Us (2019)

Us (2019)

Cast

• Lupita Nyong'o as Adelaide Wilson
• Winston Duke as Gabriel "Gabe" Wilson
• Evan Alex as Jason Wilson
• Shahadi Wright Joseph as Zora Wilson
• Elisabeth Moss as Mrs. Tyler
• Tim Heidecker as Mr. Tyler
• Kara Hayward as Nancy

Director

• Jordan Peele

Screenplay

• Jordan Peele

Director of Photography

• Mike Gioulakis

Production Design

• Ruth de Jong

Editor

• Nicholas Monsour

Original Music Composer

• Michael Abels

Horror, Thriller

120 minutes

“Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.” - Jeremiah 11:11

In Rodney Ascher’s  documentary “Room 237,” four theorists attempt to explain the hidden messages in Stanley Kubrick’s movie “The Shining.” The ideas about what the movie is about range from the possible to the downright bizarre. One theory fixates on the possibility that “The Shining” was Kubrick’s way of confessing he faked the landing on the moon footage, and another obsesses over the details of the hedge maze. The other two see evidence that the 1980 film indirectly references either the genocide of Native Americans or the Holocaust.

Like “The Shining,” there are a number of different ways to interpret Jordan Peele’s excellent new horror movie, “Us.” Every image seems to be a clue for what’s about to happen or a stand-in for something outside the main story of a family in danger. Peele’s film, which he directed, wrote and produced, will likely reward audiences on multiple viewings, each visit revealing a new secret, showing you something you missed before in a new light.

“Us” begins back in 1986 with a young girl and her parents wandering through the Santa Cruz boardwalk at night. She separates from them to walk out on the empty beach, watching a foreboding flock of thunderclouds roll in. Her eyes find an attraction just off the main pier, and she walks into what looks like an abandoned hall of mirrors, discovering something deeply terrifying—her doppelgänger. The movie shifts to the present day, with Janelle Monae on the radio as the Wilson family is heading towards their vacation home. The little girl has now grown up to be a woman, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), nervous about returning to that spot on the Santa Cruz beach. Her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), thinks her reaction is overblown, but he tries to make her feel at ease so they can take their kids Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) to the beach and meet up with old friends, the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker) and their twin daughters. After one small scare and a few strange coincidences on the beach, the family returns home for a quiet night in, only to have their peace broken by a most unlikely set of trespassers lined up across their driveway: doppelgängers of their family.

Part of the appeal of “Us” is how you interpret what all of this information and images mean. No doubt the movie will give audiences plenty to mull over long after the credits. In the film, the Jeremiah 11:11 Bible verse appears twice before pivotal moments, and there are plenty of other Biblical references to dig into, including an analogy to heaven and hell. Perhaps Jason’s “Jaws” shirt is a reference to the rocket sweater the little boy wears in “The Shining” or it could be a warning about the film’s oceanside dangers. In the ‘80s scene, when young Adelaide walks into the mysterious attraction, the sign welcoming her is that of a Native American in a headdress above the name “Shaman Vision Quest.” When the family returns to the beach, the sign has been replaced with a more PC-friendly sign bearing a wizard advertising it as “Merlin’s Enchanted Forest,” a bandaid solution to hiding the racist exterior and the horror inside its halls.  

As he did with “Get Out,” Peele pays significant tribute to the films that have influenced him in “Us.” Though this time, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus, as I spoke with others who saw the movie, we focused on different titles that stood out to us. For me, “The Shining” looked to be the film that received the most nods in “Us,” including an overhead shot of the Wilson family driving through hilly forests to their vacation home, much like the Torrance family does on the way to the Overlook Hotel. There’s also a reference to “The Shining” twins, a few architectural and cinematography similarities and in one shot, Nyong’o charges the camera with a weapon much like Jack Nicholson menacingly drags along an ax in a chase. However, “Us” is not just a love letter to one horror movie. Peele also pays tribute to Brian De Palma with a split diopter shot that places both Adelaide and her doppelgänger in equal focus for the first time in the movie. There’s also a tip of the hat to Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” in terms of dueling balletic styles and a gorgeously choreographed fight scene that looks like a combative pas de deux.

This delightfully deranged home invasion-family horror film works because Peele not only knows how to tell his story, he assembled an incredible cast to play two roles. The Wilsons are a picture of an all-American family: a family of four that looks to be middle class, with college-educated (Gabe is wearing a Howard University sweater) parents doting on their two children. Their doppelgängers may look like them and be tied to them in some way, but their lives are inverses of each other, and their existence has been one of limits and misery. It’s one of the most poignant analogies of class in America to come out in a studio film in recent memory. For the actors, it’s a chance to play two extremes, one of intense normality and the other of wretched evil. In “Us,” Duke shows off his comedic strengths as the dorky father who often embarrasses his kids, and his doppelgänger is a frighting wall of violence with little to say other than grunts and fighting his adversary. If Nyong’o doesn’t get some professional recognition for her performances here, I will be very disappointed. As Adelaide, she’s fearful, trying to keep some traumatic memories at bay but putting on a brave face for her family. To play her character’s opposite, Nyong’o adopts a graceful, confident movement for her doppelgänger, sliding into the family’s home with scissors at the ready. The doppelgänger looks wide-eyed and maliciously curious as if she’s looking for new ways terrorize this family. She whispers in a raspy but sinister voice that would make many people jump and run away.

A suspenseful story and marvelous cast need a great crew to make the film a home run, and “Us” is not short on talent. “It Follows” cinematographer Mike Gioulakis creates unsettling images in mundane spaces, like how a strange family standing at a driveway isn’t necessarily scary, but when it’s eerily dark out, they’re backlit so that their faces go unseen and the four bodies are standing at a higher elevation from our heroes, it looks like evil is swooping in from above. Kym Barrett’s costume designs not only supply the doppelgängers’ nefarious looking red jumpsuits but also the normal, comfy clothes the Wilsons and Tylers wear on vacation. Michael Abels, who also composed the score for “Get Out,” and the ominous notes from the sound design team lay the groundwork for nerve-wracking sequences.

Jordan Peele isn’t the next Kubrick, M. Night Shyamalan, Alfred Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg. He’s his own director, with a vision that melds comedy, horror and social commentary. And he has a visual style that’s luminous, playful and delightfully unnerving. Peele uses an alternate cinematic language to Kubrick, seems more comfortable at teasing his story’s twists throughout the narrative unlike Shyamalan, uses suspense differently than Hitchcock, and possesses the comedic timing Spielberg never had. “Us” is another thrilling exploration of the past and oppression this country is still too afraid to bring up. Peele wants us to talk, and he’s given audiences the material to think, to feel our way through some of the darker sides of the human condition and the American experience.

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Terminator 2: Judgment Day 3D (2017) - Film Review

Terminator 2: Judgment Day 3D (2017)

Cast

Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator
Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor
Edward Furlong as John Connor
Robert Patrick as T-1000
Earl Boen as Dr. Silberman
Joe Morton as Miles Dyson
S. Epatha Merkerson as Tarissa Dyson
Castulo Guerra as Enrique Salceda

Director

James Cameron

Writer

James Cameron
William Wisher

Cinematographer

Adam Greenberg

Editor

Conrad Buff
Dody Dorn
Mark Goldblatt
Richard A. Harris

Action, Science Fiction

Rated R for strong sci-fi action and violence, and for language.
137 minutes

While "The Terminator" was a great horror film, "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" is a great action film. While "The Terminator" was about the horror of an unstoppable harbinger of a technologically-advanced but soul-dead present, "Terminator 2" is, like so many action films before it, a paradoxically violent screed against violence. The film's reactionary politics are essentially dated, though there are several modern fanatics who embody the paranoiac impulses that compel self-styled freedom fighter Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) to fight against mental institutions, the police, and common sense to stop artificially-intelligent computer system Skynet from obliterating humanity in a nuclear war. 

But it's important to note that Sarah is not the heroine of "Terminator 2" as she was in "The Terminator," but rather a supporting character who helps raise both estranged son John (Edward Furlong) and cyborg bodyguard/surrogate dad T-101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger). The T-101 is the main character in "Terminator 2" since he, as he boasts, is a "learning machine," capable of progressive adaptation. This was the path to war in the era of George H.W. Bush bipartisanship: using one lethal system to combat a more threatening system. Robots don't kill people—people kill people. 

The T-101's burgeoning ersatz humanity makes Schwarzenegger a perfectly re-purposed tool. Director James Cameron had to convince the Austrian Oak to turn his humanoid baddie into a good guy, a jarring transition that was partly difficult for Schwarzenegger to stomach due to the prior failure of "Conan the Destroyer," another sequel that was relatively lighter than its predecessor. But the T-101's role change works as well as it does because viewers—both then and now—don't necessarily expect Schwarzenegger's deadpan killing machine to be capable of serving as anybody's Jiminy Cricket-like moral compass. Still, that's exactly what the T-101 does when he re-unites John with Sarah, and learns from both characters first-hand the value of preserving human life.

The T-101's change from a villain to a hero also reflects the ambivalent optimism at the heart of "Terminator 2." Some cogs in the system can be retrained, but not all systems are benign. The psychiatric institution, represented by vainglorious Dr. Silberman (Earl Boen), is tellingly dismissed since it keeps singular iconoclasts like Sarah down, and convinces them that they must genuinely want to re-assimilate rather than just mimic a desire to change (in "Terminator 2," bad machines are good mimics, but good people are bad mimics). The cops, represented by the confounded detectives who interrogate Sarah about her connection to the T-101 and the gas-mask-making SWAT team that tries to prevent the destruction of Skynet, are ineffectual, and hampered by a lack of emotional inspiration. 

But nuclear families, like the ones that surround well-meaning scientist Miles Dyson (Joe Morton) and good-natured survivalist Enrique Salceda (Castulo Guerra), are all positive since they represent a bright future that must be protected (hope must be preserved and defended instead of cultivated and maintained). So it makes sense that Sarah stops being a machine-like human, and starts acting like a human machine when she encounters Miles and Enrique, but is either suppressed, or threatened during her every encounter with security guards, orderlies, and cops.

These central tenets of "Terminator 2"'s fear-mongering worldview are also present in "The Terminator," but they are perhaps more compelling in the sequel since they are a product of Cameron's singularly fanatic creativity. I imagine he identified as the clean-burning machine, his vision hindered only by unyielding crew members, pressing budget restrictions, and the small-mindedness of anyone who doesn't agree that bigger is necessarily better. 

For proof, compare the way Cameron shoots violence in "The Terminator" with "Terminator 2." There's more gore and impact-intensive massacres in the former film while the latter is characterized by the relatively sleek killing style of the T-1000, or even the scalpel-like precision of the T-101, who self-disassembles his left fore-arm in "Terminator 2" much faster than he gouges his right fore-arm and his left eyeball "The Terminator." And while there aren't more collisions and car crashes in "Terminator 2" than there are in "The Terminator," there are bigger explosions. "Terminator 2" oozes barely-sublimated tension that hails from Cameron's highly personal vision, as we see during formative car chases, pyrotechnics, and body-morphing computer effects.

In fact, one major reason to revisit the "Terminator 2" is that the post-converted 3-D makes the film's textures that much richer, especially any surface covered in fire, sweat, or light. Special effects designer Stan Winston's cyborg puppets and computer effects are worth the extra couple of bucks for 3-D, especially his body-deforming designs for the T-1000, like the bifurcated "Pretzel Man," or the porous "Donut Head." 

Schwarzenegger and his mostly excellent cast-mates may not need a glossy technological reboot, but it is nice to be reminded on a big screen, through engrossing close-ups, tracking shots, and complex lighting set-ups, that Cameron knows how to use his human cogs to maximally service his hulking anti-authoritarian blockbuster. His maximalist style pays off big time, making "Terminator 2" that rare genre classic that is every bit as good as its reputation.

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Titanic [3D] (2012) - Film Review comparing the version of 1997 and 2012

Titanic [3D] (2012)

Cast

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson
Kate Winslet as Rose Dewitt Buckater
Billy Zane as Cal Hockley
Kathy Bates as Molly Brown
Bill Paxton as Brock Lovett
Bernard Hill as Captain Edward John Smith
David Warner as Spicer Lovejoy

Written and directed by

James Cameron

Rated PG-13 For shipwreck scenes, mild language and sexuality 

The new 3D version of "Titanic," like the original 1997 version, is a magnificent motion picture. The hour or more after the ship hits the iceberg remains spellbinding. The material leading up to that point is a combination of documentary footage from the ocean floor, romantic melodrama, and narration by a centenarian named Rose. The production brings to life the opulence of the great iron ship. Its passengers are a cross section of way of life that would be ended forever by the First World War. In a way, the iceberg represented the 20th century.

James Cameron's film is not perfect. It has some flaws, but I hate the way film critics employ that word "flaw," as if they are jewelers with loupes screwed into their eye sockets, performing a valuation. We can say there are elements that could have been handled differently. We can begin with some elements that are superb just as they stand.

To begin with, Cameron avoids the pitfalls of telling a story about which "everybody knows the ending." Yes, the Titanic strikes an iceberg and sinks. That isn't the story he tells. He uses that as a backdrop for stories about hubris, greed, class conflict, romance and a misplaced faith in technology. The Titanic was doomed the moment it was described as "unsinkable." There is a chilling conversation on the bridge between Bruce Ismay, the ship's owner, and Thomas Andrews, its architect.

Ismay: "But this ship can't sink!"

Andrews: "She's made of iron, sir. I assure you, she can. And she will. It is a mathematical certainty."

Its unsinkability perhaps explains why Capt. Edward John Smith (Bernard Hill), despite being warned of icebergs, cranked the ship up to its top velocity and left it speeding blindly through the night. Would the captain of any other vessel have felt confident in doing that? In another sense, many of those on board thought of themselves as unsinkable, including the millionaires Benjamin Guggenheim (Michael Ensign) and the fictional villain Caledon Hockley (Billy Zane). Guggenheim called for a brandy and went down with the ship. Hockley would have thrown women and children overboard to preserve himself. Also on board was the Denver millionaire Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), who survived and is known to history as the Unsinkable Molly Brown. She's shown as one of the few arguing that her lifeboat turn back to rescue passengers freezing to death in the icy water.

Here already I have fallen prey to Cameron's storytelling, and have become distracted from the ship's fate by the fates of those on board. Of greatest interest to us are Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), who is engaged to the snaky Caledon Hockley, and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a steerage passenger who falls in love with her onboard and saves her life. She is the same Rose, known now as "Rose Dawson," who is the old lady, the sole living survivor, brought on board a salvage vessel near the beginning of the film (she's played by Gloria Stuart, who was 86 when the film was made, and topped 100 before she died in 2010). This elderly woman, with such spirit and old, wise eyes, provides "Titanic" with what seems impossible: A happy ending. It is happy for her, at least, because she finds closure with the recovery of a drawing made by Jack and a final scene involving a famous diamond.

The Roses, young and old, provide a through-line from the day the ship set sail until the present day. She creates the psychological illusion that she's the heroine throughout, rescuing the film from a chronological timeline and providing an eyewitness for the crew on the salvage and exploration vessel. Cameron uses her as his excuse for an invaluable narrative device. He has the underwater explorers show her a little animated film that will "explain" to her how the ship sank, but actually explains it to us. This device is used all the time as a chalk talk or imaginary sequence in which the mastermind of a bank heist or prison escape explains the plan to those who will use it; he's really explaining it to us, so we'll understand it when we see it. As if there's not suspense enough when the ship is sinking, we're all the time wondering when it will break in half. Cameron is also not slow to bring the architect Andrews up to the bridge, so he can unroll his blueprints and explain to Captain Smith (and us) how the rushing flood waters will flow over one bulwark after the next.

The class differences onboard become a matter of life and death. The lifeboats are reserved for first class passengers, and those in steerage are locked below behind sliding gates. Crew members enforce these distinctions, sometimes at gunpoint; so loyal are they to their employers that, even though they're going to die, they feel no sympathy for their lower-class comrades. In an early scene, it is by sneaking up to the first class deck that Jack saves Rose from jumping off the ship. She has decided she prefers death to a life among affluent snobs like her fiancée; this shows she has more principle than imagination. Jack becomes the hero only because he flouts all class distinctions, a decision that has its roots deep in 19th century melodrama.

All of these matters take place in a ship created by art design, set construction, modeling, animation and miniatures which are state of the art. James Cameron's films have always been distinguished by ground-breaking technical excellence.

Now to those "flaws." Both of them involve the behavior of characters. There are several scenes involving Jack trying to help Rose escape the sinking ship, and then Rose helping free Jack after he's handcuffed to a pipe in a cabin, and then Jack again helping them to escape. Consider Rose. Of her own volition, she leaves the safety of a lifeboat and dashes back into the bowels of the ship to find Jack. She wades through water up to her waist, slugs an unhelpful crew member on the jaw, finds Jack, and then finds a fire ax to break the chain of his handcuffs.

Plucky, yes? But in all their other escape scenes, Jack pulls her behind him while desperately shouting Rose! Up here! Rose! Down there! Rose! Follow me! et cetera. This grows monotonous and tiresome. It reminds me of one of the early definitions in Ebert's Little Movie Glossary, the "Me Push-Pull You." That's an adaptation of a friend of Doctor Dolittle's, the "Pushmi-pullyu." I define it as a male who treats a woman as a wee helpless creature who cannot save herself but must be pushed and pulled. Given Rose's behavior in finding her way through the flooding ship while saving Jack, she seems capable enough to be allowed the occasional Jack! Up here! (There is also the inconvenience that Rose and anyone else wading through the ice-cold water should quickly be dead of hypothermia.)

Another character I have questions about is Spicer Lovejoy, Caledon Hockley's pistol-packing bodyguard and dirty tricks man. Played by the superb actor David Warner, Lovejoy is a poker-faced tough guy entirely at the disposal of his boss. In the ship's desperate final moments, he is always at Hockley's side with helpful information, such as that a lifeboat on the other side of the ship is allowing men on board. Lovejoy is invaluable to the screenplay, because he gives Hockley someone to speak and plot with. Otherwise the dastard would be reduced to dashing about madly on his own. Nevertheless, whatever Spicer is being paid is not enough.

Now for the final flaw. It is, of course, the 3D process. Cameron has justly been praised for being one of the few directors to use 3D usefully, in "Avatar." But "Titanic" was not shot for 3D, and just as you cannot gild a pig, you cannot make 2D into 3D. What you can do, and he tries to do it well, is find certain scenes that you can present as having planes of focus in foreground, middle and distance. So what? Did you miss any dimensions the first time you saw "Titanic?" No matter how long Cameron took to do it, no matter how much he spent, this is retrofitted 2D. Case closed.

But not quite. There's more to it than that. 3D causes a noticeable loss in the brightness coming from the screen. Some say as much as 20 percent. If you saw an ordinary film dimmed that much, you might complain to the management. Here you're supposed to be grateful you had the opportunity to pay a surcharge for this defacement. If you're alert to it, you'll notice that many shots and sequences in this version are not in 3D at all, but remain in 2D. If you take off your glasses, they'll pop off the screen with dramatically improved brightness. I know why the film is in 3D. It's to justify the extra charge. That's a shabby way to treat a masterpiece.

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SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993) - FILM REVIEW 2018

Schindler's List (1993)

Cast

Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler
Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern

Directed by

Steven Spielberg

Based On The Novel by

Thomas Keneally

Drama, History

Rated R

184 minutes

 

"Schindler's List" is described as a film about the Holocaust, but the Holocaust supplies the field for the story, rather than the subject. The film is really two parallel character studies--one of a con man, the other of a psychopath. Oskar Schindler, who swindles the Third Reich, and Amon Goeth, who represents its pure evil, are men created by the opportunities of war.

Schindler had no success in business before or after the war, but used its cover to run factories that saved the lives of more than 1,000 Jews. (Technically, the factories were failures, too, but that was his plan: "If this factory ever produces a shell that can actually be fired, I'll be very unhappy.") Goeth was executed after the war, which he used as a cover for his homicidal pathology.

In telling their stories, Steven Spielberg found a way to approach the Holocaust, which is a subject too vast and tragic to be encompassed in any reasonable way by fiction. In the ruins of the saddest story of the century, he found, not a happy ending, but at least one affirming that resistance to evil is possible and can succeed. In the face of the Nazi charnel houses, it is a statement that has to be made, or we sink into despair.

The film has been an easy target for those who find Spielberg's approach too upbeat or "commercial," or condemn him for converting Holocaust sources into a well-told story. But every artist must work in his medium, and the medium of film does not exist unless there is an audience between the projector and the screen. Claude Lanzmann made a more profound film about the Holocaust in "Shoah," but few were willing to sit through its nine hours. Spielberg's unique ability in his serious films has been to join artistry with popularity--to say what he wants to say in a way that millions of people want to hear.

In ''Schindler's List,'' his brilliant achievement is the character of Oskar Schindler, played by Liam Neeson as a man who never, until almost the end, admits to anyone what he is really doing. Schindler leaves it to ''his'' Jews, and particularly to his accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), to understand the unsayable: that Schindler is using his factory as a con game to cheat the Nazis of the lives of his workers. Schindler leaves it to Stern, and Spielberg leaves it to us; the movie is a rare case of a man doing the opposite of what he seems to be doing, and a director letting the audience figure it out itself.

The measure of Schindler's audacity is stupendous. His first factory makes pots and pans. His second makes shell casings. Both factories are so inefficient they make hardly any contribution to the Nazi war effort. A more cautious man might have insisted that the factories produced fine pots and usable casings, to make them invaluable to the Nazis. The full measure of Schindler's obsession is that he wanted to save Jewish lives and produce unusable goods--all the while wearing a Nazi party badge on the lapel of his expensive black-market suit.

The key to his character is found in his first big scene, in a nightclub frequented by Nazi officers. We gather that his resources consist of the money in his pocket and the clothes he stands up in. He walks into the club, sends the best champagne to a table of high-ranking Nazis, and soon has the Nazis and their girlfriends sitting at his table, which swells with late arrivals. Who is this man? Why, Oskar Schindler, of course. And who is that? The Reich never figures out the answer to that question.

Schindler's strategy as a con man is to always seem in charge, to seem well-connected, to lavish powerful Nazis with gifts and bribes, and to stride, tall and imperious, through situations that would break a lesser man. He also has the con man's knack of disguising the real object of the con. The Nazis accept his bribes and assume his purpose is to enrich himself through the war. They do not object, because he enriches them, too. It never occurs to them that he is actually saving Jews. There is that ancient story about how the guards search the thief's wheelbarrow every day, unable to figure out what he is stealing. He is stealing wheelbarrows. The Jews are Schindler's wheelbarrows.

Some of the most dramatic scenes in the movie show Schindler literally snatching his workers from the maw of death. He rescues Stern from a death train. Then he redirects a trainload of his male workers from Auschwitz to his hometown in Czechoslovakia. When the women's train is misrouted to Auschwitz in error, Schindler boldly strides into the death camp and bribes the commandant to ship them back out again. His insight here is that no one would walk into Auschwitz on such a mission if he were not the real thing. His very boldness is his shield.

Stern, of course, quickly figures out that Schindler's real game is not to get rich but to save lives. Yet this is not said aloud until Schindler has Stern make a list of some 1,100 workers who will be transported to Czechoslovakia. "The list is an absolute good," Stern tells him. "The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf."

Consider now Commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), the Nazi who has power over the Krakow ghetto and later over the camp where the Jews are moved. He stands on the balcony of his ski chalet and shoots Jews as target practice, destroying any shred of hope they may have that the Nazi policies will follow some sane pattern. If they can die arbitrarily at his whim, then both protest and adherence are meaningless, and useless.

Goeth is clearly mad. War masks his underlying nature as a serial killer. His cruelty twists back on his victims: He spares a life only long enough to give his victim hope, and then shoots him. Seeing "Schindler's List" again recently, I wondered if it was a weakness to make Goeth insane. Would it have been better for Spielberg to focus instead on a Nazi functionary--an "ordinary" man who is simply following orders? The terror of the Holocaust comes not because a monster like Goeth could murder people, but because thousands of people snatched from their everyday lives became, in the chilling phrase, Hitler's willing executioners.

I don't know. The film as Spielberg made it is haunting and powerful; perhaps it was necessary to have a one-dimensional villain in a film whose hero has so many hidden dimensions. The ordinary man who was just "following orders" might have disturbed the focus of the film--although he would have been in contrast with Schindler, an ordinary man who did not follow orders.

"Schindler's List" gives us information about how parts of the Holocaust operated, but does not explain it, because it is inexplicable that men could practice genocide. Or so we want to believe. In fact, genocide is a commonplace in human history, and is happening right now in Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The United States was colonized through a policy of genocide against native peoples. Religion and race are markers that we use to hate one another, and unless we can get beyond them, we must concede we are potential executioners. The power of Spielberg's film is not that it explains evil, but that it insists that men can be good in the face of it, and that good can prevail.

The film's ending brings me to tears. At the end of the war, Schindler's Jews are in a strange land--stranded, but alive. A member of the liberating Russian forces asks them, "Isn't a town over there?" and they walk off toward the horizon. The next shot fades from black and white into color. At first we think it may be a continuation of the previous action, until we see that the men and women on the crest of the hill are dressed differently now. And then it strikes us, with the force of a blow: Those are Schindler's Jews. We are looking at the actual survivors and their children as they visit Oskar Schindler's grave. The movie began with a list of Jews being confined to the ghetto. It ends with a list of some who were saved. The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf.

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Widows (2018) - Film Review

Widows (2018)

Cast

Viola Davisas Veronica Rawlins
Michelle Rodriguezas Linda Perelli
Elizabeth Debickias Alice Gunner
Cynthia Erivoas Belle
Colin Farrellas Jack Mulligan
Brian Tyree Henryas Jamal Manning
Daniel Kaluuyaas Jatemme Manning
Jacki Weaveras Agnieska
Carrie Coonas Amanda
Robert Duvallas Tom Mulligan
Liam Neesonas Harry Rawlings
Manuel Garcia-Rulfoas Carlos Perelli
Jon Bernthalas Florek Gunner
Garret Dillahuntas Bash O'Reilly
Lukas Haasas David
Matt Walshas Ken

Director

Steve McQueen

Writer (based on "Widows" by)

Lynda La Plante

Writer

Gillian Flynn
Steve McQueen

Cinematographer

Sean Bobbitt

Editor

Joe Walker

Composer

Hans Zimmer

Crime, Drama, Thriller

Rated R for violence, language throughout, and some sexual content/nudity.
128 minutes

 

 

Most heist movies are built on a sheen of cool genius, masterminded by a gang of antiheroes who are typically seeking a kind of justified vengeance. “Widows” is not like most heist movies. The emotional currents that power Steve McQueen’s brilliant genre exercise are different—it’s societal inequity, exhaustion at corruption, and outright anger at a bullshit system that steals from the poor to give to the rich. McQueen’s masterful film is the kind that works on multiple levels simultaneously—as pure pulp entertainment but also as a commentary on how often it feels like we have to take what we are owed or risk never getting it at all.

McQueen opens his film with an immediate boost of adrenaline, dropping us into the latest “job” by criminal Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) and his crew (Jon Bernthal, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Coburn Goss) as it goes very, very wrong. McQueen and his incredible editor (Joe Walker, who deserves the Oscar for his work here) bounce us back and forth between the fateful job and quick scenes of introductions to the Rawlings’ crew and their spouses. So we meet Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), a fragile, abused woman whose mother (Jacki Weaver) barely treats her better than her awful husband; Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), a mother of two who is just opening her own store; and Amanda (Carrie Coon), who has a 4-month-old child. Before the opening sequence is over, all three will be widows, as will be Harry’s wife Veronica (Viola Davis).

Not long after Harry’s death, Veronica is visited by a local criminal named Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who informs her that Harry’s final job was to steal $2 million from him and his campaign for 18th ward alderman. With the help of his sociopathic brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya), the Mannings tell Veronica that she has to repay the money just as Harry’s widow happens to find her dead husband’s notebook with all the details on past and future jobs. There’s a lot of information on the next job he had planned, one that looks to net $5 million. Veronica gets the other widows together and they agree to do Harry’s next job. They can repay Manning and have some left over to start new lives.

If only anything were that easy in Chicago. I haven’t even mentioned Manning’s competition for 18th ward alderman, Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), part of a long line of Windy City politicians, including his racist father Tom (Robert Duvall). Jack is one of those silver spoon politicians who almost feels like he’s owed the office just by virtue of his last name, never mind the fact that he’s facing a corruption scandal that involves grifting from a project that expanded the Chicago Green Line. Jack is the kind of politician who starts a program to put minority women to work by giving them businesses…from which he then takes a cut. Everything comes at a cost in “Widows.” Everything, to a certain extent, is a transaction. The job that opens “Widows” and then Veronica’s decision to use the notebook instead of just selling it pull back the curtain on a corrupt, broken system, one that feels distinctly Chicagoan while also commenting on inequity around the world. McQueen and his team use the city brilliantly, especially in a stunning single take in which we see Mulligan go from a campaign event in his ward to his home, the camera staying outside the car to show us the rapidly changing neighborhood along the commute.

Gillian Flynn’s script for “Widows” brings together many disparate personalities under one umbrella but the differences never feel forced. Only when you sit back and think about it, do you consider that it is likely not by accident that Alice, Linda, and Veronica are Polish, Latinx, and Black, respectively, never mind their incredibly different economic differences—Veronica lives on the Gold Coast while Alice has to become an escort to make ends meet. In part, “Widows” seems to be saying that corruption is a great equalizer, especially among women betrayed by powerful men. When Tom Mulligan says, “The only thing that matters is that we survive,” it’s a line meant to capture how tightly he’s trying to hold on to a white political legacy, but it’s something any number of characters in “Widows” could say. There are a number of great lines like that but McQueen and Flynn are careful to never allow their film to sink into a political diatribe. The dialogue crackles without ever calling attention to itself or sounding overly precious or preaching.

Part of the reason “Widows” stays above the line where it would feel like mere sermon is that it contains the best ensemble of 2018. Viola Davis can do more with a longing, grieving look out a window than most actresses can do with a monologue. Watch the beat where she’s looking out at Lake Michigan and we see her in reflection, an image of her dead husband coming up behind her. It’s almost as if her grief manifested him. And when Veronica’s drive turns from sadness to anger, Davis makes every beat count. There’s not a single wasted decision on her part. It might be her best performance.

She’s matched by a ridiculously talented supporting cast, all on her level. Debicki was great earlier this year in “The Tale,” but this is her breakthrough role, one that nearly allows her to steal the film. Watch Alice’s body language as she goes from a frightened victim to an empowered woman. She never overplays the transformation, but it's impossible to miss. It’s really the rare kind of film for which there are hard to pick standouts. Henry has a couple of brilliant scenes, although many seem to think Kaluuya steals a few from him (I'm not sure I agree. They're both great.). Rodriguez makes one wish she did drama more often. Cynthia Erivo should be a star any minute now. Even small roles like those occupied by Garret Dillahunt and Coon feel “right.” There’s not a wasted or poorly-considered role or performance.

Finally there are the technical elements of “Widows.” It’s not the kind of flashy exercise of something like “Baby Driver,” but the editing here by two-time Oscar nominee Joe Walker (nominated for “12 Years a Slave” and “Arrival”) is just as good. A film with this many characters and themes and plot points requires a master editor to keep it moving, and Walker finds the perfect rhythm. Hans Zimmer’s score is his most subtle in a long time, especially the way that McQueen uses it, holding back on score almost entirely for the first 30-45 minutes, allowing it to bubble up as the heist gets closer, enhancing the tension of the overall experience.

The tapestry that is “Widows” is so deep that it’s easy to miss some of its smaller patterns. There’s a scene in which Jatemme is following Veronica, listening to a report on the radio about Albert Woodfox, a man who spent 43 years in solitary confinement at Angola. There’s a line from Woodfox in the report that McQueen makes sure we hear: “Nothing you do is gonna change your situation.” “Widows” is about both the truth of that and a few people who decide to fight it.   

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Welcome to Mercy (2018) - Film Review

Welcome to Mercy (2018)

Cast

Lily Newmark as August
Eileen Davies as Mother Superior
Kristen Ruhlin as Madaline
Toms Liepājnieks as Young Father Joseph
Ieva Seglina as Alyona

Director

Tommy Bertelsen

Writer

Kristen Ruhlin

Cinematographer

Igor Kropotov

Editor

Jordan Maltby

Thriller

Rated NR

 

 

There's a terrific new horror film about guilt, shame, and witches, and its name is "Suspi--" wait, sorry, it's called "Welcome to Mercy," a brooding, atmospheric movie set in a Latvian convent that follows an atheist who becomes possessed by an ancient evil. That may sound like the logline for a tacky throwback to the unabashedly salacious nunsploitation gems of the 1970s, like "Behind Convent Walls" and "School of the Holy Beast." But the best thing about "Welcome to Mercy" is that its creators don't go for cheap thrills ... not many, anyway. Director Tommy Bertelsen and screenwriter Kristen Ruhlin take time to consider what drew disbelieving single mother Madaline (Ruhlin) back to her Latvian home, just to see her long-ill father Frank (Andrey Yahimovich). One answer seems immediately  apparent: to confront her standoffish, estranged mother Alyona (Ieva Seglina). But Bertelsen and Ruhlin are patient enough to make their film's more high concept ideas—surprise: Madaline gets possessed by demons!—subordinate to Madaline's attempts at reconciling abandonment issues that she hopes she won't pass on to her own daughter, Willow (Sophia Massa).

You can tell that there's something different about "Welcome to Mercy" from the way its terrific ensemble cast delivers their oft-pulpy dialogue. These performances are the heart and soul of a film whose ideas could have easily devolved into genre cliches and pseudo-empathetic pandering. "Welcome to Mercy" is, after all, a film where demonic possession is presented as an expression of Madaline's long-unexamined feelings of helplessness. Her secular trauma is given a high-concept horror twist, but with good reason: a world of old world religious/superstitious fear is the one this character was pre-emptively kicked out of, and that she consequently fears.

How can you blame her? Look at the way that Seglina and Juris Strenga, the actor playing the skeletal Father Joseph, play their parts. Their accents and appearances are (necessarily) off-putting: at times, she sounds like Frau Blücher from "Young Frankenstein" while he looks like the evil priest from "Poltergeist II." Still, there's enough humanity in both Seglina and Strenga's performances to make you wonder if Madaline knows what she's talking about when she dismisses both Joseph and Alyona's ritualistic faith as mere superstition. Listen to Strenga—as his character refers to the still-living Frank—add a syrupy pause worthy of Bela Lugosi to the sentence "He was ... a good friend." Or listen to Seglina deliver a master class in inflection as she--as Alyona rejects Madaline's claim that Yelina "abandoned [her]"—delivers a line that, from a lesser actor, would come out on the wrong side of Meryl-Streep-y camp: "I did not! A-ban-don YOU! I wanted to give you a BET-TER life.” 

That sort of pitch-perfect heightened tone is, admittedly, the sort of thing you have to see to believe. Still, the creators of "Welcome to Mercy" deserve praise for giving their story enough weight to make some timeworn horror conventions (Look out, stigmata!) seem new again. As a screenwriter, Ruhlin brings sensitivity to her characters in a way that none of the other authors of this season's big horror films did (sorry, fans of this year's "Halloween" sequel!). As a writer, Ruhlin gives Madaline enough time and humanity to worry: maybe she's unconsciously hurting her own daughter because she doesn't understand why or how much her mother hurt her. That lingering should help many jaded horror fans to suspend their disbelief, which is essential since Madaline (the audience's surrogate) must willingly submit to the prodding concern of the sisters of Mercy, a secluded convent whose nuns supposedly have the "spiritual disciplines" needed to help Madaline become unpossessed.

Madaline's dilemma sounds incredible, but it's supposed to, from Seglina and Strenga's Boris & Natasha-style accents to the superstitious, rural trappings of Frank and Yalina's home (so much garlic and hay!). This is how a skeptical urbanite sees the world she was (in her eyes) forced out of as a child. It's small, and a little backwards, so it's also easy to pigeonhole. 

Realistically, the most exciting thing about "Welcome to Mercy" isn't its exceptionally creepy scare scenes—ever wonder what the world looks like according to a victim of possession?—but rather its creators' thoughtful consideration, not only of how it feels to be abandoned, but also what it feels like to understand why you were seemingly left behind. "Welcome to Mercy" is, in that sense, a rare horror movie whose creators seriously represent both sides of a dilemma, and is therefore more mature than it seems at first glance. Bertelsen and Ruhlin understand why people fear religion, but also why we look to it as a balm for secular guilt and shame. In horror movies, Love is usually the world's one-size-fits-all cure. In "Welcome to Mercy," it's a more complex sentiment: forgiveness.

 

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The Other Side of the Wind (2018) - Review of a Netflix Production

The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

Cast

John Huston as J.J. "Jake" Hannaford
Oja Kodar as The Actress
Peter Bogdanovich as Brooks Otterlake
Robert Random as Oscar "John" Dale
Susan Strasberg as Juliet Rich
Joseph McBride as Charles Pister
Edmond O'Brien as Pat
Mercedes McCambridge as Maggie Fassbender
Cameron Mitchell as Matt Zimmer
Paul Stewart as Matt Costello
Peter Jason as Marvin P. Fassbender
Tonio Selwart as The Baron
Claude Chabrol as Himself
Henry Jaglom as Himself
Paul Mazursky as Himself
Lilli Palmer as Zarah Valeska

Director

Orson Welles

Writer

Orson Welles
Oja Kodar

Cinematographer

Gary Graver

Editor

Orson Welles
Bob Murawski

Composer

Michel Legrand

Comedy, Drama

Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity and some language.

122 minutes

 

 

In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film “La Chinoise,” one of the characters, Kirilov, announces, “L’art ne pas le reflet du réel, mais le reel de ce reflet.” Which translates as “Art is not the reflection of reality, it’s the reality of the reflection.” In “The Other Side of the Wind,” a film shot in the years between 1970 and 1976 and later (only partially) edited by Orson Welles, a character named Mr. Pister, a very young, whippet thin and presumably callow square of a film critic—played, not coincidentally, by Joseph McBride, who would go on to become, besides a fine critic and scholar in general, one of the key voices keeping Welles’ often misunderstood legacy alive—asks its bete noire-legendary director figure, Jake Hannaford, “Is the camera eye a reflection of reality or is reality a reflection of the camera eye?”

This citation of Godard sounds more like a piss-take when Pister continues “or is the camera merely a phallus?” This is meant to sound ridiculous, and it does, and yet the more you reflect on what’s actually in “The Other Side of the Wind,” the more the idea of that camera as phallus—or at least as impotent phallus desperate to achieve tumescence and usurp the passive voyeur status of the eye/lens—gains currency. Among other things, this picture from the director of “Citizen Kane,” “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Touch of Evil” and several other masterpieces both mainstream and hermetic, increases the sex-and-nudity quotient of the Welles filmography not by a percentage but by a power. 

The story, such as it is, concerns the 70^th birthday party of Jake Hannaford, portrayed with vanity-free abandon and lemon-sucking bitterness by John Huston, who looks like he’s been dragged through hell and spat back up onto earth because hell found him too hard to digest. To this party have been invited dozens of friends, enemies, well-wishers, and chroniclers. Journalists, academics, TMZ-avant-la-lettre footage collectors, documentarians, and out-and-out spies. The other thread of the story is of the movie Hannaford is trying to complete, a trippy, arty, uncomfortable, almost dialogue-free chronicle of a woman (Oja Kodar, Welles’ lover and a credited co-writer of the movie) walking nearly naked through the world and happening on all manner of orgiastic activity while pursuing a male biker whom she seduces in a moving car in a sequence that’s virtuosic, dreamlike, and squirm-inducing all at once. 

The Hannaford party is an assemblage of the footage shot by the invitees. In a narrated prologue, conceived and executed well outside of Welles’ purview, Peter Bogdanovich’s character explains the rationale behind the document. An extra-diegetic text before the film proper begins explains that this cut of Welles’ unfinished film is an attempt to “honor and complete” Welles’ vision. 

What vision it finally presents is a continually paradoxical one. It is a curse on cinema and a blessing of it. Its explorations of sexuality near explicitness, but its musings on the subject have to do with nothing but secrets. A sniping critic/historian played by Susan Strasberg harps on Hannaford’s camera fixating on his movies’ leading men. She recalls that Hannaford had affairs with all the wives of his movies’ lead males, and theorizes that this was his way of sublimating his desire for the men. Certainly Hannaford’s fixation on John Dale (Bob Random), the hippie-curled leading man of the new project, is not healthy. Dale came into Hannaford’s life while the latter was vacationing. The older man believes he saved the younger when he was trying to drown himself. A drama teacher brought to Jake’s party has a different story about Dale’s own ambition. Repressed homosexuality is not especially emphasized here as a betrayal of one’s self, but “Wind” is a movie in which everyone is selling everyone out, or at least is susceptible to doing so. Its web of relationships is vertigo-inducing, and the breakneck cutting, constantly shifting film stock, and seesawing aspect ratios don’t construct the easiest through-line by which to track them. 

“The Other Side of the Wind” is a very rich film and a very difficult one. I’ve seen it nearly three times now and what I intuit about the aspects of it that “work,” and those where the seams just show too nakedly shift all the time. Cameron Mitchell’s fired makeup artist, with his ridiculous straw hat and bathetic vaudevillian bearing, seems to have dropped in from an entirely different film, and I still can’t be sure that’s not entirely the point. Some of the compositions—an early shot on the studio lot, a low-angle into which move Mercedes McCambridge and a couple of other figures to make a nice Eisenstein-like three-figure composition that Welles expanded upon with just the right dolly-in camera movement—are vintage Welles, including uncomfortable closeups like those of Glenn Anders in “The Lady From Shanghai,” all of the tricks and trills pushed to their limits like a circus act gone mad. While the film-within-a-film, with its empty spaces and forced-perspective winks, is parodying Antonioni and other art-film directors, there’s also a self-critique or homage in the visual references to Welles’ own “The Trial.” In “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” the fascinating documentary about the making of this film that’s also an excellent companion piece to it, Simon Callow, the actor, director, and Welles biographer says “I have a feeling, for which I have no evidence, that Welles didn’t want to finish ‘The Other Side of the Wind.’” This is followed by denials, some indignant, of the idea that Welles would not WANT to finish a film. Of course he wanted to finish; he was merely denied the opportunity. 

As it happens, I agree with Callow, and I think there is evidence: it’s the movie itself. As a vessel for Welles’ self-loathing, which by this point in his life was arguably bottomless, “Wind” itself needed to have no bottom. The hundred hours of footage from which Welles worked on the feature was packed with self-inflicted wounds upon which he could pour salt, particularly with respect to his tortured relationship to the film culture he helped create, and more specifically his personal relationship with Bogdanovich. Down to the pettiest little thing. When Bogdanovich’s Brook calls Hannaford a “rough magician,” after a speech in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” and Hannaford “confesses” to Brook that he knows not the meaning of the word “abjure,” those who have read Bogdanovich’s interview book with Welles, “This Is Orson Welles,” should be able to hear Welles himself pretending he doesn’t know who Mizoguchi is. 

In that book Welles says of Godard, “What’s most admirable about him is his marvelous contempt for the machinery of movies and even movies themselves—a kind of anarchistic, nihilistic contempt for the medium—which, when he’s at his best and most vigorous, is very exciting.” It’s not for nothing that Welles sets the ending of “Wind” at a drive-in theater, the inverse of a sacred movie palace, a place for the desecration of cinema and a pretext for sexual activity, and shoots it like it’s a touchstone site of the romance of the American West, which of course it is. Everything contradicts everything else in this film, while at the same time drawing perfect circular connections. What Godard had to say about Welles, in 1963, was this: “[M]ay we be accursed if we forget for one second that he alone with Griffith, one in silent days, one sound, managed to start up that marvelous little electric train in which Lumiere did not believe. All of us will always owe him everything.” Fun fact: on the slates for “Wind,” the cameraman was written in as “Bitzer.” If you get that joke—for “Wind” is a movie best appreciated only by individuals as enriched and as damaged by cinema as Welles was himself—you will get this movie.

 

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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) - Review of a Netflix Production

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

Cast

Tim Blake Nelsonas Buster Scruggs
James Francoas Cowboy
Liam Neesonas Impresario
Tom Waitsas Prospector
Brendan Gleesonas Irishman
Bill Heckas Billy Knapp
Zoe Kazanas Alice Longabaugh
Tyne Dalyas Lady

Director

Ethan Coen
Joel Coen

Writer

Ethan Coen
Joel Coen

Cinematographer

Bruno Delbonnel

Editor

Ethan Coen
Joel Coen

Composer

Carter Burwell

Comedy, Drama, Western

Rated R for some strong violence.
133 minutes
 

I’m not one of those reviewers who likes a particular type of Coen Brothers movie more than another. As much as I revered the filmmakers’ knotty, relatively somber “Inside Llewyn Davis,” I didn’t sit through “Hail Caesar” grumbling that I’d have preferred a more serious work.

It’s hard to pin down the brothers’ new film, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” an anthology film that presents itself as a literal story book, first edition 1873. As the mournful air that supports the ballad “Streets of Laredo” (and other lyrics, as the movie demonstrates in its last story) plays, the book opens, the pages turn; a full-page illustration shows a moment from a tense poker game; and away we go.

Into a rather goofy singing-cowboy vignette, the title story, starring Tim Blake Nelson as a man in a white hat who addresses the viewer most cheerfully before he begins blowing holes in any number of dirtier men who won’t cooperate with him. Is he, as a wanted poster paints him, a “misanthrope?” No, he insists, he just doesn’t like to be, um, contradicted.

This episode is a gasp-inducing wonder, a perfect storm of Frank Tashlin and Sam Peckinpah stylings, suggesting this is going to be one of the more raucous and absurdist Coen outings. The next story, starring James Franco as an ill-fated bank robber, leads up to a punchline that’s one of the funniest in the Coen canon.

In the third story, “Meal Ticket,” the movie takes a grim, mean turn. Its protagonists are a taciturn, hard-drinking traveling showman, Liam Neeson, and his charge, an armless and legless young man with a great store of poetry and scripture at his command, billed as a great “Orator.” Beginning his “set” every night with Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” he speaks to ever-dwindling frontier audiences, compelling Neeson to make an arguably ruthless business decision.

 In “All Gold Canyon,” inspired by a Jack London story, Tom Waits—who fits so well into Coen World that it’s kind of a shock to realize this is his first picture with the filmmakers—plays a prospector for whom process seems more fulfilling than the accumulation of wealth. The next story, “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” featuring remarkable performances from Zoe Kazan, Bill Heck, and Grainger Hines, is also an adaptation, from a story by Stewart Edward White, but the Coens stack it with mordant ironies that not only make it their own, but make it perhaps the saddest of the tales here.

There’s a lot of killing in this movie, and many of those who suffer it are depicted lying down, with their eyes open, looking at the sky. In the movie’s final story, “The Mortal Remains,” one of a pair of bounty hunters, played by Jonjo O’Neill, tells his fellow passengers in a stagecoach of how, after his partner (Brendan Gleeson) has “thumped” one of their victims, he enjoys looking into that man’s eyes and watching as he negotiates the border between life and death, trying to find a state to which he can be reconciled. Do any of them “make it?” one of the passengers asks. “I don’t know,” the bounty hunter says cheerfully. “I’m only watching.”

This final segment plays like an extra-morbid but enigmatic coda to the prior proceedings. Then it hits you how, in a speech by Saul Rubinek’s  “Frenchman” character (who introduces his philosophy of life by anticipating Sartre’s statement that “we have only this life to live”), his insistence that in life you “cannot play another man’s hand” completes a circle:  extending the movie’s trajectory back into an animating situation in its first story.

What’s most bewitching throughout “Scruggs” is its sense of detail. Its meshing of formal discipline and screwed-down content sometimes give it the sense of a work that has been carefully and elaborately embroidered rather than photographed.

Do the Coens troll their audience? Yes and no. Movies require too much money and effort to predicate them merely on pranking people you don’t like. On the other hand, I had a conversation last fall with a great film scholar and critic who rather famously dislikes the Coens' work, and he was taking issue with the naming of the main character and ostensible hero of “Hail Caesar.” Josh Brolin’s good guy “Eddie Mannix” was named for a real-life character who was in fact a rather bad guy, an MGM-employed “fixer” who covered up major crimes by film figures and bullied potentially rebellious stars into doing the studio’s will. “Why would they want to ennoble Eddie Mannix,” he asked, and I said that, clearly, the movie wasn’t intended as any kind of portrait of the real Eddie Mannix, and that they probably just liked the name. Which I think is true. But the Coens are creators who rather effortlessly work on multiple levels, and I think it’s closer to the truth to say that they liked the name AND that they knew that using it would push certain people’s buttons, and they’re not just fine with that; they’re delighted by it.

Here, their adaptation of Western story modes goes directly against contemporary consciousness of Native American genocide and other issues. Because it’s a pastiche, it situates itself in an old-fashioned mode in which diversity is articulated only in terms of mutual antagonism. The only articulation of a Native American perspective comes in the form of a disdainful laugh one “Indian” warrior throws in the direction of a character with a noose around his neck. For the purposes of this marvelous and disquieting movie, it’s enough. Its pleasures—the endless succession of perfect shots of remarkable scenery, the gorgeous music by Carter Burwell and others that swells and dips like the landscapes themselves—are real, and acknowledged as such, but there’s something more real underneath it all. The book’s pages at the movie’s beginning are turned too quickly for a viewer without a freeze button to read its dedication and epigraph, but the latter might as well be a portion of the Russian grammar book sample Vladimir Nabokov used to open his 1952 novel The Gift, to wit, “An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Death is inevitable.”

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JURASSIC WORLD (2018) - FILM REVIEW

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

PG-13 | 2h 8min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi | 6 June 2018 (Philippines) 

Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard reunite - this time to both escape and save the dinosaurs - in J.A. Bayona's sequel.

In the franchise's eponymous 2015 reboot, the place called Jurassic World was a "world" only in the Disney World sense: a bigger park, with ever-escalating attractions and ever-more places for families to fork over their cash. Finally making good on its name, J.A. Bayona's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom says goodbye to the park for good, not just carrying the de-extincted dinos off the island but freeing itself from the genre trappings of the previous four films.

Here, working from a script by the last pic's Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow, Bayona not only nods to the history of classic monster movies and the legacy of original Jurassic helmer Steven Spielberg, he brings his own experience to bear, treating monsters like actual characters and trapping us in a vast mansion that's as full of secrets as the site of his breakthrough 2007 film, The Orphanage. Audiences put off by some dumb characterizations in the last film have much less to complain about here, while those requiring only some spectacular predators and exciting chase scenes should greet this outing as warmly as its predecessor.

Three years after all hell broke loose on little Isla Nublar, a newly active volcano is threatening to consume the surviving dinosaurs there. In America, activists push for a rescue mission: Having brought these species back to life, they argue, mankind owes them some kind of debt. A committee of lawmakers hears from an expert witness, whose advice boils down to "the genie's out of the bottle, folks," or, perhaps, "life will find a way." Yep, that would be Jeff Goldblum's Dr. Ian Malcolm, whose involvement in the film is limited to just this one bit of testimony — but whose lines may be teasing a bigger role next time around.

The ringleader of the save-the-dinos campaign is someone with plenty of reason to see them re-extincted: Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire Dearing, who nearly died every five minutes or so during the final hours of the park she used to run. Introducing her character with a shot that begins on her footwear and inches up, Bayona gets a laugh out of Jurassic World's biggest idiocy: This time around, Claire will leave the high heels in the office and wear sturdy knee boots when it's time to run through the jungle.

Claire is summoned by gazillionaire Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), who we learn was John Hammond's partner in reviving extinct species before the latter split off and started the first Jurassic Park. Near death, Lockwood wants to set things right for the animals he helped create: He has located a pristine island that will be suitable as a tourist-free refuge, and wants Claire's help getting as many animals as possible relocated there before Isla Nublar goes kablooey. Naturally, the mission will need the special talents of Chris Pratt's Owen Grady, who has been off hand-building a cabin in the mountains since his affair with Claire ran out of steam.

Pratt downplays the cowboy charisma that helped make the human side of Jurassic World tolerable, but Owen remains cocksure enough to set the tone for developments to come: When, after arriving on Isla Nublar, the two realize there's a plan afoot to steal dinosaurs and sell them for all sorts of nefarious purposes, Claire and Owen must sneak into and sabotage the effort much like Indy did with those Nazi submarines in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The mass evacuation leads them to a secret dino zoo on the American mainland, where mad scientists are holding that smaller-meaner beastie hinted at in Jurassic World: The Indoraptor, which gets genes from both that film's Indominus Rex and the nightmare-maker who starred in the series' first outing and most of its best moments since: the Velociraptor.

Clare and Owen meet Lockwood's granddaughter Maisie (newcomer Isabella Sermon), a very bright and curious kid who has just learned of all the nefarious stuff being planned here. With Clare's sidekicks Zia — Daniella Pineda, as a paleo-veterinarian who may owe the distracting chip on her shoulder to constant questioning about how one finds work as a paleo-veterinarian — and Franklin — Justice Smith's tech nerd, whose shrieks of terror rival Howard's — the group must keep these dangerous creatures out of the clutches of arms dealers, Russian oligarchs and the handlebar-mustachioed dudes who apparently just want to hunt them for sport.

(About that auction: The screenwriters don't seem to grasp the economics of a world ruled by the megarich. When a stainless-steel tchotchke by Jeff Koons can sell for almost $60 million, no auctioneer worth his haughty accent would allow a last-of-its-kind prehistoric monster to go for less than half that. As one baddie brags early on about being able to sell a specimen for $4 million, we snicker and recall Dr. Evil's underwhelming "one million dollars!" ultimatum. Does he think that's a lot of money for a dinosaur?)

Working with his usual DP, Oscar Faura, Bayona finds many opportunities to transform action beats into memorably beautiful visions. Trapped on the edge of the dying Isla Nublar, for instance, a magnificent lone animal — what are we supposed to call Brontosauruses these days? — rears on its hind legs as it's engulfed in smoke and flame. In his many decades onscreen, Godzilla has rarely had such an operatic showcase. And reteaming with editor Bernat Vilaplana (who has worked often with both Bayona and Guillermo del Toro), the director ensures that the enchanting images don't derail the picture's intensifying action pace.

While the movie courses seamlessly through different modes, it remains old-fashioned in its treatment of Howard's character, who mostly screams and runs while Owen gets things done. Claire has grown up a lot since her debut as Jurassic World's soulless corporate climber, but she remains a damsel in distress who (this time, as last) gets to perform a single far-fetched heroic feat when things are at their most dire.

Fallen Kingdom ends with an act that is just about impossible to believe outside the context of a fiction that, like DNA, is driven solely by the need to replicate itself. This is said to be the second film in a trilogy. But Fallen Kingdom's closing scenes seem intent on something far bigger, like a Planet of the Apes-style saga that has barely begun. You don't remake reality in a film's final frames without intending to milk things for as long as the public will keep buying tickets. If future installments are this rich and exciting, that's probably going to be a while.

When the island's dormant volcano begins roaring to life, Owen and Claire mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs from this extinction-level event.

Director:

J.A. Bayona

Writers:

Colin Trevorrow, Derek Connolly | 1 more credit »

Stars:

Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt, Ted Levine

Four years after the Jurassic World theme park was closed down, Owen and Claire return to Isla Nublar to save the dinosaurs when they learn that a once dormant volcano on the island is active and is threatening to extinguish all life there. Along the way, Owen sets out to find Blue, his lead raptor, and discovers a conspiracy that could disrupt the natural order of the entire planet. Life has found a way, again. Written by Jake Logsdon

Plot Summary | Add Synopsis

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Plot Keywords:

dinosaur | t rex | raptor | island | sequel | See All (6) »

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Taglines:

Life finds a way. See more »

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Genres:

Action | Adventure | Sci-Fi

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Certificate:

PG-13 | See all certifications »

Parents Guide:

View content advisory »

Details

Official Sites:

Official Site | Official Site [Japan]

Country:

USA | Spain

Language:

English

Release Date:

6 June 2018 (Philippines) See more »

Also Known As:

Jurassic Park 5 See more »

Filming Locations:

London, England, UK See more »

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Company Credits

Production Co:

Amblin Entertainment, Apaches Entertainment, Legendary Entertainment See more »

Show more on IMDbPro »

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Technical Specs

Runtime:

128 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital | DTS (DTS: X)| Dolby Atmos | Auro 11.1 | Dolby Surround 7.1

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.39 : 1

Read more »