Women on Fire

In the times of Hannah Montana (Miley Cyrus) twerking with her tongue out in one of the saddest displays of sexploitation ever, it’s a great relief to have Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), the strong, and humane gladiator enthralling young girls in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. The movie is very entertaining, but above all it is a movie worth having younger audiences see, boys and girls alike, as a way to counteract what sometimes feels like a retro-sexist fad in our culture these days.

Catching Fire is based on the second book in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, directed at tweens and teens. The novels are wonderfully well written and, unlike the Twilight books, they are not about the romance between Katniss, Peta and Gale, but rather about loss, death and violence in a society controlled by the wealthy (Panem – District 1%) at the expense of the rest of the enslaved, starving districts. It is about power, rebellion, and a future where technology and media dehumanize, intensifying and extending what is really not much more than the Roman gladiators of ancient times, where the poor or persecuted were the entertainment of the empire.

As Suzanne Collins says in an interview:

“The Hunger Games is a reality television program. An extreme one, but that's what it is. And while I think some of those shows can succeed on different levels, there's also the voyeuristic thrill, watching people being humiliated or brought to tears or suffering physically. And that's what I find very disturbing. There's this potential for desensitizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn't have the impact it should. It all just blurs into one program. And I think it's very important not just for young people, but for adults to make sure they're making the distinction. Because the young soldier's dying in the war in Iraq, it's not going to end at the commercial break. It's not something fabricated, it's not a game. It's your life.”

Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Banks and Jennifer Lawrence in Catching Fire

Catching Fire is true to the book, which is a merit, though it does leave those that haven’t read the trilogy feeling that it is too inconclusive. Those of us who have read the three novels –at our daughter’s insistence- can say: wait and see the next movie! It only gets more interesting, especially for science fiction fans. Catching Fire, the movie, does elevate the romance part a bit, but overall it has selected the characters well, in particular Katniss, casting the very impressive young actress that Jennifer Lawrence is in that role. Also, and what is probably its greatest feat, it has been able to recreate the visual strength of the novels, using special effects, costume and set designs to create a futuristic world that, at the same time, we can parallel to the one we’re living in.

It may be that the younger audiences aren’t getting the between the lines that the novel is so full of, but at least it is showing female actors on the screen on fire about something that isn’t just catching a guy or worried about whether they’re too fat, thin or sexy (to catch a guy), or fading into wallpaper roles to a strong male lead.

Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers

I was trying to remember what strong, intelligent, compassionate and rebellious woman role model I saw on the screen when I was a tween way back when and I can’t remember one until Ridley Scott brought Ripley to the screen to fight the Alien.  Before that there was maybe Emma Peel (the great Diana Rigg), the one who actually did the fighting in the British TV show The Avengers (1961-69). Today there are more strong female characters on television (yet still too many of the other kind), but on the big screen they are still sadly lacking. Another reason to celebrate Suzanne Collins and her Hunger Games books, which have fed a population of females starving for roles that will bring them out of their second sex status. Collins’s books have also led to a number of imitations in young reader science fiction, like the Divergent trilogy (Divergent, Insurgent and Allegiant by Veronica Roth), which already has a movie coming out in early 2014. So let the Games continue, and may the odds be ever in their favor!

Not the Old Man and the Sea*

Is it that the Sundance Kid can do anything wrong? I praise Robert Redford for his support of independent films and film makers. There is no doubt he has made great contributions to film as art with his festival. I wonder, however, if that has led many film critics to pretend that whatever he does that "appears" artsy is actually art, like his most recent endeavor All is Lost. In other words, I am surprised at the hype this movie  has created among critics. It’s on the Oscar lists for most critics, and Redford is central to its success. But then again, Gravity is getting as much or more hype and, as I've already mentioned in the post on that movie (see Lost in Space), it gravely suffers from implausibility (as many scientists have already written about in the media), which is what All is Lost shares with Gravity; apart from the fact that both movies deal with a lone person's  struggle to survive,in space or sea. How they go about surviving might be easier to believe for the Marvel-raised generation of movie goers, but to an older bunch, both seem lacking in common sense. 

All is Lost is the story of the 70 plus year old man with his small sailboat on the Indian Ocean. And stop, right there: what is a 70 plus year old man doing in the Indian Ocean, 1,700 miles from land in a small sailboat, with a teeny container of undrinkable water supply? We never find out. His sailboat is damaged when it hits a metal container full of tennis shoes. Stop again: a big, heavy, metal container full of tennis shoes is floating on the Indian Ocean, not sinking rapidly, as Robert Redford’s character, who I'm pretty sure weighs much less, does later on in the movie? The movie is about his struggle to survive. And most people that have seen the trailer to the movie know that I am revealing nothing that the trailer doesn't. That is the story, all of it. This is no Old Man and the Sea. 

Accepting the aforementioned premise, the rest of the things that occur in this movie are so ridiculous as to be rather infuriating. And allow me to be sarcastic, for I believe that is what this movie deserves. The man, whose boat –including cabinets- is made of wood, patches the hole made by the container with glue and some plastic cloth; even though we know he’s got the tools and the wood. He sees this terrible storm coming (by climbing up the mast at a terrible risk) and instead of preparing his boat for the storm, he shaves! Yes, he shaves. When the storm hits, he then gets out the storm gear and tries to put it on, with pretty pathetic consequences. When all is lost, and he must get on a rubber life raft, instead of saving the most important implements when his boat begins to sink, like clean water, a rechargeable flashlight, salt water tablets or even sun screen, he saves a box with a navigating tool (as if!…on a life raft.. navigate his way out of the Indian Ocean?); he saves his pen and notebook (maybe he was a poet?), and a rather big, clean, empty jar which, later in the movie, he will use to write and send (you guessed it) a message in a bottle!! Good grief!

And Robert Redford is being praised for his acting?! By whom, the introverts guild of America?! His face is expressionless most of the film, his eyes more than anything, (by contrast, see Tom Hanks in Captain Philips) and he barely utters a word the whole movie (people usually talk to themselves out loud when in danger, more so people in movies about people alone trying to survive; again, Tom Hanks, this time in Cast Away). He doesn't even cry out for help convincingly when a ship (two, three) go by! Yet his acting is being referred to as "career performance". Maybe it's about his endurance, as an actor of 70 plus years, being pretty much in water during all the filming.

Certainly not award worthy. And this is what is beginning to feel disquieting as the film award season creeps up, that these movies, so terribly unrealistic, so full of nonsense, might take awards away from the realism of Twelve Years a Slave or Fruitvale Station, which really have something urgent to say and have more than amazing acting. Is this to be another "The Artist" year? (Does anyone remember that Oscar winner?).

The audience in the theater where I saw it (an older bunch) were pretty much chuckling at the end of the movie. This movie goer, while chuckling along, left the theater with a rather sinking feeling.

*This post expands on a comment made in Fresh Cuts last week. The Fresh Cuts section (see tab) is updated on a more frequent basis than the posts on this blog.

A Time of Reckoning

Historical trauma. A lot more people will understand the concept once they have seen Steve McQueen’s remarkable movie Twelve Years a Slave.  The film brilliantly takes the viewer to the pre-civil war south in the United States as we accompany the black freeman Solomon Northrup who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in New Orleans in 1841. This is an autobiography, something that is impressed in your heart as you watch the brutality, the torture and inhumanity he and all other black men, women and children are subjected to by the slave owners and overseers of the cotton and sugar cane plantations in which Northrup is forced to survive. This is certainly Steve McQueen’s oeuvre and what a great one it is!  Not only has he created a movie that is visually stunning and artistically directed, where not a single shot is wasted, but he has brought history to life. This is a movie that should be used in history classes when dealing with the issue of slavery, something that would certainly help further the understanding of historical trauma as the United States continues to struggle against racial discrimination.

It is quite an experience to watch this movie in a southern state of the United States. It is impossible not to be aware that the spectators, black and white, are the descendants of enslaved people or of slave-owners. It was also a consolation to see many viewers, of all races, crying. It is no surprise that the film moves audiences to tears, McQueen is surrounded by strong talent in his story telling; he has chosen well. Sean Bobbit’s cinematography is majestic, whether we’re seeing the trees at dusk over a swamp, the rotating wheels of the riverboat cutting through the water (what great visual metaphors!), or watching the changing expressions of despair in Northrup’s eyes. The same has to be said of Hans Zimmer’s score. His music is eclectic, moving and creative to perfection. Sometimes it is silence broken only by chimes or violin solos; at others it is a full, heart reaching theme; the film also includes pieces of western classical and American folk. Overall, the music does not drive the emotions, but accompanies them.

Ejiofor and Fassbender

McQueen has also chosen his cast well and the actors give of their best performances. Four stood out to me in particular: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, Adepero Oduye and Michael Fassbender. We already knew that McQueen can bring out the best in Michael Fassbender. They have worked together before. In McQueen’s Shame Fassbender was brilliant playing a tortured man struggling with sex addiction; in Hunger, he was Bobby Sands, leading an IRA hunger strike. Here he is Edwin Epps, a heartless self-indulging plantation and slave owner. His acting is great. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Solomon Northrup and he is someone to watch! There is not an ounce of over-acting here, though the part could well have led a less serious actor to just that. He uses facial expressions and his eyes to speak the unspeakable. His heartbreak is in his face, as is his amazing compassion and humanity. He is all that Edwin Epps is not, which is what leads for the latter to hate him all the more. 

Lupita Nyong'o and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Two enslaved women cross Solomon’s path and burry themselves into his soul: first Eliza, also abducted, whose children are sold to other slave owners, and then Patsey, enslaved alongside him and the tragic victim of Epps’s lunatic desire. Adepero Oduye plays Eliza and though she’s not in the movie for any extended time, her howling cries linger long into the story; Oduye is very good. But it is Lupita Nyong'o, who plays Patsey, who will deserve the acting awards, if there is any rhyme or reason to awards. The scene between Nyong’o and Ejiofor, where she is making her singular request –which I will not reveal so as not to spoil the viewing- speaks volumes to the human misery that was slavery. How can a society recover from such tragedy and disgrace?

Adepero  Oduye as Eliza

It took a war among brothers to end such an abysmal and inhumane system as was slavery in the United States. It took men like Solomon Northrup, who went on to work with the Underground Railroad, to further advance the cause of racial integration; men full of humanity and kindness, the true Christians in this story.

We are now at a time when the United States is led by a black President. Yet, as another great film this year reminds us, Fruitvale Station (see post A Day in the Life), even today black youth are still shot for no other reason than for being black. These states have come a long way from the times of Solomon Northrup, but we are still at a time of reckoning. We still dream, along with Dr. King, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

Bad Advice

Here’s a recipe for success in a movie: an original script by Cormac McCarthy, Ridley Scott behind the director’s lens, and a cast that includes Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz. So, what went wrong with The Counselor? My expectations were high, so it came as a surprise that, given these ingredients, the movie was not better; more so because I am a Ridley Scott fan. The Counselor is not a bad movie, but it is far from one of Ridley Scott’s better films.

It’s not easy to pinpoint where the flaw lies. It could be that it resides in part with the script itself. Despite how good Cormac McCarthy can be, this seems to be “another take” on a theme well developed in No Country for Old Men. The impossible yet true inhumanity of the drug cartels; greed, greed and more greed that is so voracious as to end up devouring the people possessed by it, driving them to irrationally blind and deadly choices. In The Counselor, however, the story is somewhat confusing and doesn't completely add up. There is a lot of dialogue and too much preaching on morals and lessons to be learned, coming from the most immoral of characters; even Machado’s trite “caminante no hay camino” is recited by a “wise” guy (in both connotations) played in a very corny manner by the singer-actor Rubén Blades.

Javier Bardem and Michael Fassbender

It’s also not just that there is more dialogue in the movie, there is also much less suspense. So while in the amazing No Country for Old Men film adaptation by the Coen Brother’s the main character fights for his life and tries to outwit and outrun his destiny in a thrilling manner, in The Counselor it seems all he can do is try to reason with the unreasoning, and cry. Cormac McCarthy’s style dominates the movie and Ridley Scott sort of just fills it in. It’s hard to find Ridley Scott’s directing here and, with a script like this, it might have been hard to spark more life into the film.

The actors, on their part, with the exception of Cameron Diaz, seem to be reading their lines and come off as rather in-congruent with respect to who they are supposed to be. So the corrupt lawyer and the drug money launderer, played by Fassbender and Bardem respectively, act and talk like your average teenagers in lust and love (“Oh my goodness”, says Fassbender to Cruz at one point in the movie, “are we having phone sex?”).  Brad Pitt is also in the movie, and his character, a middleman for the drug cartels, is also border-line ridiculous. Can someone who has managed to have millions of dollars in off shore bank accounts really be that gullible? 

Cameron Diaz is a surprise in this movie and the exception to the shallow acting. She’s not an actor that I much admire, but she lives her part here and conveys her heartlessness with those icy stares; she’s a woman worthy of fear. Her acting, and the great cinematography by Dariusz Wolski, carry the movie along from set to set (good set design), as we follow this counselor who has sold his soul to our modern day Mephistopheles and is unable to save his beautiful and innocent girl along the way, like in Goethe’s oeuvre. This counselor not only doesn't dole out any good advice, but is also really bad at taking it. 

Check ‘em out

Gordon-Levitt, Brühl, Cumberbatch

I started the Fresh Cuts section in this blog to give a bit of additional information and suggestions to fellow movie goers on films that I don’t write longer post about -so don't forget to check on the tab Fresh Cuts tab on this blog updated regularly to get movie ratings. I have recently seen some very good movies that would merit posts, but time isn't always on my side. In two movies, in particular, Don Jon and The Fifth Estate, I am extremely pleased to report the wonderful talent that has come to age in three thirty-something artists: Germany’s Daniel Brühl (who was born in Catalonia,Spain but has resided in Germany from an early age), England’s Benedict Cumberbatch and America’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Check out not only their more recent work, but some really good stuff done when they were younger. Brühl’s recent Rush, The Fifth Estate, Inglorious Basterds and earlier Good Bye, Lenin!  & The Edukators; Cumberbatch’s recent Fifth Estate, 12 Years a Slave, Stark Trek into Darkness and earlier Sherlock (can’t wait till that starts up again), Amazing Grace; Gordon-Levitt’s recent Don Jon, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, 500 Days of Summer and earlier Brick, Manic.

Worlds Collide

The Best Actor category at next year’s Academy Awards is going to be one of the toughest vote of all for the members of the Academy. Adding to the already amazing list of actors that should be nominated, including Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale or Forest Whittaker in The Butler, are now Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi for their remarkable acting in Captain Phillips.

Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, two Bourne, United 93, Greenzone) has directed a very good movie, using his as-close-to-reality-as-possible style (including his signature hand-held cameras, much to this motion-sickness suffering movie fan’s despair). He has wisely gone beyond the real Captain Phillips’s memoir to give us a glimpse of the life of the Somali pirates that kidnap the Captain and has subtly yet convincingly dove into some very deep issues facing our modern world.

There is, to begin with, the clash of two worlds, the western first world, embodied in Captain Phillips and his crew, and the extreme poverty and violence that plagues much of the third world, above all places like Somalia, where war lords have absolute control over the lives of men and women. Those are fishermen violently turned pirates that take over the ship. They have no more control over their life than the men that they kidnap at gun point.

He also addresses the strife of the everyday people trapped in a world run by “bosses”. In the case of Captain Phillips and his men, it is the corporation that owns the ship, its cargo and its crew; the corporation that, knowing there are pirates in the waters where their fleets sail, don’t even bother to hire armed security guards, so a ship the size of city blocks, carrying millions in cargo, has less security than an armored truck. In the case of the Somali men, their lives are literally controlled at gun point by the war lords for whom they rob and kidnap. Muse, the character amazingly well played by Abdi, tells Phillips about the last ship they kidnapped and got 3 million dollars for, to which Phillips, seeing the ragged and impoverished state of the Somali fisherman responds: “So, what are you doing here?.” Both men’s fates have been determined for them way before they are trapped together in the claustrophobic lifeboat where we spend a good time with them as they come to realize each other’s plight.

It is the acting that tells the story. Tom Hanks is superb. So much so that I’m sure the real Captain Phillips wishes he had actually been like him (there are stories told by the real crew of the ship that he wasn’t as heroic as his memoir and the movie paint him to be). Hanks works with his eyes and every muscle on his face to convey Phillips’s thoughts and feelings, and he carries us through the ordeal, having us hold our breath along the way, up until we share his final moments of shock, panic and pain at the realization of what has happened. I truly feel this is his best acting to date.

Barkhad Abdi’s acting is no less impressive. This Somali-American actor was hired, along with his fellow Somali-American friends, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I lived near the Minneapolis Somali neighborhood in Minnesota for years and was aware of the thriving community there. It is a place so very far from the fisherman’s town shown at the beginning of the movie. Abdi, however, probably knows to heart the adversity many Somali people face in a country still run by war lords. And he brings that knowledge to the screen. His feat is doubly impressive because this is his first feature film. There is a heart-breaking moment in the film where Abdi’s character tells Phillips that there no going back for him, his is a world of extremes in which he has no control. This is another of Greengrass’s accomplishments, the “bad buys” are not the cardboard figures you need to hate; they are the complex human beings imprisoned in a world with such deep divides that their lives are worthless, not only to the navy ships, helicopters and seal teams that come to rescue one man, but to their own people back home. 

Lost in Space

2001:A Space Odyssey - Alien - Wall-E

Alfonso Cuarón stands on the broad shoulders of the great science fiction movie directors of the past to achieve his feat in Gravity, his latest film. Here and there in this movie we perceive little bits and pieces of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, against which all science fiction films are measured, given that Stanley Kubrick's film was made in 1968; Riddley Scott's Alien, against which all women-heroines-in-space-defeating-the-odds films are measured, since that film was made in 1979...there's even a little idea-steal from Disney's Wall-E, as movie viewers that have seen both films will realize. Although Cuarón's film  is not technically science fiction, given that the science he shows in the film already exists, it ends up playing that way because of how implausible everything that happens in the movie is. This detracts from its great visual and cinematographic achievement.

I went to see the film both because I've enjoyed Cuarón's films in the past and because of the outstanding reviews it received from practically all the major critics. I was disappointed  While it is absolutely true that he has done an amazing job transferring the experience of the gravitylessness space to the viewers, everything else in the movie is weak. The dialogue is as cliche and corny as they come and the same can be said of the characters that say the lines (you yearn for all the silence in Kubrick's 2001). George Clooney's character, Matt Kowalski, is old fashioned suave macho, straight out of a Hemmingway novel or Clint Eastwood western. He doesn't skip a heartbeat, not even when he's floating off into deep space; he plays his country music and gives Dr. Stone, Sandra Bullock's character, calm survival tips. 

Sandra Bullock in Gravity

Sandra Bullock, the one that has the critics handing her an Academy Award already, reminds you with her acting how much better a comedic actor she is than a dramatic one (her best film this year in my opinion was The Heat alongside Melissa McCarthy). She's supposed to be the very intelligent medical technician out in space, but has to be reminded by the always debonair Clooney character to not gulp up the little oxygen in her tank by panicking. To be sure, she is no Rippley (Ridley Scott's heroine in space character from Alien), just maybe a more somber version of her role in Speed, where she had to drive that bomb-rigged bus to safety. We have read, in newspapers and magazines and the movie reviews, how Bullock and Clooney had to be tied into their space suits for hours on end in order for director Cuarón to use his new technology to get the gravity less effect of the movie. It is maybe this that everyone is admiring, the actors'stamina while making the film under duress  Strange how Kubrick got such great effects without that much effort way back 45 years ago.

Alfonso Cuarón is a good director. Children of Men, a true science fiction, is a much better movie than this one, despite not being as technologically sophisticated in the making. There the story line is unique, there's a message to be gained (the extremes of anti-immigration policy), and the acting was really much better, in particular Clive Owen and Chiwetel Elijofor. He has also made various other good films, including Y Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Children of Men

 However, in Gravity it seems Alfonso Cuarón got caught up in playing with the new technology (we saw it in XD - 3D) and forgot that a movie is also about a good, original story (a plausible one, if it's not science fiction), realistic acting, and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of a message or lesson to be learned; all the missing elements that end up weighing this movie down.