12 Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave is a great movie.  I never want to see it again.

This harrowing film, based on the memoirs of escaped slave Solomon Northup, brings to life the cruelty and inhumanity of the antebellum South through a faithful recreation of Northup’s luring away from his New York home, subsequent enslavement, and eventual repatriation to the land of the free.

The recreation is served by the production designer’s careful attention to detail, scarring performances on the part of the cast, and careful direction and photography that highlight the jarring cruelty of slavery by showing just how routine that cruelty had become.

The production design is immaculate.  From period construction equipment to architecture to clothing, 12 Years a Slave is better than a museum: it doesn’t just show us where people lived and what they used and wore; it shows us how they lived there, how they used the materials to hand, how the clothes they wore actually looked in motion.

The cast, well, it’s remarkable. Lupita Nyong'o as a fellow slave trying to maintain some humanity provides an unforgettable performance.  Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Fassbender, as slaveholders of variable degrees of humanity, provide contrasting images of the corruption of absolute power.  Paul Dano, as a foreman who, though below Cumberbatch and Fassbender on the social ladder, absolutely assumes his God-given superiority over the slaves under his dominion, creates a character of both weakness and power – a difficult, but important, station to portray. The anchor, as he is for so many films, is the great Chiwetel Ejiofor, who Can Do No Wrong.  His intelligence, his humanity, his fear, and his desperation provide both a hero for the film and an audience identification character.  From Dirty Pretty Things to Kinky Boots and now to 12 Years a Slave, Ejiofor is putting together a filmography that’s marking him as one of the most compelling actors working today.

Of course, without the right director and photographer, all this hard work would come to naught.  Director Steve McQueen and DP Sean Bobbitt, however, are up to the task.  Watching their film, one can almost feel the heat and humidity of the Louisiana Bayou.  One can almost smell the stench of a slave quarters.  Most importantly, one can understand how life goes on even as men and women are captured, tortured, raped, murdered, and buried in shallow graves time and again, year after year.

And of course, this is all part of our American heritage, as much a part of the fabric of our country as the rockets’ red glare or the New Deal.  It’s a part of our heritage we know about, but kind of gloss over because it’s so painful to contemplate.  That pain is why I don’t want to see 12 Years a Slave again, though I’m glad I saw it once.  Do not miss 12 Years a Slave.

Loose Ends

Man, this whole "job and family thing really gets in the way of blogging.  Here are some short observations about what's been on my screen.

22 Jump  Street 

Don’t make my mistake.  Do not watch 22 Jump Street in a public, yet quiet, place.  I watched it while riding as a passenger in an airplane, and I spent roughly 90 minutes biting my knuckles to keep from guffawing.

This is my kind of comedy.  It’s clever, it’s packed with gags that hit us in rapid succession, and it even blows up a car.  Really, what more could you possibly want?

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Eh.  I’m getting too old for this $#!^.

Noah

Noah drags through its first act, then turns on the juice once the rain starts falling.  If you can get past the fact that everyone’s Caucasian and has British accents, then it’s easy to accept lava monsters and ancient industrialized civilizations.  Soon, you can immerse yourself in Aronofsky’s tale of justice and mercy, prophecy and insanity.  Just don’t make it the last film you see on a 9.5 hour flight.  This is not a movie to see when you're punchy.

Cats & Dogs

What a delightful film.  I’ve seen it, with my kids, I don’t know how many times.  It just never gets old.  

Shame

Shame brings to mind Leaving Las Vegas.  They’re both about addiction, and neither are about redemption.  They’re both about addicts who have lost all inhibition, all control over their addictions.  They’re about people who’ve burrowed into their addictions, feeding their needs far past satiety, past loathing.  They wrap themselves in shame.  They are their addictions.

With Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, it’s alcohol.  With Michel Fassbender in Shame, it’s orgasm.  And while these addictions are terrible and destructive, they aren’t, ipso facto, particularly compelling.  Humanity is compelling.  In Leaving Las Vegas, humanity comes in the guise of Elisabeth Shue as a prostitute who recognizes the man inside the addiction.  In Shame, it’s Carey Mulligan as a sister so damaged she forces the man to look beyond his.

Cage, of course, won an Academy Award for Leaving Las Vegas.  Fassbender deserved one for Shame, delivering a performance breathtaking in its fearlessness and competence.  His character begins the film a slave to his compulsions, yet he seems to have found some kind of a workable life balance.  When Mulligan’s character enters the scene, however, he’s forced to see himself.  His dawning realization, his reaction to that realization, and his subsequent evolution (or lack thereof) is absolutely magnificent to behold.

My tastes in film run toward the upbeat low- to middlebrow.  A movie like Shame, like Leaving Las Vegas, generally isn’t my thing.  But sometimes, a film is so good, so well made, so compelling, that it defies those tastes and becomes something I recommend to all my friends.  Leaving Las Vegas is such a film.  So is Shame.

Prometheus

I have mixed feelings about Prometheus.  I love its look, its feel, its ambition.  I appreciate its casting of serious, high-quality actors.  However, its screenplay needed a few more passes before it was ready to go into production.

Prometheus weds a big budget to a high concept.  Its sets are magnificent, its world dazzling.  I saw this film in 3-D, mostly because an old friend of mine was one of the camera techs, and the effects were more immersive than distracting.  Add the casting of proven performers like Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Michael Fassbender, and Guy Pearce, and this looks and feels like elite work.  The concept, well, we’re talking about finding the origin of human life on Earth, and the film’s characters have the kind of existential questions director Ridley Scott tackled in his classic Blade Runner: “Where do we come from?  Why are we here?  Why can’t we have more time?”  While we have mixed feelings about the answers the film provides or withholds, we have to credit the production with going after them.

Prometheus gets so many things right that it’s a shame the picture can’t keep our suspension of disbelief alive.  As the audience in a science fiction movie, we walk in willing to believe in technologies that defy the known laws of physics.  We can’t, however, believe in people that don’t act like people or in organisms that can, say, grow without eating.

One of the great things about Ridley Scott’s Alien was that it took things a while to get going.  We go to know the crew of the Nostromo not by having them stand up and recite their bios, but just by following them around for a while.  Once we knew them, we cared about them and believed in their story.  Prometheus gives us an implausible roll call followed by a mission briefing PowerPoint set after the ship has reached its destination, and –bang- we’re into the action.  We in the audience are left thinking, “Really?  These people are just now meeting each other for the first time?  Did they not chat while they were loading their stuff aboard back on Earth?  Oh, and how is it possible that any scientist would sign up for a long, potentially career-derailing, mission without knowing what’s involved?”  So we’re left with thumbnail sketches:  there are Redshirt One, Redshirt Two, Redshirt Three, and Redshirt Four, plus the actors whom we recognize.  Once they’re on Planet Danger, they begin acting in ways that violate even what little we do know about them: the biologist who signed up for a space journey freaks out at the prospect of alien life, then actually tries to pet a scary space-snake.  The geologist runs away from someplace he finds terrifying, only to seek refuge in the exact same place for no real reason.  These examples come right off the top of my head, and the more I think the more I recall.  How can I believe in the plight of these people if I don’t believe they’re people?   (Note: Michael Fassbender’s android character is the most consistent and fully realized of the bunch.  It’s possible that the film’s saying the android is more human than the humans, but that’s the kind of thing you think of later.  While you’re watching the film, you’re thinking, “This doesn’t make sense.”  From there, it’s a short step to “I call BS.”)  And then there’s the funky biology: creatures in this universe appear to have the ability to metabolize thin air.  Humans in this universe can undergo massively invasive abdominal surgery, then run, climb, fight, and singlehandedly rappel fifty feet without tearing open the wound and bleeding out.  And the list goes on.

And that’s the thing about Prometheus.  Those big ideas?  They’re really cool.  That art direction?  That set, costume, and creature design?  Really really cool.  The performances?  The world-class cast acts the heck out of the material, and Michael Fassbender continues his steady march toward Can Do No Wrong status.

But the writing isn’t there.  The characters feel like characters, and the revelations provide more WTH moments than “Oh, wow!” moments.  Prometheus excels at all the “elite filmmaking” stuff, but it stumbles on the fundamentals.  This could have been a great, fascinating, entertaining and wonderful classic that melded the best of Alien and Blade Runner into a rousing, challenging, enriching whole.  Instead, it’s a beautiful failure.  I wanted to love Prometheus.  I was ready to love Prometheus.  I couldn’t love Prometheus.

Haywire

Haywire stars MMA & Muay Thai champion Gina Carano as a spy-for-hire who finds herself trapped in an espionage thriller made by people who appear to have no love for the genre.

We’ve all seen plenty of action thrillers headlined by women who look like they couldn’t hurt a fly.  I like waif-fu as much as the next guy, but let’s face it: force equals mass times acceleration.  I had a great time watching wafer-thin Zoe Saldana beat up grown men in Colombiana, for instance, but at no time did I believe her punches would actually hurt.  Gina Carano, on the other hand, is no waif: she looks like she knows her way around a steak dinner, she moves like the trained and experienced fighter she is, and I didn’t have to forcibly suspend my disbelief to accept her besting her foes.

Problem is, she’s a terrible actress.  Director Steven Soderbergh puts her onscreen with people like Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, and Michael Fassbender, and she comes across as wooden and overmatched.  I believed her when she was in action, but I couldn’t believe her when she was setting up the situations and motivations that put her in action.

And the action itself?  It isn’t much fun.  In fact, it feels like it was made by people who felt they were slumming.  The music just sits there, the fights are poorly edited, the double and triple crosses carry no heft, and the production has no sense of joy.  Compare Haywire with, say, Tai Chi Master.  Tai Chi Master is standard wuxia fare, but it’s made by people who love wuxia.  There’s an exuberance in the stunt work, the music, the performances, the editing, that you just won’t find in Haywire.

Look, I like action pictures.  I enjoy good fight choreography, I like fireballs as much as the next guy, and I’m a sucker for a good chase scene.  But you’ve got to meet me half way.  You’ve got to cast a lead who can act.  You’ve got to give your picture a sense of urgency and propulsion.  You’ve got to love the genre.  Haywire doesn’t, so I’m marking it down as one of Soderbergh’s failures.

X-Men: First Class

Holy cow.  X-Men: First Class is actually good!

Some background: I never got into superhero comics.  Everything I know about the X-Men I’ve learned from going to the movies.  Consequently, my last exposure to the X-Men universe was through the odious Wolverine.  When I went in to this one, my expectations were low.

Here’s the setup: it’s the Kennedy Administration.  A dude with groovy brain powers recruits a coldblooded revenge killer to join Team Good.  As one may imagine, things do not work out as groovy brain guy might have preferred. 

The film hangs a pretty good story on that frame, helped along by fun period work, seamless effects, well-directed action set pieces, and the revelation that the amazing young actress from Winter’s Bone looks great naked.

The consensus among my filmgoing friends is that X-Men: First Class is average, at best.  I don’t get it.  I had more fun at this film than any other superhero film released this year.

Inglourious Basterds

Lots of people love INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. They say that it’s one of Tarantino’s best films. They say it’s one of the best movies of the year.

It’s the first Tarantino film to really bother me.

The inconsistent tone, bouncing between excruciating suspense and neo-‘70s hip, kept me from settling into its groove. The performances, particularly Pitt’s painfully false Appalachian accent, Christoph Waltz’s affected silliness, and Eli Roth’s jarring presence, never felt organic. And most importantly, Tarantino’s imagining of a unit of Ike’s Army as being more despicable than Al Qaeda in Iraq, coupled with his invitation to root for this unit’s tactics as though being “on our side” made them excusable, felt like a betrayal of the American ideal. I got the feeling that Dick Cheney would have loved this movie.

The International Red Cross, the Geneva Conventions, the Law of Armed Conflict, they all exist for good reasons. They exist because of the all too human tendency to see outrages committed by “Team Us” as permissible and even commendable, particularly because “Team Them” has it coming. The reality, of course, is that combatants aren’t masterminds. Often, they’re just guys who got drafted, or who thought that signing up would be a good idea, or who were faced with the choice of putting on a uniform and maybe getting shot or refusing to wear one and definitely getting shot. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDSes ignorance of or contempt for these laws and traditions, its glorification of brutality, was just too much for me to stomach.

Now, there are some great things about this movie. Tarantino crafts an image with smoke and light that may be one of the great shots of movie history. There’s some wonderful misdirection and a refreshing willingness to defy some rules of storytelling economy.

But I just couldn’t get past the film’s ideology. It felt deeply, profoundly wrong. It felt un-American. It really bothered me.

300

Every now and then, the chance to see a movie in a theater drops into my lap. When those chances come around, I try to see pictures that I know just won't be the same when viewed on a laptop.

This weekend, I had just such an opportunity, and I used it to see 300. As far as tellings of the tale of the Battle of Thermopylae go, it's worse than Gates of Fire and better than the Frank Miller comic book 300, which it brings to life. I haven't gotten that far in my Herodotus just yet - give me time. As far as movies go, 300 is extraordinary.

300's stylized world, created almost entirely on a TRS-80 (or so I'm told), manages to both immerse and dazzle us. It takes us to a heightened reality, invites us to believe it, and rewards us for so doing with spectacle and audacity. I bought Gerard Butler's Leonidas, Rodrigo Santoro's Xerxes, and all the rest of the grunts and and monsters. I forgave the Spartans their convenient (and action packed!) deviations from their own military doctrine and I was willing to overlook the fact that steroids were not available in ancient Greece. I dug the look, I dug the story, and I dug the imagination.

I'm glad I saw this one on the big screen.