Under the Skin; Only Lovers Left Alive

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin features a sexy alien serial killer.  Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive features hipster vampires, presumably having died from overdoses of hipness.  When Tom Hiddleston’s character from Lovers is told that a certain talented singer would become famous one day he responded “God I hope not.  She’s way too good for that.”  Which sums up the possessive adoration many of Jarmusch’s and Glazer’s fans feel about their work.

Glazer’s film stars Scarlett Johansson, who proves she can go well outside her normal range of pretty indie chicks.  Her inhuman mimicry of sexual predatory behavior stands as a pretty good symbol of the age for anyone who has tried online dating, with its faux intimacy and exploitations. The images are nightmarish and haunting, like something Kubrick would have given us.  Although there is not much in the way of dialogue, the dissonant score and bleak Scottish setting convey more than entire scripts.  It brings to mind the work of Shane Carruth, especially his recent Upstream Color.  Though Skin is not as difficult as that film, it has the same ability to give us characters which seem right out of a bizarro new folklore for the post-9/11 post-financial crisis neo-malaise period even as they’re entirely original.

Jarmusch’s contemporary undead Hamlets convey the same ultimate sense of sadness even while embodying a sulky sexualilty.  Sunglasses, gloves, obsessions with old guitars, frequent references to Byron and Shelley put a welcome new mythology of vampires into play.  There is no discernible plot, nor is one needed.  It’s all about atmosphere, brooding intellectuals and stunning visuals.  It’s hard to imagine someone watching this and not wanting to hop on a nighttime flight to Detroit or Tangiers.  It’s also the best romance since last year’s Before Midnight.  And underneath it all is the occasional self-mockery.  “This is so 14th century,” Tilda Swinton’s character complains at one point.

Each of these directors takes a minimum of four years per movie, so getting both these gems in the space of a month is just south of a miracle.

Best Pictures of 2013

It is time for the prestigious Ordpaxa Awards, those highly anticipated but too-cool-for-fanfare awards which come sandwiched between the Globes and the Oscars.  This year, there were but 2 films which qualified as nominees, but I've also included six honorable mentions to round out a Top Eight:

Honorable Mentions:

8.  Gravity
Overhyped and with some bad science (how were the debris particles going the opposite direction to all the other orbiting stations?), the special effects and acting were still pretty spectacular.  At the end of the day, the story was compelling, but will not be iconic.

7.  Mud
A low budget indie film with heart.  Manages to take the muddy rivers and strip malls of Arkansas and make them seem spellbinding with great filming and the frame of a coming of age story.  They overplayed their hand with an overdone ending, but McConoughy still gave some of the best acting of his career.

6.  Blue Jasmine
With a plot almost entirely ripped off from A Streetcar Named Desire, this film still manages to seem original with the stylings of Woody Allen and Best Actress caliber performance from Cate Blanchett.

5.  Saving Mr. Banks
The criminally under-recognized and under-nominated film from Disney chronicles the creating of the film Mary Poppins.  From this unlikely premise comes a great character-based script.

4.  12 Years a Slave
Solid.  Best performance from an actor this year.  Will almost certainly get the Best Picture Oscar. Intense, required viewing.

3.  American Hustle
David O. Russell strikes again with an incredibly creative well scripted film that is sexy, stylish and cool.  As with last year's Silver Linings Playbook, we get a mixture of drama and comedy, this time with a 70s vibe.

Runner Up:

2.  Before Midnight
Obviously the Ordpaxa best films skew towards movies with great scripts and great acting, and this would be exhibit A in that trend.  As the (probable) culmination to the 'Before' Series, this would have been the year they finally took home the (nonexistent) Ordpaxa statue for Best Film were it not for an 11th hour dark horse:

The Winner:

1.  Her
It's a movie about relationships.  It's a movie about the Singularity.  It's a movie that proves Scarlett Johanson would still be sexy even if she were a disembodied computer program. This movie is excellently paced, and has one of the most creative scripts I've come across in a long time.  It's quirky indie perfection with a scifi twist.




Full Disclosure Haven't Seen Yet:
- Nebraska
- Philomena
- August: Osage County
- Captain Phillips
- All is Lost
- Inside Llewyn Davis

Mitt

A documentary which shows that behind the platitudes and the persona, there's an actual person, and not an unlikable one at that.

One of the most interesting scenes of this latest Netflix Original depicts Tagg (or one of Romney's other whimsically named sons) being asked the question of whether it's all worth it.  He gives us two different answers, first the trained answer he would give to the media, and then the real one.  They don't quite contradict, but what's striking is that the second one is so much more appealing and earnest than the first.  The first achieves a consultant-enriched buzzword density, but the second elicits actual human feeling.

Does this mean politicians and their campaigns should speak from the heart, and be themselves?  Probably not.  Saying what a candidate actually thinks (or "going off message" as the pundits call it) leaves open the possibility of making an error which would then get played again and again and again through all the media channels.  Successful candidates must be disciplined.

That being said, this movie is not without its own biases.  It's clearly filmed and put together with a friendly eye--with the right editing and enough footage one could make Gandhi seem like a petty unlikeable hypocrite and Josef Stalin like an earnest compassionate saint.  But the family dynamic behind the scenes was touching, and wholesome enough to make It's a Wonderful Life look dysfunctional.

This fuzzy grandpa Romney is clearly only one side to the man though, and at one point we get a sense of the competent rational boardroom shark in the suit.  He's arguing with some debate organizers about the format, and the strategizing assertiveness comes out then.

And even while this documentary does give a sense that Mitt the man is less of a phony than Mitt the politician, the system as a whole is left looking phonier than ever for forcing a distinction between the two.

One More Thing by B. J. Novak

The debut book "One More Thing" by B. J. Novak, (who starred as Ryan in The Office, and wrote for the same show) came out earlier this month.  My anti-TV snobbery caused me to assume the book would be lame, so imagine my surprise.

I actually read the first story "The Rematch" 3 times the night I got a copy of this book.  It's a sequel to the fable of the tortoise and the hare.  When the humiliated and depressed hare tries to get a round 2, he's informed by the tortoise's spokesperson that "The tortoise is focused full-time on inspiring a new generation with the lessons of dedication and persistence through his popular speaking tours and his charitable work with the Slow and Steady Foundation."  And it only gets funnier from there.

Novak's really good at mimicking and distilling the most absurd elements of our modern culture.  Take for instance his story about the Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela.  It walks that blurry line between tasteless and satire of the tasteless.  You'll either be offended or you'll laugh.  A lot.  

Other great stories are "The Man Who Invented the Calendar" which first appeared in the New Yorker, "Sophia" which is like some kind of weird inversion of the new film "Her", and "Kellog's", all of which have a distinctly George Saunders feel to them.  

Not every story in the collection is as strong.  Some of the shorter ones are either a little too clever for me, or a little too random.  Others are super short and elicit a chuckle.  Take "The Literalist's Love Poem."  It goes:

                Roses are rose.

                Violets are violet.

                I love you.

And that's it.  This collection is super hip and super edgy.   Some will age better than others.

I will almost certainly read whatever he writes next, so at the end of the day it's a win for Novak.

Also, be sure to check out the trailer for the book, which he does with Office co-star and fellow writer Mindy Kaling:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FxhTn9cEhI

Mud

When Mud first shows up onscreen (played by a swaggering and disheveled Matthew McConaughey), he is looking decidedly non-Hollywood, with his scraggly beard and unwashed tangly hair. 

What follows might be a modern-day Huck Finn with a little more seediness and dysfunction thrown in (it was certainly influenced by the Mark Twain classic).  14-year-old Ellis is making his own first awkward steps into the adult world of relationships, is the product of a disintegrating marriage, and wants very much to believe in the all-consuming power of love.  Enter Mud, a fugitive they meet on a secluded island, with his wild tale of a passion-induced crime.

Everything is complicated in Mud; everything has two or more sides to it.  The moment you try to place any of these characters inside the standard lines someone else comes along with an entirely different view of them and we're left with a Picassoesque view of a character that seems to shift every time we refocus our eyes.

Is Mud a rough around the edges drifter with a heart of gold as Ellis believes?  Is he a charismatic manipulator who is ultimately selfish as his intermittent girlfriend played by Reese Witherspoon tells us?  Or is he a fool in love, who had the misfortune to choose the object of his desires unwisely, per the account of old friend and father figure played by Sam Shepherds?

The camera work is fluid and sharp, and makes the Arkansas world of strip malls, church billboards, houseboats and motels seem romantic and mysterious.  This is clearly a labor of love for writer and director Jeff Nichols, who grew up in the area.  It is reported to be the largest production ever filmed in the state, though by Hollywood standards it is more or less a small indie film.

This is either a film about loss of innocence, or about preserving idealism even in the face of the disappointments of the world, all dealt with in a touching way that is only somewhat undercut by the too conventional whiz bang ending.  Subplots and digressions abound, making this film as rambling as the river it takes place on, but then, that's part of the charm.

Grade:  A-

Pacific Rim

This movie makes Michael Bay look bad.  For any of use who'd been excusing his Transformers movies by saying that Hollywood flicks about massive fighting robots are predestined to mediocrity, we are now officially proven wrong.  Of course there's probably a long list of directors who would look unimpressive standing next to Guillermo del Toro, the auteur from Spain who also brought us Pan's Labyrinth.

Pacific Rim is not entirely original, with elements taken from (or homage being paid to) Godzilla, and even one or two whole lines seemingly lifted from Independence day.  But with a finished product that matches the accomplishments of either one, I can't imagine anyone complaining too much.  It grants itself full summer-movie license to a ridiculous premise:  Giant alien sea monsters from another dimension are taking out our cities, starting with the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco and since our current technology proves inadequate to the task of taking them down, we construct giant robots to do the job for us.  (Why a few tactical nukes wouldn't do the job much better is never addressed, but that would make for a pretty boring film so let's all just agree not to mention it.)

With talent mined from all over the entertainment ecosystem, we finally have a summer blockbuster with heart.  Top billings go to Guillermo del Toro's behind the camera direction, which imbues everything here with a visually stunning and surreal appearance, whether it's malevolent behemoths from the ocean's depths or bustling futuristic streets of Hong Kong.

Then there's Charlie Day who pivots from his borderline retarded character on "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" to a highly entertaining and manic off-his-rocker scientist without missing a beat.  There's also Idris Elba who brings his steely badass intimidation factor from the Wire to this role as supreme military commander defending the Earth.  "Today we cancel the apocalypse!" he yells out in the best line of the movie.  (Note: It's not a spoiler because it's in the trailer.)

One of Japan's more popular actresses, Rinko Kikuchi, bring some talent from the other side of the Pacific as a pilot for one of the giant robots (or "jaegers" as the film calls them, a German word for hunter).  Whoever did computer affects deserves an academy award as well.  The sea monsters (or "kaiju" in the parlance of the film) will get your heart beating.  They are beautiful and terrifying, even artistic in the way they look and move.

There's some typical silliness about global warming and acid rain having made our planet hospitable to these alien invaders (have to fit a moral in somewhere, right?) but it's not nearly so hamfisted as the ecological preaching of Avatar, which also managed to be a good film.  It almost seems to take a stance from the other end of the political spectrum against government waste, as a cowardly coalition of world politicians decides to defund the robotic jaegers in favor of massive coastal walls, which prove completely ineffectual.  But it stops short of making the heads of state look too foolish, and goes back to mad scientists, simmering sexual tension and fighting aliens.  Which is not an entirely bad thing.

If you're going to see one blockbuster this summer, I would make it Pacific Rim.  It's not a sequel and there are no big names, but again, that's not entirely a bad thing.

Grade:  A-

This is the End

I was unsure how my usual love of all things post-apocalypse would fare against my general dislike of stoner comedies, and after seeing what is possibly the very first movie ever to be both simultaneously, I would have to say it's a decidedly mixed bag.

Just about every comedic actor between the ages of 20 and 40 is in this movie with at least some sort of cameo, playing themselves as attendees to a party at James Franco's house during the Apocalypse.  Michael Cera plays the opposite of his usual innocent screen self, an over the top caricature of pretty much every negative trait you can imagine, all 7 deadly sins rolled up into one, with a few others that should probably be added to the list.  Jonah Hill plays the nicest guy you've ever met, but also manages to be not a particularly good or likable guy without any sense of contradiction.  His eventual possession by a demon makes for some entertaining watching.  Aziz Ansari has about 20 seconds of screen time, before getting swallowed up by a pithole from Hell; Jason Segel is more or less wasted as part of the scenery, as is the talented Mindy Kaling, among others.

The characters are unlikable, vain, venal, self-absorbed, self-congratulatory.  This is by design, a major part of the comedy Seth Rogen and his team have constructed here--a self-referential mockery of Hollywood culture in all its smug self-importance and triviality.  But it's a satire that also glorifies what it condemns, making the party setting and stars seem glamorous even as they are playfully taken to task for their hedonism.  This attempt to have it both ways makes the film muddled in its feel and message.

Shallow character revelations mix with pop-ethics and pop-theology, giving the whole venture an unsatisfying and unreal feel.  While it is only a comedy, and one which takes itself none too seriously, characters we can care about and like are nice in any genre.  Can an entire film be fueled by Schadenfreude at watching bad things happen to unlikable people?

That being said, there are a few moments which standout.  The couple scenes with Emma Watson are some of the funniest in the movie and make up for a number of other misfires.  While the schtick of actors playing fictional versions of themselves starts to wear thin at times, there are some amusing moments like when Rogen walks through an airport bashfully ignoring the obnoxious paparazzi hounding his steps.  Unfortunately this scene comes at the very beginning and by then end you're starting to wonder if maybe Hollywood shouldn't be swallowed up and stomped on by demons.  Okay, Jonah Hill and Emma Watson should be raptured up out of there, but for the others if this is the best you can do, Sayonara!

Grade:  B-