Tis' the season to stay inside every night, Netflixin' and chillin'. Here are some movies and TV I've watched on Netflix and Amazon Prime recently.
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Ex Machina
Ex Machina is perhaps most notable for its threesome of on-the-verge stars: Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander, who are now well on their way to being in every fucking movie ever (especially Gleeson, who's had four big roles in 2015 alone).
Isaac plays Nathan, the founder of a Google-esque company. He recruits Caleb (Gleeson), a rather naive, if extremely smart in that annoying white guy way, employee of his to perform the Turing test on Nathan's top secret creation: a robot named Ava (Vikander). The test is particularly interesting because Ava *looks* like a robot, with a midsection filled with wires and a beautiful female face. Nathan wants to see if Caleb can overlook the obvious to determine whether or not Ava has a will of her own.
Yo dawg, Ava manipulates both of them, killing Nathan and using Caleb to escape Nathan's luxury compound (trapping Caleb inside). Frankly, both of those dum-dums deserved it, so I'm calling this one a happy ending.
/SPOILERS
There's a lot of potential here. For example, why did Nathan create not just a female-appearing robot, but a beautiful one? Do you think he sees women as things?? (probably). And Caleb probably sees women as things too, since clearly he can see that Ava is 100% 'bot, yet still crushes on her anyway.
The film is not terrible, but it could have gone much deeper, both intellectually and emotionally. Instead, it moves away from the realm of ideas--materialism, gender, the singularity, etc--and into the easy route of scary/sexy robot movie.
Grade: C+
***
While We're Young
Noah Bambauch is a very talented filmmaker. So talented, in fact, that his film, While We're Young, which is a 1.5 hour long straw man argument against Millennials, manages to be entertaining and sweet even though it paints both young and "old" people with a broad brush.
Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play Josh and Cornelia, a married couple in their early-mid 40's. They are upper middle-class, white, well-educated, and live in New York City. Their friend, also in their early 40's just had their first baby, which is a very middle-class, urban thing to do.
Josh and Cornelia feel a bit stuck--they are growing older, yet they don't connect 100% with their peers. Enter Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried), a married couple in their mid-20's who are auditing a film class taught by Josh at a local university. Josh is drawn to the young, painfully stereotypically Millennial couple (Darby's career is making her own ice cream, not for the money, but because she "loves it"). Cornelia is a little more reserved.
My main beef with the movie is how stereotypically hipster Darby and Jamie are (they watch VHS tapes, for crying out loud!). It's like Bambauch didn't even try to be subtle about it. I do love how, in Bambauch's vision of the world, Jamie's ambition via being a liar and a cheat is a failure of character unique to young people. Fucking LOL. Old people are just as likely (if not MORE likely) to be dirty little fucking liars as young people! Bambauch, you big ol' crank, your age lines are showing.
However, Josh's distress at realizing he was used and manipulated by Jamie gives the film a much-needed dose of real, human emotion. In a scene near the end of the film where he confronts Jamie he even says "I loved you". Which is a pretty baller statement for a man to say to another man with zero intent of romantic attraction. What Josh really means is that he loved what Jamie represented: sincerity, creativity, and the freedom of having most of your life ahead of you instead of behind you. To have that revealed as phony would be genuinely devastating.
Overall, I think While We're Young is actually one of Bambauch's more positive and accessible films, compared to some of his earlier stuff like Margot at the Wedding and The Squid and the Whale. I thought it was a funny, enjoyable film...but it would have been better if he had written Jamie and Darby to be slightly less cartoonish in their youthful, hip ways. But then again, I don't live in New York. Maybe that's how twenty-somethings actually are there.
Grade: B
***
Phoenix
Phoenix, a modest, quiet film by Christian Petzold, received rave reviews this year, with a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's the story of Nelly Lenz, a concentration camp survivor disfigured by a bullet to the face, who returns to Germany after the war to receive facial reconstruction surgery and to seek out her husband, Johnny. Her friend, Lene, who nurses Nelly back to health, is convinced that Johnny betrayed Nelly to the Nazis. But Nelly still carries a torch for him.
When she does find Johnny, he doesn't recognize her...although he tells her she looks "similar" to his wife, whom he believes died in the camps. Not knowing that Nelly really is his wife, he encourages her to dress and act like Nelly so that they can pretend she survived the camps, receive her inheritance from her dead relatives, and split the money. Nelly agrees to this scheme, while refusing to believe that Johnny betrayed her.
While Phoenix was a really good film, I didn't connect with it all that much. Actress Nina Hoss does an excellent job of playing Nelly as a shell-shocked victim in recovery. She is stiff, quiet, and emotionally walled off. Her physical appearance changes from bandaged to bruised to disheveled to beautiful, and she's certainly not afraid to look "ugly". Actor Ronald Zehrfeld as Johnny is not quite as good. It's hard to get a handle on what this guy's motivation is--is he a coward? Is he greedy? Does he still love his wife? Did he never care for her at all?
Phoenix, though good, is ultimately as impenetrable and distant as Nelly herself.
Grade B
***
Black Mirror: White Christmas
I binged my way through Black Mirror, the cultish "British Twilight Zone" TV series, during December 2014 like many other pop culture fanatics, and was very excited to watch Black Mirror's sick version of a "Christmas special" when it popped up on Netflix a couple weeks ago. I was not disappointed.
Starring Jon Hamm, a Good and Hot Actor, the 73 minute episode plays out in an isolated cabin in the dead of winter. Hamm plays Matt, who draws out Potter (Rafe Spall), the introverted, sulky coworker he shares the cabin with (what their job entails is never explained), by telling him stories about his life before the cabin. He then asks Potter to share what brought him to the cabin as well.
Most Black Mirror episodes take place in a not too distant future where technology has given humans the opportunity to do great things...and also fuck ourselves horrible...and this ep is no different. I won't go into any details, but White Christmas feel akin to the episodes "The Entire History of You", in which people use otherwise cool technology to do stupid shit and torture themselves, and "White Bear", in which technology is used to punish wrongdoers (and usually the punishment is WAY harsher than the crime). White Christmas includes both tech that is cool but that we would ultimately regret using and tech-as-punishment as well.
Black Mirror is pretty tech phobic, although it's always the people who use the tech who are the authors of their own and others' suffering. It's like the saying "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." In the case of Black Mirror, technology evolves more quickly than humanity does, thus we, a selfish, hypocritical, sadistic people use technology to make ourselves and others miserable. White Christmas, like the other episodes of the series, hits all those uncomfortable, tragic spots. It's classy, intellectual pessimism.
Grade: A-
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