he works in a great manufacturing plant, building the ‘drones’ that serve as law enforcement officials both on Earth and Elysium, furthering a developing trend in Hollywood wherein the unemployed must settle for jobs developing the very harbinger of their inadequacy.

Following an accident at the plant involving radiation, Max is given a precariously short time to live and resolves to make it to Elysium for treatment at any cost. That’s effectively the entire story, which moves in a cumbersome, lumbering way because Blomkamp has so little material and a feature-length film to fill with it. Of course there is a girl, Frey (Alice Braga), and Max’s forthright single-mindedness and avarice betray the change of heart that will define the film’s climax. There are of course flashbacks, fleeting images of clichéd adolescence that would have been right at home in a Christopher Nolan movie.

At its heart, Elysium is an action movie, a prolonged, violent chase between the righteous fugitive and the corrupt authority in an unjust world. Having seen both his first feature, the intriguing but overrated “District 9”, and now this, I feel that Mr. Blomkamp is not a sure handed director. He struggles with tone. His presentation is inconsistent. In “District 9” he attempted a kind of pseudo-documentary/news reel approach that he elected to disregard when the action escalated.

The technique in “Elysium” is more conventional, but the same problem persists. Blomkamp is at his best when there is something to regard, rather than something with which he feels he must keep up. There seems to be a bizarre corollary between the shakiness and general incomprehensibility of the camera and the stakes of the action. An early shootout in an empty lot is staged with a much better sense of place and movement than a climactic fight in the bowels of a futuristic military compound on Elysium. Blomkamp is more effective when his characters are in a place he can admire.

“Elysium” isn't the first movie ever made to use conventional formula to serve an allegory. Hollywood made an art of the tactic during the years of the Production Code. But Blomkamp is hanging his laurels on the setup and not on the payoff. That’s why the back of the DVD cover will betray a generic film with hollow ambitions. In the end, this film is aware of our society’s shortcomings and expects that to be enough. The last twenty minutes are spent waiting for “Elysium” to return to its topical roots. Blomkamp can’t seem to tell you why he’s still swinging that rolled up sign.

The Lawless, Lackluster Limbo

R.I.P.D.
Directed by Robert Schwentke
One and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

Apparently in an effort to cash in on the “Men in Black” trend while it’s still fresh, Robert Schwentke’s “R.I.P.D.” employs the same lawless universe afforded to an irresponsible filmmaker making a film about the supernatural. “R.I.P.D” plays a bit like a Terry Gilliam film without the wit. Everything is thrown at the wall. No opportunity for the outlandish or the quirky is left on the table, usually at the expense of continuity or restraint. When I am told that deceased police officers acting as purgatorial gateway gunslingers must navigate the world of the living not as invisible phantoms but as randomly assigned avatars like bodacious supermodels or crotchety old Chinese men, I begin to suspect that the office in charge of rejecting bad ideas had sat empty for a day or two. Or eight.