Saturday, November 29, 2014

Oceans of Time

Movies: Interstellar

I'm going to keep this one short because, honestly, I don't feel that I have too much to add to the conversation about Interstellar. The film has been out for nearly a month and those who were champing at the bit to see it probably already have. The critical reception has been, not tepid exactly, but not hot. I find myself in agreement with the general consensus of the critics: Interstellar is a movie that aims for greatness and achieves goodness.

If anything can be said of Christopher Nolan's latest film, it is definitely ambitious. Not just visually, but intellectually and emotionally. You get the feeling that Nolan envisioned this film as his magnum opus. Perhaps that ambition is what held the movie back from true greatness. It feels overstuffed, as if Nolan and his brother, Jonathan, who wrote the movie were like "Ok, we gotta have stuff about wormholes, and the love between a father and his daughter, and a message about environmental stability, and a sarcastic robot, and a message about how love is a force that transcends time, and a giant tidal wave, and and and..." My first impression upon leaving the movie theatre was that if Nolan had held back a little bit, or maybe had a tighter focus without the lofty philosophical messages, the movie would have been better.

Visually, Interstellar is amazing. There are any number of beautifully imagined scenes, including travel through a wormhole, a stop on a planet with tidal waves a mile high (this part of the movie was probably my favorite, and was also legitimately terrifying), and a climatic scene near the end that dares to imagine what five dimensions would actually look like--if you had a God's eye view of time itself. Accompanying these scenes is Hans Zimmer's pounding organ music score which is perfect for the film. It invokes a sense of religious reverence and adds to the feeling of mankind's puniness in the face of an endless universe. As a work of art, Interstellar succeeds.

As a work of philosophy, not so much. Beyond the science of wormholes and black holes and relativity, there is a message about love and human connection. The idea is that love is more than just a feeling and that it is in fact a force of nature itself that can even transcend time. The idea is voiced first by a teary-eyed Anne Hathaway, playing an astronaut who tries to convince her fellow space travelers to use the little fuel and time they have left to travel to a planet that her lover, Edmunds, set out to explore ten years earlier. She argues that her love for Edmunds is perhaps a signal, across the universe, that they will find the resources they need on his planet. On the one hand, wow, what a beautiful message. On the other hand, barf. I don't know why I reacted so skeptically to this part of the movie. But I just couldn't buy it, and I thought that this emotional overlay--"love conquers all, including the theory of fucking relativity"--just took away from the more interesting aspects of the film.

So that's my conclusion. Interstellar is a beautiful, but overly ambitious film. I found it unfocused and confusing at times, and wish Nolan had exercised a little more restraint. I guess the worst you can say about Interstellar is that it's a movie that aims for the moon--and lands among the stars.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Bring the Noise

Movies: Whiplash

I don't know how to begin this review except to take the Lord's name in vain as a way to express how much I loved Whiplash. Goddamn, that was a great movie.

Directed by Damien Chazelle, Whiplash is a small masterpiece. Unlike the huge epics and blatant Oscar bait commonly released during this time of year, Whiplash is small, unpretentious, and comes out of nowhere to get up in your face and slap you upside the head with its intensity. Everything about it--the fresh jazz soundtrack, the quick cuts and sharp camera angles, and the ferocity of both J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller's performances--is designed to leave you breathless.

Miles Teller plays 19-year-old Andrew Neiman, a first-year at a prestigious music conservatory who dreams of being a great jazz drummer like his idol, Buddy Rich. Andrew is plucked from his lower level music class by Terrence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) and given a shot as a drum alternate for Fletcher's elite studio band class. It becomes apparent on Andrew's first day in studio band that Fletcher is manipulative and abusive toward his students--he humiliates and insults the members of his (suspiciously all-male) class for the slightest mistake and drops and adds new members on a whim. After Fletcher spends class screaming at Andrew, slapping him in the face, and throwing a chair at his head, Andrew goes home and practices the drums until his hands bleed. So begins the emotionally abusive, practically sadomasochistic relationship between the two men: one who wants to be "one of the greats" and the other who wants to discover and, in his sick way, mentor a revolutionary musician.

There are plenty of characters in Whiplash, but they all serve as props to the central relationship between Fletcher and Andrew. This is one of the only weakness of the film. Andrew's father starts out as a solid character--taking his son to the movies, arguing that being a musical genius isn't worth it if you end up dead at 34 (as Charlie Parker did), and coming to his son's rescue when it seems that the young man might be losing it. But ultimately, Andrew's father only serves as the audience's surrogate: the voice of reason Andrew stalwartly ignores as he becomes more and more invested in meeting Fletcher's challenges.

Andrew also has a love interest who certainly could have been fleshed out as a character in her own right. Instead, she is merely a prop to reveal Andrew's youthful arrogance. He dumps her early on, implying strongly that she'll just hold him back from his destiny.

The dismissiveness with which the secondary characters are treated is mirrored in the way that Fletcher treats the other drummers in his band. Once Fletcher sees Andrew's potential, he uses the other drummers (there are three guys, including Andrew, vying for one part during a climatic scene) as a way to manipulate Andrew into performing even better. While Andrew appears single-minded in his drive to become as excellent a jazz drummer as humanly possible, Fletcher is equally focused on bringing out the talents of one special player--even if it is detrimental to the band as a whole.

Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons turn in brilliant performances. Simmons is terrifying as Fletcher, and he teeters on the brink between playing a sincerely passionate man who wants to push students beyond what they ever believed they could achieve and playing a cartoon villain. In fact, Simmons does occasionally let his inner cartoon villain come out, but he does so in such a masterful, believable way that you totally buy it. I totally bought that the young men in his studio band would put up with Fletcher's bullshit and abuse in order to have potential doors open for them down the line.

Teller, who took drum lessons in order to learn how to fake-play in this movie, captures the masculine bravado of a 19-year-old boy who is deeply talented and knows it. Andrew lives in a black and white world: it's all or nothing for him. He will either be one of the greatest musicians of his generation, or he'll be nothing.

Taken together, Simmons and Teller's performances almost blend into one. Their anger, their passion, their talent, and their disturbing willingness to use one another to accomplish their goals swirls into a fucked up teacher/student relationship like I've never seen before. And what I loved about Whiplash is Chazelle's unwillingness to come down against Fletcher's abusive teaching tactics and Teller's unhealthy single-mindedness. In fact, the end of the movie seems to suggest that Fletcher is right to push his students to their extremes and to pit students against each other in order to uncover the true talent of one particular student. The film is a blunt, stark look at what it takes to be the best. Whiplash asks "is it worth it to give up your life in service to your craft?" and it answers its own question: "for a true artist, yes."

5 out of 5 stars

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

You Don't Know Jake

Movies: Nightcrawler

I have been in love with Jake Gyllenhaal as an actor and as a stone cold fox since I saw Donnie Darko in the early 2000's. At the time, Gyllenhaal often played the weird boy next door (and occasionally, the weird boy next door in a bubble). Over a decade later, Gyllenhaal has proven more than capable to branching out into a wide variety of roles, many of which have been increasingly gritty. What I love about Gyllenhaal is that he can play his masculinity softly or he can play it hard. He's equally believable as gentle cowboy Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain or keyed up marine Anthony Swofford with an itchy trigger-finger in Jarhead. Whether he's going the buzz-cut macho route, or the shaggy-haired nerd route, Gyllenhaal has played a lot of good guys.

But now, in Dan Gilroy's shocking, sickening, and exciting Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal plays something entirely different. He plays a character who is more of a shark or a vulture than a human. He plays a sociopath with no social skills, a predator without the sexy camouflage to hide his true intentions. His character, Louis Bloom, is many things--but he most certainly isn't a good guy.

Nightcrawler opens with Louis beating up a security guard and taking his watch after he gets caught trying to cut through a wire fence. The film offers no explanation as to where Louis came from and if he has a family or friends. The director alienates the audience from Louis from the word "go". Gyllenhaal's appearance further alienates us: the actor lost about 20 pounds for this role, and boy, does extreme thinness not suit him. His normally soulful eyes bug out crazily and his face is all  painful, sharp angles. His clothes don't fit, his hair is greasy. Boy is a hot mess is what I'm saying, but it works well for the character--a man who stays up all night, driven by his obsession with finding gory video footage of car accidents and crimes to sell to a low-rated news station.

Louis is trying to break into the seedy world of freelance crime journalism. He buys a police scanner and a camcorder and uses sheer audacity to get in real close to victims of auto accidents, muggings, and shoot-outs. Louis' complete lack of empathy and boundaries allow him get great shots of people dying, covered in blood. Where would Lou be able to sell such shocking footage? To a snuff video website? Nope. He sells his graphic videos to a news station that runs the stories on the morning news. As a fellow crime journalist (played by Bill Paxton in a fun little role) puts it, "if it bleeds, it leads".

After making a few hundred bucks, Lou is inspired to take it up a notch, which includes sexually blackmailing Nina (Rene Russo), a local TV news veteran who heads up the graveyard shift at a low-rated station. After propositioning Nina, he points out that while she can walk away, so can he, leaving her station gasping like a fish for the audience ratings his bloody videos once provided. Dude knows how to woo a lady. Lou also hires a naive assistant (Riz Ahmed) who is too green to understand the lengths Lou is willing to go to get great footage. For example, beating the ambulance to the scene of a car accident and moving an injured person around to get a better shot.

Part of the fun of Nightcrawler is seeing how far Louis will go to manipulate circumstances to serve his ambitions, and the climax of the film is extremely intense. My jaw was definitely hanging open. Nightcrawler has been compared to the films of David Cronenberg, and I was reminded of his film Crash (no, not the movie about how everyone is racist, the one about people with car crash fetishes) during a car chase scene that was almost sexual in its adrenaline-pumping intensity. While I've seen far more psychologically disturbing films than Nightcrawler, this movie was a lot more physically affecting (heart pounding, hands gripping the armrests) than any movie I've seen in a long time.

Nightcrawler isn't perfect. It would have been nice if the film stood on its own merits as a thriller, but director Gilroy insists on rubbing our noses in the message (news stations manipulate viewers with messages of racism and fear!). The film feels derivative at times--almost cliche. I've read reviews that compare Gyllenhaal's performance to Robert De Niro's in Taxi Driver (quite the compliment to Gyllenhaal!) and Rene Russo's performance to Faye Dunaway in Network. While the film is most definitely good, it's not really fresh or unique.

In spite of the quibbles I have about Nightcrawler, the sheer force of Gyllenhaal's un-glamourous, wacko performance really carries the movie. The actor strips away his beauty and his leading-man machismo to reveal a feral animal underneath. The excitement of watching an already talented actor uncover new depths is as much of a thrill as any grisly video footage Louis Bloom could find on the mean streets of L.A.

4 out of 5 stars