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Avengers: Age of Ultron

Marvel’s latest blockbuster is a mess too beholden to plot threads of the MCU, and James Spader’s great Ultron can’t save it.

Marvel has been branding their Cinematic Universe in such a way that each subsequent film teases the next, and all seem to be building to something. “Avengers: Age of Ultron” should be that moment, but it doesn’t feel like the culmination of all that’s come before. Worse, it doesn’t even feel like an “Avengers” movie.

With 2011’s “The Avengers”, director Joss Whedon did successfully juggle the many characters who showed up in Marvel’s “Phase One”, and he seemed to wink at the camera while doing so, allowing these big personalities to clash and poke fun in a way that returned the color, fun and originality to what had become an increasingly dense, plot driven series.

“Age of Ultron” doesn’t allow its characters to grapple with a major story as a team. It’s a super mess full of forced backstories and plot threads to past and future movies. Black Widow and Bruce Banner are given an unlikely and unexpected tortured romance while trying to battle their demons. Iron Man hints at fracturing from the team as he will in “Captain America: Civil War”, but feels half-baked and underdeveloped here. Thor disappears from the team to fulfill a nonsensical side plot in a Nordic cave. Hawkeye suddenly has family melodrama on a reclusive farm that slows the film to a halt. And new additions are given neither the screen time nor the emotional heft to truly make an impact.

If Marvel isn’t building to this and still hasn’t arrived at their best, what are we waiting for?

In the film’s opening shot, Whedon weaves through the forest of a fictional Russian-esque country as the Avengers stage an attack on a compound. It’s an unbroken take (achieved through digital trickery) that unnaturally circles the area in an effort to showcase each hero one by one as they deal with some baddies, all before catching them all lunging forward at once in a poster-ready screen grab. It’s emblematic of how “Age of Ultron” both looks and feels, in which Whedon is really just showing off. Some of these elaborate, but not stylish shots only remind how much is going on.

Like the camera, the plot also fails to stay fixated in one place. Upon reaching the compound, they retrieve Loki’s scepter. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) plan to research it in an attempt to create a brilliant form of artificial intelligence that can provide peace on Earth somehow. They inadvertently succeed but manage to create Ultron (voiced by James Spader), a highly intelligent program that in no time flat deduces that the only way to achieve peace is to eliminate The Avengers and evolve mankind through extinction.

Ultron brings to the film possibly Marvel’s first actual theme and message, and he proves to be arguably the best super villain Marvel has dreamed up. He repeatedly sings “I’ve Got No Strings” from “Pinocchio” to show he’s not one of Iron Man’s puppets, and his principled ideas about the evolution of intelligent life resound with the weight of countless sci-fi films before it. “Age of Ultron’s” ideas about AI and the folly of man may not be profound, but delivered with Spader’s quick, dry, ironic tone, it’s convincing.

But as for making a convincing narrative and objective for Ultron, Whedon is far less successful. As a villain, Ultron is convenient. He exists in the Internet! He’s unstoppable, and always one step ahead. So when his plan is revealed to make a tangible version of himself, it seems like a step in the wrong evolutionary direction. But even that plan fizzles out to make way for yet another new character, and the resulting final battle is The Avengers taking on thousands of disposable metal baddies. The action sequences feel like a rehash of not just the chaotic spectacle at the end of “The Avengers”, but of “Iron Man 3” for how many Stark-powered enemies they’re forced to bring down.

Whedon has more luck with a battle between Iron Man and a hypnotized Hulk in a crowded city. It isolates the action on two figures and smashes things up real good. Yet it too blends in with the chaos at the Russian compound, then in the African warehouse, then in the Russian city. Marvel seems unable to stage a compelling set piece that doesn’t involve a million moving parts in a busy area.

These scenes are so unmemorable because they lack suspense. They’re hugely bloodless and without any of the dark edges of Christopher Nolan’s or Zack Snyder’s superhero attempts. Marvel also doesn’t see the need to make us care for these characters again, as they’ve already done so in previous films. But it’s easy to forget what makes Tony Stark heroic and likeable in the first place, not least of which because he’s been separated from the brilliant, charming chemistry he has with Pepper Potts (the movie makes a quick, cheap concession to explain why Gwyneth Paltrow and Natalie Portman are missing).

When the action does settle down, Whedon brings his trademark smarm to the party, particularly in a scene where all the Avengers try to lift Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) hammer and find themselves unworthy. These characters have shades and nuance, but under Whedon’s dialogue they all seem like the same cocky adventurers with a quick act of wordplay here and a too-clever high-brow pop culture reference the next.

But Whedon has interesting things to work with, and you wish Marvel would withhold flashbacks of Black Widow’s (Scarlett Johansson) assassin up-bringing for her own movie and condense the two hour, 20 minute run time of this one. Johansson is arguably the standout of this franchise, and her interactions with Ruffalo are the closest Marvel has gotten to making Hulk’s werewolf curse understandable and believable.

“Age of Ultron” isn’t a movie though; it’s seven movies, and none of them stick. Marvel has to quit making teases for their next Big Thing and make that movie today.

2 ½ stars

Ex Machina

Alex Garland’s directorial debut sci-fi about artificial intelligence starring Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson.

In Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina”, Ava (Alicia Vikander) is a highly receptive robot who can speak, interact, have an intelligent conversation, tell jokes, flirt, and possibly display the true signs of human intelligence. In a conversation with the protagonist Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), she can pick up on the “micro expressions” in his face and tell that he’s lying, that he’s uncomfortable or that he may even be in love. She’s gifted with tiny details that make her personality so memorable.

“Ex Machina” succeeds not on the broad strokes of its clever sci-fi premise, but in the little “micro expressions” that define its character, style, ideas, thrilling pulse, and entrancing tone. It’s a finely tuned machine of a movie, with beauty and excitement that make it human.

When we meet Caleb, his computer is sizing him up from his web cam. His expressions and his excitement are recorded as he learns he has won a prestigious contest. Deep in reclusive Alaskan forests, Caleb arrives by helicopter to the subterranean home of Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a computer genius who we learn is the mastermind behind the world’s most widely used search engine, Blue Book. Caleb is one of his star coders, and as part of this contest, he has been chosen to observe and test Nathan’s latest creation, a super sophisticated version of Artificial Intelligence known as Ava. Caleb’s goal will be to take The Turing Test, and see if by the end of his week stay he still knows he’s talking to a robot.

Garland treats this concept with an elegant, fine touch. Caleb’s arrival at Nathan’s secret facility isn’t announced or explained as a procedural, but is gradually understood. Already we feel like a rat in a maze, with the sterile colors, no windows and low ceilings and corridors that make us feel both trapped and observed. Isaac’s performance as Nathan too is highly adept. We’ve been given only background details that he’s a computer genius and a titan of industry, but even before we know that, Isaac makes him to be an uncomfortable figure nothing like we expected. He’s a casual, cavalier bro, the kind of alpha, powerful figure so comfortable in his own skin that he makes others feel nervous around him.

But Vikander is the real star of the show. Garland has given Ava a slender, silvery sleek figure. She has a human face molded over a metal frame, and we can peer through her shimmering, metallic body to see her inner workings. Garland has done this such that we can literally see inside her, spiritually and physically.

Caleb is placed in a small room with see through glass separating him from Ava while Nathan observes. He asks questions about her past and her hobbies, and she proves to be charming and candid. Vikander’s quiet, yet open performance allows her to delicately toe the line between AI and Caleb’s immediate dream girl. Vikander is a former ballerina, and Ava has the grace of one. But Nathan and Caleb wonder if she’s for real, or if she’s an incredible simulation of a person having a conversation.

In later sessions, Ava makes jokes and asks about Caleb’s own past and hobbies. “Ex Machina” at this point starts to resemble a hybrid of Spike Jonze’s “Her” and Shane Carruth’s “Primer”, with a beautiful affectation for a computerized presence emerging out of thin air, all while the suspicion of Nathan’s test and of the discussion of science and AI theory create a simmering tension.

But Garland has more up his sleeve, and his ideas offer both a powerful insight into human nature while rewriting some of the rules of artificial intelligence in science fiction. We’ve been told that robots cannot feel love or emotion, but “Ex Machina” is the first film that would beg to differ. Why does the robot need sexuality, Caleb questions? Humans weren’t programmed to love or feel attractions, but then of course we were. These animal urges aren’t learned but are instinctual and automatic, coded into our DNA. The idea is Garland’s additional jab at men, with Nathan’s brutish, often drunken behavior and disregard for his servant Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) suggest man’s base desire to control women and dream of creating an ideal woman. It’s no coincidence then that Ava is a “female”.

Garland goes deeper and suggests through a chilling look at the transparency of the digital age that search engines have come to understand how humans think, not just what we’re thinking. It is another detail in Garland’s modest scale that helps add up to important spiritual questions. “Is it strange to have made something that hates you,” Ava asks of her creator. Nathan’s character is constantly a curious one because he could be playing God, or he could be just tinkering with a computer program with emotions that are an illusion. He could be a dangerous loose cannon, or he could be more innocent and clueless than he lets on.

Some critics have argued that Garland’s film ends predictably, and that it lacks a compelling and surprising Deus Ex Machina from which the film draws its name. But what remains unexpected is just what note Garland chooses to end this story on. Throughout “Ex Machina” he has been juggling tones of surreal suspense and touching romance, and while any number of endings could have put it closer in line with “Blade Runner,” “Moon” or “A.I.”, Garland chooses one that’s all his own, one that spins what it means to be human in a darker and unexpected light.

4 stars

It Follows

David Robert Mitchell’s indie horror film is directly about sex and the fear of being watched.

Sex has long gone hand in hand with horror films. The promiscuous girl among a handful of teens in a cabin in the woods is always the first to go, and the virgin always lives to tell her tale. As that cliché grows more prevalent, more and more horror films have attempted to subvert it.

The genius of “It Follows”, by far the best horror movie in recent memory, indie or otherwise, is that sex is no allegory. Director David Robert Mitchell uses horror to directly implicate the person committing the dirty deed, and the consequences “It Follows” suggests feel that much more real and disturbing.

Jay (Maika Monroe) is a young teen living a peaceful life in the suburbs with several friends and admirers. While swimming in her backyard pool, some young neighbors spy on her from the bushes, and it’s easy to see why. Her friends label her stupidly pretty, her room is lighted with misty, dreamy shades, and her friends feel her childhood friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist) is obsessed and won’t be able to keep it in his pants.

Jay ends up sleeping with a boy named Hugh (Jake Weary), and as soon as they finish, he drugs her and ties her to a wheelchair in an abandoned parking garage. “You won’t believe me, but you have to listen,” Hugh explains, claiming its for Jay’s own good. Something will follow you wherever you go, and it will try and kill you. It may look like someone you know or someone you’ve never seen before, and it will be invisible to everyone else. But he explains if she sleeps with someone else, she’ll pass it along, just as he did to her.

This is a real fear. It could be an STD. It could be the stigma of being labeled a slut. Then there’s the moral concern of knowingly passing that shame along. Whatever the circumstance, for some, sex changes you, and the lingering feeling doesn’t go away.

Mitchell doesn’t make a point of it though; the reality is that these people following Jay are as plain as day, and we’re given all the time in the world to process this cold, disturbing figure that does little more than lurk. Jay’s followers are typically nude or partially clothed. They can be young or old, but more often beaten and bruised as though they died that way, and their scantily clad appearance only strengthens the case for abstinence.

More so than just sex, “It Follows” is about the fear of being watched. The opening shot places the camera square in the center of the road and finds a partially clothed girl fleeing from her home. The camera rotates to some other neighbors, never breaking, and the perspective is that of an onlooker; the only danger we see is the one that feels obvious to her. In other moments the camera is fixed on Jay (if not tethered in the gripping wheelchair sequence) but receptive to her peripheral surroundings. The fear that any figure on the horizon might be “It” is a palpable one. And because Mitchell plays with our sense of perspective, it’s unsure when it’s safe to not look over our shoulder.

For a movie concerned with sex, there is no sexuality to be found in “It Follows”. Jay sleeps with her hunky friend Greg (Daniel Zovatto) in the hopes he might be able to see “It” and protect her. Later Jay sleeps with strangers on a boat in an attempt to pass “It” off. And she hopes to save her meeker, nicer friend Paul from the same fate.

Though “It Follows” might scare some teens from sex, Mitchell’s film isn’t puritanical. Paul’s male perspective is one handled a lot on screen, horror movies aside. Why does the cute girl always overlook the nice guy and go for the hunky jerk? But “It Follows” is Jay’s story, not Paul’s. The reality is that there’s more to a woman’s choices than meets the eye. It’s a powerful feminist statement packaged in a creepy thriller, and the real horror is that in the film’s ambiguous ending, the act of sex may be rendered completely sexless. That’s scary.

3 ½ stars

Still Alice

Julianne Moore is a revelation in the modest film about Alzheimer’s disease.

Though most fictional movies are not trying to be documentaries, there’s a desire we crave for authenticity in characters, storytelling and habits. To make a truly “authentic” movie about a woman suffering from a disease or disability might not be much of a movie at all. People grow old and sick, and those affected try to adapt and move on.

“Still Alice” tells the story of a woman struggling with Early Onset Alzheimer’s, and it’s a modest movie without the added frills or melodramatic hooks of adversity, romance or history that attempt to turn a story about disability into a more traditional narrative. In that way, “Still Alice”, along with Julianne Moore’s impeccable performance, feels like the most authentic movie about Alzheimer’s yet.

So many disability movies involve characters that are defined by their disabilities. Watching “The Theory of Everything,” you’d be fooled into believing that all Stephen Hawking did in his life was have Lou Gehrig’s disease. And for the bulk of “Still Alice”, that’s all Alice Howland (Moore) is: a 50-year-old woman with Early Onset Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t delve deep into her past or explore her life outside of her family, but what Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s film does is tell the story of a woman who fears losing herself, both physically and symbolically. Alzheimer’s is just a means to that end.

Alice is a renowned professor of communication at Columbia College, and her life’s work of research is also her life. She’s a woman who thrives on her intellect and her family, and that seems to be enough. She goes running on campus and uses practically made-up words like “Hadj” to win at her Words With Friends obsession.

Alice’s very first mental slip-ups are so miniscule that you could miss them; her family certainly does. After one run on campus, the world around her turns into a blur, the camera spinning dizzily around Alice’s head. Moore’s breathing gets heavy, and the fear that Alice has no idea where she is sinks in.

In one very economical scene, Alice visits a neurologist and goes under a quick evaluation. In a static shot captivated with Moore’s plain, confident work, the camera never breaks, and we never see the doctor’s face. Such a long look seems to put our minds at ease, but it doesn’t stop Alice from testing herself in creative ways, writing words on a chalkboard to see if she can remember them minutes later, or posing questions to herself in notes on her phone.

When the news is confirmed, Alice’s bigger fear is passing the disease on to her children. Her oldest Anna (Kate Bosworth) is successful, married and about to have kids. Her middle son Tom (Hunter Parrish) is just through medical school. And her youngest Lydia (Kristen Stewart) has skipped college and is working to be an actress in L.A.

The whole family is intimate, conversational, understanding, and the movie focuses in on the pain Alice is feeling by making it clear how her disease impacts the life choices of those closest to her.

“I wish I had cancer,” Alice says in plainly cynical terms. With cancer, people understand. But with something like Alzheimer’s, it changes you, and it changes how people perceive you, she believes. “Still Alice” isn’t about the fight to beat the disease, but about how Alice maintains her resourcefulness, intuition and in turn her identity even as her condition worsens, be it in wetting herself because she can’t remember where the bathroom is, or in blindly reading Lydia’s private diary without realizing what it contains.

Why “Still Alice” must be valued above all is that it’s a movie with a middle-aged woman at its core who is experiencing challenges, hardship and emotional peril like a relatable human being. It passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors, and Moore proves to be a revelation, an every woman symbol when there are so few others in the movies. She can be witty, droll and confident but can also fall to pieces in an instant. And her work matches the tonal modesty of the film. Free of clear delineations of time, she goes through a slow, but radical physical transformation and feels convincing at every stage. And in a long career, it’s not a stretch to say this is possibly Moore’s best work.

There’s a sense that “Still Alice” could go further. The directors hint at tension between Anna and Lydia that if explored further could’ve complicated the family’s decision about what to do with their mother. And both daughters are served with devastating news as a result of their mother’s diagnosis, but the degree to which their lives change goes unexplored.

Further, compared to a film like Sarah Polley’s “Away From Her”, “Still Alice” lacks a romantic angle that could help elevate it in terms of cinematic storytelling. But what remains is hardly the shell of a movie, a character or a person; it’s still Alice.

3 ½ stars

Out of the Furnace

Christian Bale and Casey Affleck star in Scott Cooper’s grim Americana noir.

There’s a moment in “Out of the Furnace” when a backwoods, villainous hick named Harlan DeGroat has a deer skinned to its bones hanging from the ceiling. The imagery calls to mind something absolutely raw, as though this bleak look at Americana symbolized all that’s emotional and open about the people who live this way. But Director Scott Cooper’s prized trophy doesn’t have that much meat on its bones to begin with. “Out of the Furnace” feels frustratingly unspecific, empty and generic, no matter how gritty the characters are.

It starts as a story of two brothers grappling with the complications of poverty, crumbling industry, crime, family, violence and more before taking a left turn as a revenge story driven by not much at all. Cooper has loaded his film with imagery and personalities full of gravitas as though that were enough.

Russell and Rodney Baze (Christian Bale and Casey Affleck) are two good ‘ole boys with little to their name beyond their factory jobs and their truck. Russell has a girlfriend he loves dearly (Zoe Saldana) and a father on his death bed, but he’s yanked violently from those loves when he gets involved in a drunk driving wreck that kills a woman and child. While his brother lies in prison, Rodney has lost thousands gambling and looks to repay his debts through illegal bare-knuckle brawls. As a former soldier, fighting seems to be all he knows.

Rodney eventually finds his way to the most rural of rural areas, where the meth dealer and backwoods boss Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson) has organized a fight that gets Rodney in trouble. Russell, now free from prison, looks to rescue his brother and bring him back home.

These are men full of rage, anger and addiction, but none of it seems specific or tied to a real backstory or social issue. That Rodney is driven to fight as a result of his veteran status is treated as a given. The police claim they have no jurisdiction in Harlan’s gangster society up in the hills, and yet their dynamic as criminals seem to have no real impact on Anytown, USA where “Out of the Furnace” is set. Rodney is forced to take a dive during his fight, but it’s never explained why there should be an unspoken tension and danger between Harlan and Rodney’s manager (Willem Dafoe). “Am I supposed to be scared because he sucks on a lollipop,” Rodney asks of Harlan. Cooper struggles to explain why we should be afraid of Harlan, but with a line like this he calls attention to how cartoonishly cliché and short tempered Harrelson’s character is in the first place.

In fact all of the industrial, Americana imagery in the film contains an understated melodrama but doesn’t seem to signify much of anything in particular. Saldana is the film’s only named female character, and she’s given absolutely zero to do. And Bale’s Russell is the protagonist, but possibly only to serve as an ironic counterpoint to his more troubled brother. “Out of the Furnace” ends on a heavy note, and the cinematography makes it to be a movie of purpose, but it’s without much purpose at all.

2 ½ stars

Into the Woods

Rob Marshall adapted Stephen Sondheim’s 1987 musical in this mash-up of classic fairy tales.

Do we really need another movie or show that reimagines old fairy tales? How many different ways can we tell the story of Cinderella? Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Into the Woods” first premiered in 1987, but since then the spirit of taking beloved childhood properties and twisting their meanings to play up the dark imagery and fables at their core has exploded into pop culture. It hardly seems new to suggest that the Little Red Riding Hood story has gross undertones of, perhaps, pedophilia or otherwise. Ooh, how sinister.

And yet here we have Rob Marshall’s live action film adaptation of “Into the Woods”, which reimagines the fairy tales yet again but has defanged them even further. Marshall’s film is hardly as subversive or as slyly perverse as its subject matter, either by Sondheim or Brother Grimm, suggests. And like all the worst film adaptations of Broadway stage musicals, it pays more lip service to the theater than it does to cinema. “Into the Woods” often looks cheap and visually uninteresting, stimulated only by some above average singing.

Sondheim’s story is a mash-up of several popular childhood fables, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel, all brought together by a baker and his wife (James Corden and Emily Blunt) who cannot conceive a child. They’ve been cursed by a witch (Meryl Streep) and can only break the spell by collecting four items, one belonging to each of the fairy tale characters. Their paths intersect in one of those frustrating cast numbers that look great when everyone is participating and moving on stage, but meander and jump around as a result of incessant film editing.

Streep is really the star of the show, going big and broad and bold in the way only she can and owning her songs. Constantly she’s stalking and hunching over with a grimace and dominating the screen. She’s only matched in hammy overacting by Chris Pine as Prince Charming, who may be both the best and worst part of the film. He has a so-dumb-it’s-amazing number called “Agony” in which Sondheim’s composition itself is dripping in self-aware swells, only enhanced by Pine nonchalantly brandishing his chest and tossing around his golden locks as though he were blissfully unaware of his masculinity.

Marshall however plays it mostly (ahem) close to the chest, allowing the actors to do all the heavy lifting. Say what you will about 2013’s ugly looking “Les Miserables,” but the film at the very least had a style. Some of the sets look flat out cheap, and by the film’s climax involving giants descending from the beanstalk, Marshall tries to pay homage to the original production by hiding them within the scenery, but it looks more like the budget simply ran short.

Only by “Into the Woods’s” end do the characters start to get a sense of depth as flawed figures. One song points the finger at every character and their intersecting mishaps, and it reveals themes of parenting, family, abandonment and more.

Surely Sondheim’s original production has its ardent supporters for this very reason, but Marshall just wants to put the musical on the big screen again. Hollywood has lamented the loss of popularity for the movie musical, but part of that decline might stem from only making films that can have a slavish devotion to a beloved source material. Put an original property in Marshall’s hands, and he’s talented enough to do more with what he’s done to Sondheim.

2 ½ stars

The Imitation Game

Morten Tyldum tells the life story of Alan Turing and his important work creating the first computer during World War II to win the war.

No one goes into making a movie trying to make an “Oscar movie”, which with eight nominations and Best Picture frontrunner status, “The Imitation Game” has easily been for some time. But a director will go into a film trying to convey a person’s importance. Those fawning biopic qualities of genius in Morten Tyldum’s film overshadow the crafty genre picture of numbers and intellect waiting to be decoded.

“The Imitation Game” depicts the life work of Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), a British mathematician who invented a machine designed to break the Nazi code Enigma during World War II. Thousands of messages were sent via this decryption machine during wartime, crippling Allied intelligence in the process. The machine was so sophisticated that it was thought unbreakable.

When Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) conveys to Turing the stakes of not being able to crack this code, “The Imitation Game” shines. “Do you know how many people have died at the hands of Enigma? Three. While we’ve been having this conversation.” He gives Turing the impossible odds, and Tyldum appeals to the audience’s gamesmanship. It’s a riddle, and by explaining how code breaking works and how Turing learned to decipher codes as a child, we feel a little smarter watching it.

In something like “A Beautiful Mind”, that was almost enough. The logic behind John Nash’s theories and cryptography made for compelling filmmaking. But Tyldum tries to tie all of Turing’s number crunching into work befitting Mozart or Steve Jobs. “Think of it as an Electrical Brain. A Digital Computer,” he explains in laymen’s terms and putting the careful emphasis on “computer” to his colleague and sort of love interest Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley). You see, not only did Turing single handedly win World War II by breaking an unbreakable Nazi code, but he also single handedly invented the one tool that defines every aspect of modern society. Isn’t he great?

Most traditional biopics have only determined two personality types for people of unspeakable genius: the overconfident and smug visionary or the awkward, anti-social nerd. Both end up being assholes in one way or another. Much like Russell Crowe’s work as John Nash, Cumberbatch’s performance places him into the latter category, sputtering through dialogue, looking fervently at his shoes, avoiding eye contact, missing social cues and acting generally blunt, deadpan and slyly witty.

It’s admirable work, and Cumberbatch’s chemistry with Knightley brings out the film’s understated social politics. She was forced to work in secret on Turing’s team because it was deemed inappropriate for a woman to be in the company of men on the job, and he was forced to mask his homosexuality, two details that give the film an added layer of dramatic tension.

Beyond that, “The Imitation Game” somewhat lacks in creating real drama. Cooped up inside offices and missing any war footage, the stakes aren’t truly obvious for Turing and his team until late in the film when they finally crack one, torn between how this new intelligence and their new power can shape the war. Tyldum then amps up the personal melodrama of Turing’s childhood and the “importance of what he’s doing here” in a way that screams prestige.

As a British period drama about a genius, “The Imitation Game” has perhaps wrongly been compared to “The Theory of Everything.” But Tyldum’s film views his genius with more depth than James Marsh does, and even if in the grand scheme of history Turing is less important than Stephen Hawking, he puts enough weight and excitement into the film to convince otherwise.

3 stars

Goodbye to Language 3D

Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D visual experiment is ambitious and groundbreaking, but he’s found himself on the wrong side of history.

Jean-Luc Godard has been innovating and testing the limits of cinema for over 50 years. This is the man who effectively invented the jump cut decades ahead of its time. His vision and his legacy are unspeakable. With his latest film “Goodbye to Language 3-D” he has found himself ahead of history yet again and this time possibly on the wrong side of it.

Using new 3-D to shatter rules of composition and clarity and break down his audience’s comprehension of cinema, “Goodbye to Language” becomes an excruciatingly nonsensical experiment. A narrative is nonexistent. Concrete themes and philosophies are beside the point. Watching it is physically painful, as Godard stages a visual and aural assault on your senses with his cinematography and sound mixing. There is a dog, poop and naked people.

The title “Goodbye to Language” is certainly apt, as Godard has done away with the traditional tools and building blocks we use to communicate. These expectations and rules are constructs that muddle our interpretation of the world; they demand to be broken. But he’s also discarded emotions that would allow us to feel anything while watching his latest avant-garde opus.

Less a movie and more a visual essay, “Goodbye to Language” combines the lives of two couples, one introduced through the subtitle “Nature”, the other through “Metaphor”. The two mirror each other closely to the point of repetition, and the barrage of images toy with our mood at every moment. Students discuss Hitler and literature while operating their smartphones backwards. Over saturated bursts of color adorn babbling brooks and children wandering a prairie. Flashes of Old Hollywood relics interrupt the contemporary. Later, a couple will wander their home in the nude. While the man of the house defecates, he explains that pooping is the only true form of human equality. The woman is not amused, and she’s seen holding a plate of fruit in what A.O. Scott calls “a moment of naturalistic surrealism” in which two major genres of painting have been combined.

Thus judging all this as a movie as we know it betrays the spirit of the work, and Scott again quotes Susan Sontag in arguing “Against Interpretation” and the need to derive a cogent meaning from something constructed out of broken tools.

And yet the film’s most telling shot, one that has been championed as the shot of the year, also highlights “Goodbye to Language’s” failing as visual art on par with Godard’s more charming or emotionally fraught forays into art film over the course of his career.

Godard’s Director of Photography Fabrice Aragno found a way to separate the two images that make up a 3-D image and then rejoin them later in the take. In context of the film, a woman is talking with an older man, but she is then violently pulled away from the conversation and affronted with a gun. The image however rests on both scenes at once, with the overlapping images produced by both the right and left cameras in conflict with one another. The shot is designed such that by closing one eye and opening the other, you can choose which image to view. Taken together, the effect is physically jarring and painful to view, obfuscating anything coherent within the frame. Godard even pulls the same trick again later, this time with a man’s genitals and a woman’s.

In the short time that 3-D has been an available tool for filmmaking and something more than just a gimmick, rules have been put in place designed to simulate how the human eye functions and how to create an illusion of depth. In every use of 3-D during the film, Godard deliberately goes against these norms. Why recreate something you can already see with your eye when you have the technology to imagine something new? There’s texture and depth in the frame but we’re forced to adjust our POV, and nothing on screen is made to look naturalistic to how our eyes would perceive the world.

Using 3-D the way he has, Godard has made a brilliant point, and he’s accomplished something no filmmaker has yet dreamed to attempt technologically. But the way he’s chosen to make this point feels like a direct affront on the viewer. These images are designed to be painful, they’re made to wreck everything we think we know about cinema. With a less high brow, pretentious work of art, we might call that trolling.

Part of me feels like a curmudgeon, casting scorn on something I simply don’t understand and am under prepared for. Many a critic looked like a fool years after they laughed “Breathless” out of the room. They despised Godard’s rapid editing and guerrilla visual style because it went against years of traditional filmmaking that worked just fine. Is it possible that “Goodbye to Language” represents a next wave of filmmaking we can’t yet predict? Will 3-D find a way into a film’s narrative fabric in a way Godard has laid the groundwork for here?

The difference between “Goodbye to Language” and “Breathless” is that with his first film Godard started a New Wave. He and his French peers saw style in certain American films and sought to reinvent their ideas and aesthetic in a way that could accelerate and push film forward. “Goodbye to Language” arrives as part of a technological New Wave, and with Godard’s apparent rejection of the ideas already established, he now seems determined to hold the movies back.

1 star

56 Up

Michael Apted’s touching portrait of life continues with all the subjects now at age 56.

Though Michael Apted’s series of “Up” documentaries typically get pegged as pinnacle achievements in documentary film, they’re actually landmarks of television. This was reality TV before the genre was a thing, and for possibly the only time in the genre’s history, the subjects were somewhat reluctant and unwilling participants.

“I have this ridiculous sense of loyalty to [this series] even though I hate it,” says a now 56-year-old Suzy to Apted. “56 Up” is simply yet another installment in the longest running franchise in history. It reacquaints us with characters we’ve already met and grown to admire, and they’re now at an age and a point in history when they finally seem to get it. This is TV, and like any program, you want to see what happens next and how it will all end.

But also like television, contemporary streaming services have made it possible to binge watch over 50 years of a person’s life in a couple of days, cutting down the wait time of seven years that has followed the most loyal patrons of the program. Having come to the series in this way, it becomes clear why the “Up” series is typically classified as a set of films: each installment is about something new. My assessment of all the films looked at how the overall theme of “21 Up” was not the same as what we see by “49 Up.” The characters have grown mentally and physically, the line of questioning has changed, their ideas have evolved, and Apted finds a new thing to say about people in this point of their lives.

“56 Up” is a film about looking back fondly on what’s come before. Many of the subjects this time around are optimistic, have no regrets (even though they surely have before), they’re humble about their successes in life and at ease with the moments of pain. In “49 Up”, Apted asked them all a question about what they think of the program as a whole, and all 14 treated it as something of a “pill of poison” every seven years. Now at 56, they finally seem to get the point.

“It’s a picture of everyone, of any person and how they change,” says Nick, one of the series’ most interesting and humorous subjects. Meeting with Suzy for the purposes of doing a joint interview (just one more of Apted’s pleasant surprises and developments that he still manages to find time after time), they share how when they watch the finished product, essentially a 15 minute clip, they react by saying, “That’s all there is to me?”

Though the “Up” documentaries give us insight into the lives of these 14 individuals, fan favorite Neil is quick to point out that people don’t really know him, and that their avatars make up a better picture of “someone”. We don’t know these people in particular, but we know people like them, and we see ourselves in one, if not all of them.

Just as with any film in the series, some of the patrons have had some tough times, revealing depth, struggle and pain going on behind the scenes. For Jackie in just the span of the last seven years, her ex-husband was killed in a car wreck while suffering through cancer, all days before their first child was born. Now she’s begging David Cameron to find her a job in her condition after losing her benefits.

Others like Peter, who left the franchise after age 21, announces plainly that he’s back to promote his band The Good Intentions. His life has not been full of tragedy, but his trajectory that led to this time in his life and the poignant reason as to why he left the series in the first place, is not completely unlike Jackie’s more tragic story.

Apted has again found touching surprises upon his latest visit, some more impressive than the others, and though the film alone is not mind-blowingly different from all the ones that have come before, it’s a reminder of how important the collective whole is.

Writing now two years after the filming and release of “56 Up”, we’ve learned that Lynn Johnson has passed away, the first of the series. If we do get a “63 Up”, Apted will face yet another new challenge, but looking at the quality of this latest film, this portrait can only get richer.

4 stars

Lucy

Luc Besson’s action/sci-fi “Lucy” is a film about no limits, and this wacky film seems to have none.

Luc Besson’s “Lucy” is a mad genius mash-up of “The Tree of Life”, “The Matrix” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Its script, concept and sheer disdain for rules or accurate science make it laugh out loud ridiculous, but in doing so it becomes purely inventive and cinematic. “Lucy” is about no limits via the power of your mind, and this film seems to have none. It’s a wacky blast of an action/sci-fi that in just 90 minutes simply doesn’t stop.

Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, and her performance matches the alien precision, depth and control she brought to this year’s seriously weird “Under the Skin”. In it, Lucy is a clueless blonde tourist bullied by her new boyfriend into delivering a briefcase into a hotel. As she reaches the front desk, the boyfriend is killed, and she’s taken upstairs to a group of Japanese mobsters. They pressure her to open the case, fearing it may explode, and all the while, all too on-the-nose images of cheetahs stalking their prey intercut between the action. It’s obvious, overwrought symbolism but builds powerful energy into every moment.

Like Lucy, we’re totally in the dark. Besson makes it feel as though anything can happen next, and it does. After the case is opened, Lucy finds four packets of blue crystals that turn out to be a new drug. A junkie is forced to try the drug, he throws his head back in a conniption, laughs in Lucy’s face and subsequently has his head blown off. Lucy is then transformed into an unwilling drug mule, forced to carry the bag of drugs surgically placed in her intestines. Nothing’s happened yet and all ready this movie is bananas.

Cut to Morgan Freeman giving a lecture about how we only use 10 percent of our brain’s capacity. It seems completely random, and a seemingly odd moment to lay out the film’s bizarre premise and pseudo science. The natural images flashed during his presentation bring to mind some Terrence Malick movie in awe of the possibilities of the universe. It’s all token stock footage, but it’s made all the more unusual by their placement.

And in no time at all, Lucy is on the friggin’ ceiling. The bag of drugs gets released into Lucy’s bloodstream, unlocking additional parts of her brain that give her increasingly limitless telekinetic power. In a flash, she grabs a gun and murders her captors, inhales food and pulls a bullet out of her shoulder; she didn’t even notice it hit her.

As her brain capacity grows, so do her abilities and the movie’s zany possibilities. She can read Japanese, hear conversations from a mile away, absorb all the information of the Internet in minutes, recall fleeting memories of her time as a baby, take control of phones, TVs and computers, shape shift her hair and body and render an entire room helpless with a flick of her wrist.

Besson doesn’t stop to put rules in place on what Lucy can and can’t do. She just does. In the process Besson amasses a gigantic body count and has all the fun in the world doing whatever he pleases. It’s cathartic and exciting to see just how outrageous “Lucy” can get.

But Besson also doesn’t bother with a genuine backstory, melodrama or morality for Lucy that might slow the film down or muddle the ideas and possibilities he’s trying to explore. Besson instead relies on Johansson to convey a trace of humanity within her heightened state of mind. She plants a sudden kiss on a helpful detective, she musters a feeble smile to an old friend, and she finds a brief moment to call her parents and say how much she loves them.

“Lucy” actually charts similar territory as Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”. They both make big nods to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” in their visuals and themes, but “Lucy” does away with Nolan’s stodgy plotting and rules and conveys a sense of infinite possibility and a higher human understanding by actually showing us instead of telling us. This is what cinema is supposed to do, stoke the imagination through images and wonder. And not despite the goofy plot but because of it, “Lucy” is a gorgeous feast to watch, but you would’ve never guessed it would come in such an unusual package.

4 stars

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