Recent Movie Roundup 25

This bunch of movies is something of a transitional group--a few of the early blockbusters of the year, but also some of last year's art-house movies that only made it into Israeli movie theaters recently, and one movie that I wasn't expecting to see here at all.  The coming summer doesn't have much that appeals to me (though I was excited to learn, just today, that both Colossal and The Big Sick have scheduled Israeli releases), so this might end up being the most intriguing group of movies I see for some time.

• Get Out - It's a bit of a shame to come to Jordan Peele's blockbusting debut film so long after its release, given that its topic, twists, and most memorable moments have been the subject of so much discussion (not to mention GIF-ing and meme-ifying) in the intervening months.  I would have loved to approach Get Out knowing a lot less about it (but then, until very recently it was quite unusual for Israeli film distributors to even purchase films by or about African-Americans, so I guess even a delayed release is something to celebrate).  Still, even knowing what to expect, there's a lot to enjoy and admire here, both the audacity of creating a film that melds the horror genre and the real-life horror of racism and racially motivated violence so seamlessly, and the skill with which that melding is accomplished.  In its early scenes, Get Out feels like a pitch-perfect dark comedy of social awkwardness, as photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya, excellent) nervously accompanies his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) on a weekend visit to her family, uncertain what to expect in a white enclave where he is likely to be the only black presence.  Chris's interactions with Rose's parents, Dean and Missy (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener), initially balance on the knife's edge between well-meaning cluelessness (Dean assuring Chris that he would have voted for Obama a third time if he could have) and something more sinister.  The more Chris sees of the neighborhood, however, the more suspicious it seems, and particularly his interactions with the few black members of the community: Dean and Missy's servants Walter and Georgina (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel), or friend of the family Logan (Lakeith Stanfield), whose behavior grows increasingly creepy and inhuman as the film draws on.
  
  Peele has such a perfect grasp on the slowly mounting tension and wrongness in the Chris-focused parts of the film, that the ones that move away from him can feel slack in comparison (in particular, a plot strand involving Chris's friend Rod (LiRel Howery), who grows suspicious of Chris's reports, is very funny, but could have stood to be pared down significantly).  When the film returns to the family home, however, it is a perfect engine of suspense, black humor, and keen social observations.  The core conceit of Get Out is, of course, overturning the racist trope in which the black interloper endangers an innocent white family, by reversing the direction of danger.  But even knowing that going in, I couldn't help but gasp at some of the ways Peele found to express that idea, such as the fact that Chris is literally auctioned off by his hosts (the slow revelation of what's actually going on in this scene is one of the film's most shocking and brilliantly executed directorial flourishes), or the realization, as sirens sound in the distance in the film's final moments, that Chris may be in as much danger from the cops coming to his rescue, who might automatically see him as the assailant, as he was from the people trying to kill him.  But the most audacious and provocative twist Peele makes to his premise is to reveal that the danger Chris is placed in is motivated not by straightforward hatred of black people, but by the fetishization of them and their bodies.  The people he ends up running from desperately want to be black, while feeling so secure in their privilege that they are unable to even imagine the danger that can sometimes pose for real black people--a danger they end up embodying.  It's a rich, heady examination of the inherent contradictions and irrationality of racism, wrapped in a genuinely thrilling and engaging story.
  
  
• Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 - The second Guardians of the Galaxy film is sentimental, self-indulgent, and very heavily dependent on the twin crutches of its catchy soundtrack and jokes that seem cleverer than they actually are.  It's also a lot of fun--at least while you're watching it--largely because of a still-game cast, psychedelic visuals, and some genuinely exciting action scenes.  The actual plot is overstuffed, but circles mostly around manchild Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) being reunited with his father, Ego (Kurt Russell), a living planet who has taken the form of a man, and whose plans for Peter quickly turn out to be sinister.  There's the hint of a genuinely interesting idea in Ego's dilemma, as an all-powerful immortal who desperately searches for meaning to his existence, and lands on something monstrous but, in its own way, understandable.  But Vol. 2 is much more interested in Ego as an engine for Peter's never-ending daddy issues, to which end it also brings back Michael Rooker's Yondu, the brusque space-pirate who raised Peter, and who spends the last act of the film fighting with Ego over the titles of good and bad dad.  The whole thing looks rather silly and, again, self-indulgent if you think about it for very long, but it works in the moment, largely because Pratt manages to sell Peter's vulnerability and craving for a father-figure without ever surrendering his inherent immaturity and silliness.  (The same, unfortunately, can't be said of Dave Bautista's Drax, who like Peter is meant to be both clueless and deeply damaged, but whose humor in this movie mainly comes off as mean and unpleasant.)
  
  The other Guardians get their own storylines--Gamora (Zoe Saldana) continues to fight with her adoptive sister Nebula (Karen Gillan); Rocket (Bradley Cooper) pushes people away with obnoxious behavior; and Groot (Vin Diesel) is going through the stages of tree-person development.  It's good that Vol. 2 works so hard to give each member of the team their turn in the spotlight, while also introducing new member Mantis (Pom Klementieff), as well as several new locales and potentially recurring characters (certainly the film does a much better job of juggling multiple main characters and settings than either Civil War or Age of Ultron).  But with each of these storylines being just as heavy-handed as the main one, the ultimate result is both overwrought, and not entirely earned.  It's nice, for example, that Gamora spends most of her on-screen time with Nebula (which also means that Vol. 2 has the most meaningful Bechdel pass of probably any MCU movie), but their shared scenes, which reveal more of the horrors they endured as the adopted daughters of Thanos, only reinforce the impression created by the first film, that Gamora's well-adjusted, even slightly boring personality makes no sense--except as the film needs her to be the adult to Peter's child.  And even when the film's subplots land, Vol. 2 doesn't have a strong control of its tone.  Like its predecessor, it bills itself as cheeky but heartwarming, but what shows up on screen is often much darker, and all the more so for going unacknowledged.  An excessively long sequence in which Yondu's men mutiny, for example, leading first to his supporters being spaced, and then to the mutineers being killed off one by one by Yondu to the sounds a jaunty tune, is weirdly graphic and brutal.  And yet the film clearly means for us to find it cool, or even funny.  It's a good thing that Vol. 2 is so ephemeral, slipping from your fingers even as you step out of the movie theater; thinking about it more than a little reveals some pretty disturbing stuff beneath the surface.
  
  
• To Walk Invisible - I don't know why it took me so long to get around to watching this movie, since it combines so many things I like: the writing of Sally Wainwright, of Happy Valley fame; stories about prickly women artists who keep plugging on despite the obstacles piled in their path; and the Brontë sisters.  Once I sat down to watch the film itself, however, I found its structural choices a bit strange, perhaps even offputting.  To Walk Invisible focuses on the period between 1846 and 1848, when Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë (Finn Atkins, Chloe Pirrie, and Charlie Murphy) decided to focus seriously on their writing as a potential career, encouraging and advising one another on their work, and sending it out to publishers under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.  But it frames that story through the narrative of the final deterioration of the only Brontë son, Branwell (Adam Nagaitis).  The film begins as he returns home, after having been dismissed from a his position as a tutor for having an affair with his employer's wife.  It follows him as he sinks into depression and alcoholism, and ends with his death.
  
  The film paints a chilling portrait of the agony of living with an addict who won't even try to get better--the queasy combination of frustration, pity, resentment, and love the sisters feel for their brother, especially since, even in his dissipation, he is considered more respectable, and more capable, than they are simply because of his gender.  But because Branwell's actions--drinking and whoring and haranguing his father (Jonathan Pryce) for money--are inherently more dramatic than the sisters' writing, or their silent rage and frustration with him, he can end up taking an outsized role in a story that doesn't belong to him.  Even more disturbingly, the juxtaposition between Branwell's downward spiral and the sisters' success can end up feeling rather moralistic--Branwell is a failure because he won't "get over" serious emotional problems, while his hardworking sisters triumph because they persevere in the face of profound discouragement.  This isn't wrong, obviously--and the film even makes the point that part of the reason Branwell is so fragile is that he's been taught to think only of himself, while his sisters were trained to work hard without the expectation of reward and recognition--but by the end of the story there seems to be a tinge of gloating to the way the film contrasts the male and female Brontës.  It feels particularly pointed that the film ends with Branwell's death, and only informs us that Emily and Anne followed him soon after in its end titles.  Especially when you recall that one of the causes of Emily's death was her refusal to accept medical attention until it was too late.
  
  All that said, there is still a great deal to enjoy in To Walk Invisible, and particularly the way that it draws each of the sisters as her own unique person, whose personality is reflected in the work she ends up producing.  Charlotte is deeply ambitious, and most able to clearly articulate the frustration of being discounted because of her gender.  Emily is short-tempered and hard-headed, perhaps the most purely talented of the three sisters, but also the one most afraid of exposing herself to public judgment.  Anne is outwardly conciliatory, but also has the keenest social awareness, and is eager to use her writing to advance social causes.  The depiction of writing as work, and of publishing as a business, are not only engaging in themselves, but set up the film's best and most moving scene, when Charlotte presents herself at her publisher's office to quash the rumors that the Bell siblings are all the same person.  Watching her be met first by befuddlement, and then with total, unabashed fannishness is gratifying twice over.  As someone who has been watching Charlotte struggle both professionally and personally, it's wonderful to finally see her get the recognition she deserves.  And as a reader, it's marvelous to imagine how it might be for an author you deeply admire to simply walk into your workplace one day.  If I remain dubious about some of To Walk Invisible's framing choices, its commitment to the idea that the Brontë sisters were remarkable artists, worthy of celebration, is certainly laudable and worth watching for.
  
  
• Paterson - For about its first half hour, it's hard not to feel a sense of slight puzzlement towards Jim Jarmusch's most recent movie.  What is it about this gentle but repetitive film, about the life of a bus driver and his wife, that enraptured so many critics?  Once you get into the rhythm of Paterson, though, the magic of it becomes apparent, though not very easy to explain.  Set over the course of a week, Paterson follows its title character (Adam Driver) as he goes about his routine in the New Jersey town whose name he shares.  He wakes up early in the morning, eats breakfast, walks to work, drives the #23 bus back and forth across town, walks home, eats dinner with his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahni), walks their dog, and stops at his local bar for a beer.  In between these mundane actions, Paterson observes the sights of his town, listens to the conversations between his passengers, and interacts with friends and strangers, all of which inspire him to write poetry, which he jots down in a notebook he carries with him.  Nor is Paterson the only artist in the movie.  Throughout the week he runs into other poets, from a little girl to a Japanese tourist to an aspiring rapper, all of whom take the time to observe the world, and try to put something new in it.  Laura, meanwhile, is bursting with talent and creativity, experimenting with everything from fashion to music to cookery, but unable to decide on a single direction.  There's an obvious risk that a movie with this premise will fall into the trap of treating its subjects like an anthropological curiosity: a bus driver who writes poetry!  Working class people with dreams of being taken seriously as artists!  But instead Paterson makes its premise seem not just unremarkable, but entirely inevitable.  It puts us so thoroughly in its protagonist's head that we start to see the world through his eyes, and to see how the things and people he encounters can only be captured through poetry.  It's a feeling that persists even after you walk out of the movie theater--the belief that even in the mundane, there is something worth creating art over.
  
  
• Wonder Woman - Plot-wise, DC's latest movie--and, amazingly, the very first superhero movie in the decade-old "expanded universe" craze to star a woman--is not much to write home about.  Its opening segment on the island of Themyscira is overlong and stuffed with portentous pronouncements (though it does feature the film's most distinctive action sequence, in which a legion of Amazons on horseback battle a boatload of pistol-packing German infantry soldiers).  The rest of the movie, after heroine Diana (Gal Gadot) leaves her home with crash-landed spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) in order to bring an end to WWI, feels almost like a remake of Captain America: The First Avenger, and especially because, despite some solid action scenes, Wonder Woman doesn't really have a signature moment along the lines of Winter Soldier's elevator fight.  None of which is intended as a criticism of this movie, but more an observation that its strengths lie elsewhere than plot.
  
  Near the top of any list of those strengths would be the characters.  Gadot plays up the young Diana's naivete without ever losing sight of her innate heroism.  Neither the audience nor the characters around her ever doubt that Diana is a born hero, but she also spends the movie in genuine dismay at the cruelty and suffering of the first modern war, and her conviction that this is all the work of the war god Ares, and that all she needs to do is kill him in order to restore peace to the world, grows thinner and less persuasive as the story progresses.  One might expect Pine's Steve to be a cynical contrast to Diana's idealism, but instead his is merely a more mature, more compromised version of her belief in the need to do everything possible to save lives.  (As much as I liked Steve as a character, one can't help but notice how much space Wonder Woman gives him, and how much of a role he has in moving the story and helping Diana develop into a hero, compared to female love interests.  In particular, it feels as if the film ends up downplaying the romance between the two in favor of giving Steve his own story in a way that would never have happened with, say, Peggy Carter.)  The band of misfits the two collect in their quest to destroy a poison gas production site, while obviously based on the Howling Commandos, is compelling for being more obviously damaged: a French-Muslim charlatan who dreamed of being an actor but couldn't make it because of his race (Saïd Taghmaoui), a shell-shocked Scottish sniper (Ewen Bremner), and a Native American smuggler who pointedly observes that he is following the lead of a man whose people exterminated his own (Eugene Brave Rock).  That these unappreciated denizens of the demimonde are nevertheless willing to risk their lives for the greater good--and that Diana recognizes their heroism even when it is curtailed by their various weaknesses--is a powerful statement that hardly any other superhero movie has made.
  
  Being willing, even eager, to accept the damaged and the flawed is, in fact, Wonder Woman's greatest strength, and the thing that most sets it apart from The First Avenger.  When I first heard that the film was going to have a WWI setting, I assumed that this would be a fig leaf, and that it would nevertheless treat its German villains as cod-Nazis.  Instead, Wonder Woman faces head on the senseless slaughter of the first world war, the fact that there were no right sides in this dispute, and no clear-cut villains (in fact, the actual villains of the film's superhero plot--Danny Huston as a German general who refuses the proposed armistice, and Elena Anaya as a chemist developing new poisons--barely even register compared to the impersonal evil of modern warfare).  Against this much suffering, even a superhero might quail, and indeed the core question of Wonder Woman is what its heroine can (and should) do to save the world from itself--a question that it handles with more nuance and delicacy than the Captain America movies, refusing to blame the ills of the world on a single villain or an infiltration of evil, while insisting that humanity is still worth fighting for.  Diana herself is simultaneously unequal to the challenges set before her, and a figure of hope and inspiration whose strength lies, in no small part, in her refusal to accept that she can't save everyone.  Another way of putting it is that Wonder Woman earns the tone of bleak hopelessness that infected the previous Justice League movies--Diana's experiences actually justify the loss of faith in humanity that both Batman and Superman take as their starting position.  And yet this is by no means a hopeless movie, but rather one that powers through hopelessness, the recognition that there is evil in the hearts of men that no superhero can vanquish, and nevertheless lands on the choice to continue fighting.  I don't know if future DC movies will follow in Wonder Woman's ideological footsteps, but they might be wise to, as it lays out a template for setting themselves apart from the MCU while still remaining recognizably heroic.

Recent Movie Roundup 24

The deluge of 2016 Oscar films continues, which means that I'm still catching up with what this year's awards were about even though they've already been handed out (for the record, I am thrilled with this year's winner, especially since I, like everyone else including the people announcing it, thought that the best picture trophy would go to the pleasant but comparatively shallow La La Land).  At the same time, we're starting to see the first inklings of 2017's blockbuster movies, which normally would mean a roundup made up of a whole bunch of highbrow films and one or two lowbrow ones.  This year, the lowbrow films are aspiring to cultural significance--in fact, there's not much between Logan and Oscar nominee Hell or High Water, except that I think Logan is better.  We'll have to see how that plays out in the rest of the year.

• Moonlight - It's hard to know how to begin writing about a work that left me feeling as excited and exhilarated as Barry Jenkins's second film, a three-part meditation on identity, masculinity, and connection that checks in on the life of Chiron, a gay black man from a poor Miami neighborhood, as a child (Alex Hibbert), a teenager (Ashton Sanders), and a young man (Trevante Rhodes).  At each of these points, Chiron is taciturn and emotionally withheld, but also clearly yearning for love, and trying to work out how to be a person--and a man--in a world that doesn't seem to have a place for him.  He finds mentors and supportive figures, in the form of the local drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali) and his warm-hearted girlfriend Teresa (Jannelle Monáe), and develops feelings for his best friend Kevin (Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome, and André Holland).  And he struggles with his mingled love and hate for his drug-addicted mother (Naomie Harris).  Underpinning this all is the question of what kind of man Chiron wants (and is capable of) becoming, and whether his environment's demands that he toughen up (especially in response to his sexuality, which is identified by almost everyone around him long before Chiron is ready to acknowledge it) are something that he can accommodate, or must give in to.
  
  Moonlight is a remarkably specific movie--Jenkins, who co-wrote the screenplay, and Tarrell Alvin McCraney, upon whose play the film is based, are both natives of Liberty City, the neighborhood where most of the story takes place, and their mingled affection and clear-sighted view of its flaws help to create a powerful sense of place that grounds the film despite the fact that its storytelling shows us only snapshots of Chiron's life.  And Chiron himself is very clearly the product of a particular situation and set of circumstances.  He's not just gay, but also black and poor, and his identity is bound up in all of those labels and how they affect one another, as well as his family history and home town.  (In that sense, and several others, Moonlight reminded me a great deal of Donald Glover's Atlanta, another story about a young black man trying to make his way despite not answering to a particular, prescriptive form of masculinity, which repeatedly draws on the details of the neighborhood Glover grew up in.)  It's that specificity that gives the movie life, but it is also the quality that helps it feel so universal.  The heart of the film are conversations that Chiron has with Juan, Kevin, Teresa, and his mother, about the kind of life he wants to lead, how he sees the world, and his fears that it might be too late for him to change.  It's so unusual in pop culture to see depictions of men talking (and especially to one another) about their feelings, hopes, and fears, and especially with the honesty, vulnerability, and openness that they do in Moonlight, that the film becomes a template for what so much filmmaking should aspire to.
  
  It's perhaps because of this openness that Moonlight, despite its difficult subject matter, ends up being a remarkably hopeful, even joyful film.  Where other films about marginal characters in bad neighborhoods might try to shock us with those characters' humanity--this guy may be a drug dealer, but he's also kind to small children!--Moonlight starts from the assumption that that humanity exists.  The drug dealers, addicts, and criminals in this movie are full human beings, who have made bad choices (sometimes for understandable reasons, and sometimes less so), but whose lives are not encompassed in those choices.  They are also parents, children, friends, neighbors, and lovers, and the film holds out the hope that those relationships can help the characters make better lives for themselves (some of them do, and some don't).  The film's final act, which sees Chiron and Kevin reuniting as adults after a decade's separation, is a small but perfectly formed love story, in which the most miraculous thing that can happen to a person is to be seen and accepted for who they are.  That this miracle is handed to someone like Chiron, who in other movies might have been treated as beyond hope, is a huge part of what makes Moonlight so moving, and so important.
  
  
• Hidden Figures - There is scarcely a single sports movie cliché that is not hit on with gusto in this movie about the black women whose calculations enabled the American space program to succeed.  Its beats are entirely predictable, right down to the minute, and if anything the film leans into its familiar structure and character arcs.  But Hidden Figures is nevertheless entirely winning and engaging, in no small part because of the trio of winning and engaging actresses at its heart--Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson, the mathematician whose launch and landing calculations enabled the Mercury and Apollo missions to succeed, Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan, one of NASA's first computer programmers, and Janelle Monáe as Mary Jackson, an aspiring engineer.  Another big reason for the film's success is how different and fascinating its subject matter is--this is not just a film about space, but about the mathematics of getting into space, and about the black women who were doing that mathematics.  Beyond how exciting it is to learn about this overlooked chapter of the history of the space program, it's genuinely infuriating that it wasn't more widely known until now.  (The biggest compliment I can pay to Hidden Figures, in fact, is that it inspired me to read the Margot Lee Shetterly book on which it was based, and learn more about these women and their work.  On my twitter feed, I had some more thoughts about the differences between the book and the movie, and storified them here.)
  
  One of the ways in which Hidden Figures bucks its sports movie structure, which ends up being its smartest and most rewarding choice, is in not choosing to focus on a single, remarkable individual.  Though the three heroines all grapple with similar obstacles of racism and sexism, each of their journeys is different, and informed by their different personalities--Katherine is geeky and slow to stand up for herself, Dorothy prefers to ask forgiveness than permission, and Mary openly defies authority and unfair regulations.  Hidden Figures also stresses the support that the three women give to each other, and the fact that they are part of a group of black female mathematicians, and of a community, whose pride in them and support of them are essential to their success (it's particularly fun to see the film treat Katherine and Mary's romances--with, respectively, Mahershala Ali and Aldis Hodge--in the same way that most movies like this treat female love interests; Ali and Hodge's job is to be charming and supportive, which they do incredibly well).  More mixed is the film's handling of its white characters.  It does a good job of depicting the complicated relationship between black and white women at NASA, which encompasses both hostility and support.  Kirsten Dunst plays Dorothy's supervisor, who clearly derives some satisfaction from having someone below her on the totem pole, and Kimberly Quinn plays the administrative assistant in the space group Katherine is assigned to, who quietly helps her navigate her new environment.  In both cases, this behavior is underplayed--Dunst isn't the villain of the piece, and Quinn isn't a hero; neither one of them goes through life thinking about black women, and both their nastiness and kindness are minor notes in the heroines' journeys.
  
  The white men that Katherine works with, however, are allowed to be major notes in the movie, whether it's Jim Parsons as an engineer who resents being shown up by Katherine, or Kevin Costner as a supervisor who recognizes her talent, and the absurdity of ignoring it because of her race.  Both of them are allowed to take up too much space in a story that should never have been about them, and particularly Costner, whose "good white guy" character was invented for the movie and feels more and more out of place as its story progresses.  Hidden Figures juxtaposes the journey into space with the struggle towards full opportunity and acceptance of African-Americans, making the dual point that, on the one hand, a society that aspires to go into space can't afford to hold on to backwards prejudices, and on the other hand, that the only way to achieve the impossible is to make use of everyone's talents, regardless of race or gender.  It's a shame, therefore, that it chooses to make this point by putting it in the mouth of a white man who never even existed, and whose character was clearly created in order to appease the kind of white audience who can't stand not seeing themselves at the center of a story.
  
  
• Hell or High Water - Looking back at the dismal selection of movies delivered by the summer of 2016, it's easy to understand how David Mackenzie's spare crime drama, about two down-on-their-luck brothers who decide to rob banks in order to pay off the mortgage on their mother's farm, and the Texas Ranger who pursues them, ended up seeming like a breath of fresh air and a credible awards contender.  But one might have hoped that by the time January and Oscar nominating season had rolled around, cooler heads would have prevailed.  Hell or High Water is well made, and features strong performances from Chris Pine and Ben Foster as the two robbers, and Jeff Bridges as the Ranger.  But it's also a thoroughly conventional and even slightly underwritten piece of filmmaking, not really any better or worse than several other crime stories set in the economically depressed American south from the last few years.  The story proceeds with very few surprises--indeed, with an almost depressing predictability; about ten minutes into the film, one identifies the character who is going to die tragically, who shuffles off precisely at the moment you think they will--and a lot of empty space that is not adequately filled by either the performances or the nicely-shot landscapes of open fields and dying towns.
  
  There are some grace notes--a brief scene in which Bridges and his partner (Gil Birmingham) are stopped in their pursuit by a herd of cattle fleeing a brush fire has a certain elegiac quality, and there's some wit in Birmingham's character, who is part Native American, observing that the white people who dispossessed his ancestors are now being driven off that same land by capitalism.  But like so much else about Hell or High Water, this economic message is watered-down and barely followed through.  The film never makes us feel sufficiently invested in the brothers' plight, but neither are they so foolish or short-sighted as to be interesting as a cautionary tale.  By the time the bodies start dropping because of their choices, it's hard not to simply check out of their story.  And while Bridges's turn as a soon-to-be-retired Ranger, well-versed in the wide variety of human folly, is very well done (the one case where I feel the film's Oscar nomination was deserved), it is also, like so much else about Hell or High Water, a pale imitation of better work--in this case, Tommy Lee Jones's very similar character in No Country for Old Men, whose ending is far bolder and more resonant than what Bridges gets.  Though entertaining, Hell or High Water feels patched together from pieces of better movies, and this makes its continuing presence in this year's awards races rather baffling.
  
  
• Jackie - Pablo Larrain's film is a stunning achievement, at once a biopic and a meditation on politics, public image, celebrity, and legacy.  Natalie Portman is magnificent as the recently-widowed Jackie Kennedy, in a performance that could easily have come off as a cheap imitation but instead uses Jackie's antiquated accent and mannerisms to get at a deeper truth--that this was a woman who was, herself, constantly putting on a performance.  The film rests completely on Portman's shoulders, with the camera often trained closely on her face as she struggles to suppress an emotion, find the right tone to strike to get what she wants, or hold her own against the men who see her as an ornament, or an impediment to their plans.  The narratives switches back and forth, framed by three interviews--with a reporter (Billy Crudup) who comes to Jackie shortly after the assassination to discuss the lavish funeral she orchestrated for her husband; with a priest (John Hurt), some time after Kennedy's death; and with a news crew, during her 1962 televised tour of the white house.  Interspersed with all these are depictions of the minutes, hours, and days immediately after the assassination, as Jackie makes her way back from Dallas with Kennedy's body, plans her husband's funeral, and leaves the white house.  Through it all, the central question of the movie is: who is this woman, and what does she want?  What is the purpose of the grand display of grief she's planning for her husband?  Is she a vain fame-hound just looking for a few more moments in the public eye?  Is she a grieving widow trying to keep her husband alive for just a little longer, if only in the edifice she erects to mourn him?  Or is she a canny politician, who realizes that the funeral is her last chance to cement her husband's image in the public consciousness?  In one of the film's best scenes, Bobby Kennedy (a criminally overlooked Peter Sarsgaard) rails against the injustice of cutting short his brother's life before he could accomplish all he wanted.  But Jackie, listening silently, seems to realize that Kennedy's legacy is what she is at that moment creating: the image of hope, vigor, and promise which she is teaching the nation to mourn.
  
  It's easy to draw lines between Jackie and our current political moment.  On the one hand, the innate sense of service that permeates so many of the characters seems enviable, from our present situation.  Everyone in the movie recognizes the need to sublimate their own needs, and even their own grief, to the needs of the nation, and the fact that Kennedy's death does not belong solely to his family is accepted by all.  But at the same time, it's hard not to look at Jackie's projects as first lady--not just the funeral or the white house renovation, but making the presidency a sort of royal court, inviting artists to perform for the president and having grand parties in the residence--as the first steps towards the celebritization of the presidency.  One of the arguments the film makes is that a lot of the things we take for granted about how American presidents are treated, in life and death, were being invented in the Kennedy white house, and especially after the assassination.  That before Kennedy, the president was a public servant, and after him, he was something akin to a king.  The film is deeply ambivalent about the value of that--was the grand state funeral, as the reporter suggests to Jackie, a "spectacle", or was it, as he concedes later on, a necessary component of the nation's healing?  What this, as well as the scenes with Bobby, leave us to chew over is the question of what politics actually is--is it image, or action?  And is there really a difference between the two, given that so much work has to be put into projecting just the right image?
  
  For a film as smart and well-made as Jackie to have been locked out of this year's best picture race (not to mention Portman's loss in the best actress category to Emma Stone, whose performance in La La Land is perfectly fine but nowhere near the difficulty of what Portman accomplishes here), would be infuriating, if the film itself were not crafted, at least in part, as an explanation of why that sort of thing keeps happening.  Ultimately, Jackie's difficulties come down to the fact that we're not socialized to consume women's stories.  We either take it as a given that women don't have stories worth telling, or we see them as monstrous for trying to be at the center of a story--too ambitious, too vain, too flighty, too chilly, too emotional, too something.  The fact that none of the men around her can understand Jackie, that they keep trying to put labels on her that clearly don't fit, is directly linked to their inability to see her as their equal, as someone operating within the same sphere as them.  Jackie herself is alternately frustrated by this failure, and very savvy about using it to her advantage.  That audiences and critics similarly failed to grasp this film's importance and versatility, the way that, like its heroine, it uses our inability to put just one label on her as a way of disarming our expectations and prejudices, is equally frustrating and to be expected.  Nevertheless, even if the Academy failed to recognize Jackie's genius, there's no excuse for viewers doing the same.
  
  
• Logan - It's been a little frustrating, watching the rapturous critical reactions to Logan pour in, all calling the film a great leap forward in superhero storytelling.  Not because Logan isn't a good film--it undeniably is.  But because the things that make it good have nothing to with revolutionizing superhero movies, but are rather (obviously deliberate) throwbacks to the Westerns of the 50s and the crime dramas of the 70s.  Logan is good because it takes a very simple, very straightforward story--in a near-future in which mutants are all but extinct, a physically-shattered Wolverine tends to a senile Charles Xavier, but is forced out of retirement by Laura (Dafne Keen), a young girl who possesses the same powers as him and is being hunted down by the sinister corporation who created her--and tells it well, with careful attention to its characters, and some very bloody, vicious fight scenes that suit the bleakness of the film's premise and the desperation of its situation.  That this represents a revolutionary approach to superhero films is not actually untrue.  Superhero films have, for some time, been characterized by a "more is more" approach, piling on countless characters and relentless CGI to make up for slack, underwritten scripts; so Logan's relatively spare, and yet well-crafted, storytelling makes for a refreshing change.  But it is a little depressing to think that Logan breaks new ground simply by trying to be a good movie, and what's more, it gets in the way of appreciating Logan as a work of filmmaking in its own right.
  
  On that level, Logan is actually strongest in the moments where it embraces its inner X-Men movie.  For all its ups and downs, one of the most consistent strong points of this film series is its grasp on the relationships between its characters, in knowing which of them would like or dislike each other, and how they'd interact (compare that to the MCU's blithe insistence that all its good guys would get along famously, except for when the script requires them to fight).  Logan's bleak, nearly-hopeless tone could easily have come to seem like a gimmick--the equivalent of the 90s comics craze for "gritty" storytelling, which confused an emotional tone with a path towards some deeper philosophical truth (especially since we know that, right around the corner, there's another ensemble X-Men film coming that will no doubt return to the series's standard, more upbeat tone, and to the prevailing assumption of this genre that no story is worth telling if it doesn't hang the fate of the world in the balance).  That it doesn't is entirely down to the relationship between Logan and Charles, and the ad hoc family they form with Laura, a violent, taciturn ball of rage whose pure-id behavior clashes amusingly with the two older men's more experienced, damaged personalities.  Stewart, in particular, is excellent and heartbreaking as a once-great man made querulous and childish in his old age.  His relationship with Logan shifts back and forth between their old teacher-student bond, and a more intimate parent-child relationship, in which it's Logan who must realize that Charles's judgment can no longer be trusted, and that he needs to take on the parent role.  Logan's own character arc is less engaging, largely because it hasn't changed much in seventeen years, but these familiar character beats are revitalized by pitting him against Laura, in many ways his younger mirror.
  
  The one thing that Logan does bring to the superhero table is the film's background setting.  Logan is set in a near-future in which draconian restrictions on immigration, and the hostility towards immigrants that they promote, have become the norm.  In which American corporations set up sites in Mexico where they conduct unethical experiments, creating new mutants to be used as soldiers, because they can bully the local nurses and surrogate mothers into silence, and kill them if they refuse.  In which the working class is increasingly squeezed out of what little they've managed to carve out for themselves by giant corporations and their violent cronies.  None of these are the point of the movie, but the fact that the world has gotten crueler and more prone to exploiting the weak is what allows its story to happen, and it contributes to its characters' despair, their sense that they've failed as heroes and activists.  This is finally an X-Men movie that recognizes that there are more axes of oppression than anti-mutant prejudice, and that white, middle-to-upper class men like Logan and Charles can't be expected to stand in for all of them--which makes it all the more important that Laura, and the other young mutants she eventually joins forces with, are almost all POCs.  Because Logan tells such a small story, in which victory consists of saving just one girl, it can acknowledge that the world's ills are too great for any one person to solve, even if they have mutant powers, and this allows the movie to be a lot more honest about what those ills are than most works in this genre.  I'd like to believe that at least one of the lessons Hollywood will learn from Logan is to take a more realistic view of the world's problems, but I suspect what we're actually going to get is a slew of R-rated superhero movies starring pre-pubescent, barely-verbal action heroines.

Recent Movie Roundup 23

The first few days of 2017 have been rather interesting, as some tweets of mine went unexpectedly viral and sparked an interesting conversation about how Hollywood perceives the behavior, and fantasy life, of male versus female characters (you can read the whole thing here).  But that feels like a distraction from the exciting news that there are finally films in movie theaters that I want to see.  For some reason Israeli film distributors have broken their habit of waiting until February to bring out the year's Oscar hopefuls, and of course there are the year-ending genre movies.  I didn't like all of these films, but I certainly enjoyed the experience of looking forward to them.

• Moana - Disney's latest attempt to reinvent the princess movie takes two novel approaches: drawing on Polynesian folklore and mythology for its story, and recruiting Hamilton wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda to write the film's songs.  Heroine Moana (Auli'l Cravalho) is torn between her duties as the daughter of the village chief and her desire to roam the seas, but finds herself able to gratify both desires when she's tasked with restoring the heart of creation goddess Te Fiti, aided by Maui (Dwayne Johnson), the demigod who originally stole it.  The plot is thus a picaresque, in which Moana and Maui encounter various dangers and challenges on their journey to Te Fiti, during which they also bond and help each other overcome their hang-ups.  It's a similar structure to Tangled--still, to my mind, the best of the modern princess movies--but Moana lacks that film's multiple intersecting plot strands and broad cast of characters, and ends up feeling simpler and more straightforward.  What it does have is genuinely stunning animation, especially where it draws on the scenery of the Pacific islands and the iconography of Polynesian cultures, and some excellent songs by Miranda, which pay homage to both the Disney and musical theater traditions while still retaining entirely their own flavor--I'm particularly fond of a scene in which Moana and Maui encounter a giant, jewel-encrusted lobster (Jemaine Clement), who sings a David Bowie-inspired glam-rock ballad, and then complains that no one likes him as much as The Little Mermaid's Sebastian.  But pretty much every song here is excellent and memorable in its own right.
  
  Even more importantly, the fact that Moana is a story about its heroine rediscovering her people's heritage of exploring and ocean-voyaging feels especially significant in one of Disney's rare POC-starring vehicles, and lends a particular poignance to what is ultimately a fairly conventional follow-your-heart-and-be-true-to-yourself message.  Nevertheless, it's hard not to compare the relative simplicity of that message, and of Moana's story, to recent non-princess Disney projects like Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia, and feel that Disney is aiming low by merely refreshing this template with different world cultures.  Girls--and non-white girls especially--deserve stories as inventive and complex as the ones being offered to boys, and Disney might serve them better if it put heroines like Moana (and her heritage) in those stories instead of sticking to the tried-and-true conventions of the princess movie.
  
  
• The Lobster - Yorgos Lanthimos's Cannes-winning sensation has a delightfully out-there premise--it takes place in a world in which the single are corralled into a resort where they have 45 days to find a partner, or they will turned into a an animal--and one of the many wonderful things about it is that it plays it completely straight.  Our hero, David (Colin Farrell), checks into the resort after his wife leaves him, but when a putative romance goes horribly wrong, he runs away to join a group of singleton rebels who live out in the woods, amongst whom romance is strictly forbidden.  This becomes a problem when David falls passionately in love with one of the rebels, played by Rachel Weisz.  The Lobster is, first and foremost, an uproariously funny movie, not just because of how straight it plays its ridiculous premise, but because of how it develops it with even more absurd details.  A major criteria for romantic happiness at the resort is that partners have compatible physical abnormalities, so David, who is short-sighted, is constantly on the lookout for a woman whose vision is similarly impaired, and seems genuinely to believe that he could never be happy with anyone whose vision is better or worse than his.  The rebels, meanwhile, inform David that they only dance to techno music, so that no one can dance with each other and thus potentially commit a romantic infraction.  And though the film never discusses its central fantastic concept, throughout its events the characters are joined by various exotic animals--peacocks and dromedaries and porcupines--who are clearly transformed rejects from the resort, and whom no one comments on or pays attention to.  The sheer audacity of the film's conceit, and the fact that it is developed so well and with such imagination, carries you through most of it without stopping to wonder what the point of it all is (as does the delight of constantly finding top-tier actors in such a strange project: as well as Farrell and Weisz, the cast includes Olivia Colman, John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, and Léa Seydoux).  So when that point arrives, it cuts like a knife: the sudden realization that in a society that places absurd, arbitrary restrictions on what romance can look like, actual love is all but impossible.
  
  
• Star Trek Beyond - The third in J.J. Abrams's revamped-and-not-at-all-improved Star Trek series both benefits and suffers from its connection to its two predecessors.  Benefits, because compared to the utterly lamentable Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, the fact that Beyond is merely tedious and predictable is enough to make it seem like something resembling a good movie, especially when you consider that Abrams has been replaced in the director's seat by Justin Lin, who at least knows how to stage an action scene as if he cares, even if none of the ones here are particularly memorable or exciting.  And suffers, because Beyond, which co-writers Simon Pegg and Doug Jung clearly envisioned as an attempt to bring the new Star Trek back in line with the franchise's roots, depends for this task on the previous two movies having established certain characters and relationships to be broadly in line with what they were in the original series and movies, which means that it's relying on a foundation that hasn't been laid, and which in some cases blatantly contradicts what Beyond wants it to be.  William Shatner's Jim Kirk, for example, could (and in fact did) shoulder a storyline in which he becomes disenchanted with the Enterprise's mission of exploration and peaceful diplomacy, and considers leaving his command.  The same can't be said of Chris Pine's Kirk, who never seemed interested in Starfleet for anything beyond the gratification of being judged worthy to captain a starship, and who despite that judgment continues to be genuinely awful at all of the things that make a good Starfleet captain--as demonstrated by Beyond's opening scene, in which he hopelessly botches what should have been a straightforward diplomatic mission due to what looks like a simple lack of preparation.  The fact that Beyond constructs itself around this crisis is not, as the film clearly believes, a meaningful exploration of mid-life ennui, but yet another reminder that it has never been clear just why we should accept this Kirk as a hero--since he doesn't want to be one, and is in fact quite bad at it.
  
  By the same token, the scenes between Zachary Quinto's Spock and Karl Urban's McCoy seem to expect us to assume a long, rancorous-but-ultimately-respectful friendship between the two characters which this version of Star Trek, and these actors, have never actually done the work of establishing.  Beyond's screenplay makes a smart choice when it splits up the main cast into small groupings, each with their own storyline, after the Enterprise is attacked and destroyed over a mysterious planet (in yet another case of the reboot movies borrowing a major plot point from the original movies and not knowing what to do with it; it's not just that the Enterprise's destruction in Beyond lacks the resonance it had in The Search for Spock; this is a movie that can't even achieve the emotional heights of Generations).  Some of these storylines, such as Uhura and Sulu taking command of the surviving crewmembers, or Scotty bonding with a feral but plucky castaway (Sophia Boutella, in a role that would be more enjoyable if it did not feel so out of place in the Star Trek universe, original or reboot), work well enough on their own.  But when the time comes to tie them all together, it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that Beyond's story relies on us believing in the cohesion of its crew, and their faith in their captain, in a way that is simply unsupported by any of the films in the reboot universe, including this one.
  
  Beyond clearly has pretensions of engaging with Star Trek's core philosophy, but like its predecessors it runs aground on the fact that no one involved with the film has any idea what that philosophy is.  Characters spout words like "unity", "diplomacy", and "cooperation", but they seem bored even as they do so.  In a particularly tone-deaf scene, the film's villain, Krall (Idris Elba), explains to Uhura that its peaceful ways have made the Federation weak, and that conflict is needed for any species to thrive.  One might have expected that a Uhura, as a black woman, would be uniquely positioned to point out that the Federation's peace and harmony are hard-won treasures that humans only achieved after millennia of war, oppression, and genocide (a fact that is made all the more pressing when we learn Krall's true origin).  But that would require anyone involved with this movie to actually understand why peace and cooperation are good, desirable things, and it's clear that no one does.  Instead, the film treats Kirk's embrace of these ideals as a kind of favor he's doing to the universe, and then ends, as all the reboot films have done, with a single hero beating up on a single villain in order to save the day.  For all its pretensions of returning to its roots, Star Trek Beyond is still the same reboot Star Trek--utterly unclear on what made this franchise worthwhile, and completely incapable of staking out a claim for its own relevance.
  
  
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - Disney's first standalone in the Star Wars universe is very clearly an attempt to transform that franchise into something very like the MCU--a shared universe in which it is possible to tell stories in many different registers, genres, and scopes.  Whether or not the Star Wars setting can support that kind of expansion, however, remains to be seen, even after Rogue One, because the problems of this movie have a lot more to do with the perennial sloppiness in how Hollywood (and Disney in particular) constructs its action-adventure stories, than in the specifics of this particular story.  Rogue One's first half is quite promising, giving us a glimpse of the inner workings of the Rebellion, and of its internal rifts and disputes.  We get to see the psychological toll of constantly living on the knife's edge, not knowing who to trust since anyone could be an Imperial spy, fighting amongst different factions of the Rebellion over the correct tactics, making morally compromising decisions for the greater good, and above all, living in the constant awareness that it might all be for nothing, and that the Rebellion could so easily fail in the face of an enemy as powerful and implacable as the Empire.
  
  All of this creates the expectation of a tense heist/espionage story, as our heroes try to outsmart a much more powerful, organized opponent in order to retrieve the Death Star plans that will jumpstart the plot of A New Hope--something along the lines of a million WWII movies.  Instead, Rogue One plumps for a generic extravaganza of explosions and special effects, as our heroes launch a frontal assault against an Imperial records facility that doesn't make a great deal of sense, and completely squanders the bleak, paranoid tone of the film's first half.  It's not the first time I've gotten the sense that Disney's live-action division is weakest in its script department, and particularly those scripts that depend on something slightly more intelligent than fights and explosions (this has also been a problem of some recent MCU movies, chiefly Ant-Man and Civil War).  And unlike The Force Awakens before it, Rogue One can't shake off its script problems by relying on charming, engaging characters.  Heroine Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is meant to be the film's beating heart, as the daughter of the scientist who designed the Death Star, and the person who convinces a rag-tag team of resistance operatives that a mission to retrieve the plans is worth the risk.  But Jones's polite, underpowered performance makes it impossible to believe that this is a woman who has been living on her own since she was sixteen, much less someone who could inspire the grizzled, morally compromised soldiers of the Rebellion to have hope in the impossible.  (It's genuinely depressing to recall that Jones's chief competitor for the part of Jyn was Tatiana Maslany, who would surely have made a meal of this dark, gender-swapped Han Solo type.)  Diego Luna, as the film's male lead, resistance spy Cassian Andor, has a great deal more presence than Jones, but his character arc is yoked to hers, requiring us to believe that she spurs a moral awakening in him, which I never did.
  
  Far more successful are the film's supporting characters: Riz Ahmed as the fidgety but quietly heroic Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook, looking for redemption on Jyn's mission; Forest Whitaker as the semi-deranged, paranoid leader of a breakaway group from the Rebellion; most of all, Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang as former Jedi monks and probable married couple Chirrut Îmwe and Baze Malbus, who squabble and watch each others' backs in equal measure. None of them, however, get enough space in the story to make up for Jyn's dullness, Cassian's muddled character arc, or the script's sloppiness.  Rogue One thus ends up being very promising in parts, and very disappointing in its whole.  If Disney wants to turn Star Wars into something like the MCU, it will have to stick to the more breezy, adventure-based genres, where unconvincing scripts and boring characters have less of a chance to register.
  
  
• La La Land - The best compliment I can pay Damien Chazelle's throwback musical is that while I was watching it, I found its candy-colored world, in which characters repeatedly break out in rhapsodies to Los Angeles, Hollywood, and the dream of it making it there, a little cute and overdone.  And then when the credits rolled, I realized that I didn't want to step out of that world, with its melancholy, romantic tone, and its haunting musical refrains that I've kept on humming long after leaving the movie theater.  When I say that, though, I'm talking more about the film's background--its loving, gorgeously-lit views of LA landmarks and vistas, or the way it captures the strangeness of that city, and of its dream industry, and makes something charming out of a world that we've been trained to think of as cynical and exploitative.  I was a great deal less charmed by the film's main story, the romance that develops between aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone) and jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as they both try to get their big break.  In the films that La La Land riffs off--everything from Singin' in the Rain to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg--we accept that the lovers exist in their own world that bends itself to accommodate their love story.  But either Chazelle isn't quite able to believably create a world like that, or (more likely) the film's modern-day setting makes it impossible for me to believe in it.  So the fact that Mia and Sebastian frequently engage in obnoxious, self-absorbed behavior--everything from standing up in a movie theater while the film is running, to constantly blowing off their loved ones because they can't be bothered to remember their appointments--made it really difficult to root for their happy ending.
  
  I was, however, a great deal more interested in Mia and Sebastian's professional travails--she's trudging from one unsuccessful audition to another and wondering if she might simply not be good enough to make it, and he dreams of playing "pure" jazz at his own club, but is forced to take gigs at restaurants and house parties to make ends meet.  I'm a sucker for stories that depict art as work, and artists as people who are working towards the perfection of their craft--trying to find their unique voice, and then struggling to find an audience for that voice.  But the failure mode of stories like that is to depict "real" artists as people who are constantly saying no to opportunities (or who regret saying yes to them) because the work on offer isn't pure enough, and who thus spend their life waiting for the perfect opportunity to come along rather than taking any chance to develop their craft and do the work they love.  La La Land falls into that trap rather frequently, chiefly in a subplot in which Sebastian joins a band led by John Legend, who combines old-school jazz with modern hip-hop sounds, to Sebastian's obvious dismay and disapproval.  (There is also, obviously, a huge problem with a storyline in which a white man is the sole keeper of jazz's true soul, while a black man degrades it by combining it with a modern black musical style.)  But in fairness to the film, it doesn't live in that mode--Mia, for example, makes the valid point that while she likes the music that Sebastian is playing, it's not worth it if doing so makes him miserable.  In the end, it's hard to tell where La La Land falls on the selling out/doing work wherever you can find it question--perhaps because the film's fundamental romanticism means that both Mia and Sebastian end up achieving more of their dreams than actual people in their situation would probably get to.  And it is that romanticism that stays with you when the film ends, and which makes its whole worthwhile despite my problems with its parts.

(Not So) Recent Movie Roundup 22

It's pretty far down the very long list of reasons for its awfulness, but 2016 has not been a great movie year.  The failures of this year's summer movies have been sufficiently enumerated, but the truth is that by the time they rolled around, I was sufficiently burned out by the disappointing spring that I didn't even bother to watch most of them.  And a great deal of interesting 2016 films that I would have liked to see--such as Midnight Special, The Lobster, High Rise, and The Handmaiden--didn't even make it into theaters near me.  This post, therefore, actually covers something like five months of movie-watching, and though some of it has been worthwhile or entertaining, none of it counters my impression that 2016, in its cruelty, couldn't even offer us the distraction of good movies.

• Love & Friendship - The biggest and most vexing question raised by Whit Stillman's adaptation of Jane Austen's unpublished novella Lady Susan is: why the title change?  Not only is Lady Susan a perfectly good title, but Love & Friendship is actually a singularly bad one for a story that is all about selfishness, manipulation, and stupidity coming very close to ruining the lives of some perfectly inoffensive people.  Actual love and friendship are in short supply, shoved off into the background while the real business of the movie focuses on the machinations of Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale) as she schemes to marry off her daughter to a rich man whom she doesn't love, to arrange occasions in which to meet her own, married lover, and to entertain herself by seducing an upright young man who believes himself impervious to her charms.  If there's any love and friendship on screen in this movie, they are the ones between Susan and her best friend Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny), who supports, without question or qualm, Susan's schemes and manipulations.  It's here, however, that Love & Friendship fails to take advantage of its opportunities, to expand and fill in some of the gaps in the original novella--such as Alicia's lack of a personality except as Susan's supporter and confidant, or the blankness of Reginald de Courcy (Xavier Samuel), the young man whom Susan seduces, and who eventually falls in love with her daughter.
  
  None of this is to say that Love & Friendship is anything less than delightful--Beckinsale is wonderful as a completely amoral woman, and the cast around her, which includes familiar faces such as Stephen Fry, Jemma Redgrave, and James Fleet, all on top form, are extremely entertaining as they try to grasp the truth that they can't hope to deal with a person who understands society's rules perfectly, but has no sense of the values underlying them.  But despite occasional gestures towards expanding the story's world beyond what Austen made of it--characters discussing religion or poetry, and philosophizing about the meaning of life in a way that makes it clear that even these privileged aristocrats are trying to give their life more meaning than that offered by the tropes of a Regency novel--Love & Friendship never manages to feel like more than what it is, an adaptation of an imperfect but highly entertaining minor work by a great author.  Which is still quite a lot, and a great deal of fun to boot, but given how few works Austen left us, and how rare it is for a skilled, appreciative artist to try to adapt them, it's a shame that Stillman didn't try to put more of his own stamp on her work.
  
  
• Ghostbusters - Before watching Paul Feig's reboot of the beloved 80s comedy series, I sat down and rewatched the two original movies, for what was probably the first time in twenty years.  This, as it turned out, was doing Feig a huge favor, because time has not been terribly kind to either of these movies.  The original Ghostbusters feels more like a proof of concept, whose jokes--either because I know them all so well, or because fashions in comedy have changed--just aren't very funny anymore; and the less said of Ghostbusters II, the better.  The new Ghostbusters isn't a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it's more competently made than either of its predecessors, and has several scenes that cracked me up, which is more than I can say for the older movies.  It also, however, has a lot of dead air, and in fact the film's core problem is that it feels like a bunch of skits strung together by someone who didn't have the heart to go in and trim the ones that aren't that funny.
  
  What saves the film, even in its slower moments, are its four stars, and even more than that, the charming and engaging characters that Feig and co-writer Katie Dippold have created for them.  Whether or not it's funnier than the original, the new Ghostbusters has a great deal more heart, and that's completely down to its main characters, whose friendship, rivalry, camaraderie, and mutual exasperation are all believable and instantly lovable.  My only complaint here is that I was a lot less engaged with the central story of former friends Erin (Kristen Wiig) and Abby (Melissa McCarthy), who must heal their ruptured relationship over the course of the film.  What I wanted was a lot more scenes with Kate McKinnon's zany mad scientist Holtzman, and Leslie Jones's MTA worker (who also has an encyclopedic knowledge of New York history) Patty.  They don't have character arcs of their own, but it was always a joy to see them on screen, either on their own or interacting with each other, and I hope that the sequel, if it happens, gives them more space in the story.  (Also, it is officially time to accept that Chris Hemsworth can't act.  His role, that of the Ghostbusters' dumb, hunky receptionist, should have been one that Hemsworth could carry off in his sleep; but instead his scenes are consistently the most boring in the movie.  Maybe it's time to reevaluate whether men can even be funny.)
  
  
• Doctor Strange - Marvel's latest standalone movie has a great opening scene, and a final battle that toys with some really interesting ideas, finally upending a lot of the conventions of this increasingly formulaic filmic universe.  In between these two bookends, however, there's an origin story so tediously familiar, so derivative and by-the-numbers, that by the time I got to Doctor Strange's relatively out-there conclusion, all I wanted was for the thing to end.  As noted by all of its reviewers, the film is very pretty, positing a society of sorcerers who fight by shaping the very fabric of reality, causing geography and gravity to bend in on themselves in inventive, trippy ways.  The film's opening scene, in which bad guy Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) and Dumbledore-figure The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) stage such a battle in the streets of London, turning buildings and roads into a kaleidoscope image, is genuinely exciting.  For a brief time, you think that Marvel might actually be trying something new.
  
  Then the story proper starts, and a familiar ennui sets in.  Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is Tony Stark without the charm, the vulnerability, or the penchant for self-destruction.  In other words, he's a bore, and the film's attempts to make him into yet another brilliant asshole thrust unwillingly into heroism feel perfunctory and unconvincing.  The film's middle segment is essentially a protracted training montage, in which Strange, seeking a cure to an injury that ended his career as a surgeon, travels to Nepal to be healed by the Ancient One, and realizes that he'd rather learn to be a wizard instead.  Once again, there isn't a single original beat in this entire part of the film, and though Swinton's performance--alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor as fellow acolyte Mordo, and Benedict Wong as kickass librarian Wong--gives these scenes a little more personality, ultimately what they amount to is an Asian-inflected Hogwarts, notable mainly for pretty set dressing and effects (and, of course, for the decision to put a white actress in the middle of it), but still rather tedious to get through. 
  
  About twenty minutes before it ends, Doctor Strange finally lands on a raft of interesting ideas, any one of which might have enlivened the film and given it a personality if it had been threaded throughout the entire story, but which, at that point, no longer has the space to be developed adequately.  There is, for example, the fact that Strange suddenly remembers that he is a doctor, sworn to do no harm, and his refusal to become the kind of warrior that Tony Stark or Steve Rogers take for granted.  Or Mordo's increasing disillusionment with Strange and The Ancient One's willingness to bend and even break the laws of nature in order to achieve their short-term goals.  Taken together, these lead to a genuinely format-breaking final battle, in which Strange, instead of causing the devastation of a major city, works to undo it (the fact that this city is an Asian one feels particularly significant, given the way that previous Marvel movies have trampled cities in non-white countries as a way of establishing stakes, before gathering their heroes to defend New York or the fictional but still white Sokovia), and defeats his enemy by outsmarting rather than outfighting him.  If these themes had been present throughout Doctor Strange instead of just showing up shortly before it ends, it might have been something to see.  As it is, it feels as if director Scott Derrickson and writer Jon Spaihts had a few interesting ideas, and no clue how to tie them together into a worthwhile story.
  
  (I wrote the above on the weekend of Doctor Strange's release, when the world seemed headed towards a Hillary Clinton US presidency.  A week later, in a world that is about to be ruled by the bigot and rapist Donald Trump, the priorities and preconceptions of this movie suddenly seem much darker.  Only a few days after white men (and women) overwhelmingly decided that eight years under the leadership of an intelligent, compassionate, visionary black man was more than they could bear, and that a highly qualified and competent woman could never compete with a lazy, fraudulent, perpetually dishonest man, the very concept of a story in which we all--women and POCs included--are saved by a privileged white man, while the black man who criticizes the white heroes for their abuse of power is revealed as a psychotic villain, feels like a cruel joke.  Along with the rest of Hollywood, Marvel buys into--and indeed, helps to perpetuate--the mentality that if there isn't a white man in the middle of the story, there must be something wrong with the story.  We have just seen how that mentality plays out in the real world, and we will all spend years paying the price for it.)
  
  
• Manchester by the Sea - Kenneth Lonergan's Oscar-hopeful feels like an object lesson in the arbitrariness of Hollywood's prestige ladder.  The film's premise has been, and will continue to be, the stuff of millions of weepies and made-for-TV movies: protagonist Lee (Casey Affleck) receives word that his beloved older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has died of an illness, and that Lee is now unexpectedly the guardian of Joe's teenage son Patrick (Lucas Hedges).  This forces Lee to return to his home, the titular fishing town, where he is haunted by memories of a terrible trauma, and by lingering resentment from some of his neighbors.  Obviously, it's the execution that differentiates between shlock and drama, and Manchester by the Sea is indeed a well-made, closely-observed and deliberately low key variation on its extremely familiar story.  But I can't help but rankle at the fact that that very avoidance of melodrama is being hailed as proof of the film's seriousness, of its being an exceptional and especially worthy example of its type.  It feels telling that a male writer and director has taken a genre typically associated with women, told a story within it that concentrates almost exclusively on men, focused on "hard", violent emotions such as Lee's still-simmering anger and guilt, and gotten effusive praise for it.  Take, for example, the way that flashbacks spread throughout the movie reveal Joe's role as the strong, supportive center of his family, someone whose loss, by the end of the movie, feels genuinely devastating.  Now try to remember the last time that a movie--much less one as prestigious as this one--made its dead wife or mother as real or as human, anything more than something for its male heroes to get over.
  
  The ultimate effect of this was that I found it hard to appreciate Manchester by the Sea for the thing that it has been most commonly lauded for, Affleck's performance.  He is, of course, very good as a man struggling, and ultimately failing, to overcome terrible loss, but I found myself resenting the way the film valorizes Lee's anger and inability to move on--there is, for example, something almost ridiculous about the eventual revelation of his inciting trauma, as if Lonergan couldn't stop himself from piling on yet another detail that would make Lee's loss more horrific.  What does work, however, is everything around Lee, and particularly Patrick, whose depiction as someone who, on one hand, is a great deal more together and connected to the world than his uncle, and on the other hand, is still a child, is one of the most realistic filmed portraits of a teenager I've ever seen.  The relationship between Patrick and Lee feels real and lived-in, full of unspoken but clearly felt history.  So, too, is the portrait the film paints of the close-knit working class community of Manchester, which supports the struggling family but also makes it impossible for Lee to escape his past.  And the film's ending, which avoids an easy solution to Lee and Patrick's problems while still offering hope for the future, is perhaps the greatest rebuttal Lonergan can offer to his story's melodramatic roots.  It's not entirely Manchester by the Sea's fault that I wasn't blown away by it--a lot of it comes down to the industry around it and the way that it prioritizes men's stories over women's, even when they're the same story--but I still found myself appreciating the film more for its background details than for the figure in its foreground.

Recent Movie Roundup 21, Part 2

In a few hours, this year's Oscars will be handed out, concluding a season that has been interesting more for the conversation surrounding the nominated movies than for the movies themselves.  Nevertheless, here are some more thoughts about nominated movies (plus a recent one) with my ranking of the best picture nominees at the end.

• Room - A few years ago, when Emma Donoghue's novel was the topic of discussion everywhere, I found myself, on several occasions, just on the verge of picking up a copy, and then deciding not to.  What held me back was the reaction I had to every one of the novel's reviews, and their description of its premise, in which the experiences of a teenage kidnap victim are filtered through the point of view of her young son, who has spent his entire life in the room in which his mother was imprisoned by her abductor, which he believes to be the whole world, and who must rebuild his worldview when they are rescued.  I kept thinking: this sounds unbearably cute.  And that, unfortunately, was also my reaction to Lenny Abrahamson's adaptation of Donoghue's novel.  To be sure, Room is unflinching in its depiction of "Ma's" (Brie Larson) life as a years-long prisoner, stressing the meanness of her circumstances and the utterly selfish entitlement of her abductor.  And some scenes--chiefly the one in which young Jack (Jacob Tremblay) escapes and tries to get help--are unbearably tense.  But the focus of Room is still on Jack, and on his experiences learning the world, and it expresses those experiences in terms that I couldn't help but find twee, and not entirely believable.  Ma has taught Jack, for example, that the room is the whole world, so he doesn't use the definite article, but refers to "bed," "wardrobe," and "skylight" as if there were only one of each.  The film's segments are bookended by Jack's internal monologue, a cutesy explanation of his personal mythology and how it develops after his rescue, but to me this focus obscured the more interesting story, of Ma and her family's adjustment to life after her rescue.
  
  This is, obviously, to criticize Room for not being the movie I wanted it to be (and given how heavily the idiosyncrasies of how the book and the film tell this story have been publicized, I can't even claim that I didn't know what I was getting in for).  But the way in which the film prioritizes Jack's story over his mother's is more than just an unsatisfying (to me) narrative choice.  It expresses the film's preoccupations and worldview, in a way that I found increasingly frustrating and disturbing as the story draws on.  What Room is about, fundamentally, is parenthood, or rather motherhood, the way that parents shape their children in ways both good and bad, and the way in which they are, in turn, shaped by being parents.  For Ma (whose real name is Joy), becoming a mother is simultaneously a burden and her salvation.  It gives her confined, hopeless life a sense of purpose and focus (as she tells Jack, before he "came along" she was living in despair, "a zombie").  As we see in the early parts of the film, Joy has worked hard to make Jack's life as happy and as rich as possible.  She tells him that Room is the whole world so that he will never feel as confined and trapped as she does.  She invents activities and stories for him in order to develop his mind and body.  She fights with her captor to get him medicine and clothes, and uses her own body to protect Jack from his father's attentions.  But at the same time, motherhood is something that has been imposed on Joy in the worst possible way, and it means that she will never be able to fully move on from what was done to her.  There are moments when Larson looks at Tremblay, and her face suddenly twists with anger, that to me felt like the most honest, most important scenes in the movie.
  
  For the most part, however, Room doesn't address this tension, and when it does it's only to criticize Joy and put her down.  Throughout the film, I kept waiting for someone to tell Joy what an amazing mother she was, and how astounding it was that she had managed to give Jack such a normal life under such terrible circumstances, even though she was not much more than a child herself when she became a mother.  But instead, all she gets is criticism.  Seemingly everyone--her own mother, a reporter, even her captor--lines up to tell Joy that she's doing motherhood wrong, when really they should be marveling that she's willing to do it at all.  And the only person in the movie who isn't immediately accepting of Jack, Joy's father, does so in terms that are clearly designed to make him look villainous, and is quickly removed from the story.  There are, obviously, some very complex questions that are raised by Joy and Jack's connection, and I'm not trying to say that Room should have ended with her abandoning him.  But the movie doesn't even try to raise those questions, and instead takes it for granted that a happy ending for Joy is one in which she fully embraces her role as Jack's mother.  In the film's third act, Joy sinks into depression, and while it's understandable that Jack would feel betrayed and abandoned by this, the way in which the film validates his point of view seems to be pointing us towards the conclusion that Joy doesn't have the right to feel her own trauma--or worse, that the only way for her to heal is to embrace her role as a mother.  Near the end of the film, Joy laments that she is a terrible mother, to which Jack replies "but you're Ma."  I think the movie means for me to see this as hopeful--to think that Jack is a positive presence in Joy's life who can help her move forward from her experiences.  But to me it just felt like a continuation of the film's tragedy.  Like any child, Jack loves his mother not because she's a good mother, but because she's his.  So the only positive presence in Joy's life is also the one that traps her in a role that she never really had a choice in assuming.
  
  
• Brooklyn - Coming as the follow-up to Room only did good things for this movie by John Crowley, which taken on its own is sweet but extremely small.  After the rather punishing experience of a movie in which everyone, good and evil, behaves as if the young heroine doesn't have the right to live for herself, it was a profound relief to come to Brooklyn and find a story about a young woman's pursuit of happiness, on her own terms, and even when the people around her tell her that she's being selfish to do so.  This is, perhaps, to make Brooklyn seem rather combative, when in fact it's an extremely, perhaps deceptively gentle film.  Saoirse Ronan (luminous, and to my mind a better choice for the best actress Oscar than Brie Larson because she has to carry so much more of her movie on her own, and manages to convey her character's emotions without a child to play opposite) plays Eilis, a young Irish woman in the early 50s who, lacking job prospects or any hope of a good future at home, emigrates on her own to the US.  Eilis's life in Brooklyn follows the familiar beats of an immigrant story--she's terribly homesick at first, then slowly finds her footing, makes friends, and even meets a young man (Emory Cohen)--and it's therefore easy to see Brooklyn as by the numbers, or even perfunctory.  But the real story here is Eilis's growth into womanhood and adulthood, her discovery of the kind of life she wants and of her ability to pursue it--even when her behavior can seem hurtful, such as when she returns to Ireland for a visit and strikes up a flirtation with another suitor (Domhnall Gleeson), concealing the fact that she's got someone waiting for her at home.  Even more interesting is the fact that the people who help (and sometimes hinder) Eilis on her path towards finding herself are almost all women--her landlady (a delightful Julie Walters), the girls at her boarding house, her boss at the department store where she works, her mother and sister, the local busybody at her home town.
  
  Brooklyn's script, by Nick Hornby, is sharp and extremely effective, but also a little on the nose.  This is particularly true when it comes to the rather simplistic contrast the film draws between Ireland and the US, which represent, respectively, a genteel conformity that Eilis eventually comes to see as restrictive and narrow-minded, and the land of freedom and opportunity.  (This reductiveness is responsible for the one bum note in the script, the event that finally jogs Eilis to decide where her home is and what kind of life she wants to have, which requires one of the characters to act in a way that, as even the script itself acknowledges, she has no real motivation for.)  But the film's rose-tinted perception of America also means that it makes an unexpectedly powerful statement.  Eilis's story--an immigrant seeking a better life in a foreign country, getting help and support from those who came before her, and establishing herself with a profession and a home--is the story of so many immigrants all over the world, and just as Irish people like Eilis came to America in the 50s and before, people from Syria and South America and everywhere else in the world are making that journey today.  One hopes that at least some of the people who were so charmed by Eilis's story will realize that there are countless young men and women like her living that story today, and feel a little more sympathetic towards them.
  
  
• Hail, Caesar! - The trailers for the Coen brothers' latest movie make it look like one of their trifles, on the spectrum between Intolerable Cruelty and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a comedy full of exaggerated accents and implausible coincidences.  This isn't entirely inaccurate--the accents do pour forth like water, and the film is, indeed, more a comedy than anything else.  But Hail, Caesar! is also a great deal stranger than its promotional materials suggest, and it lacks the kind of structure that might make it a successful comedy.  The loose framing story follows 1950s Hollywood studio executive Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), as he puts out fires that include a starlet pregnant out of wedlock (Scarlett Johansson), a Western star who is having trouble adjusting to the transition to dramatic roles (Alden Ehrenreich), warring gossip journalists threatening to unearth dirt about his stars (Tilda Swinton in a double role), and the kidnapping for ransom of the star of his biggest movie (George Clooney).  The individual pieces are all impeccably made--Johansson is a lot of fun in the few scenes that reveal the hard-bitten reality beneath her Esther Williams-esque, bathing beauty facade, and Channing Tatum gets to show off his dance moves as a hoofer in a ridiculously cheesy musical scene--but most of the players appear for only a few scenes, and their stories fizzle out more often than resolve satisfyingly.
  
  Tying the movie together is Mannix's passion project, a dramatization of the life of Christ seen through the eyes of a Roman centurion (Clooney, delightfully cheesy in a recreation of 50s swords-and-sandals epics).  It very quickly becomes clear that in the movie's central metaphor, Mannix is a stand-in for this centurion, and that his doubts over whether his work has meaning--he is entertaining a job offer from Lockheed, whose executive promise him a chance to get away from the movies' triviality--are being treated as tantamount to the spiritual awakening experienced by the character.  Making movies, in other words, is likened to finding Jesus.  This is, to say the very least, quite odd (and all the more so because it makes Hail, Caesar! the Coens' most Christian--not to say Catholic--movie, which feels strange coming from creators whose previous work's religious undertone has tended to reflect their Jewishness).  It only gets stranger when one considers the kidnapping plot, in which Clooney's abductors turn out to be Communists scriptwriters who spend his incarceration educating him in Hollywood's role in perpetuating the Capitalist machine.  If nothing else, one has to wonder what the Coens are trying to say when they imagine a cell of Communist Hollywood scriptwriters--with direct connections to the USSR, no less--at the height of HUAC's activities, which are directly referenced when Clooney tries to extort a share of the ransom money by threatening to "name names."
  
  Wondering what the Coens are trying to say with Hail, Caesar! is, in fact, my overall reaction to the entire movie.  Whatever the trailers might suggest, this is not a screwball comedy about old Hollywood and the excesses of the studio system.  But neither is this a film that really seems to know what it's saying.  Near the end of the movie, when the recently-discovered actor playing Jesus in Clooney's movie is sneeringly asked whether he's to be treated as an extra or a featured player--while he hangs from the cross, no less--one simply has to throw up one's hands up in dismay.  The Coens are perfectly capable of making oblique movies that nevertheless have a lot of emotional heft (I'd argue that Fargo, one of their best movies, has some of that attribute), but Hail, Caesar! is ultimately a bum note in their varied filmography.
  
  
• Son of Saul - Like a lot of Israelis my age, I spent my teenage years obsessed with the Holocaust, consuming fiction and non-fiction about it.  But at some point--probably not long after returning from the March of Life--I found myself feeling burned out on the subject.  These days I tend to avoid Holocaust fiction, not least because I've found the modern variations on it frustrating in the extreme--either misery porn, or, worse, sickeningly sentimental.  If it hadn't been for my project to actually give this year's Oscar nominees a serious look, I probably would have given László Nemes's Son of Saul a pass as well, which means that I finally have a reason to feel genuinely thankful to the Oscar voters, because Son of Saul is the closest I've ever seen a fictional depiction come to capturing K. Tzetnik's description of life in a Nazi death camp as "another planet."  A lot of this is down to the film's striking visual (and auditory) style, in which an old-fashioned square frame remains tightly fixed on the film's protagonist, Saul (Géza Röhrig), as he moves through the hellish environs of the camp's apparatus of death--the gas chambers, preparation rooms, and crematorium.  The camera's shallow focus means that everything around Saul and in the background is glimpsed only dimly, even as the sounds of atrocities are unnaturally amplified, conveying not only the chaos and confusion of of the camp, but Saul's own disturbed state of mind, his growing disconnect from the world, from humanity, and finally from life itself as he surrenders to the horror that he's witnessed and been made to participate in.
  
  Saul is a member of the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners made to assist in the running of the gas chambers and crematorium.  In the film's harrowing opening scene, we see him help to corral a newly-arrived group of prisoners into the changing room and the "showers," then brace against the door of the gas chamber as their heart-rending screams emerge from behind it.  Later he and his fellow prisoners scrub the gas chamber clean, and transport the bodies to the crematorium.  The fact that the camera remains trained, for the most part, on Saul's face or back, focusing more on his reactions than on the depiction of horror, helps Son of Saul avoid the pitfall of reveling in that horror, but it--and Röhrig's performance--make it clear that his months in the Sonderkommando have scraped Saul's soul down to nothing.  When he spots the body of a young man among the victims of the most recent transport, and becomes convinced that the boy is his illegitimate son, it's very clear that this is merely an obsession.  Saul becomes determined to give the boy a proper, Jewish burial, stealing the body to keep it from the crematorium, and frantically searching for a rabbi to perform the funeral service.  Along the way he endangers and betrays the trust of several other prisoners, even those who go out of their way to help him, and puts at risk the plans of the other prisoners to smuggle out evidence of the atrocities happening in the camp, or launch an armed attack against the guards.  It soon becomes clear, however, that Saul's insanity is, in his insane situation, actually quite rational.  The other prisoners insist that he is betraying the living in order to honor the dead, but the film leads us to question whether their forms of rebellion are any more sane, and any more likely to accomplish something meaningful, than Saul's belief that he can give meaning to what his life has become by giving one child a proper burial.
  
  Most Holocaust movies tend to have a broad sweep, showing us the characters' lives before Nazism disrupted them, or the course their life took--whether to death or rescue--once in the camps.  Son of Saul is focused not only in its style but in its timeframe and storytelling.  We learn almost nothing about Saul, and it is in fact implied that he has lost all sense of connection to his previous life (for example, the other prisoners seem to imply that he never actually had a son, and Saul can't offer anything like a detailed counter-argument).  And he also has no hope for his future--there are rumors circling that his Sonderkommando unit is headed for the gas chambers soon--and at no point does the film suggest, as so many other Holocaust stories do, that escape and survival are something he could reasonably hope for.  To both himself and to us, Saul exists only in the moment, and in the hell of the death camp, and the only way for him to hold on to what's left of his humanity is to latch on to the futile, meaningless mission of burying his "son," just as the other prisoners have latched on to their rebellion or attempts to witness and document Nazi atrocities.  Son of Saul wisely avoids the trap of sentimentality--it never for a moment allows us to believe that Saul's mission is noble or meaningful, and indeed he never really manages to bury the boy as he wants.  The only triumph it offers him is a partial, sad, and brief one.  This, too, is essential to its being a worthy work of Holocaust fiction--as I grow older, I become more and more convinced that telling stories about the Holocaust through the lens of survival (for all that it's an understandable focus, since most Holocaust stories come to us from survivors) is inherently dishonest.  The Holocaust was an engine of death, its survivors statistical errors.  Son of Saul depicts that engine, and the small, partial, fundamentally insane instances of humanity that nevertheless managed to survive within it.
  

With six out of eight best picture nominees under my belt, I'm not very surprised to report that I'm still rooting for Mad Max: Fury Road to win the day (my complete ranking: Mad Max; Spotlight; Brooklyn; Room; The Martian; The Big Short).  None of the other films even approach George Miller's level of accomplishment, on either the storytelling or filmmaking levels, and I think it probably says all I need to say that I saw Mad Max nearly a year ago, and yet it lingers in my mind more than films I watched in the last month.  That said, if I could choose to give the best picture trophy to any movie, it would go to Son of Saul, and I'm honestly disappointed that it didn't make the general ballot instead of just the foreign picture one.