I Can't Praise "Hail, Caesar!", But I Can't Quite Bury It, Either.

Friday night at the movies finds the wife and me going to see Hail, Caesar!, the latest offering from the Coen Brothers.  I’m not one of those who worship at the altar of Joel and Ethan Coen, but I’ve enjoyed more of their works than not, and the marketing for this one was funny enough to evoke thoughts of Raising Arizona, so I was really looking forward to this one.  It’s apparent that Hail, Caesar! is intended to be something of a “love letter” to Old Hollywood, and in that respect, the Brothers have pulled it off.  Sadly, they didn’t succeed at much of anything else.

Their screenplay gives us Eddie Mannix (played by Batman-jawed Josh Brolin), who in reality was an executive at MGM through the forties and fifties, working as a “fixer,” addressing the scandals that followed their stars around and doing his best to maintain the facade of wholesome people making wholesome entertainment for the Eisenhower generation. Oh, how times have changed… This fictional Eddie marches all around production at the fictional Capitol Studios, starting every day in confession (where the priest even tells him he comes entirely too often), trying to stay morally upright in a morally bankrupt industry.  He then deals with drunken starlets, snippy gossip columnists, a demanding-but-never-seen studio boss, and a pregnant-out-of-wedlock actress in one morning.  The afternoon brings news that the star (George Clooney) of the studio’s big swords-and-sandals prestige production has been kidnapped by communist screenwriters (it IS the early fifties, after all) seeking bigger cuts of the monies their writings produce.

The movie follows enough disparate plotlines to allow the opportunity to revisit several different film styles of the early fifties, and the Coens pull off all of them. Gene Autry-style Westerns, Esther Williams-style swimming spectacles and black-tie teacup dramas all have homage paid to them with sly wit.  The work done by their production designer Jess Gonchor, costume designer Mary Zophres and legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins is outstanding, totally convincing me this world actually was Hollywood in its heyday of the 1950s. The myriad of quirky characters all represent some genre that studios of the day cranked out in their assembly-line fashion, and the witty dialogue they speak are entertaining in their own way, but the downside is that it seems their focus on recreating this world and being faithful to it kept them from crafting a more gripping story.

Just one example is the impressive Anchors Aweigh-type dance number mid-way through the film, which plays as perfectly as if Stanley Donen were staging it for Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra.  Channing Tatum taps and jumps and glides and sings throughout the number, proving he might very well have been a bigger star back in that day than he is today, but once the number is over, it’s over, and serves no other purpose in propelling the story… or what little story there is.  

The Coens seem to have come up with a series of bits and matched all of them up perfectly with the members of their “repertory company,” but aside from Clooney, and perhaps Alden Ehrenreich as the cowboy actor Hobie Doyle, all of these names you see listed above the title on the movie poster are mere cameos.  Scarlett Johansson, Jonah Hill and Frances McDormand all have a mere one scene each, and none of the three seem to do anything that relates to the underlying plot line of the Clooney character’s kidnapping.

Sadly, this movie is also yet another victim in the trend of movie marketing giving us all the funny bits as a means of drawing us is, but not leaving any for us to discover once we’re in the theater.  A sequence showing exasperated director Laurence Lorentz’s (Ralph Fiennes) attempts at getting a dense actor to deliver a line properly was featured in the film’s second trailer, and while the painful coaching the director gives is hilarious, it’s also probably the highlight of the movie’s laughs. Lots of other one-liners fall flat, as do pretty much all of George Clooney’s myriad of Elmer Fudd-like facial expressions.

The tone, the mood, the visuals were all spot-on, but I kept waiting for the story to get deeper.  It never did. Okay, the Coens want us to get the joke when they name the Carmen Miranda-type character Carlotta Valdez, and fans of Hitchcock probably will, but is that sort of thing enough to build a movie’s plot around? Hail, Caesar! is a great idea for a movie, and even a great starting point for a movie, but not one that became a great movie.  A “meh” one, perhaps, but after such works as Inside Llewyn Davis, O Brother Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men, we expect better from the Coens, or at least something more engaging.

No one should try to defy "Gravity"

As wonderful a genre as science fiction is, 99.9% of movies made under that label lean a lot more heavily on the “fiction” part than the “science,” so it’s a rare treat when we get one that relies on some scientific fact-based scenarios to produce dramatic effect.  When pitching 2001: A Space Odyssey to MGM all those years ago, Stanley Kubrick said he wanted to produce the first “good” science-fiction film, with his definition of “good” being “believable,” as he wanted to tell a compelling story in a setting that could easily be our own world. Of course, he very famously did so, and the lack of similar efforts by other filmmakers through the years could be evidence of how difficult a task “realistic” science fiction is.

Alfonso Cauron’s Gravity, however, belongs in any discussion with Kubrick’s master-piece.  By saying such a thing, I don’t mean to imply that they are equals (2001 is such a unique film that almost anything will pale in comparison to it), but I do mean that Gravity is such an absolute technical marvel, like 2001, that its being a very good human story is like icing on the proverbial cake.

The film opens with an uninterrupted seventeen-minute take depicting a space shuttle repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.  Astronauts Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) are two members of the crew we see performing extra-vehicular activity (that’s space-walking to you and me) when NASA radios an emergency abort alert, as a field of debris from a destroyed Russian satellite is in a direct orbital path with their shuttle.  This cloud of metallic fragments travelling faster than any bullet ever could does indeed find them before they are able to change their orbital path, destroying the spacecraft and leaving Kowalski and Stone adrift in space.  What follows is an engrossing, fascinating story of loss, bravery and the discovery of a will to survive, told by Cauron in such a stunningly beautiful way that any audience member not feeling fear and anxiety, and happiness and joy, is almost certainly a fairly dark-hearted individual.  

By the end of the first act, Gravity essentially becomes a one-woman show, a story of a woman’s decision to survive, not only her current predicament, but her lonely, emotionally empty life in general.  Sandra Bullock’s performance is a statement that her Oscar win two years ago was no fluke, and I fully expect to see her name listed amongst the Best Actress nominees again come February. There are so many scenes in which she is the only character, and yet even without anyone to exchange dialogue, she conveys so much about Stone’s fear, and pain, and depression, that we know this character intimately by the time the film ends, and her fate is all the more emotionally impactful for it.

As amazing a story as Gravity is, the concept of a massive storm of orbital space debris could be the impetus for several other fascinating stories, as we could imagine how our society would react to a severe crippling of, if not outright elimination of, global telecom-munications that would result from such a scenario.  Imagine television and radio broad-casts being interrupted, international telephone calls being impossible, and internet connec-tivity being all but stopped.  Hell, the loss of world-wide Twitter access alone might be the beginning of Armageddon.  Cauron, to his credit, does not distract us from the story he chooses to tell, not even once, trusting his audience to understand how there’s a wave of chaos going on down on Earth, which makes the solitude of Bullock’s character all that much more profound.

At the risk of being repetitive, I’ll reiterate that Gravity is worth the price of admission as a visual treat alone.  Cauron’s use of computer-generated effects is extensive, but done with such great skill that not once are we under the misguided notion that we’re viewing some sci-fi space opera. Cauron’s lighting and camera movement constantly amazed me, and the moments of suspense and danger the astronauts faced got physical reactions from me that most movies can’t get out of me anymore.  Even the sound design of the film was fantastic, as we heard the radio transmissions from Earth differently when we were inside the astronauts’ helmets than we did when we were outside their suits (yes, you read that right - Cauron takes us all sorts of places in this film), and the silence of space is punctu-ated by the thuds and clunks that would be heard when the characters were in enclosed spaces with atmosphere.  

Now I did see Gravity in IMAX 3D, and yes, I’ve just raved and raved about how beautiful it was to watch, but I continue to believe this format to be a waste of a filmgoer’s money, and a lesser viewing experience than traditional two-dimensional film presentation.  With the ex-ception of Avatar, I’m yet to see a 3D film that didn’t have muddied or unbalanced colors, and I would even include Avatar when maintaining that the 3D effects have not yet added anything absolutely necessary to a story being told on-screen.  That being said, to each his own, and your tastes and experiences may differ, but I don’t think there’s really any debate needed when saying Gravity is the best picture of 2013 so far.

"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" - a case of Been-there-Done-That...

Awright! We get to go back to Middle Earth! Like pretty much all of my geek brethren, that was my initial reaction when Peter Jackson finally got his desire to film The Hobbit pushed through the nightmare of lawsuits between Warner Brothers and MGM over film rights, and then MGMs bankruptcy proceedings.  Yay!  Then came the news that the adaptation would actually be a pair of movies.  Okay, I guess with some stuff from Tolkein’s “Lord of the Rings” appendices and a little creative license, two average-length movies could come from the novel.  Then, we get word that this simple little adventure story would be stretched into THREE films, and three-hour “epics” at that!  Geez, Louise, how thinly can they possibly spread a pat of butter over so much bread???

Well, the finished product is finally here, so with a little bit of reservation, I went to see the first installment of this new trilogy yesterday.  For the sake of brevity, I’ll assume that you, dear reader, are among the hundreds of millions of folks who’ve seen the Lord of the Rings movies, and thus won’t waste your time elaborating on the “adventures” about which Bilbo told Frodo, and which are depicted in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (and the next two movies…).

The first third of the movie dawdles a bit, with a very-padded prologue leading off things showing older-Bilbo beginning to tell this tale to Frodo.  We see thirteen dwarves showing up in separate pairs at Bilbo’s doorstep, raiding his pantry and making asses of themselves, but at least they have the good manners to do the dishes afterwards (don’t bother with trying to keep up with the thirteen dwarves - I won’t say it’s impossible to do so, but it’s not entirely necessary, as Jackson does a pretty good job of having whatever dwarf is important in any given scene identified in the course of that scene).  The show finally does get on the road, so to speak, and while there are a couple of sequences in the second and third acts that go on a bit longer than I think necessary, the final two-thirds of the story on the whole moves along fairly well, thankfully. 

If you’ve read “The Hobbit,” then you’re aware that, unlike the trilogy of books that followed, it is primarily a children’s story, and as such, the movie that comes from it certainly has a different tone than those three monstrously-successful movies from a decade ago.  Maybe that explains how the three Lord of the Rings films had a… I started to say “majesty,” but perhaps that’s a bit over-the-top.  Then I thought “originality,” but that’s being a bit too harsh on the new film.  Whatever the term for which I’m searching, there’s some sort of sense of wonder lacking from The Hobbit that was present in the Lord of the Rings.  Perhaps it’s just something as simple as the settings and effects not being new to us anymore, or maybe it’s The Hobbit’s story being a little bit less about the End of the World and more about one short guy overcoming his agoraphobia.

I realize that this is sounding a bit negative, but that’s not actually my intent, as there are good things about the movie, starting with the cast.  Martin Freeman as Bilbo was a good choice.  He is his usual put-upon, underdog-self here, a personality type he always seems to play so well (see Love, Actually and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and I liked how Ian McKellen played Gandalf with a different slant than he did in the Lord of the Rings flicks, conveying the character at an earlier stage in his life.  The multitude of dwarves are actually quite funny, and there are even appearances by some folks who pop up in the Lord of the Rings, so we do get the sense that all of this is building to something, which seems a good thing. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is this first installment of this Hobbit trilogy left me with a little bit of a feeling of “been there, done that.”  I liked it okay, but unless it grows on me in the coming months after I see it again on home video a time or two, I’m not going to be in a very big hurry to get to the theater next December for the second one.    

"Skyfall." Best. Bond. Ever.

That's right, I'll say it again in case you misunderstood me - Best.  Bond.  Ever.  I could just quit writing right there, because it really doesn’t get any simpler than that.  Don’t get me wrong – Goldeneye was great.  I still love Thunderball and Goldfinger.  Even Live and Let Die was pretty good, but if we are to take the word “reboot” literally, then I have to consider the Daniel Craig era as a separate entity from the rest of the Bond series, and as such, Skyfall is simply the best of the bunch.  One of the greatest sensations I can hope to experience as a moviegoer is when a movie lives up to my high hopes for it.  This one most certainly does.

After an intense pursuit of a stolen hard drive that contains vital information through the streets of Istanbul, Bond is wounded during a desperate fight atop a moving train, flung to a river below and left for dead.  MI-6 continues on without him, but when the complex plot of a cyber-terrorist to discredit and disgrace “M” (Judi Dench) begins to take shape, he reappears from the dead, only to be told that he’s possibly too old and out-of-shape to continue serving.  Not that he or “M” would allow silly things like physical evaluations and psychological profiles to keep 007 out of action for long, so rules are bent and superiors are ignored, and Bond then jet-sets halfway across the globe in pursuit of those who seek to make use of the information on that stolen hard drive.

That information turns out to be the identities of every covert operative currently undercover in terrorist organizations all over the world, and it’s being used by some evil mastermind to wreak havoc on MI-6 in general, and on “M” in particular.  The villain turns out to be a former MI-6 operative named Silva (played by a wonderously-creepy Javier Bardem, who can do Creepy Bad Guy better than most, as proved by No Country for Old Men), whose plans turn out to be much more complex, and much more personal, than mere cyber-terrorism.  His first meeting with Bond must be the grandest entry of any Bond villain into a film, and his ensuing conversation with him must also rank as the strangest.

Of course, it’s amazing what an Oscar-winning director can do for a franchise-formula movie (pay close attention to that statement, Walt Disney company, when deciding who will helm the next Star Wars flick…).  I have wondered what sort of “action movie” Sam Mendes could make from the moment I heard of his hiring to direct this film.  I mean, let’s face it – American Beauty and Revolutionary Road were wonderful movies, but they don’t exactly make one think he could just as easily have made Die Hard or something like that.  That said, I’ve had a gut feeling all along that he’d pleasantly surprise us and would make Skyfall something special…  and he sure as Hell did.

Mendes has given us the most visually gripping Bond film I can remember.  As exotic settings have always been a staple of the Bond series, Mendes makes fantastic use of the nighttime settings of Shanghai and Macau, with a skyscraper’s glass and a city’s neon lights apparently being the new trees and foliage in which snipers ply their trade these days.  The gloom of Scotland, the light bulbs of the London underground, and the harsh sunlight of an abandoned island in the South China Sea are all important parts of Mendes’ lovely finished product.

I can’t rave enough about this script, either.  Skyfall is certainly the most character-invested film of the entire Bond series.  We see Bond have doubt about the world changing around him.  We see “M” face her mortality.  We see other, younger operatives suffer the consequences for actions demanded of them.  We see the people to whom they answer question their very necessity in the modern world and the wars we might fight.  We also, for the first time in the fifty-year history of the cinematic version of the character, see that Bond actually did exist before he was granted his Double-O status. Screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan apparently took advantage of the extra two years provided by MGM’s financial problems to hone this script to near-perfection, and given the sorta-flat previous film in this series (that would be Quantum of Solace, which actually began filming without a completed script), it’s easy to forgive being made to wait longer for this movie.

We’re even given the pleasure of being reintroduced to some of the characters and details we used to love about the series that went away after Casino Royale, in ways that are entirely appropriate to the new style and tone of the series.  There were just enough winks to Bond’s past to be appreciated, but none of them so over-the-top as to make one’s eyes roll at the cheesiness of doing so.  I am so tempted to give away some of these nuggets, but oh, how I don’t want to deprive you of the pleasure of learning these things for yourself (I will blab that it’s great to see that Bond made sure the Aston Martin he won from Demetrios in Casino Royale got shipped over from the Bahamas after that mission was completed, and that it has a few specs that harken back to other Bond movies…).

If you’ve avoided the movie’s Wikipedia entry so far (damn those European moviegoers who’ve had an extra two weeks to see it and spoil the surprises for us over here…), then you’re in for one heck of a time.  The pre-title action sequence alone is worth the price of admission, so consider getting a completely fantastic experience the rest of the way as a bonus.  In other words, Skyfall kicks ass.  Maybe I should’ve just left it at that.