Tag: Ben Mendelsohn

Ready Player One

Ernest Cline’s book is the subject of much deserved backlash, but Steven Spielberg’s film might be interesting if it was even half as problematic

Ready Player One PosterI feel like one of those angry male fanboys complaining about “accuracy” and being “faithful” to source material. While Ready Player One maintains most of the plot points of Ernest Cline’s novel, it often feels like a completely different story. Masturbatory and overwritten though it may be, the book Ready Player One at least took its fandom seriously. Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation is a sugary pop culture smorgasboard. It’s empty, overstuffed and bland where it should be awe-inspiring. And instead of a virtual reality world filled with wonder, Spielberg’s latest vision of the future looks corny even for him.

Ready Player One has been the subject of a lot of backlash, much of it deserved. Cline’s adventurous sci-fi novel celebrates ‘80s pop culture but does so trivially. And in the process it overlooks art made by and for women and champions insular, nerdy dudes who view the whole world as a video game and have become the model for hateful trolls on the Internet.

If Spielberg’s movie were half as problematic it might be interesting. It cheapens the Willy Wonka sense of discovery you got from reading the book and simplifies the idea of the OASIS, an infinite, game-like universe to “a place where you can climb Mt. Everest…with Batman!” Cline’s book isn’t celebrated for his prose, but even he never wrote a line that bad (he’s a co-screenwriter on the film). And better luck next time to any tech guys who thought this movie might put VR headsets on the map. For every remarkable thing that happens in the OASIS, Spielberg can’t help but cut back to someone in the real world looking like a total dweeb. Continue reading “Ready Player One”

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

The push and pull between new directions and tones and nostalgic fan service make for a frustrating “Star Wars” spinoff.

Rogue One PosterThe paradox of “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” is that it’s somehow tonally and thematically separate from the original “Star Wars” films but pays even more homage to the original trilogy than even “The Force Awakens,” amazing, since that movie is essentially a remake of “A New Hope.”

Its hero is not a wistful young farm boy but a cynical girl named Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) who has been in exile and shuttled around Galactic Empire prisons and work sites for years. The film’s first scene recalls the cruiser soaring overhead at the beginning of “A New Hope,” but “Rogue One” forgoes even the iconic opening crawl.

There are moments at which the film even diverts from George Lucas’s ideologies of good and evil and of the power of faith and religion. One of the film’s standouts is Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), an acrobatic yet blind protector who is not a Jedi but senses the Force in the world. When he chants relentlessly “I am one with the Force, the Force is with me,” it’s a noble yet bleak mantra as he marches into certain death and the unknown of the open battlefield. Continue reading “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”

Slow West

A Scottish boy teams with a bounty hunter to track down his love in the Old West.

SlowWestPosterLying on the ground in the Old West, a naïve boy and a grizzled bounty hunter look up to the moon and constellations in the night sky. The boy cocks his fingers into a gun and shoots holes in the heavens, and the bounty hunter says that when we finally get to the moon, the first thing we’re likely to do is kill all the natives that live there. Even space is a reflection of their bleak reality.

John Maclean’s “Slow West” is a Western as a fairy tale, an often unusual and quirky independent film with more than a few stylized, surprising moments like those above that buck the conventions of the genre. “Slow West” starts as a coming of age story of overcoming naïveté and insecurities, and it at least seems less interested in the violent, bloody resolution where it inevitably ends up. Maclean’s film tries to be economical and subtle in its storytelling but often feels light on strong narrative if not outright contrived.

Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a young Scottish man come to America to reunite with the love of his life, Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). Lost in the wilderness and in danger, he teams up with a bounty hunter named Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) to get him to his destination in one piece. Except Silas is using Jay to reach Rose first, who has a hefty Dead or Alive bounty on her head, a fact unbeknownst to Jay. Jay is also oblivious to how little Rose actually cares for him. We see in a flashback in Scotland that she thinks of him as “like the little brother I never had” rather than Jay’s true love. When Silas comes to the realization, “You haven’t bedded her yet,” it’s clear just how fruitless Jay’s journey is.

Maclean (who also wrote the screenplay) fills in the gaps of Jay and Silas’s motivation through some clunky voice-over narration. It’d rather tell us that Silas is the ruthless, loner type than actually show us, and surprisingly rarely does Fassbender get to actually perform the stunts and acts of gunslinger heroics that would prove to us just how dangerous he’s supposed to be. Silas even gets sidelined during the film’s unnecessarily bloody ending and even cheesier coda, and his change of heart to protect Jay and his interests comes from nowhere.

It’s the more modest, artistic moments that help “Slow West” stand out as a potential indie darling. In one scene, Jay separates from Silas and happens across an amicable German writer making camp in the middle of an open, desolate swath of desert. The still image cinematography has some otherworldly beauty, and Maclean reaches for more profound ideas of “dreams and toil” that defined the Old West philosophy. In another, Silas and Jay admire a skeleton of a man crushed by a tree he was chopping down. “Natural selection,” Silas crows.

“Slow West” is weirdly stylish and thoughtful in these isolated moments, but they hardly feel baked into a complete whole. It’s a fairy tale without much of an ending.

2 ½ stars

The Place Beyond the Pines

Derek Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines” is a moving, surprising and sprawling epic of choices, fate, family and fathers.

Three motorcycles are stunt driving in a spherical cage at a circus. It’s a sight to see, but your nose is nearly grazing the walls, and the three fly by in a powerful blur, all seemingly connected in this daredevil harmony. This little visual metaphor is a wonderful summation for the near narrative perfection found in Derek Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines.” It’s a moving, surprising and sprawling epic of choices, fate, family and fathers.

One of those daredevils is Handsome Luke Glanton, played with a menacing blankness by Ryan Gosling. We meet Luke donning a red leather jacket and striding through a colorful carnival, the camera bobbing as it carefully follows the back of Luke’s head. We’re the thought that’s nagging in the back of his skull, the responsibility that won’t escape him.

At one of his shows, he meets Romina (Eva Mendes), who he had a fling with a year earlier. They’re about to part ways, but Luke learns that Romina’s one-year old son is his and makes a commitment to stay and care for the boy, even if he doesn’t really have a place in the family. Continue reading “The Place Beyond the Pines”

Killing Them Softly

The thinly veiled allegory in “Killing Them Softly” is that the American system of economy and culture is broken, and the people pulling the strings may as well be sleazy, stupid criminals. I say that’s bull, not because I necessarily disagree with Director Andrew Dominik but because his broad analogies, over stylized film and nonsensical story prove nothing.

It’s about two gangsters, Frankie and Russell (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn), who are hired to rob a mafia poker game. The logic behind this is that one of the bosses himself, Markie (Ray Liotta), planned such a heist before, and if it were to happen again, they’d know who to blame.

But the bosses, whoever they are, aren’t completely stupid, because they hire Jackie (Brad Pitt) to find Frankie and Russell and just treat Markie like a patsy. The thought process is, Markie and the boys need to die because a message needs to be sent to other members of the mafia that their money is safe and that the black market economy isn’t in danger.

This alone does not make a compelling argument for how American Capitalism works or doesn’t. So “Killing Them Softly” is set around the 2008 Presidential Election, and these gangsters are very well informed on politics. Car stereos are always tuned to talk radio, airport and bar TVs are switched to C-Span, and wherever you go, you hear George W. Bush or Obama talking about the economy.

Simply put, Dominik is reaching. Jackie seems to think he’s picking winners and losers by allowing some parts of this mob economy to fail and be eliminated and others to be bailed out and kept alive. But the specifics as to who dies and why seems vague, namely because this mob doesn’t operate in realistic ways at all.

There’s no sense of community here. There are no women, no backstories, no bosses, and no organized crime against the law-abiding society. There are only rules and senseless beatings. One of the mob’s messengers (Richard Jenkins) explains you can’t get anything done today without passing every money exchange and hit by a committee, which doesn’t seem plausible, only a plot device. Even the sleazy and unlikeable vermin that make up “Killing Them Softly” are constructed as such so that the movie can linger on their bile, like in one scene when Russell hears every dirty, meaningless word and threat out of his partner’s mouth in a slow motion, drug-soaked haze.

“Killing Them Softly” is disgusting, less so for its violence, which during a drive-by murder and car wreck is fetishized beyond belief, but more so for its repulsive characters and cynically repellent ideas about American politics.

2 stars