QUICK REVIEWS: The Overnight and Loving Vincent

The Overnight

(watched on Netflix, twice)

Halfway though The Overnight one could easily mistake it for a horror movie, but it's really just a perfectly-drawn comedy of modern social anxieties.  Adam Scott ("Parks and Recreation") and Taylor Schilling ("Orange is the New Black") play Alex and Emily, a young couple with a young son who have just moved to a trendy L.A. neighbourhood.  A chance meeting with Kurt (Jason Schwartzman), a weirdly forward local dad, leads to a dinner invitation at Kurt and his wife Charlotte's home... and it's all just a little too perfect.

The house, designed by Kurt in a fashion of Charlotte's childhood home, is huge, and gorgeous.  Charlotte (Judith Godreche) is beautiful, charming, and so very French.  Kurt distributes water filters to central Africa, can speak multiple languages fluently, and blows Alex and Emily's mind by serenading their son to sleep in a matter of minutes.

For a while this hip couple is just too perfect, but it's to The Overnight's credit that it never really tips its hand as to what exactly is going on.  Is this Alex and Emily's dream scenario, making friends with a cool, new couple that's oh so Californian?  Alex is fully into the ride, but Emily grows increasingly suspicious that there's something "swingy" in their new friends' agenda.

Directed by Patrick Brice and produced by Adam Scott and Mark Duplass, The Overnight has that light, bubbly improvisational quality common to the "mumblecore" genre.  Shot in twelve days, well, nights between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., you can really feel how the great vibe of the cast coalesced into something special.  Scott and Schilling have this lovely, very real chemistry, marked by your usual insecurities but never overplayed.

Schilling is probably my favourite of the cast, bringing that same vague unlikability and privileged anxiety of her "Orange is the New Black" character.  It's a difficult role, because she's the wet blanket, but at the same time that background voice of reason.  So when her own issues pop out it's not a matter of "ha ha, you dumbass", you actually feel for her.

Special acknowledgement also has to go to Jason Schwartzman, who has a similarly difficult role.  Kurt carries Schwartzman's perpetual-smarminess, but simultaneously manages to be genuine in nearly superhero fashion.  He (almost) always has the right words for every occasion, for every negotiation, and it's wonderful to watch.

What I particularly liked about The Overnight is that it's not safe.  It's so impressively frank about relationships, and sex, and despite being raucously funny at points it has very few cheap laughs.  Everything feels earned, and that's so rare in a comedy, especially one that deals with real, flawed characters.  

Loving Vincent

(seen at The Odeon in Victoria, playing now)

It's pretty uncommon when a film is made using specialized techniques that are labour-intensive and technically-complex and it doesn't turn out hampered or somewhat neutered by those techniques.  Sometimes it works, say, with Linklater's Waking Life or Sokurov's Russian Ark.  But most of the time the result is something like Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's Loving Vincent, a nearly-Herculean accomplishment of artistic effort that doesn't really work as a "film".

The trick with Loving Vincent is that every single frame (heh) of the film was actually painted, by hand.  Using Van Gogh's paintings as inspiration, over five-thousand painters painstakingly created over an hour and a half of film "frames" as footage which was assembled into a narrative.  Almost every scene, and character, and location, is based off an actual painting.  Rotoscoping (which also fuelled Waking Life) was clearly used to assist in the animation, but each frame was still individually painted.

The results are truly impressive, and there's no question that Loving Vincent is a beautiful film that's an interesting watch.  The insertion of animated characters, blowing trees and twinkling stars into statically-designed canvases is fascinating at times, weirdly akin to those old "King's Quest" games where players walk in jerky fashion over colourful, static digital backgrounds.  

But there's two problems with the film.  Firstly, the narrative itself, which follows one man's investigation into the very recent death of Van Gogh, isn't particularly interesting.  It plays something like a murder-mystery, our intrepid (but fallible) hero plying the locals for information, slowly coming to the conclusion that Van Gogh didn't kill himself but may have been shot.  It's loosely based on real-world events, and all comes about as pretty plausible, but spends so much time with the investigation that I never really felt like I actually learned much about the painter himself.

Secondly, and I guess this isn't exactly a second complaint but more of a result of the first, Loving Vincent's gimmick of being entirely handpainted is just that... kind of a gimmick.  It's not used to illuminate the narrative, or produce subtext, or at least not in any way that I could detect.  Understandably, a project of the order that Kobiela and Welchman (and their legion of painters) undertook was massive, so it's hard to fault them.  Rather I'd just argue that attempting to suture Van Gogh's static works, which have meaning and power all to themselves, with any kind of narrative that actually incorporates the painter himself was difficult in itself.  

Now, take all this with a grain of salt, as reviews for Loving Vincent have been nearly unanimous in their praise.  I think if you're interested in the history of art, or in films that take technical and aesthetic risks, it's a perfectly interesting film.  For me it was lacking something of a soul, something to engage my emotions.  

NEW TO NETFLIX: The Bad Batch and 1922

The Bad Batch

So, I haven't seen Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Midnight; despite its indie-darling appeal it's always been one of those "oh hey, yeah, this one is supposed to be good OH WAIT *insert stupid sci-fi/horror thing I can laugh at here*" movies that sits on the edge of my viewing periphery.  But the trailer for her follow up The Bad Batch was intriguing for a bunch of reasons... I've always been a sucker for postapocalyptic things of all kinds, it had Jason Momoa (Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones) and Keanu Reeves in it, and gosh damn that track is slick.

The film is set in some ostensibly dystopian America where a bleached dry chunk of Texas hinterland has been established as a sort of prison zone where society's unwanted are simply dropped off at the gate and basically left for dead.  Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) a teen blonde whose "F.U." cap pretty much emblemizes her attitude, is barely there for a couple of hours when a couple of locals from a local gang snag her and summarily take an arm and a shin for dinner.

Arlen escapes with anticipated cleverness and brutality and somehow makes her way to a competing town called "Comfort", a sort of permanent Burning Man inhabited by undesirables ruled by a creepy benefactor (Reeves).  A few months pass and an enraged Arlen makes her way back towards the cannibals, finds one in the desert, and shoots her in front of her child Honey (Jayda Fink).  Suddenly somewhat remorseful, our heroine (?) takes the child back to Comfort... not knowing that Honey's father is the supremely badass Miami Man (Momoa).  

I won't summarize much past this other than to say Arlen and Miami Man eventually meet up and it's curiously more affecting than I thought it might have been.  The trailer and the appearance of a "VICE" logo at the film's opening credits made me think The Bad Batch would be more cheeky, maybe overly self-aware of all of its hipster trappings, instead Amirpour plays everything pretty straight and it's quite refreshing.  

That said, it's a difficult film to recommend.  It's not flashy, and there's almost no action, so people expecting something like Mad Max are going to be bored, and at the same time what subtext there is to be found is not really interesting enough to watching it for its social or political implications.  There's statements made about morality and redemption, and a great quote from Arlen about wanting to "be a solution to a problem" but when it was over I felt myself expecting something more.  

1922

This little Netflix production is maybe one of my favourite viewing surprises of the last while, a tense and surprisingly meaningful little ghost story that gets better as it goes along.

It's 1922 on a small farm in Nebraska surrounded by cornfields.  Wilfred and Arlette James (Thomas Jane and Molly Parker) are facing a rapidly dissolving marriage; Arlette, essentially a city girl, wants to sell the farm and move the family to Omaha, a plan the more conservative Wilfred refuses to even acknowledge.  Divorce comes up, things get heated, and Wilfred convinces their son Henry (Dylan Schmid) to kill Arlette and shove her body down the well.

Don't worry about the spoiler, as 1922 is entirely about the consequences of the murder: guilt, regret, despair.  The film becomes a sort of ghost story, but unlike most recent ghostly fare (which admittedly I've avoided for the most part) it focuses on the ostensible villain instead of the usual gaggle of suburban family members.  Sure, there's the usual appearance of gross and scary things, but they're almost inconsequential to what's actually going on in the protagonist's head.

I say "ostensible villain" when referring to Wilfred because 1922 forces us to some degree to sympathize with his plight.  Initially he's something of a monster, coercing his son to hold his own mother down while Wilfred cuts her throat on the marriage bed, then flinging her body casually down the well... but as the misfortunes and anxieties and regrets pile up, it's pretty hard not to feel for him.  

This is obviously a difficult task, and would be impossible if not for a couple of things.  Firstly, Thomas Jane is marvelous, his face craggly and sunburnt, his look perpetually sour and yet at the same time so very much human.  

Secondly, ghost stories often just sort of sit on their own as genre exercises, but 1922 can be read as a sort of elegy for a disappearing way of life.  Wilfred is essentially conservative, rural America personified, a moral man in his own ways, a hard worker who believes in his land and (ironically) his family, who watches his more progressive wife tear that family apart.

It's to the film's credit that it doesn't demonize his beliefs or sympathies.  Watching the farm literally fall apart around him is shockingly tragic, because in our minds we know that a hundred years later (the title is a pretty good marker that we're supposed to correlate the film's events with that of our contemporary reality) the rural American way of life is in steep decline and - for those in the midst of it - it's a truly horrific experience.

I was pretty broken at the end of 1922, emotionally exhausted.  It's not a pleasurable film (even if it's wonderfully shot and paced), but something more powerful, and I think that even people who aren't into horror but like an "interesting" film with some cultural punch will get something out of it.  

It makes me even more curious to read King's novella.  His obvious (and public) liberal leanings are often foregrounded in his works, but typically his conservative characters are over-the-top stereotypes... Wilfred is not one of these at all.  

QUICK REVIEWS: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,Wonder Woman

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

The first Guardians was a pleasant surprise, a colourful, nimble "little" big film that was fun, exciting, and more genuine than I expected.  But we've all been trained to be apprehensive about sequels, my own particular fear being the dreaded "sequelitis".  Sequelitis is the disease in which the filmmakers look at what audiences liked most about the first film - usually a certain side character - and then crank that aspect to obnoxious levels for the second film.

Guardians 2 manages to avoid this to a degree, and actually provides a pretty good balance of screen-time for its motley crew of space adventurers.  I was expecting it to be 24/7 Baby Groot (seen above) but Vin Diesel's little tree actually is there almost entirely for comedic purposes and I'm all good with that.

The main plot of the film involves Peter Quill/Starlord's long-lost dad, who turns out to be Kurt Russell.  Actually, his name is "Ego", but really Russell is so awful in the film that he's pretty much just Kurt Russell.  Anyhow, there's something about Quill's quasi-magical past and the inevitable "something's not right here" and a big honkin' explosive ending with lasers and spaceships and a giant brain and whatnot... but somehow, despite the fact that I really didn't care a whit about Quill and his daddy issues, I generally enjoyed the film.

A huge factor here is the acting of the cast as a whole, and while I find Quill himself really, really boring, and Russell was just off-puttingly almost a stereotype of himself, everyone else is pretty great.  Zoe Saldana is really quite good in an otherwise thankless role as side-plot girlfriend/ass-kicker, Bradley Cooper's voice is perfect for the wise-cracking trash panda with a gatling laser, and Michael Rooker is - as always - everyone's favourite soft-hearted semi-antagonist.

But special mention here has to go to Dave Bautista as the goofy bruiser Drax.  His earnest demeanor combines so perfectly with his blunt honesty and deadpan delivery.  By far the funniest bits of the film are Drax's little add-ons at the end of some ridiculous expository group dialogue, and easily the biggest laugh I've had in a long time came at his semi-boast about his "famously huge turds".  

Let's just end with the turd quote.  It's all you really need to know.

Wonder Woman

Just look at those two people.  Honestly, those are two of the most attractive faces I've ever seen, which makes any review of Wonder Woman a little... complicated.  I knew going in that I had a fairly fierce crush on former Miss Israel Gal Godot from her brief appearance in the Fast and Furious franchise and stint in the truly awful Keeping Up With the Jonses; she just has "it", a combination of beauty and humility that's truly endearing.

And Chris Pine?  The guy is pure charisma, making the best out of mediocre roles in a smattering of mediocre movies before really giving us a fantastic Captain Kirk in the new Star Trek films.

It's the chemistry between the two that really drives Wonder Woman.  It's a little wonder of a superhero film (if any blockbuster can be called little), relying on character and theme to pull us into the story rather than blasting us with in-jokes and appearances by random side-heroes nobody cares about (see: most of the Avengers series and most certainly the recent Batman vs. Superman).

And it wouldn't work if we didn't care about the protagonists.  Godot's Diana "Prince" / Wonder Woman is surprisingly nuanced, essentially a naive girl with the power of a God who is finding out about the cruelty of the real world for the first time.  She finds out about the horrors of World War I (the film takes place in 1918) and assumes it's all about Gods and her destiny, and it's to Godot's credit that we can't help but sympathize with her in the realization that it's not all about her.

Of course, the whole trope of heroes finding hope in the potential of humanity to overcome its own tragic flaws is a common one to the superhero genre, but Wonder Woman pulls it off because Pine's character - a spy who knows well about the horrors conceivable by man - is such a perfect foil to her blind hubris and optimism.  It's of course a given that the two will fall in love despite this, but the two are just soooo cute together and their charisma soooo clear that it works against all odds.  

Yes, it's frequently a cheesy film, fraught with discussion of love and human potential and whatnot, but Wonder Woman works because of the cheese, not despite it.  It's even good from an aesthetic and action viewpoint.  The locations, even the Amazons' magic island, feel real and "worn".  The film flows well, and is efficiently edited all the way to the fight sequences.  I especially liked the occasional moments of quiet, a rarity in superhero films.  The scene where our two pretties first hook up is really quite wonderful, a dance in the midst of a newly-liberated French town square, with snow fluttering and the music subtly fading out in the background. 

And yes, there's no question that so much of the film's success is due to its status as a superhero film about a female hero, and that it was made by a female director.  That said, it doesn't play up that political angle for "points" at all, there is very little in the way of the "I am no man" fuzzy-faux-feminist bullshit that you might expect.  It's actually far more complexly portrayed in the film; Diana does eventually learn that not all men (heh) are warmongering jerks (as she had learned from her amazon upbringing), but at the same time she maintains her own agency throughout and finishes strong while maintaining a feminine perspective.

Now, that all said, I can't say I'm optimistic for her role in the upcoming Justice League.  I have a feeling all that nuance is going to get thrown out the window or totally subsumed under Batman's silly brooding or Superman's, uh, standing there looking all buff.  

At least there's guaranteed to be a Wonder Woman 2.  

QUICK REVIEWS: Alien: Covenant, Free Fire, Colossal

Alien: Covenant

Attempting to figure out a way to explain how Alien: Covenant fits within the mythology and narrative that is the Alien series is giving me a stomachache.

So, you had four films spaced over roughly twenty of our years, Alien in 1979, Aliens in 1986, Alien3 in 1992, and Alien: Resurrection in 1997, all of which were the saga of Ripley, former dock worker cum badass flamethrower-wielding warrior. Then in 2012 we got Prometheus from Alien's director, Ridley Scott, a prequel to the entire affair, a complete mess of a film that attempted to establish an entirely new series explaining the origin of the “xenomorph” but didn't make a whole lot of sense.

So, along comes Alien: Covenant, in my attempt a largely failed attempt to ground this new series in the years of cultural familiarity we have with the original films. It follows a brand new crew of nobodies on a ship going from nowhere to nowhere, much like Alien, and references the original film by way of all manner of obvious callbacks: musical cues, lines of dialogue (“a... perfect organism”), and scenarios (another “let me out of here”... “no, quarantine says I can't” situation, for one).

It's all really quite distracting. I'd be OK with all the self-reference if the film were funnier, or more campy, but Scott plays the thing almost entirely straight and what we end up with is a film that simultaneously wants to make money and be “fun” while expanding its philosophical and metaphorical arena beyond what makes the original series so interesting.

At some point I might go into this a little deeper, but what I've always found frightening about the Alien series isn't the physical aliens themselves. They're almost too scary in terms of their essence, all teeth and claws, no eyes to give them humanity, no red blood to give them a connection to “life” as we know it, pure killing machines. What makes them disturbing on a deeper level is the existential notion that our universe is so utterly uncaring and mechanical that it could easily generate such monsters purely by accident, and in fact, maybe the aliens are evolutionarily more “fit” than we are to exist. The universe actually prefers the aliens.

Prometheus and Alien: Covenant turn this entirely on its head by making the xenomorphs not the creation of evolution/reality/accident but a result of intelligence-driven genetic engineering. This is not nearly as scary as the idea of a universe that DGAF about me or humanity in general.

That all said, Alien: Covenant bears the nu-Ridley mark of being pretty as hell and superbly staged. The initial alien attack, a clusterfuck of confusion and gore in multiple locations, is one of the scariest things I've seen in a while in terms of pure chaotic horror. And it's well acted, especially by Michael Fassbender in a dual-role that really showcases his ability to go from dashing near-Bond level stud to raving madman in only a few seconds.

I think that people new to the series would be better off starting with the originals, which hold up really well given their age. But if you've seen the originals and are at least okay with the direction taken by Prometheus in terms of its handling of the mythology, Alien: Covenant is worth a watch.

Free Fire

This review will be shorter because, well, there's really not much to say about Free Fire that you can't glean by watching the trailer.

The plot is as bare bones as plots get. It's 1978, and two groups have met in some beat-up warehouse in a Boston industrial dregland to exchange assault rifles for cash. We get a good twenty minutes of character setup (he's an IRA hitman! This guy's a junkie! And, uh, this one's got a mustache) and then, thank God, there's a misunderstanding and shots are fired. The rest of the film is a dozen or so people lying behind chunks of concrete, trading bullets and barbs for the better part of an hour.

I sound unimpressed, but it would be entirely unfair to say that Free Fire isn't without its pleasures. In terms of pure, realistic “gunplay”, it's a pretty fun watch. Gunfire sounds authentic, explosions are loud and punchy, and there's a sense of randomness to the affair that feels real.

But at the same time, like all of director Ben Wheatley's films, there's a weirdness to the whole affair which feels mannered, artificial, as if he wants to make a genre film and deconstruct it at the same time and doesn't quite get it “right”.

Maybe it's because he occasionally stops the narrative for a moment of calm, or twists what might be a moment of chaos into something more poetic, and it gives the audience the feeling that maybe there's more to what's going on than just bullets and blood.

Maybe it's a case where the presence of an “artsy” director means we look for something where it isn't, or what we've found isn't anything close to what Wheatley intended. If there's a subtext to Free Fire, something about our love for violence, or darkness in human nature, or some kind of comment about film aesthetics, I sure couldn't find it amoungst the whizzing of shells and insults thrown around in various accents.

Colossal

Ah, what a little gem of a film! Colossal could have been a massive failure, but turns out to be a low-budget high-concept effort that somehow overcomes the weirdness of that concept and delivers something thoughtful and surprisingly meaningful.

I feel I can give away the central “idea” of Colossal without a spoiler warning for this very reason, but if you really want to go in blind, and you dig smaller, stranger films, just give it a shot. Otherwise, read on!

Anne Hathaway stars as Gloria, a hard-partying Manhattanite who gets kicked out of her apartment by her boyfriend (Dan Stevens) after one-too-many late nights. She moves back to an old house she inherited from now-dead parents, and reconnects with Oscar (Jason Sudekis), and old school friend, who owns a local bar. She meets his friends and starts working at the bar.

Meanwhile, a Godzilla-esque creature has attacked Seoul (no, I didn't just forget which review I'm writing). Gloria doesn't really notice it at first but after a couple of days realizes (via watching the creature's movements on YouTube) that the monster is essentially her avatar, mimicking her movements whenever she walks onto the local playground at which she makes nighttime calls to her ex-boyfriend.

At first her new friends don't believe her, but when the creature starts mimicking her dance moves live on air, they're convinced. And this is when things get really messy, as it turns out that there's more than one monster on this playground.

Colossal is exceptionally clever, setting up what seems like the reversal of a typical “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” scenario where some existentially-lost urban male moves home and meets a cutie pie who shows him how to live, and then pulling the rug out from under our expectations. At first we're like “hey, this girl needs to settle down, look at the damage she's doing to her friends with her refusal to settle down and become an adult” and then we're like “heh, look at that sweet metaphor! Her self-destruction and effects on other is so bad it has manifested as Godzilla!”.

And then the film turns on us, establishing an entirely different metaphor that plays off those expectations surprisingly well, creating yet another level of metaphor that deals with gender stereotypes and masculine rage in a powerful, yet, mindful way.

It helps that the leads are just fantastic, Hathaway a hot mess that at first feels like a stock character you're supposed to hate (perfect casting choice there) but can't help but sympathize with, and Sudekis wonderfully underplaying his obvious charm to develop a quiet, hidden menace that's all too real. Dan Stevens feels overcast, but isn't that always the case?

Colossal isn't a film for everyone. Many of you will find it too weird, and it's more than a little rough around the edges. Personally, I found it to be one of the most welcome surprises in my recent filmwatching history, and wish more things coming out of Hollywood were this ambitious.

QUICK REVIEW: A Cure For Wellness

Gore Verbinski's A Cure for Wellness is one of those films that I admire for its craftsmanship and ambition but can't really quite recommend, a visually perfect but narratively tired horror/thriller.

Dane DeHaan is Lockhart, a brash, young financial workaholic sent to a remote Swiss health spa to find a fellow exec who never came back from a two-week vacation. When Lockhart first arrives at the immaculate mountain-top “resort”, he seems mildly annoyed by the parade of white-clothed seniors playing croquet and badminton and amused by the idea that the aquifer below the spa has the power to heal all manner of modern conditions.

When his attempts to convince his cohort to leave fall on deaf ears, our arrogant hero incurs the wrath of Volmer (Jason Isaacs), the spa's administrator. A freak accident results in a broken leg, forcing Lockhart onto crutches. It's not long before he has suspicions that something quite wrong is going on, something to do with tainted water, disturbingly passive patients, a two-century feud between the spa and the locals, and... eels?

A Cure for Wellness, if nothing else, is just beautiful. Verbinski has always been a talented creator of mise en scene in a wide variety of contexts: Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring, even The Lone Ranger all did a fantastic job of immersing you into their respective worlds. The “wellness centre” of A Cure for Wellness is a triumph of production design that feels like a revamped Overlook Hotel out of The Shining, all its colours calming, its edges soft.

And there are scenes that astound, such as an increasingly claustrophobic sequence of getting lost in a series of sauna chambers, all identical yellow bricks in perfect patterns, or a truly horrific scene involving a dentist's drill, and a front tooth (yeah, people who have issues watching teeth “stuff” close your eyes, it's an image I won't ever be forgetting no matter how much I visit r/eyebleach).

But overall, the whole affair feels... tired? I had a tough time caring for Lockhart, who's a jerk at the start of the film and pretty much stays that way through to the end. It doesn't help that DeHaan has made a career out of playing twisted psychotics (see: Chronicle for a great example), making his face hard to sympathize with.

Worse, the entire mystery at the heart of the film is unnecessarily convoluted and not particularly well exposed over the course of the two-plus hours of its running time. Worst, isn't surprising in terms of pure mystery or theme. Horror is scary not just because of what's on the screen, but because of what it connects to in the viewer's real world, and A Cure for Wellness doesn't really evoke much in the way of psychological or social fears.

This is, of course, a Verbinskian concern. He is very much a product of the Jerry Bruckheimer system, a visual experimentalist who's nearly an auteur in the way he deals with colour and texture, but very much someone you'd accurately say makes films that are more “style than substance”. Only this time his sensual experience isn't matched by the script, and the result is a genre trifle that I don't think will appeal to many.

Before Sunrise

Richard Linklater's 1995 Before Sunrise has always been a personal favourite of mine, a tear-jerking little movie about young love. And yet, a recent reviewing, the first in easily a decade, exposed a deeper, more philosophical, existential heart, a meandering, nearly maudlin look at what it actually means to be alive as a human being, among other human beings.

If you haven't seen it, you should, but here's a summary. Two cute twenty-somethings, the American boy Jesse and the French girl Celine, meet on a train in Europe. There's an obvious connection, and Jesse makes a brazen appeal: they get off in Vienna and spend the night exploring the city before he gets on a plane bound for America at 9:30 the next morning. She agrees, and the two embark on an epic wander through the city, walking and talking and falling in love... but realizing that what they have is most temporary, and in fear of what happens when the sun finally rises.

On the surface, and admittedly, the way I'd always seen it, Before Sunrise

is something of a 101-minute meet cute, two pretty good but mannered actors ad-libbing a beautiful start to a relationship that's somewhat tragic, but endearingly so. Because they know they're going to have to separate in the morning, and they know that it's likely they'll never see each other again, the proceedings are lent a special kind of emotional punch.

And it's a great movie if you just take it at that level. It's not “realistic” in any way, really, it's more of a play in that it feels fairly stagy and much of its power comes from little moments that are genuine but at the same time seem nearly overtly played. Jesse's hand, casually dipping to brush hair from Celine's face just a moment too late before she turns, or Celine semi-subconsciously nibbling her pinky, “oh God he's so deep” as Jesse oh-so-adorably talks about seeing his dead great-grandmother's ghost in a spray of water from a sprinkler when he was a child. Somehow, these just work, maybe if at some level we wish we were Jesse or Celine and it was a young, goateed, leather-jacketed Ethan Hawke or Julie Delpy with her wide-set eyes, perfect ivory skin and devastating smile that were sitting across from us while we drank a beer on a cafe beside the Danube.

But, on another level, and maybe this comes only from watching it as an experienced (sure?) adult, Before Sunrise is surprisingly layered in terms of theme. Sure, it's a tragic love story, but the tragedy isn't just limited to a banal discussion of “love”. Instead, it's existential, a moment in time worthy of Roy Batty's memories, a long day that summarizes human experience in all its brevity.

One could easily miss this depth while distracted by all the eye-batting and lovely smooching, but as an older viewer it's easier to discern Before Sunrise's sub-textual evocation of the awful pleasure of the passage of time, and impermanence. It's not just the circumstantial aspects of Jesse and Celine's day-long journey, the shortened time-frame lending their relationship an intensity, a rush, it's that said relationship becomes a metaphor for a human life.

Many times throughout the film, and in a lovely, nuanced way, our lovers' conversation dips into discussions of time and finality. The two dance around the subject of the mortality of not only relationships but human beings as a species, never fully conflating the two – perhaps because of their young age – but we, and Linklater, know better. We know that relationships, and people, get old and die.

But we also know, and it's to the film's credit that Jesse and Celine occasionally pick up on this, that it's the very fact that life, and everything connected with life, is mortal... that this mortality is what gives life meaning. Celine is somewhat stereotypically afraid of death, and it's obvious that this French existentialist bent is somewhat being balanced by Jesse's American gumption, and it's telling that it's actually he's the one who cracks first when the two are faced with finally coming to grips with the thought that maybe they should let things play out as if they'll never see each other again. She's the old world, he's the new one, a surprisingly effective dichotomy that almost plays out like the dual nature of ourselves as humans.

Most interestingly, and inspiringly, Before Sunrise absolutely offers an antidote for this bleak fear... connection. In perhaps the film's most important scene, one that takes place in a small back alley, the two sitting on pallets, somewhat exhausted, Celine notes that maybe, just maybe, if God exists, he doesn't exist up there, or in you or I... but in that space between you and I, in the moments where two egos meet and decide that hey, maybe you mean as much to me as I do to myself.

It's a stunning moment, one easily lost amidst the cutesiness of the rest of the proceedings, and I'd almost like to think it's enough to overcome the film's very last moments of nearly frenzied panic. It's telling that the editing, which usually follows our lovers constantly, stopping only for the occasional montage, occasionally cuts out at key moments such as when they might have sex, or at the midst of certain very important discussions... and the film itself ends on a curiously open-ended note that absolutely begs for hope but most likely will have to suffice with melancholy.

It doesn't really matter if Jesse and Celine get together again, because what they had, they had. Closing shots from the morning after of places they'd been only hours earlier, now quiet and sun-dappled, somewhat contradict this optimism, revealing places devoid of humankind, empty chairs and benches. But only somewhat, because those spaces only mean something because of what happened there, and what happened was connection. And connection, if it's God, as Celine said, is thus eternal.

Quick Reviews: Doctor Strange and Rogue One

Doctor Strange. A friend said “go see this in the theatre”. I should have taken his advice, but had been burned by one too many visually-middling Marvel efforts to quite get over the hump of making the effort to pay twelve bucks.  But finally, at home, and sitting there with a touch of some bug wriggling through my veins, I figured "what the hell, at least it has Mads Mikkelsen".  And I don't know if it was the bugs or the phantasmagorical visuals on screen, but the resulting viewing was a decently fun time.

Doctor Strange isn't narratively special; if anything, its story of an arrogant white guy going east for salvation and finding wisdom/magic powers is painfully cliche. Benedict Cumberbatch (No sp! First time, even!) is a Manhattan neurosurgeon whose Dr. House-like photographic memory and brilliant mind seems to have given him a comparably ridiculous superiority complex.

One night he multitasks just a little too much while driving a curvy road and ends up smashing both of his hands to bits. Finding that no conventional means will bring his fingers back to what they once were, he follows a loose rumour all the way to a temple full of mystics in Nepal. Their leader, the “Ancient One” (a bald, smirking Tilda Swinton), goes all Morpheus on the Doctor and before you know it he's bending the laws of reality.

So yeah, it's Harry Potter + The Matrix. And weirdly, it's mostly pretty good, and the way Doctor Strange visually realizes the effects of magic on reality is downright amazing. Sorcerers weave patterns of light and fire in the air. Gravity swings sideways, upside down, in circles. Buildings multiply and fold in amongst themselves. Wormholes fling us from dimension to dimension, from crystalline, shimmering beauty to bulbous, fuzzy disgust.

You probably won't care what happens – Strange is himself such a douche that it's pretty tough to care if he makes it past his rambunctious self-love to a space of “let's save the world!”. But as far as the Marvel side-projects go, Doctor Strange ranks alongside the first Iron Man and Ant-Man as one that people who aren't really into superheroes could check out.

Rogue One. So, it was 1:00 a.m., I'd just finished Doctor Strange and Rogue One was also just sitting there and the bugs hadn't won yet. I thought “well, let's just see how it looks”. Whoops. Before I knew it, it's 3:30 in the morning and my brain is just reeling in wonder.

For those that aren't already entrenched in the “Star Wars” phenomenon, Rogue One is a standalone film that takes place just before the action that starts the original 1977 Star Wars. It follows the story of a ragtag group of castoffs who find themselves at the heart of a plot to steal the technical plans for the very first Death Star.

Again, sort of like Doctor Strange, the plot isn't entirely inspired. Well, that's being kind of unfair, since Rogue One shares some of the baggage carried by the recent Star Wars: The Force Awakens, forced to continually remind you that you're in a “Star Wars” movie by way of little (and big, that said) references to the saga. And I think Rogue One did that better, if only because it didn't have to showcase a clearly bored Harrison Ford.

Where this film really shines is its energy and visuals. Director Gavin Hood, who also did the recent Godzilla, has a great touch for composing action within a frame. Unlike Force Awakens, which kind of suffers from its own director's obsession with keeping everything on the screen at a sort of flat, middle-distance, Rogue One perfectly establishes distance and movement.

A star destroyer pops out of hyperspace, completely filling the frame and dwarfing the half-dozen Rebellion ships with its size, and proceeds to shred them to pieces with a barrage of laser blasts. The camera tracks a squadron of X-Wing fighters, whipping to the side as they pass and then pulling behind them as if on a string as they swirl and dive down to attack a shield-generating space station. A blind mystic fights a dozen stormtroopers simultaneously, twisting and dancing, his staff flailing and smacking them on the head and foot, pure controlled chaos.

I'd also be lying if I said I didn't get a little emotional at a couple of points, but interestingly, they weren't the obvious ones (i.e. when the film was making its connections with the rest of the series). It was the smaller moments, the times in between “big moments” when the excellent cast has their banter and whatnot.

So yeah, Rogue One is great fun, a welcome addition to the saga, and I hope that more of these get made. If this new “Han Solo” movie is even close to as good, and it's Lord and Miller (“Clone High”, the Jump Street remakes, The Lego Movie) so it likely will, we're looking at an interesting new trend in the way in which Hollywood does the remake/sequel thing.

Quick Reviews: Cafe Society and Nocturnal Animals

Cafe Society. The first Woody Allen film I've seen since... Midnight in Paris? Kind of a shame, as this semi-trifle is a pretty enjoyable effort, if not a little too slight to be entirely interesting or totally memorable. Reprising their chemistry nurtured in the quite likeable Adventureland and American Ultra, Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart are still super darned cute together. It's the 30s, and Eisenberg's Billy moves from the Bronx to Hollywood to hopefully get a job from his powerful studio-mogul uncle Phil Stern (Steve Carell, nicely toned down). He immediately falls for Stewart's Vonnie, Phil's secretary. The two connect immediately, but she's got a “journalist” boyfriend that keeps them from hooking up entirely. Plot twist? The journalist isn't a journalist, it's Phil. Oh, boy.

I kind of figured the entire movie would be a screwball comedy of missed connections and delayed declarations of great loves, but Cafe Society eschews anything so simple. Allen not only edits to surprise, extending throwaway character bits beyond their narrative purpose and then popping a revelation out of the blue, but the film shifts halfway through from something cutesy to something approaching something short of depressingly realistic. Before you know it the entire affair has shifted back to New York and Blake Lively livens up the show as a stupendously hot shiksa (can I say that?  I haven't read Portnoy's Complaint recently enough to remember if it's a bad word or not) while “House of Cards”' martyr of choice Carey Stoll magnificently suspenders-it-up as a smart-talkin' gangster.

Worth seeing? Yeah, depending on your tolerance for Eisenberg and Stewart (I have an abundance of love for both). It's pretty and cute and the aforementioned shift in tone is interesting enough if not really all that novel for an Allen film. Does it look like you'll like it? You'll like it.

Nocturnal Animals. Middlebrow thrillers are pretty rare now, what with theatres now oscillating between eye candy for teams of semi-drunk office ladies on prowl and uh, hot guys in spandex flying around and tackling each other.

I haven't seen director Tom Ford's A Single Man, but now I kind of want to, just to see if it's as frustratingly nearly-there as Nocturnal Animals. A sort of a story within a story, the film has Amy Adams once again wandering around a glass house with beautiful vistas (see also: Arrival). Adams is Susan, an L.A. art dealer/curator/somethingrather who puts on high budget art shows of the kind that cultural Marxists (like myself) love but probably only make sense to other cultural Marxists or their groupies.

Susan not only hates her job, because she wishes deep down she was an actual artist, but she's in the death-throes of a horrifically casual marriage to a cheating cad (the way-too-wholesome-to-authentically-play-a-cheating-dick Armie Hammer). One morning she receives a manuscript of a novel written by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), who she dumped long ago when his failing career as an author didn't match up with her somewhat “realistic” needs for a more standard lifestyle.

The novel, dealing with Tony (also played by Gyllenhaal, surprise), deals with both the horrific assault on Tony and his wife and daughter in the Texas hinterlands and the subsequent revenge scenario. Susan, of course, reads the novel as a metaphor for their failed marriage and is immediately struck by existential dread. But as she moves further along a hope seethes within her, a hope for a return to a more idealistic time in her life, before her beauty-queen Texas mom and her consumerist, all-American values drove her to a real career and away from Edward.

This is one of those movies where your final reaction is either “oh, that's nice, I can get out of bed tomorrow” or “Oh Jesus Fuck, turn on the oven” depending on the very last shot, and on that level Nocturnal Animals is pretty good, even excellent. It has a lot to say about how the power of art is derived from our own personal reactions to how it relates to our life experience; Edward is literally using art to expose Susan to her unconscious self and it's pretty genius in that way as a dark, nearly cynical polemic on why art is so vital to human existence.

But there's something missing, some kind of directorial flourish or idiosyncrasy that you might have seen from other thriller experts like Da Palma or Verhoeven or even recent genre-apers like Jeremy Saulnier. The first few minutes is totally dynamite, opening on an art-piece consisting of buck naked, quite overweight women dancing while wielding American flags and sparklers, then cutting to visions of a smoggy, lethargic LA landscape, but after that Nocturnal Animals is stylistically sort of bland.

Worth seeing? I don't know. I think it's more of a curiosity than a must-see, a relic of earlier cinematic times. I almost want to champion it just for its ambition within the genre, but we all know that that's a slim rationale for a recommendation.  

Blue Valentine and the Lovely Transience of Love

Go, pretentiously.

There's a sense of permanence fuelling the desperation behind Valentine's Day. “If I don't have a partner for this one, I never will”. Obviously that's not the words actually flowing through singles' minds at the time, it's more of a subtext, an unconscious feeling that gives the whole thing a sort of existentialist dread. The same dread, in a way, pervades Blue Valentine. Derek Cianfrance's grungy, grimy, all close-up look at the two-day expiration of a marriage is laden with references to ageing, death, and impermanence... all framed within the context of various supposedly permanent institutions: America, capitalism, family, and most importantly (but never without ties to the others), marriage.

The film takes place in two timelines following the lives of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), one a grim procedural of what might be their last two days as a couple and the other a greatest hits tour of how they met cute and got together quick some five years prior. Cianfrance expertly flits back and forth between the two, giving us a truly insightful look at how the lives of couples are a mishmash of memory and perception and history, how both subtle, passive-aggressive jabs and brutal, knock-down arguments are often tied up with emotionally positive moments of the relationship's past.

Obviously, this isn't your typical Valentine's Day film, one that I only retroactively realized had “Valentine” in the title, weirdly enough, but while a lot of people would find it overly depressing and not in the spirit of the holiday itself, this writer would beg to differ. Of course, the (possible, goddamn spoiler alert) dissolution of a marriage is not a good thing, but Blue Valentine's aforementioned emphasis on the very ephemeral pleasures of the current moment are what I think power the film's essential meaning: find pleasure in the current moment, for it could fade and disappear at any time.

This may certainly be the waylaid desires of a critic/bachelor attempting to salvage hope from a film that, ostensibly, is about the futility and impermanence of “love”. After all, it's fucking Valentine's Day, and holy shit isn't that just a great reminder that you have failed at the Great American Dream of two cats and a fence or something.

It may be, but I've seen enough films to realize that it's not the ones that everyone else calls “depressing” that depress me. Things like your typical romantic comedy are the depressing ones, because you know there's no goddamn way your lower-middle-class butt is going to ever be that repressed millionaire who booked it halfway across Manhattan to make sure your Manic Pixie Whatever Girl doesn't get on the flight to London.

No, films like Blue Valentine, films that acknowledge that love is temporary, that love would mean absolutely freakin' nothing without the possibility that it could someday end – like life, amirite – these are life-affirming. The way in which Cianfrance muddles the timelines of the events makes the chronology of them immaterial. It doesn't matter when Dean and Cindy were so truly in love, his shitty ukulele playing and her awkward tap-dancing staging a gorgeously perfect moment of connection on a Brooklyn street, that moment is completely out of time.

In this way that I, a single man who ain't quite Hey Gurl young no more, can look back at my own past moments like this and acknowledge that their past-ness doesn't matter. I mean, you'll never see me singing with a ukulele, but I have ripped off a drunken serenade of “All of You”. It's as if love is always and will be always. And all of you in couples right now, maybe having just made love, or sitting waiting for your lover to come out of the bathroom so you can make love, or even parked on the couch Netflixing without any likely Chill to come (heh), reading this, remember that this moment is right now, but in a way it will always be always.