Middle Earth as You've Already Seen It

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Directed by Peter Jackson
Two and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

One can call Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”, the second installment in his "Hobbit" trilogy, many things: ‘ambitious’, ‘epic’, ‘bombastic’, ‘cluttered’, ‘listless’… But if there is anything “Desolation” is not, it is ‘Tolkien’. With one book of modest length strained to the breaking point of a trilogy of three-hour movies, and much of the Middle Earth history provided in Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion” off limits to him, Jackson has found a great deal of vacuous space to be filled with his own cinematic hedonism. This includes, most notably, a showdown with the titular dragon that persists for a full hour and recalls, more than its source literature, the climactic final act of Jackson’s earlier “King Kong”. There's more than one reason we feel like we've done this before.

A Familiar Arena

The Hunger Games: Catching FireDirected by Francis Lawrence
Two and One Half Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire envisions a future in which an oligarchy rules with an iron fist, while its poverty-stricken masses are sedated by a cruel and callous ‘sport’ in which competitors are thrust into an arena and forced to fight to the death.

Confronting Our History

12 Years a Slave
Directed by Steve McQueen
Three and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

In 1841, a free black man living in New York by the name of Solomon Northup was lured to Washington D.C. by two white men, promising him some good money to be made quickly with his violin. Northup was drugged, kidnapped, and smuggled south to be sold illegally into the slave trade, where he lived for twelve years before finally being returned to his family. During Northup’s time as a slave in the Antebellum South, he observed, as an educated, erudite and thoughtful man, the ways that empathy and compassion and religion and virtually every other facet of human behavior navigated their ways around the racism innate in their culture, the ways that men could be purchased as property, forced to work without pay, and yet spoken to with respect and dignity, the ways that black men could be spoken to with respect and dignity yet still be addressed as that most execrable slur. To reconcile one’s humanity with the needs of an archaic plantation infrastructure, huge concessions were made where they must not have been made: in the realm of human decency.

Retreating Into Romance

Blue is the Warmest ColorDirected by Abdellatif Kechiche
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color” is a work of disarming emotional intensity. What begins as a coming out tale becomes a coming of age one, and graduates finally into a harsh reminder that we never exhaust the well of hard lessons we've left to learn. A relationship is a two-sided blade, and in our youth we know not how to wield it. Sex appeals to us first as an extravagance of adulthood and quickly becomes a haven from the remaining tumult of adolescence. But that haven becomes a refuge, and that refuge an asylum, an isolating force that no longer offers reprieve but collars and represses our capacity to develop as individuals. We pour all of ourselves into the symbiosis and lose our sense of self. If we’re lucky we endure this cataclysm with time to recover before adulthood strips away the barricades, before it exposes us. It was a lesson I learned the summer before college, I recall. Well, started learning anyway. It’s never a clean break.

Squabbling Over Mommy

Thor: The Dark Age
Directed by Alan Taylor and James Gunn
Three Stars

By Rollan Schott

Alan Taylor’s and James Gunn’s “Thor: The Dark World”, the latest in the Marvel movie ponzi scheme, is the big, dumb comic book movie we deserve. Make of that what you will. I’ve maintained that the first “Thor” was the most turgid and listless of the Marvel superhero movies, and the most emblematic of the Marvel marketing con, wherein each Marvel movie seems to exist merely to sell the next Marvel movie. Marvel, Marvel, Marvel. The machine has been effective, but most individual installments don’t have the foundation to stand independently of the others. Each film is propping up the next, and the system barrels forward with an ever-more perilous pace of bar-raising spectacle. Given the momentum, “The Dark World”, with its bumbling, Shakespearian, Hammer-wielding barbarian, behaves like the proverbial bull in a china shop, and the effect is weirdly satisfying.

The Folly of the Foolish Kingpin

The CounselorDirected by Ridley Scott
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

And so the writer conveys story through the written word, and the filmmaker with the moving image and this is the way it is. Cormac McCarthy must be considered one of the great contemporary American novelists, and it is not insignificant that  he wrote the remarkable “The Counselor”, directed by Ridley Scott, not as a novel but a screenplay, his first in the format to be produced. The writer, confronted directly with the visual medium, has moved his stoic, worldly prose seemlessly from narration to dialog. His characters speak as if outside of themselves, meditating heedlessly about the nature of their own circumstances. They are individualistic, fully-realized and complex characters with unique perspectives, but in each of their monologues can be found a hint of McCarthy’s wry, biblical wit.

Broadcasting His Decline

Alan Partridge: Alpha PapaDirected by Declan Lowney
Three and One Half Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

Alan Partridge, the long-lived character played repeatedly by Steve Coogan in various incarnations over the past 20 or so years, is distinctly unlikable. He’s irresponsible, selfish, at times sleazy. The chronicling of his career since his first appearance in 1991 has essentially been a spectacular fall from grace due to incompetence and a complete lack of self-awareness. Partridge lay dormant for a few years in the middle of last decade, but came back with a vengeance with the publication of the viciously hilarious memoir I, Partridge in 2011 (I strongly recommend the audiobook as read by Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge), and now the feature film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa.

Wild Dogs Everywhere

Mystery RoadDirected by Ivan Sen
Four Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

Mystery Road doesn’t surrender its secrets readily. It is a difficult film to describe and review, because like other great thrillers of its ilk (Wake in Fright, Fargo) it functions on a number of planes. First and foremost, it is a murder mystery – its opening scene makes that clear. A truckie pulls over to the side of a deserted highway, checking his load. Perturbed by the ruffling of wild dogs, the truckie investigates a small underpass, and finds the mutilated body of a teenage Indigenous girl.

Shortly thereafter, we meet the film’s protagonist, Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), who has recently returned to his home town in isolated western Queensland after some time working in the city. He investigates the murder of the aforementioned Indigenous girl. He finds himself up against an intransigent local police force that would prefer to brush the whole thing under the carpet, as well as resentment in the Indigenous community when he questions the locals.

Complicating all of this is Jay’s ethnicity, you see – he is the sole Indigenous officer on the local force, in a community that clearly has a high Indigenous population. There is rancour, tension and of course racism between the whites and blacks in the town, and Jay is caught right in the middle of this. Mystery Road manages to incorporate the issue of race into its tale quietly, and its tone benefits from the fact that this aspect of the story isn’t shouted from the rooftops. It’s clear that racial tensions are fuelling most of the action in the story, and for the most part the movie lets the issue be, appreciating the toll it has taken on Swan and how it affects the choices he makes.  It isn’t overstated, which is often a risk in a film like this.

As the movie gets into the swing of things, it becomes clear that it has aspirations beyond being a straightforward whodunit. As with most modern cinema, it’s almost impossible to watch new movies without thinking about what they remind you of. Oh, that scene was a bit like a Coen Brothers scene; that shot is a bit like the one from the old Scorsese movie; isn’t this all a bit like LA Confidential? Most of modern cinema harks back to things that have come before – we live in the era of the pastiche. This poses a problem for modern cinema’s aesthetics. How can a movie stand on its own two feet if it is constantly reminding its audience of other, presumably better works?

I tried my hardest to draw comparisons between Mystery Road and other movies, but I gradually realised that most comparisons were superficial in nature. Yes, the black humour (and Mystery Road is very funny on occasion) is a little like a Coen Brothers picture. Yes, the overarching plot of a ‘good cop’ trying to beat the corrupt system to preserve justice is a bit like LA Confidential. And yes, many of the shots and sequences reminded me fleetingly of other directors. (interestingly, I found many shots and sequences of Mystery Road to be quite reminiscent of another Australian crime masterpiece from recent years: Animal Kingdom by David Michôd. Australian cinema, so vastly improved in recent years, now seems to be worth imitating)

Mystery Road is its own movie, and while it doesn’t quite maintain its focus and meanders every so often, for the most part it’s a viciously precise and thoughtful thriller. Aaron Pederson is Oscar-worthy as Jay Swan, and a host of supporting actors also inhabit their characters like a second skin. The film benefits from Ivan Sen’s directorial style, which is straightforward and considered. There are plenty of images that leave an imprint on the memory here – the recurring motif of the ‘bird’s eye view’ that intercuts scenes, even images as simple as Jay sitting solemnly in front of his dinner, considering his next move.

Sen is also adept at using simple, powerful signals to demonstrate Swan’s precarious position as an outsider to both the police force and his own community. One of the biggest ones is his car, a sturdy looking Holden. An Australian make, and a fine one – for the most part shiny and clean, a striking symbol of an upwardly mobile citizen. It drives others in the town, who aren’t so lucky, crazy. Swan’s ambivalence towards alcohol (which makes sense due to numerous hints about his prior proclivity to drink before entering the force) sets him apart from his loutish fellow officers. When his boss suggests they go for a drink to escape the bleating heat, Swan looks at his watch suspiciously, before we see him sipping an ice water. The optics of a 60-plus-year-old constable drinking beer in a country pub full of white people while on duty are far less damaging than a young Indigenous officer doing the same thing.

Lovely little moments like these abound in Mystery Road. It’s a smart movie, realistic about race relations, while also being aware of the need for its central murder mystery to work. The investigation is engrossing, and builds up to a finale that, while retaining the elgant and deliberate pacing of the rest of the film, is more visceral and exciting than most big studio cops and robbers movies we typically see. Mystery Road, by most measures, is a quiet masterpiece.

Adolescence is a Powerful Force

Carrie
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Three Stars

By Rollan Schott

One of the interesting aspects of Brian De Palma’s “Carrie”, the 1976 horror classic about repressed sexuality and the power of femininity, was that it was written (novel and screenplay) and directed by men. It’s an odd band to be writing a feminist anthem, but what De Palma’s “Carrie” became, amidst the whir of testosterone involved in the production, was a parable about the Darwinian cruelty of high school and, perhaps more importantly, a paranoid allegory of masculine insecurity, of the buried power of the women that a male-centric society dares to subjugate. It worked both as a sardonic revenge fantasy and as a cautionary tale, and felt all the more dangerous and startling for managing both.

White Privilege Around the African Horn

Captain Phillips
Directed by Paul Greengrass
Two and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

Paul Greengrass' "Captain Phillips" is a taught, well-written thriller about a wholesome white cargo ship captain standing strong in the face of ruthless black pirates. I am not sure this is a movie we need. Indeed it is difficult for a film like this not to be about race in at least some capacity, not in an increasingly progressive American society that is paying more and more attention to the casual racism infecting the most visible cadres of popular culture. Greengrass doesn't seem to mind this being the underlying subject here, but his visceral, combative approach doesn't allow space for the principal dichotomies necessaries to give it any weight.

A Tale Told too Quickly

Rush
Directed by Ron Howard
Two Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

Ron Howard’s Rush, a sports drama focusing on the famous rivalry in the 1970s between F1 drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt, is a shiny product that clearly has high production values and an experienced hand behind the camera. Most of the technical aspects of this movie are first rate, including the performances of the two leads by Daniel Bruhl (who, so many years ago, was wonderful in Goodbye Lenin!) and Chris Hemsworth. There are driving sequences aplenty, and for the most part they’re easy to follow and enjoyable, with an added dramatic twist in that we know that F1 racing in the 1970s was far more dangerous than it is today, with the prospect of serious accident or death hanging over the competitors every time they sat behind the wheel.

Money is a Foreign Language

Blue Jasmine
Directed by Woody Allen
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

And so, here at age 77, Woody Allen has made one of the great films of his long career, and has drawn from Cate Blanchett one of the great comic performances by anyone. Allen has always predicated his films on the vast chasm over which people from different circumstances attempt to understand one another. His time has come. With income inequality in America as wide as it has been since the twenties, our public discourse has shifted toward attempts by both the rich and the poor to pigeon-hole and typecast the other. Class warfare has no place for humanity.

The Pantheon (2013)

Citizen Kane, 1942, Dir. by Orson Welles

Retired Entries
- The Third Man (Reed, 49)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 68)

Jon's Picks
Rollie's Picks

1. Citizen Kane (Welles, 42) +2
2. Rear Window (Hitchcock, 54) +3
3. City Lights (Chaplin, 31) +1
4. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 76) +11
5. Goodfellas (Scorsese, 90) +5
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 28) Even
7. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 58) +2
8. Psycho (Hitchcock, 60) -1
9. 12 Angry Men (Lumet, 57) +14
10. Stalker (Tarkovsky, 79) -2 

The Horror of the Endless Quiet

Gravity
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
Four Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

“I hate space.”

So says medical engineer Ryan Stone in Gravity. And well she may. Innately, all humans are. Of course, it’s quite humbling to stand down here on terra firma, watch a few episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and look up at the night sky, the uncountable distant galaxies and far away suns. The reality of existence in space, however, is another thing. Space is empty. Think about that concept. Empty. No atmosphere, no sound, certainly no life apart from what we have flung up there in spacesuits designed to mimic the conditions under which we can survive. No sign, as Sagan once said, of help from elsewhere coming to save us from ourselves.

That innate discomfort humans have with space is what Gravity is about, and we the audience instinctively understand that, which is why this movie is such a white-knuckle experience. This film explores, to coin a phrase by Neil DeGasse Tyson, the many ways in which the universe is trying to kill us. Sandra Bullock is Ryan Stone, who along with astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and a small crew is in orbit around Earth, on a mission to repair the Hubble telescope. Kowalksi and Stone are really the only two characters we get to know in the early going – Kowalski as a playful flirt and experienced astronaut, Stone as an uptight engineer with little experience in the vacuum. Kowalski, Stone and a third astronaut are on a spacewalk when disaster strikes.

A nearby Russian satellite self-destructs, and a storm of space debris (yes, this movie also acts as something of a commentary on the little-understood problem of space junk) flies towards our heroes’ space station. In the initial blitz, the third colleague on the spacewalk is killed, and the space station’s hull is compromised, killing another two crew members. This means Kowalksi and Stone are alone in the emptiness of space, communications with Houston severed, with nothing but malfunctioning human-made technology to help them get home. Oh, how our cleverness and self-proclaimed genius pales when faced with the empty horror of life outside our blue planet.

Gravity is directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who previously directed the excellent Children of Men as well as the third instalment of the Harry Potter series. His is an elegant, unhurried directorial style, and Gravity is better for it. Cuaron is an eminently visual director, and it’s remarkable how engrossing he makes a simple sequence of Stone taking off her space suit when she, at last, reaches an airlock. (there’s also, I think, a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the framing of the final, beautiful shot in that sequence as Stone falls asleep)

The action set pieces are tense and horrifying; Cuaron lingers on just how little control our heroes have in this harsh environment. He also focuses on the shared humanity of these two astronauts, which forms the core of Gravity’s emotional punch. We don’t get to know either character all that well, but we gain a basic understanding of what they’re all about, and when it comes down to it, they’re likable. That’s important in a movie like this – Gravity wouldn’t have worked nearly as well if the last bastions of humanity in this disaster were a pair of jerks.

Gravity is probably the strongest of the science-fiction films of 2013 thus far. It doesn’t present a stylistic and creative vision of a dystopian future. It isn’t wall-to-wall with special effects that call attention to themselves. It allows space for the instinctive fear of what exists outside our tenuous atmosphere, while also airing our sense of humility – when Kowalski is faced with his fate, spinning helplessly in orbit, he – visible to us as a mere speck of a homo sapien set against the vast emptiness of space and the enormity of Earth – remarks on the beautiful sunset over the Ganges.

Gravity is in some ways one of the least showy science fiction movies in recent memory, but also one of the most audacious. It is set essentially in the here and now, focuses on a realistic set of parameters and problems astronauts could be faced with, and seeks to explore a powerful question – outside of a planet that we have become masters of (and are poisoning as fast as we can with a kind of perverse glee), how do we humans reconcile our timidity in the face of a vast, powerful and indifferent universe?

Precisely the Jobs You Imagined

Jobs
Directed by Joshua Michael Stern
Two and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

It’s tough not to watch Joshua Michael Stern’s “Jobs”, the messianic biopic of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, without recalling David Fincher’s masterful “The Social Network” from a few years ago. The two films side by side are like an expose on what separates an average film from a great one. Both are about great entrepreneurs in the tech world that revolutionized the ways that people communicate with one another, who themselves were deeply isolated and socially challenged in some way. Fincher’s Mark Zuckerberg was painted as a kind of Charlie Kane, a man who gained it all and felt the hollow fruits of his success. But Stern’s Jobs (Ashton Kutcher, in a surprisingly effecting performance) is a man who had it all figured out, possessed of an almost prophetic knowledge of the world he had yet to witness, grew up a little bit, and existed largely as a siren for the limitless frontier of digital technology.

This is, certainly, a film that loves Steve Jobs deeply. One can almost applaud the bravery in the sparing moments when Stern dares to inject complexity into the Jobs persona, but these moments effectively serve only to punctuate the intervening time when Stern is painting the man with broad strokes of almost obnoxious brilliance. How many speeches can a single man give about ‘having a vision’, or ‘changing the world’, or ‘believing in this idea’? An early moment when Jobs turns away his pregnant girlfriend threatens to be the only moment of humanity he is provided, but a nice redemptive moment later brings both the girl and the daughter back for a moment of pleasant intimacy.

“Jobs” is very much about Apple, the company Jobs founded with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Apple is the current through which Jobs’ vision was channeled. The film details the early days, when Jobs, employed by Atari, discovered the closeted brilliance of his friend Wozniak (Josh Gad), who had casually assembled the rudimentary components of the first personal computer in his living room. Wozniak’s modest invention incited a wave of potential in Jobs, whose drive and vision pushed the two of them first into Jobs’ parents’ garage and then into the forefront of consumer electronics.

The rest of the movie will take place within the Apple campus, frequently within the boardroom after the company had gone public, when Jobs’ perfectionism and ambition clashed with his shareholders, who felt his business model was too risky and preferred a safer, less innovative route.

Wozniak is clearly the eye of morality here, a soft spoken man who sought the modest pleasure of creation and tinkering with his gadgets in the face of  Jobs’ relentless ambition and his own company’s skyrocketing success. He is one of many casualties in Apple’s rise, which slowly left behind many of the men we meet in that garage. Jobs, like this film, has not the time to eulogize their departures. One of the reasons “Jobs” feels a little flat, or packs little punch, is that it fails to adequately feel the weight of Jobs’ losses, or the harsh circumstances of his meteoric rise. Stern does not tell us much we did not already know. Steve Jobs was a great innovator, possessed of an astonishingly forward thinking vision.  That he had little time for a personal life hardly seems like the adequate basis for a drama.

Dull Instruments

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

By Jon Fisher

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

Keep Your Eye on the Ball that Never Was

Now You See MeDirected by Louis Leterrier
Two Stars

By Jon Fisher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A World a Little Too Much Like Ours

Elysium
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Two Stars

By Rollan Schott

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lawless, Lackluster Limbo

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

By Rollan Schott

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

The Wolverine We Deserve

The Wolverine
Directed by James Mangold
Two and One Half Stars

By Jon Fisher

James Mangold’s The Wolverine does what it says on the tin – it provides action and special effects on a mostly lavish scale, while attempting to add a touch of humanity to its proceedings. Whether any real enjoyment can be gained from the film outside of those parameters is another question, but rest assured – if you want to plonk yourself down and watch pretty pictures fly across a movie screen, you can do worse than The Wolverine.

A Love Letter to an Old West That Can't Read

The Lone Ranger
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Two Stars

By Rollan Schott

The early shots in Gore Verbinski’s “The Lone Ranger” betray a strange beauty. We see the Golden Gate Bridge, half constructed, which would place us sometime in the mid-thirties. A young boy (Mason Cook) is visiting an amusement park. He stumbles into a tent full of displays of the Old West, a time that exists now only in fantasy and history books. In here, he meets the elderly Native American Tonto (Johnny Depp), working as a live display of the proverbial “Savage”. Through Tonto’s memory is the story told to the boy, and so to us. In this way, Verbinski casts the shadow of mortality over his images of the old west, the romance, the beauty, the vast freedom, the opportunity. It existed only yesterday and only now as a dream, and in his interpretation of the Lone Ranger Verbinski has hung in the air the thick aura of the finite.

The problem, of course, is that Verbinski’s Old West is not romantic. It is not fantastical, and it is not beautiful. It is, instead, a cartoonish playground for a generic odd-couple, ambitious of franchise. It has the stink of a film that was made not for its own sake, but to sell a sequel. The screenplay by Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott is well structured, with clever plot twists and a host of archetypical characters, and the film’s finale, with the Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer) riding his famed horse Silver along the roofs of a runaway train is a satisfying payoff, but Verbinski’s delivery is slack and unfocused, his characters only half-realized, which makes the presence of the white Depp as a Native American – in the Twenty-First Century, mind you – all the more insensitive. They cannot prove he was worth the political incorrectness of his casting.

Though it must be conceded that Depp’s presence as Tonto may play into Tonto’s history as a Comanche outsider, who as a young boy had been tricked by a couple white men into betraying his tribe in exchange for a cheap pocket watch. This backstory supplements that of John Reid (Eventually the Lone Ranger) a New York lawyer returning to Texas to see that the outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) is given a just trial before his public hanging. A local railroad tycoon Cole (Tom Wilkinson) would like to put on a show, demonstrating the wave of justice his Trans-Continental Railroad will bring to the West. But Butch escapes, after a wild train crash, and John and Tonto, who meet on the train, conspire to bring him to justice for independent reasons, and in independent fashions. John is a hopeless ranger, ethically opposed to guns, clinging to a naive value of due process in a place where this value cannot be adequately enforced, ignorant of the ways and means that scores are settled outside his dear law school, an outsider to the lawless West. Much of the action in the film revolves around John needing to be creatively rescued from precarious situations by the formidable and resourceful Tonto.

The early scenes in “The Lone Ranger”, and the occasional interlude between the elderly Tonto and young boy at the amusement park, keep prescient the impact and the innovation that the railroad at the heart of this story had on the very place and idealism that the Lone Ranger had fought to preserve. The themes implied by the film’s structure vastly outweigh Verbinski’s delivery. This is the fifth film that the director has made with Johnny Depp, and one gets the awful sense that their relationship has devolved into the routine. Depp here is so ingratiatingly Depp-like. There is no risk, no invention, no spontaneity. His presence is a pre-determined spark of quirkiness that percolates “The Lone Ranger” like a low drone, present but unsatisfying, unchanging, and finally, unending.

In a late scene, an entire Comanche tribe is slaughtered by the battalion of a corrupt general. Verbinski offers them no remorse, nor feels any weight in this moral defeat. But then, this isn’t a film that stops to feel or regard much at all. Not the majesty of the western countryside, not that receding universe of the Native Americans, not the regrets of its main characters. “The Lone Ranger” begins with a checklist of images and scenarios its storied character demands, and checks them off one by one until there are no more. When it is over, the credits roll. That, in a nutshell, is the experience the story provides.

An Art Movie With an Art Deficiency

Only God Forgives
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
Zero Stars

By Jon Fisher

Some spoilers exist herein

This film is a piece of work. Only God Forgives evoked in me the most visceral disgust that I can recall feeling in a cinema for a number of years. This film obsesses over, yearns for, and savors sadism. When it isn't coming up with abhorrent scenarios to subject its audience to, it commits the even worse cinematic crime of being insufferably boring.

Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn had some success a few years ago with the Ryan Gosling vehicle (pardon the pun) Drive. My impressions of that movie were that Refn was a terrifically talented visual director, with an ear for soundtrack but a worrying tendency to savor violent acts and present them almost lovingly. Boy, I had no idea what was coming in his next feature.

The horrendous violence on display in Only God Forgives is sickening, and serves an artistic purpose that is half-assed and poorly executed. Ryan Gosling plays Julian, an American expatriate who makes a living smuggling drugs out of a Muay Thai boxing center in Bangkok. His brother Billy goes on a violent spree that culminates in him brutally raping and murdering a 16-year-old prostitute. This is brought to the attention of Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), a police officer with shady ethical boundaries, who sanctions Billy’s murder. Julian’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives, determined to assist Julian in seeking vengeance for her son’s death.

Despite its best efforts to distinguish itself from everything else at the multiplex, the structure of the film is actually quite predictable. A few sequences of flat, expressionless dialogue delivered in a manner we've seen done much better in David Lynch movies, followed by an outburst of tremendously detailed violence that would have been passé in a mid-1990s David Cronenburg movie. Most of the violence is usually performed in front of a swathe of bystanders who sit or stand by with blank looks on their faces. Woop-tee-do. The shock of the violence wears off after the first or second instance (although the film’s latter stages are plenty disgusting). The tedium of the presentation is what lived with me.

Only God Forgives is, it would seem, an exploration of the psyche of a man with a particularly powerful and dangerous Oedipal complex. It’s not presented with much subtlety – see, for instance, a conversation in which Julian’s mother claims that Julian couldn't live up to Billy because Billy possessed the larger penis of the two. Refn is on record as confirming that Only God Forgives takes place in a woman’s vagina. I’m not sure if we can decipher this from the evidence in the picture – although there are a lot of long, narrow passages and softly-lit, warm-looking spaces. And there is a moment in which Julian (in slow-motion, of course) further eviscerates his mother’s corpse and reaches into her womb…

Whatever. You’re getting the idea of the pretension on display in this movie. It’s a movie that so badly wants to convince us of its cleverness and brilliance. It gets so caught up in its own genius that it forgets the basics of storytelling – creating compelling characters and believable story arcs. The problem here is not that the characters are all completely psychopathic and unlikable. It’s that they’re uninteresting. Everyone in this movie is uniformly blank. They move in painful-to-watch slow motion. They allow no emotion to pass over their faces. They glide from one disgusting set piece to another. They show no remorse, no grief, no love, nothing. Even the hints at Julian’s ethical code (refusing to allow an innocent young girl to die, for instance) seem to come from some alien, inhumane realm. The characterization in this movie is a boring one-trick pony. Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives is a trick that isn't worth giving the time of day.

Monsters, Robots, and a Blockbuster for the Ages

Pacific Rim
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pacific Rim” is the movie “Transformers” would like to be when it grows up, a wet-dream of comic book, science fiction, action, and monster movie tropes a whirl in a melting pot of hysterical blockbuster equilibrium, the kind of heedless, silly gusto that elicits a fevered “Oh hell yes” when the credits roll. There are a number of “Oh hell yes” moments in “Pacific Rim”, actually. Del Toro is the kind of director that can conjure them effectively. Here he has taken a skirmish between monstrous aliens and skyscraper-sized robots and imbued it with a clever wit and a modest humanity. Startling what that little extra can do to a movie like this.

At some point around present time, a bizarre rift appeared along the ocean floor, deep in the Pacific Ocean. Out of the mysterious opening crawled a giant, monstrous creature we first see trudging into San Francisco Bay, through and over the Golden Gate Bridge as though it were unheeded police tape. Fighter jets and guided missiles were hurled relentlessly at the creature, dubbed the Kaiju, and it was finally brought down several days and several hundred miles after it first reached shore. The moment was memorialized, the fallen heroes lionized, and mankind moved on. But a few months later another appeared, and then another, then another, and it became clear that more sophisticated means of defense would be necessary.

Queue the Jaeger Program, an army of enormous robots manufactured by the international community to combat the Kaiju before they could reach our shores and ransack our cities. The Jaegers are controlled by two pilots, rigged in simulator body-suits within the robots’ heads, piloting the machines by thought and body movement. Because the interface of the system is too complicated for a single human mind to manage, two pilots must synchronize their minds, a process called 'drifting', and train themselves to manage and contain each others’ memories while guiding the machines in unison.

This we are told in an opening scene that is as oversized and gloriously bloated – at around twenty-something minutes – as the whole of the film. This early montage and initial battle are awe-inspiring. It’s a gratifyingly tongue-in-cheek moment when, nearly a half hour into the film and following an epic, almost climactic fight sequence, the title page finally appears, Del Toro’s coy method of suggesting that yes, there’s plenty more where that came from.

When the story proper begins, the Jaeger program has been defunded after the Kaiju, in their evolving state, have become too large and too powerful for the robots to combat reliably. The world governments don’t have any better ideas, and control of the Pacific Rim is slipping away. What remains of the Jaeger program have convened in Hong Kong under the command of General Pentacost (Idris Elba), coordinating an underground resistance effort to take the fight to the Kaiju for a change. This involves digging up retired pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), who’d left the program after his co-pilot and brother was killed in battle, and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), a young upstart under Pentacost’s paternal wing.

The rest is effectively fodder for massive-scale action sequences between the Jaegers and Kaiju, though there is some clever comic relief courtesy of a couple manic scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) working with the program. The reason “Pacific Rim” is such a splendid movie is because these action sequences are inventive, beautifully photographed and coherently composed, and because Del Toro brings enough generic humanity to his characters to lend the action just the right touch of emotional weight.

Should we pretend, this is a grand metaphor? That there is a wealth of subtext? I feel like this would be a disservice to Del Toro’s achievement. Sure, this is a movie about trust, and sure, Dr. Geiszler alludes to greenhouse gasses making the planet more enticing to the Kaiju than it otherwise might have been, but indeed it is the headlong, vacuous simplicity of the narrative that makes this such a puritanical entertainment. “Pacific Rim” has satisfied for me a long unfed appetite for good old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster camp, genuine, original and competent, and on these humble grounds it is one of the best films of the year.

A Superman Movie for Batman Fans

Man of Steel
Directed by Zack Snyder
Three Stars

By Jon Fisher

Superhero movies used to be almost wholly perceived as dead-on-arrival garbage, but no longer are they merely fodder for children and adolescents. Serious-minded adults now look to superhero movies for entertainment, intrigue and even a reflection of the zeitgeist. American society goes through distinct cycles with regards to superhero popularity – “Batman moments” and “Superman moments”. Sure, there is the odd Spider-Man or Iron Man that maintains its own level of steady popularity, but the two juggernauts of superhero lore are indisputably the Caped Crusader and the Man of Tomorrow. And their popularities rise and fall according to the needs of their times.

The Same Ol' Zombies, Only More So

World War Z

Directed by Marc Forster

Three Stars

By Jon Fisher

I imagine that, fifteen years ago, starring in a zombie movie would have been considered a major step back in Brad Pitt’s career. How the popular culture landscape has changed – zombie literature, formerly of an audience of societally fringe-dwelling nerds and goths, has not only become accepted in the mainstream, but arguably the world’s biggest movie star now describes a zombie movie as one of the most fun movies he’s made in a long time. In addition to that, a zombie serial (The Walking Dead) has become one of the most popular television shows around in the more cinematic, post-Sopranos TV landscape. The source material for that show is complex and harsh, with a focus on the human dimension of a zombie apocalypse. The source material for World War Z, written by Max Brooks (who, we must note with a whiff of suspicion, is the son of Mel Brooks), attempts the same level of complexity. I enjoyed the book for its devotion to and interpretation of the zombie mythology, but concluded that Brooks wasn’t much of a writer. All of his characters sound the same, whether they are a blind geriatric rural-dwelling Asian or a pair of American school teachers.

The W.A.I. Family is Growing

I suppose we’ve been working toward this moment for a long time. I’ve known Jon Fisher for many years now, though we’ve never (yet) met in person. Jon and I became acquainted through an Ebert and Roeper Facebook group, and began networking our movie blogs. His delightful website, The Film Brief, has gone through many phases, looks, styles, functions. My own has gone through more. From ‘Go See a Movie’, to ‘Ghost on Screen’, and now as ‘Wide Angle Iris’, we have frequently sampled each others’ reviews, recorded podcasts debating our divergent opinions and convened annually for three years now to compile our Pantheon of the greatest films of all time. We linked to each others work on social media and grew each others’ web presence. We were two college kids on opposite ends of the world with a love of great film and a passion for the conversations they elicit. But over the years life has made the upkeep of our respective sites more difficult and inconvenient. Full time jobs and the burden of adult responsibilities post-graduation have slowed our output. And so it is with great pleasure now, that I announce that Jon and will be combining our efforts to maintain a single site, right here at WAI.

Water Levels, Nukes, Drones, and the Casual Diplomacy of "Oblivion"

Oblivion

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

Three and One Half Stars

Science fiction is less a genre than a society, and to join, one must pay tribute to the council of elders. More than any other genre, fans of science fiction scour their films for references to the titans of its heritage. The allusions are often scattered throughout as deliberate, coy visual cues, not unlike a word search. It is customary, for example, to represent any malicious artificial intelligence with the ominous red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" ("Red Planet", "Moon", "WALL-E"...). But that's just one example, and one of many that Joseph Kosinski conjures in the clever and striking "Oblivion", a science-fiction blockbuster in the classic sense, placing lavish visuals and exciting action in the service of simple and elegant political ideas.

Nothing Behind Us, Everything Before Us, As Always it is On the Road

On the Road

Directed by Walter Salles

Three Stars

Note: This is the first review I've written since the passing of my hero Roger Ebert. I'd like to dedicate this review in his honor.

I've looked forward to reviewing Walter Salles' adaptation of Jack Kerouac's landmark novel, "On the Road", if only because it would afford me the opportunity to write about the book itself, which is among my very favorites. Kerouac had captured, in vibrant color, an entire cultural movement. The Beats, they called themselves, an underground generation of progressive liberation, punctuated by sex, drugs, and jazz, that laid the foundation for the  hippy movement of the late sixties. He told a tale of the last days of an untamed American countryside, as the coasts had just begun to close in on each other, and cries of freedom still disappeared into a sprawling, wild openness, populated sporadically by strange and eclectic characters that seemed as if from another world.

Roger Ebert Remembered

Roger Ebert (1942 - 2013)

"Thank You." Roger Ebert opened his last blog entry this way, a gesture of gratitude and reflection that hinted ominously at tragedy. Ebert went on to confess that he would be dialing back the near superhuman output of reviews, blogs, and other writings he had maintained for years. He is not as he was, he told us, but he would continue on at a pace more befitting a man of 70 with recurrent cancer. Two days ago he wrote this. And now, today, while at work, a friend of mine texted me the news. Roger Ebert was dead.

The Golden Iris Awards

I confess that my time spent at the movies has dwindled in the last year, the cinema having now to share valuable downtime with an ambitious fiction project. But make it to the movies I did, and though I didn't see enough great films to constitute a top ten list, I'll present a simple top three, in medal form, below.