film

Captain America: Civil War

Spoilers, natch.

Finally, a Spider-Man who actually looks like he’s in high school! That, along with ever more compelling character studies of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, made this latest episode of The Marvel Cinematic Universe Show worth watching.

Captain America and Iron Man are by far my favorite Marvel characters thus far, and the Avengers I find most interesting. That they find themselves on opposite sides here is made all the more interesting when you realize how both have essentially flip-flopped. Stark, the recalcitrant “genius billionaire playboy philanthropist” playing by his own rules but tormented by guilt, now wants controls on their heretofore unchecked power. Rogers, the patriotic soldier desperate to fight for good, now is disillusioned by authoritarian overreach and wary of a corruptible bureaucracy. Neither of them are wrong. The other superheroes who align with or against them have their own reasons for doing so, but fundamentally Civil War concerns itself with this core conflict.

I suppose this puts me on the #TeamIronMan side of things, but I think there absolutely should be some oversight of the burgeoning cadre of “enhanced” persons formerly under the purview of SHIELD. Even after gnashing their teeth about the devastation of Sokovia, it takes like two seconds before this motley crew of all-powerful superheroes with fragile egos and hair-trigger tempers are obliterating an airport or whatever building they happen to be in during their latest squabble. It’s like they’re all early-stage Spider-Man, wracked with teenage insecurity, lacking self-discipline, flailing around while trying to discover and control the extent of their powers. Setting aside the ethical debate over the Sokovian Accords, the cost of their property damage alone warrants reparation and regulation.

As for the film itself, the directors Anthony and Joe Russo mentioned in an interview that they tried not to follow the typical three-act superhero movie structure, which is something I noticed while watching. The film doesn’t resolve where we’re conditioned to expect it; it could have ended at several points but didn’t. Perhaps that’s a product of the ongoing (infinite?) nature of the MCU, wherein each movie doesn’t begin and end in its own self-contained universe like normal movies and needs to set up the next installments. (Which currently include not only the two Avengers: Infinity War films, but offshoot franchises for Black Panther, Spider-Man [again again], Doctor Strange, and a bajillion other ~~products~~ characters.)

However, for the first time in eight years’ worth of movies within Phase 1 and 2 of the MCU, I’m OK with that. I’m OK with, or at least resigned to, winding through the spider’s web of stories with cautious optimism, knowing not every installment will achieve the same balance of thoughtfulness, wit, and dazzling spectacle the best of the MCU display.

As much as it’s true that superhero films are eating Hollywood; as much as it’s true that a fraction of the billions being spent on these franchises could and should be allocated to the smaller, non-serialized films that end up on Oscar ballots and Top 10 lists far more often than the latest comic-book fare… I enjoyed watching superheroes fighting each other. It was fun (if sometimes confusing to determine who was on which side and why), and made the case for being seen on the big screen. For another entrant into an already abundant genre, that’s good enough for me.

May 15, 2016 Add Comment

BTTF 4 is here!

Anyone pining for a Back to the Future IV ought to just read IDW’s ongoing series of “Untold Tales and Alternate Timelines” comics. Co-written by Bob Gale, they weave in and out of the trilogy and its characters with new backstory (my favorite so far being Clara’s story in #5) and “extended universe” stories.

I don’t think I’ve ever read comics before, at least nothing outside of the Christian subculture I grew up in. Not sure how these compare to the best of them in style and substance, but as a BTTF nerd I find them delightful, and a much better alternative to an actual Part IV.

April 29, 2016 Add Comment

Midnight Special

It’s really a shame Jeff Nichols got bounced in the second round of the Filmspotting Madness directors bracket. Unlike the NCAA tournament, where success is tangible and stats-driven, there is no one way to account for which director is better than the other. Everyone voter is left to his or her own interpretation and taste. The one I’ve used is based on what the Filmspotting guys have put forth: you’re standing in a theater lobby and two films are showing, one from each director. You choose one and the other director’s disappears, his future career extinguished.

Mad love to Scorsese, who gave us Raging Bull and Taxi Driver among other greats, but I’m going with Jeff Nichols. If a sadistic, crisis-inducing challenge like Filmspotting Madness is about the present and future of a director’s work—and to me it is—then I believe myself compelled to choose Nichols, whose small but undeniably strong oeuvre gives me great hope for his future over Scorsese’s, whose will be a lot shorter and less reliably compelling.

So it seems fitting I had the choice this weekend of seeing either Everybody Wants Some!!, the latest from Richard Linklater (another Filmspotting Madness erstwhile contender) and Midnight Special, the latest from Jeff Nichols. A huge fan of Linklater, I knew I’d see Everybody eventually, but I knew I had to see Midnight Special, simply because of Nichols’ name and the little I knew about the film. That’s as good a test as any.

As is often the case, Matt Zoller Seitz was spot-on about Midnight Special. He expresses a sort of baffled delight that a movie like this could exist amidst so many other deafening superhero smash fests. Its “marvelous energy” propels its quickly sketched but deeply felt characters through a story that’s as lovingly familiar as it is unique. A boy with otherworldly powers, his loyal father (Michael Shannon) who supposedly kidnapped him from his former apocalyptic cult, and the government agents trying to find him all are in pursuit toward a mysterious yet significant destination.

The first act is something else. Tense, bold, determined. We’re dropped in media res and trusted to keep up. Kudos to Nichols for this choice in structure, but also (I’m assuming) for fighting studio execs to have to preserve it against some origin story filler. The power is in the mystery, in the putting together of the pieces as they’re given.

The film slackens as it goes, however, especially in the scenes that take us away from the boy and his escorts, who have a kind of enraptured determination you could imagine the apostle Paul feeling after seeing the light on the road to Damascus. Nichols seems very aware of that story, given the righteousness he’s imbued in these characters and the mission they’re on. I stayed with the movie throughout, though, because how could I not? From idea to execution, Midnight Special is inspired in every sense: as homage to Spielbergian themes of family and destiny, as a sci-fi fable with the courage of restraint, and as an auteurist vision that doesn’t always shine scene to scene but adds up to something effulgent when it matters.

Nichols couldn’t have found a better muse/avatar than Michael Shannon, whose quiet, self-assured, and focused presence has for me become inseparable from the Nichols films he’s been in, which is all of them. (Shotgun Stories remains his best—find it if you can.) And he’ll be in Loving, Nichols’ next film, coming out this November. Not sure if I’ll have to pick between two great directors again to see it, but he’s got good odds if I do.

April 4, 2016 Add Comment

Wendell Berry: Coming Soon to a Screen

Hat-tip to Rod Dreher for spotlighting The Seer, an upcoming documentary on Wendell Berry that counts Nick Offerman, Terrence Malick, and Robert Redford as backers. The filmmaker Laura Dunn has worked for years to bring the film to life, and now has a Kickstarter campaign to fund the remaining post-production costs. It’s due to premiere at SXSW, suddenly making me wish I could be there.

Filmed in and around Henry County, Kentucky, the documentary features original audio interviews with Wendell and on-camera interviews with members of his family and community:

When we first began corresponding about the possibility of a documentary, Wendell made clear that he does not regard screens of any kind and that he has declined to participate in films for decades.

This might have been the end of the matter, but for our team, it prompted reflection. Rather than make a “front lit” portrait of the man, could we use the film medium to subvert biopic conventions and instead immerse you in the world of Wendell Berry? Could we draw a portrait of a man in a way that understands the individual as simply a function of his place and the people around him? Rather than lens the way the world sees Wendell Berry, let us imagine the way Wendell Berry sees the world.

Cannot wait to see this, and to contribute to the Kickstarter. Berry’s “A Homecoming” was read at our wedding, and Hannah Coulter and Life Is A Miracle are in my upper echelon of all-time books. I hope this film gets into theaters, DVD, or VOD as soon as possible.

March 3, 2016 Add Comment

Better Living Through Criticism

I’ve been a fan of A.O. Scott since his too-short time co-hosting At the Movies with Michael Phillips, which was my favorite post-Ebert iteration of the show. Their tenure was a salve after the brief and forgettable stint of Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz. Phillips and Scott brought a benevolent wonkiness to the show I greatly enjoyed and mourned when it was axed.

So I was quite pleased to read A.O. Scott’s new book Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, which is not as self-helpy as it sounds, mercifully. In fact, it’s nearly the opposite of self-help, a genre hell-bent on offering surefire prescriptions for every psychological impediment blocking our true greatness within. Scott is far less strident. He avoids making grand declarations about The Purpose of Criticism, much to the chagrin of grand declarers. All the better. To me, criticism is not about conquering artistic foes or achieving certainty, but about making sense of what goes on inside our heads and hearts when we encounter something beautiful, pleasurable, or truthful — or all (or none) of the above.

The book ambles towards answers to the pointed questions I’m sure Scott receives often: What are critics for? Are critics relevant anymore? One purpose for critics he lands on is to be people “whose interest can help to activate the interest of others.” This is absolutely true, as is its inverse of steering others away. Many movies that I expected to be worthwhile ended up being duds, and the critical consensus that bubbled up before their opening weekends helped convince me to wait for the Redbox or to avoid them altogether.

Conversely, without Bilge Ebiri’s incessant cheerleading for The LEGO Movie before it came out in early 2014, I would have assumed it was another cheap kids movie and not a hilarious and surprisingly profound meditation on creativity and identity. Ditto Brooklyn, which I expected to be another overwrought, Oscar-baity period drama but in fact nearly brought this non-crier-at-movies to tears. Critics matter, even when I disagree with them (*cough* Carol *cough*).

Scott also feels duty-bound as a critic “to redirect enthusiasm, to call attention to what might otherwise be ignored or undervalued. In either instance, though, whether we’re cheerleading or calling bullshit, our assessment has to proceed from a sincere and serious commitment.” The calling attention to is big: a recent example is last year’s Tangerine, a tiny indie I wouldn’t have given a chance without wide and persistent acclaim from the bevy of critics I admire and follow just so I can get scoops like that.

“Redirecting enthusiasm” might also be considered a challenge to “swim upstream”: to seek out the earlier, influential works that laid the groundwork for whatever we’re watching, listening to, reading now. American culture’s on-demand, presentist bias deprives us of decades of good art, whose only crime is not being made right this live-tweetable second. The critic who compares a new film to an older one, favorably or otherwise, provides context for readers but also a tacit clue that checking out that older film might be worthwhile. The upside of our appified age is that finding those forgotten gems has never been easier: getting upstream is as easy as visiting your local library, Amazon, or streaming service.

But what I consider the most compelling reason for the critic’s job might be their most self-interested one. Scott quotes the ever-quotable critic H.L. Mencken, who wrote the motive of the critic who is really worth reading is “no more and no less than the simple desire to function freely and beautifully, to give outward and objective form to ideas that bubble inwardly and have a fascinating lure in them, to get rid of them dramatically and make an articulate noise in the world.”

The process of making an articulate noise about something is the point, I think. It’s where a writer lives most of the time, engaging in a back-and-forth with the work and with himself until he lands on something approximating the truth of his experience. To that end, Scott writes, the history of criticism is the history of struggle. This book embodies that struggle literally: Scott engages in four interstitial dialogues, wherein he banters with an unnamed interlocutor (or inner critic?) who could also stand in as the aggrieved audience, demanding that Scott justify his existence.

I know this combat comes with the job, but the hostility critics in general receive baffles me. There’s way too much out there to see, read, and hear for one person to sort through. “This state of wondering paralysis cries out for criticism,” he writes, “which promises to sort through the glut, to assist in the formation of choices, to act as gatekeeper to our besieged sensoria.” Having professional curators with unique, informed, and enthusiastic taste is a good thing, not something to scoff at or claim is irrelevant in the age of Rotten Tomatoes.

But if you think a critic is wrong and want to tell him why, congratulations! You’re now a critic and are obligated to say more.

Anyway, good on Scott for driving this conversation, and for holding his ground against Samuel L. Jackson.

February 28, 2016 Add Comment

Adventures in Logbooking

Looking at my logbook, I noticed that I recently had a string of four starred books or movies in a row, the longest streak yet. (It would have been five in a row had I seen Brooklyn before Love & Mercy, which I liked a lot but not star-liked.)

749	Typewriter Revolution, The	Richard Polt	book	2015	☆	2015	Dec
748	Tangerine	Sean S. Baker	film	2015	☆	2015	Dec
747	Creed	Ryan Coogler	film	2015	☆	2015	Dec
746	Winter: Notes from Montana	Rick Bass	book	1991	☆	2015	Dec

That’s only the second time that’s happened since I started keeping track in 2010. The other was in December 2010:

208	Social Network, The	David Fincher	film	2010	☆	2010	Dec
207	True Grit	Joel and Ethan Coen	film	2010	☆	2010	Dec
206	Fighter, The	David O. Russell	film	2010	☆	2010	Dec
205	Black Swan	Darren Aronofsky	film	2010	☆	2010	Dec

All four of those films from 2010 made my best-of list that year, and yet I haven’t rewatched any of them besides The Social Network, so I couldn’t say whether they would still remain on my Best of 2010 list if I were to make a new one these five years later. Likewise, Creed and The Typewriter Revolution will make my 2015 lists (with Tangerine just missing the cut), but time will tell if they’ll stay there.

My criteria for earning a star are as diverse as the logbook itself, but my basic interpretation is whether that book or film could end up on my best-of list from whichever year it was made. So both of these streaks could be considered flukes given the inherent subjectivity of star-giving. On the other hand, that both occurred in December makes sense given the abundance of higher quality films in the thick of Oscar season.

With its mix of books and movies, old and new, the 2015 streak seems more unlikely—a conglomeration of providence and serendipity. I’m sure if I were to reread and rematch every movie and book on my list some would lose stars and some would gain them, so I won’t put too much stock in what’s essentially an anomaly. But that’s why I’m glad I started this logging practice: to document a fairly large part of my life, and to catch my first impressions and see how they fare in retrospect.

Still, I found it interesting enough to write a post about, so I have that going for me, which is nice.

February 9, 2016 1 Comment

Favorite Films, Books & Albums of 2015

Resurrecting my 2013 choice to include all my best-ofs into one omnilist, here are 15 films, books, and albums I loved from 2015.

1. Brooklyn
There’s a scene about five minutes into Brooklyn that setup the whole film for me. Eilis (Saoirse Ronan), soon bound for a new life in 1950s America, watches as her friend disappears into the dance crowd with a partner, leaving her alone, on the outside looking in at what will soon be her old life. The camera holds on her face, which betrays a tender bittersweetness that characterizes the whole of John Crowley’s exquisite and humane film. Even while still at home she is homesick, a struggle she will have to endure long after she sails away from Ireland and attempts to forge a new meaning of home. Saoirse Ronan carried this film, and me with it.

2. Spotlight

3. Mad Max: Fury Road (if only for this shot)

4. Creed

5. Slow West (review)

Books

1. The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson (review)
I’m a sucker for concisely written popular histories that uncover forgotten pockets of history and render them understandable and entertaining to the general public. This book does just that. Having read Isaacson’s biography of Einstein last year I was a little better equipped than I otherwise would be when reading about Einstein’s role in this narrative, yet I found Levenson’s distillation of the theories revolving around the Vulcan episode even more accessible than others. I’ve been pimping this one at the library with hopes more people will enjoy it as much as I did.

2. Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

3. H Is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald (review)

4. Step Aside, Pops by Kate Beaton (review)

5. The Typewriter Revolution by Richard Polt (review)

Albums

1. Psalms by Sandra McCracken
“All Ye Refugees” was quite timely this year, given the animus surrounding immigration. It’s heartening to remember public policy need not and should not be influenced solely by politico and demagogues. Though this album is explicitly based on the Psalms, like her previous albums The Builder and the Architect and In Feast or Fallow its blend of modern and ancient style lends it a timeless sound even the irreligious can appreciate.

2. Didn’t He Ramble by Glen Hansard

3. Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens

4. Such Jubilee by Mandolin Orange

5. Strange Trails by Lord Huron

January 26, 2016 3 Comments

From Chicago, A ‘Brooklyn’ Homage

It was a pleasure and an honor to attend Filmspotting’s 2015 Wrap Party at the Mayne Stage on January 9. I’ve been an avid listener for a few years, and finally became a regular donor last year, so with that evening off I jumped at the chance to go to a live show.

A few days before the show they emailed attendees to solicit listener picks for Scene of the Year for possible inclusion in the show. I knew there was a chance they’d read my email or put it on the big screen, but didn’t think much of it. Then suddenly, surprisingly, during the Listeners Picks portion of the show Josh called out my name. Oh shit, I thought. Tyler Greene of WBEZ was sprinting upstairs to where I was in the balcony to hand me the mic, and at once my voice was booming out to the sellout crowd.

With no time to formulate my thoughts, I scrambled to remain articulate about my submission, which was from Brooklyn. My answer is at 1:35:00 in episode #569 (though you should listen to the whole thing and subscribe while you’re at it). I got through it well enough, but I wish I’d recalled more of what I’d submitted in writing:

My scene of the year takes place in a small-town Irish dance hall, not five minutes into the exceptional film Brooklyn. Eilis, soon bound for a new life in 1950s America, watches as her friend disappears into the dance crowd with a partner, leaving her alone, on the outside looking in at what will soon be her old life. The camera holds on her face, which betrays a tender bittersweetness that characterizes the whole of John Crowley’s exquisite and humane film. Even while still at home she is homesick, a struggle she will have to endure long after she sails away from Ireland and attempts to forge a new meaning of home.

Anyway, it was a fun night all around. I went alone, but ended up sitting next to two guys with whom I chatted about the year in film. Thanks to the Filmspotting crew and WBEZ for putting on the event, and for manufacturing a podcast that is intelligent, well-rounded, and edited. (Seriously, I can’t overemphasize how wonderful it is that the show is thoughtfully edited and not just a stream of talking.)

See you in my iTunes feed.

January 18, 2016 1 Comment

The Big Short

The scene in The Big Short that encapsulates the entire sad, tragic, enraging economic failure it covers is a short one. After Lehman Brothers collapses, the dejected horde of laid-off employees are shown streaming out of the building, bewildered and holding their bankers boxes of personal items, as an executive (which in the script is described as “diminutive”) shouts robotically:

“Go straight to your transportation! Do not talk to the press! Go straight to your transportation! Do not talk to the press!”

I don’t know if this actually happened or not, but it sure sounds like it could have. The Move along, nothing to see here attitude pretty much sums up the events in the film, and the Great Recession in general. Malfeasant banks, obeisant credit agencies and watchdogs, reckless homebuyers, deceitful executives all agreed there was nothing wrong, that bad things are only done by bad people and not Good Americans just doing their jobs.

I was a junior in college when the crash hit in September 2008, so I was largely (and luckily) isolated from its worst effects. By the time I was looking for a “real” job, after a gap year and two years in grad school, it was 2013 and economic conditions were much more favorable. Still, I remember that time very well: GOP presidential nominee John “The fundamentals of our economy are strong” McCain, the bailout, the bonuses, Jon Stewart vs. Jim Cramer.

People my age have witnessed many events over the last decade and a half that I think will remain deeply instructive for our foundational understanding of the world: 9/11, the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, the Catholic Church sex abuse, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession, Trayvon Martin, and the NSA a few among them. Controversies like these often reveal the partisan fault lines that determine what you ought to believe about them, depending on whether your county is red or blue. But to me they all proved, just as The Big Short proves, that the game is rigged, that the truth is not as it is reported to be.

Move along, nothing to see here.

This is a lamentable conclusion. The film dresses it up with good actors delivering savvy exposition at a caper’s pace, but it is there nevertheless. At the heart of this film are farsighted money-men trying to profit off the greed of shortsighted money-men. This makes them no better than Captain Renault in Casablanca, and yet we root for them because they’re not Major Strasser.

I wasn’t planning on getting so down while writing about this film, but the underlying melancholy that pervades it stuck with me, and ought to. Perhaps that’s why I responded to this much more than The Wolf of Wall Street, which treads similar territory yet repulsed me. (I get that Scorsese was trying to do that: congrats, I feel disgusted by Belfort and his life; now I will never watch it again.) The Big Short made me understand and made me give a damn; The Wolf of Wall Street spat in my face. Who would have thought Adam McKay would create a more well-rounded take on American avarice than Martin Scorsese?

January 15, 2016 1 Comment

Love & Mercy

As biopics go, Love & Mercy is more interesting than most. I liked how the two arcs and time periods of Brian Wilson’s life start off on their own but then slowly merge like converging highways. Having ’90s Brian in our heads as we watch ’60s Brian slowly devolve personally and psychologically, even as he peaks musically and famously, lends more dramatic irony to the film. Most Beach Boys fans probably already knew Wilson recovered and returned to music, but the film doesn’t let on until the credits (and fanboy postscript).

As for the Pet Sounds sessions, at times the process of inspiration to execution took on the feel of the movie version of Jersey Boys, where someone would say offhand “Big girls don’t cry…” and then we’d see the proverbial lightbulb over Valli’s head, and then cut to the band singing the fully formed “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” I suppose it’s just an efficient way to signify the creative process, but it’s also a bit disingenuous. Lightbulb moments do happen, but shotgun songwriting in my experience tends to be the exception and not the rule.

The movie luckily doesn’t overuse that trope; indeed, it dedicates good time to watching Wilson “compose” the album via the many studio musicians and strange new sounds. And the subsequent self-doubt and uneasiness about the album’s prospects for success will ring true to any musician or artist venturing into unorthodox grounds.

I’m grateful, above all, that it didn’t go full-bio. We learn just enough about Wilson’s upbringing to provide context for the story; and we see just enough of Older Brian to get a sense of his nadir. Put those two halves together and you’ve got a story that says more than if they were to actually include more.

More of that, please.

Sidenote: Paul Giamatti is a national treasure. He can be likably flawed (John Adams, Win Win), a colorful character actor (Saving Private Ryan, Parkland), and total sleezeball or straight-up villain, as he is in Love & Mercy and 12 Years A Slave. (Also, his middle names are Edward and Valentine, apparently. If he were around in the 1930s and ’40s he could have gone by Eddie Valentine and been a badass Edward G. Robinson doppelgänger. Come to think of it, he is today’s Edward G. Robinson.)

December 10, 2015 1 Comment

The Hunt for Vulcan

I’ve never forgotten the scene in Men in Black, when Jay (Will Smith) and Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) are sitting on a bench facing the New York City skyline. Jay has gotten a brief but shocking glimpse of the secret alien world Kay is trying to recruit him into, one that few people know about.

“Why the big secret?” Jay asks. “People are smart. They can handle it.”

“A person is smart,” Kay responds, but “people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

This scene came to mind right after I finished reading Thomas Levenson’s new book The Hunt for Vulcan: …And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe. Levenson writes about the now-forgotten period between 1859 and 1915 when scientists believed our solar system had a planet called Vulcan within Mercury’s orbit. An anomaly in Mercury’s orbit affected its gravitational trajectory just enough to suggest another mass was tugging on it. Professional and amateur astronomers alike made several attempts to observe this mystery mass, and some reported doing so. But it wasn’t until decades later, when Einstein applied the principles of his new theory of relativity to the orbital calculations, when those sightings were finally reclassified as misidentified stars and the coulda-woulda-shoulda planet Vulcan was expunged from the solar system.

This same process had happened in the mid-nineteenth century, when the French astronomer Urban Jean Joseph Le Verrier used Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity to discover Neptune, which, like Vulcan decades later, was hiding within a mysterious gravitational blip of a nearby planet. A decade after Neptune’s discovery Le Verrier detected Mercury’s anomaly, so he followed the same reasoning as before, expecting it to reveal the source of the anomaly just as Uranus had done with Neptune. But it didn’t happen. What mathematically should have existed stubbornly refused to reveal itself.

As much as we could interpret this case study as a warning against relying on dogmatic belief over science, fallibility can extend both ways. When Einstein sought to tackle the problem of gravity and relativity, which did not fall in line with Isaac Newton’s time-tested theories, his colleague Max Planck cautioned him against it. It was too hard a problem, he said, and not even other scientists would believe him. Why? Essentially, because they are human: “Science may celebrate the triumph of the better idea,” Levenson writes. “Scientists don’t, not always, not immediately, not when the strangeness involved takes extraordinary effort to embrace.”

If we extrapolate this Case of the Missing Planet to even bigger questions about creation and the universe, it may trigger some challenging questions. Is God just another word for something we haven’t solved yet (or, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has framed it, does God mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread)? Or does the entire system of scientific inquiry shortchange the presence of the divine?

“We know now that Vulcan could never have existed; Einstein has shown us so,” Levenson writes. “But no route to such certainty existed for Le Verrier, nor for any of his successors over the next half century. They lacked not facts, but a framework, some alternate way of seeing through which Vulcan’s absence could be understood.”

What is your framework? How near or far are the boundaries of your view out into the world? What are you failing to see? Or trying too hard to see? “Such insights do not come on command,” Levenson writes. “And until they do, the only way any of us can interpret what we find is through what we already know to be true.”

This book came as close as any other I’ve read to helping my curious but overmatched brain understand how the heck relativity works. I think it’s because Levenson here seems less a scientist-author than a really smart dude at a bar who after a drink can unleash a killer stranger-than-fiction story between swigs. He paints a narrative picture that’s at once sweeping—running from Newton to Einstein and every key figure in between—and intimate, concisely explaining the nub of every junction point in Vulcan’s winding road to nowhere.

Good popular science, at least in my experience with it, really has to hit the why better than the how. It has to relentlessly thresh the wheat from the chaff, making sure every paragraph and every key moment can answer the question “Why does this matter?” within the span of an elevator pitch. People like me who read science-themed books written for a general audience do so because picking up a textbook on the same topic would be as useful as reading something in Aramaic. It just wouldn’t compute. Not in the time it would take to read, anyway.

So I greatly appreciated Levenson’s authoritative voice as much as his humane style. This book was fun. Which, given that the subtitle pretty much spoils the main events, lends even more credence to Levenson’s storytelling savvy. He guides us through some pretty heady stuff with equal parts aplomb and passion, exemplifying an Einstein quote he references when speaking of the driving force behind great work: “The daily effort does not originate from a deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”

November 17, 2015 3 Comments

Citizenfour

The hotel’s fire alarm testing in Citizenfour = the nighttime controlled explosions in Force Majeure.

I wonder how well this documentary would work with someone who knew nothing of Edward Snowden, who wasn’t aware of the NSA leak when it happened and its subsequent firestorm. Without knowing that context ahead of time and carrying it through the viewing, I doubt the scenes of Snowden in the hotel room breaking down his documents and sharing his (quite poised) reasons for whistleblowing would carry the same weight.

The flipside of that is, remembering that time very clearly and still harboring animosity for the skullduggery Snowden revealed, I thought it was gripping. Poitras’s footage allows us to be present at the epicenter of the hurricane, before and after the public learned of “Ed” Snowden and his very deliberate actions. It’s like a zoomed-in photo negative. Recommended.

November 1, 2015 Add Comment

A Reader’s Guide to ‘Back to the Future’

I noticed a motif of paper, reading, and the written word throughout the Back to the Future trilogy. Perhaps that’s much more common in movies set in pre-Internet times, but I thought it was especially prevalent in the Holy Trilogy.

(Tap/click photos to enlarge)

Part I:

Part 2:

Part 3:

October 21, 2015 Add Comment

Closing the Almanac: On the Fandom-Industrial Complex and Moving Forward from ‘Back to the Future’

The day Back to the Future fans have waited for is finally here. The thirty-year countdown to October 21, 2015, one of the most well-known dates in movie history (despite how often it has been incorrectly reported on the interwebs), is over¹. There’s been an ongoing celebration of the trilogy on the internet and in real life: this Wired dispatch by Jason Tanz, “Fandom Eats Itself at New York Comic Con,” spotlights the kind of reception a widely loved favorite like BTTF gets in the more insular (yet quickly expanding) world of nerd culture:

The rowdiest panel I attended was about the film Back In Time, a documentary about Back to the Future fans. The documentarians presented themselves as Back to the Future fans, but also as fans of other Back to the Future fans, like the guy who spent more than $500,000 to buy the original DeLorean time machine. The audience greeted the documentarians as celebrities too, making them fans of fans of fans of Back to the Future.

Fandom is eating itself, but from the tone of the article and the culture at large you wouldn’t think this is a bad thing. Tanz describes the end of the panel, when the documentary filmmakers give away replicas of the specially produced Pepsi Perfect bottles featured in Part II to everyone in the audience. “Before the event,” he writes, “I had rolled my eyes at the promotion, a two-decade long-con of corporate sponsorship. But here, surrounded by red-vested Marties, whooping and stampeding toward the back of the hall, I couldn’t help but feel a begrudging thrill as I grabbed my goddamn bottle of Pepsi Perfect. What can I say? I guess I’m a fan.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say Back to the Future has been a foundational element of my life. I don’t remember when exactly I watched the trilogy, but middle school was when it caught on with a fury. Since then it’s embedded itself into my identity so thoroughly that I’ve heard from several friends and acquaintances that I’m the first person they think of to send BTTF-related articles, parodies, fake product announcements, and news bites of every stripe. It’s a distinction I’ve willingly cultivated over the years, what with my effusive writings on the subject, my collection of homemade and gifted memorabilia, my eager attendance at meet-and-greets with cast members, and my delight at two separate encounters (both arranged by my very accommodating father) with cosplaying Doc Browns.

So when I read articles like this, at the tail end of decades of brand-sponsored fandom, I’m conflicted. The incipient parade of new Star Wars films and its adjacent subculture has helped me see this phenomenon of superfandom from the outside. I’ve never been much of a Star Wars fan. This might be due to not watching them at an impressionable young age as I think was the case with many of its proponents. But, separating my impression of it from its iconic place in film history, I also don’t like them all that much. So when every scrap of news from the now Disney-owned Lucasfilm universe is alternately drooled over and dissected, I get that “uncanny valley” feeling of seeing another version of my BTTF-loving self that doesn’t quite feel right, that I’m prone to criticize or roll my eyes at without realizing how much it looks like me.

In a now-deleted post called “Withdraw Into Yourself Forever,” Fredrik deBoer criticizes what I’ll call the fandom-industrial complex, the natural outgrowth of a cultural landscape littered with infinitely rebooted Superhero Brand franchises and their surrounding ecosystems that encourage you to keep on loving and buying it in perpetuity, and blur the lines between those two things. “It’s the creation,” deBoer writes, “of an economic, social, cultural, and even political infrastructure to convince you that your urge to dive deeper into the stuff you already like is always the correct feeling. It’s an ideology of taste that is totally unfettered by anachronistic compulsions to be more widely read, or to try new things, or to acquire a cultural literacy other than the stuff that you have always loved.” And it’s a phenomenon perfectly encapsulated in Wired’s dispatch from Comic Con.

I’m not advocating for consuming only new things or for abandoning the things you love simply because other people like them (nor do I think deBoer is). Rewatching favorite movies, or going back to an album that perfectly scores a moment or mood is a unique thrill—and that in our time is unbelievably easy to do. But I still try to subscribe to the tenets Alan Jacobs lays down in his great book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, which I’ve adapted for moviegoing here:

Whim: Watch what you want, when you want to, without shame.
Aspiration: …but don’t get stuck watching the same stuff—branch out and seek to be a better watcher.
Upstream: Seek out the older works that inspired your favorites and be challenged to “swim upstream.” It might be challenging sometimes but the rewards will be greater than just coasting downstream.
Responsiveness: Don’t be afraid to take notes and respond to what you’re watching—make moviegoing matter.
Slow: You’ll miss the little things if you view moviegoing as simply uploading information. Slow down and you’ll absorb more.

Jacobs meant for these to be an approach to reading books, but taken together they work just as well for a more balanced and thoughtful approach to consumption of whatever culture you’re into. They’re also a challenge for myself, and a reminder of what other good I could be missing every time I return to Hill Valley, however weirdly charming it is.

I’m not breaking up with BTTF. I married a Jennifer, for Doc’s sake. In 2015 no less.² Our first dance was to the movie version of “Earth Angel,” which was immediately followed by a group dance with our bridal party to “Power of Love.” I think I’ve fulfilled my density. The trilogy will always be there for me to enjoy. But the hegemony it has enjoyed over my identity has begun to wane. I don’t want to withdraw into Back to the Future forever. I’m so grateful for its place in my cultural biography and for its fraternity of enthusiastic fans, but I’ve got the same blank page Marty and Jennifer got at the end of the trilogy when Doc says their future hasn’t been written yet, that it would be whatever they made it.

It’s time to explore a new future, and today is as good a time as any to begin doing so.

I think November 5, 1955, is the more important date, but who’s asking? ↩︎
Believe it or not, this didn’t dawn on me until a few months before the wedding, which unfortunately didn’t happen in the Chapel O’ Love. ↩︎

October 21, 2015 Add Comment

The Martian

I conducted an experiment with The Martian. Too many times I’ve read a book before seeing its movie version and have come out of the theater disappointed they didn’t show this or showed too much of that, and above all that I knew what was going to happen. Seems the conventional wisdom is that you should read the book beforehand to get the truest experience first and prepare for seeing the movie, but this doesn’t make any sense. Prepare for what? Knowing what’s going to happen so you’re not surprised? I like not knowing what’s going to happen in a movie. So I postponed reading Andy Weir’s book until after I saw the movie.

Ridley Scott’s rendition captures the book quite well. It condenses Watney’s extensive, often mind-numbing passages on the technical aspects of his survival process while maintaining the spirit of the book. (At some point a character tells another “Walk me through it,” and I thought that could easily be the title.) Watney’s play-by-play is (mostly) fascinating, absolutely, but changing it for the movie to Matt Damon directly addressing the camera/mission log allows us to see Watney’s personality come to life in real time.

The movie also, for me, elevated interest in the deliberations at NASA and on the Hermes. Screenwriter Drew Goddard cleaned up a lot of Weir’s cringeworthy dialogue in the book, or at least made it more palatable for the very talented supporting cast of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Kristin Wiig (!), and Sean Bean on earth, and Jessica Chastain et al on the Hermes.

The book lived up to its reputation as an exciting, extremely detailed, chatty thriller slash user manual. I assumed, having seen the film, that I knew how it was going to end—that they wouldn’t have made any drastic changes to the conclusion—but it’s a testament to Weir that I stayed with it the whole time. Indeed, my palms were sweating during the climax. No doubt there’s a scientific solution for that.

October 15, 2015 Add Comment

We Don’t Need Roads

Caseen Gaines, author of Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon, leads this year’s deluge of commentary honoring the Back to the Future trilogy’s 30th anniversary with a wide-ranging and lovingly crafted retrospective on the development, production, and long afterlife of the 1985 time-travel classic. Built upon extensive interviews with cast, crew, studio executives, and even Huey Lewis (who wrote the movie’s famous theme “Power of Love”), We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy explores the treasure trove of trivia usually reserved for hardcore BTTF buffs.

Like the futuristic DeLorean itself, Gaines flies over lots of fascinating territory, dispelling myths (no, hoverboards still aren’t real), revealing production snafus (how a stunt almost turned deadly), and explaining the curious case of casting Marty McFly. We Don’t Need Roads benefits from the detailed recollections of the trilogy’s co-writer Bob Gale and director/co-writer Robert Zemeckis, but not from the onslaught of clichés and Entertainment Tonight-style copy Gaines unfortunately succumbs to. (It pains me to say this as a longtime BTTFhead.) Nevertheless, equal parts celebration and exposition, it’s a well-informed ode to a beloved series that casual moviegoers will enjoy as much as dedicated cinephiles.

September 24, 2015 Add Comment

Pay attention during ‘Children of Men’

I noticed the bustling in the background during my first viewing of Children of Men, but it was overshadowed by the main plot and everything else going on. It wasn’t until the second or third viewing when I started paying attention.

September 24, 2015 Add Comment

Slow West

The refrain from Thomas Hood’s nineteenth century poem “The Haunted House” stands out not only because it appears about halfway through Slow West, John Mclean’s darkly funny reverie of a western, but because its final line—“The place is Haunted!”—breaks the iambic pentameter the poem employs throughout the rest of its eighty-five stanzas. Such a break jars the listener out of the steady rhythm they’ve been lulled into and calls abrupt attention to whatever the line proclaims.

It’s a fitting reference in Slow West, a film whose moments of flashbang severity disrupt the steady gait of a young man’s westward quest for redemption and grace within a world reluctant to give them.

It’s haunted, the place we wind our way through. The barren plains and pined mountains of 1870 Colorado are unforgiving to Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a teenaged Scottish patrician who, anguished in unrequited love and unresolved guilt, ventures through the wild American West for another chance to win over Rose (Caren Pistorius), a commoner’s daughter who back in Scotland had playfully rebuffed Jay’s declaration of love. “These violent delights have violent ends,” she’d told him (quoting Romeo & Juliet) with a smile and a sisterly nudge. But to Jay it’s a gut-punch, and it clearly haunts him when we meet him: lying on a blanket beside an extinguished campfire, stargazing, calling out constellations by name and pinpointing their stars with his revolver. He seems to be harnessing the heavens to his quest. The scene calls to mind the first stanza of Hood’s “The Haunted House”:

Some dreams we have are nothing else but dreams,
Unnatural, and full of contradictions;
Yet others of our most romantic schemes
Are something more than fictions.

This serves as a kind of establishing shot for what follows, both in the poem and the film, where the characters’ dreams of every kind often presage reality like violent premonitions.

Jay trudges on alone through rough terrain and the smoldering remains of torched Indian camps, haunted by memories of Rose and his role in her forced exile. Soon, finding himself in a harrowing spot, a cloaked mystery man—later revealed as the bounty hunter Silas Selleck, himself an immigrant from the British Isles played by Michael Fassbender—relieves Jay of this precarious situation and elects himself (for a fee) chaperone of this vulnerable boy.

So westward they go together on a plodding course, Jay suspicious of Silas’ motives and Silas, a taciturn mercenary, irritated by Jay’s starry-eyed chatter. Quickly the dynamic between them reveals itself when Silas asks about Rose:

“She’s a beauty,” Jay says. “And she does not waste words. They tumble out, wit following wisdom.”
“You haven’t bedded her, have you?” Silas responds with a chuckle.
“You’re a brute,” Jay retorts.

A brute, it turns out, who learns something Jay doesn’t while stopping at a trading post: that Rose and her father have a $2,000 bounty on their heads, dead or alive, for what they fled their homeland for. Perfect fodder for a bounty hunter being led right to his prey.

But along the way the facade of Silas’ gruff exterior, forged by the toil of surviving the West’s hardscrabble life, begins to crack. He grows fond of Jay. Of his innocence, of his willingness to brave a new unknown world for the sake of unlikely love. And soon, after fixating on the pencil sketch of Rose on her “Wanted” poster, he grows fond of her too, or at least the idea of her and the idyllic life she could represent.

The movie’s odd-couple dynamic shines brightest in the darkest moments. More than once Silas stares down a gun pointed at his head while maintaining the tempered serenity of a man very familiar with death. Jay, though highly determined, lacks the weathered wisdom of a gun-for-hire like Silas, and is often victimized by the desperate circumstances around him.

We see this in a scene of the pair curving through an eerily quiet forest considered by the locals to be haunted. The sun creeping through the canopy, Jay, perhaps in a bout of superstition, recites from Psalm 91:

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night;
nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness;
nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

Silas, considerably less pious, cuts in with a timely invocation of the refrain from “The Haunted House”:

O’er all there hung a shadow and a fear;
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is Haunted!

They couldn’t have been more right. What happens after that sets the stage for a climactic set piece that’s at once a wryly fatalistic conclusion and a searing, clear-eyed accounting of all the loss and destruction Jay’s mission—and by proxy the wild west itself—had wrought.

The occasional showy shot aside, Slow West is exceptionally well-crafted, deliberate in the best way, and concerned about portraying its humans as such, and not as plastic figurines in a cowboy-themed Playmobil set. They are flesh and grit, have dirty fingers and often die ingloriously. They’re brazenly self-serving, out to make a buck or get ahead at any cost, or just survive. Even our young protagonist Jay, with his nobleman’s comportment, is impertinent and brash, prone to bouts of high-minded hauteur at poorly chosen times.

The music in Slow West, composed by Jed Kurzel, accompanies the action only when necessary and is as spartan as the film’s running time. Maclean savvily weaves in the throbbing strings beneath key moments, but also allows other moments to unfold in the harsh, spare silence of reality. Despite what we’ve seen in countless westerns, real shootouts aren’t underscored by an orchestra or a triumphant brass theme. The whip-crack of the revolver’s hammer, the whistle of an airborne arrow, the thud of a bullet into flesh, the crackling of a destructive fire in a soft wind: these are the sounds of death in the West, and Maclean wisely lets them tell a lot of this story.

Other reviews of Slow West have called attention to its stylistic similarities to more well-known filmmakers like Wes Anderson and the Coen Brothers. At times it did remind me of the best parts of the Coen Brothers’ rendition of True Grit. But I’ll happily take Slow West on its own terms, unbeholden to its predecessors. It’s good enough to stand on its own, and it deserves to.

September 15, 2015 3 Comments