No Country for Old Man "Logan"

Hmmm… so what would happen if The Coen Brothers, John Ford, Werner Herzog and … oh, let’s say... Clint Eastwood all got together in a room and decided to create a “superhero” movie?  I’ll grant you a moment to recover from the cluster-mash of images that have certainly just exploded into your movie-loving imagination… Better now?  I had never actually contemplated such a question myself, but after seeing Logan, I wonder if the result of that dream collaboration would not have looked something like this.

Hugh Jackman has spent almost eighteen years playing this character across nine movies, and doing it so effectively that the original comic-book version of the character as a five-foot, five-inch tall Canadian has been almost entirely forgotten. Some of the movies he’s been in have been less than stellar, but no one has ever accused Jackman of giving less than one hundred percent of himself every time he’s strapped on those CGI-created claws.  You may not believe him when he says this is the last time he’ll play the character (speaking for myself, I am not completely convinced), but if this is to be his last outing as Wolverine, then we should all be glad that he saved the best for last.

The time is 2029, and director James Mangold (who also directed The Wolverine) shows us a time in which mutants have all but vanished from the face of the earth and no new ones are being born.  Logan has outlasted all his friends save for a now-Alzheimer’s ridden Charles Xavier (once again played by Sir Patrick Stewart), and is now a limousine driver in El Paso.  When Logan is not caring for the former Professor in their sorta-hideout across the border in Mexico, he often finds himself at the bottom of a bottle, a sad broken shell of a former hero.

That all must quickly fall by the wayside when Logan comes across Laura (played superbly by young newcomer Dafne Keen), a seemingly mute child on the run with her nurse and caretaker, Gabriella (Elizabeth Rodriguez).  Gabriella explains that corporate mercenaries known as the "Reavers" are hunting Laura, and gives Logan a sizeable sum of money to ferry them to "Eden," a safe haven near the Canadian border.  Logan reluctantly agrees, but it doesn’t go according to plan, and he ends up with a surprise stowaway when he returns home.

Charles reveals he’s been communicating with Laura telepathically for some time, and that she is, in fact, a mutant.  The Reavers, led by the cyborg Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), descend upon Logan and Charles' hideout to take Laura, and here the reason for her being hunted is revealed. What ensues is a film that is equal parts road trip and western, as our three heroes set out for “Eden,” and along the way, the truth of what has happened to mutants, the X-Men, and why Laura is on the run is revealed.  

While the plot has some incredible revelations about the X-Men Movie “universe,” what drives this movie is character.  Carrying the physical and emotional weight of a 200-something year-old man, Logan limps his way across the country, coughing and exhausted, slowly grinding into nothing.  If not for the charges in his care, one would think Logan would like nothing else but to lie down in front of an oncoming train, but what Laura is (a human molded into weapon, not unlike Logan himself), and maybe more importantly WHO she is, gives the Wolverine one last purpose.

Of course, Jackman is once again iconic in this role, but let it be known that Dafne Keen is a showstealer here. Even in silence, she carries her character’s tragic history with her, eyes conveying years of horror and torture. When she finally does speak, it is powerful, yet incredibly charming.  If you thought Arya Stark was a little Toughie, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet (even to the point Laura has her own list of names to recite, though in an entirely different context).

The rest of the cast is exceptional, too.  Stewart is heartbreakingly good in the film, as dementia makes him both vulnerable and dangerous (his brain, which has the power to release psionic blasts paralyzing those anywhere near him, has been labeled a Weapon of Mass Destruction).  Stephen Merchant is endearing as Caliban, an albino mutant who helps Logan care for the professor, and while none of the villains are given a robust characterization, they are all given enough moments to shine in their roles that they are not mere mustache-twirling caricatures.

Logan is a visceral tale of what happens when a man given too much time finally starts running out of it.  It is an inspired, ambitious, and violent Neo-Western/ Superhero Chase film, leading me to think of David Mackenzie’s recent film Hell or High Water afterwards, with a couple of mutants thrown in there for good measure.  Mangold’s story takes time to allow a few key sequences to really stretch out and breathe, which may lead some viewers to feel the movie to seem "long" at times, but I did not see it that way. On the contrary, the film’s two-hour, twenty-minute length gives us an opportunity to see so much more of these characters, their surroundings, and how they respond to them, and makes the violence that ends some of those moments all the more shocking.

The best mutant stories, both in the comics and on film, give insight into the nature of humanity, and Logan does this in spades.  Time, mortality and legacy are all at the heart of this film, making it what I believe to be the strongest X-Men film to date.  Surely Messrs. Coen, Ford, Herzog and/or Eastwood could not have done any better.

"Jane Got A Gun"... Finally!

Sometimes movies are doomed from the start.  Sometimes movies end up better than they have any right to be.  Sometimes they fall somewhere in the middle.  As such, we have Jane Got A Gun.

Those who follow movie production news like lonely housewives follow soap operas may have heard how director Lynne Ramsay quit on Day One of principal photography back in 2013 and left the entire production in limbo.  The movie had already been in pre-production for a couple of years, simmering so long that Bradley Cooper and Jude Law had each left the cast, and Ewan McGregor had left and then come back, but to a different role.  Natalie Portman’s never-ending desire to work with a female director having been frustrated yet again, her unhappiness didn’t help matters much, either. Somehow, director Gavin O’Connor (before he even started developing The Accountant) was convinced to step in and try to save this mess.  The finished product finally saw the light of day this past summer, almost three years after photography wrapped, and while I sure don’t think the movie will be mentioned come Oscar night, it actually ain’t half-bad.

Jane Hammond (Portman) and her husband Bill (Noah Emmerich) have scratched out a decent life in the middle of New Mexico territory, or as decent a life as can be had there in 1871.  Bill returns home one day severely wounded with several bullets in his back, after having had a run-in with an old family nemesis, the Bishop Boys, led by the notorious John Bishop (McGregor).  Bill claims that the gang is going to come, come fast, and come well-armed with the intent of destroying the family once and for all. Jane tends to her husband's wounds, but he's in no condition to mount a defense.  As a last-ditch resort for help, Jane approaches her ex-fiance' Dan Frost (Joel Edgerton) to come to her and Bill's aid.  He reluctantly agrees, finding himself in the middle of a deadly showdown, vowing to protect the woman who once left him for another man.

Like many of the great Westerns before it, story complexity isn't at the forefront of Jane Got a Gun.  The movie is built around a simple premise of "bad guys want good guys dead," and while it's hardly groundbreaking, the movie works well with that as a backdrop to a more intimate story of how lives become, and remain, entwined.  It moves along at a typical Western-like pace, allowing us to form our moral judgments on these characters, but then we’ll drift to flashbacks that show us we were wrong to presuppose. The moments are probably the best of the film.

What little marketing there was for the movie featured Portman with the titular Gun, striking tough-girl poses and casting her in the light of the modern feminist action hero, but this was all very deceiving.  The film finds its footing less in its action and cruder story details that see it evolve to the inevitable showdown, and more in how the characters come together and how they carry the baggage that their past and present relationships bring to the table.  Gavin O’Connor keeps the movie from becoming overly-melo-dramatic, however, finding enough narrative strength to carry the limited action as a compliment to the story, not the other way around.

It feels like Jane Got A Gun is trying to be a tragic love story wrapped inside a push-button Western. By “push-button,” I mean it hits all the standard notes in its fairly-predictable story-telling, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a poor film. Portman’s performance doesn’t help matters much (she can’t completely rid herself of that “I’m-better-than-you” Harvard accent, no matter how hard she tries), and I wonder if the movie would’ve been stronger if Ewan McGregor’s bad guy had been explored a little deeper. Perhaps if O'Connor had been given the luxury of scrapping all the preproduction work and starting this story all over from scratch, he may have worked the script over in such a way that it delved into the characters even more. The movie that resulted from the messy situation he was presented doesn’t attempt to reinvent the Western, but it tells a lightly engaging tale of loss and love that will appeal to fans comfortable with the genre’s conventions.  

"The Revenant" is a brutal, beautiful experience

There are movies that are meant to be enjoyed.  There are movies that are meant to be endured.  There are movies that are meant to be admired.  It is entirely possible for a movie to be one, a combination of any two, or all three at once, and still be great.  In my particular case, I found all three to be applicable to The Revenant.  

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s follow-up to last year’s Oscar-winning Birdman is an even better film.  It is a survival story, a revenge tale, and travelogue all rolled into one, and would serve as an almost-perfect example of each.  We’ve all seen the shots of the battle scene in the trailer and television spots, and yes, those are incredible, but these moments from the first ten minutes of the film are not indicative of the whole.  If you choose to see this film, you may think you’re going to see a Western.  You may think you’re going to see a thriller.  You may think you’re going to see a revenge yarn.  In a manner of speaking, you may be right, but you’d also be totally wrong.  

The story opens in the 1820s, and explorer and frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo Dicaprio) is helping other Americans get through the unchartered Dakota territories as they collect pelts, but are soon attacked by natives and reduced in number from a hundred to a mere twenty or so. The survivors, still followed by the Indian leader in search of his daughter who was kidnapped by other fur trappers, leave the sure path of the Missouri River to civilization to instead trek overland and hopefully lose their pursuers.  As they escape the terrain, Glass is furiously mauled by a wild bear protecting her cubs.  With a couple of hunters left in charge of caring for him, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), not only stabs Glass’ son to death in front of him, but buries Glass alive, leaving him for dead.  Glass survives his wounds, however, and begins a superhuman journey to find Fitzgerald and exact revenge.

This film is an endurance trial, for both DiCaprio’s character and the audience viewing it.  I don’t believe I’ve seen any character suffer so much throughout the course of a story since The Passion of the Christ, although that suffering certainly had a different impact. DiCaprio conveys Glass’s hardships with nary a spoken word, as he may only have a couple dozen line of dialogue throughout the film (I didn’t count, so don’t quote me on that). Considering DiCaprio never seems to take a role that doesn’t require him to do some yelling at some point, this is definitely a change of pace for him. With so many of his scenes being shot in close-up, looking deep into his pain-wracked face, or staring into his revenge-filled eyes, Leo shows us yet again why is he one of the best film actors of this generation.

The movie’s other lead, Tom Hardy, is almost unrecognizable as Fitzgerald, and is even unintelligible at times, too, but I thought that to be probably historically accurate - Hell, education is supposedly better now than it was a hundred and ninety years ago, and people can’t speak English worth a toot NOW, so imagine how bad it must have been back then!  But I digress…

With all that said, one must be aware that this is not a Leonardo DiCaprio movie, nor is it a Tom Hardy movie.  Sure, those names are what will appeal to general audiences and possibly lead them to buy a ticket, and their performances are out-of-this-world.  Make no mistake, however - this is an Alejandro G. Iñárritu movie.  This is an instance of a great artist creating his Magnum Opus.  Iñárritu has crafted a film that, on the exact opposite end of the spectrum, is as visually stunning as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. His astounding camera movement - around moving horses, over and under water - is something I’m yet to figure out for myself.  Every frame of this film is beautiful, and a still of any shot would make a lovely piece of art to grace anyone’s wall.  The film was shot entirely in natural light by Emmanuel Lubezki, Oscar-winning cinematographer the last two years running (for both Gravity and Birdman), a technical feat that I will not attempt to describe here, but take my word for it - shooting an entire movie in natural light is incredibly difficult.  

Some may call Iñárritu’s pace of the 156-minute movie slow, but I would disagree.  A short-and-sweet hour-and-three-quarter movie would not do justice to the ordeal the main character must suffer in this story.  The movie’s pace is deliberate, steady and unrelenting, following Glass’s efforts at survival not only with great detail in HOW he survived, but with sequences of dreams and delirium that provide insight into WHY he survived.

We often sit in a darkened theater or our living room and watch characters suffer through physical and emotional pain that most of us can’t really comprehend.  Too often, these endurance tests feel manipulative or, even worse, false.  We’re smart enough to “see the strings” being pulled, and the actor and set never fades away into the character and condition. What’s remarkable about The Revenant is how effectively it transports us to another time and place, while always maintaining its worth as a piece of visual art. You don’t just watch The Revenant, you experience it.  You should walk out of it exhausted, impressed with the overall quality of the filmmaking, and a little more grateful for the creature comforts of your life.

"Legends of the Fall" revisited

In the autumn of 1994, I saw Legends of the Fall on its original theatrical run.  I looked forward to this film for two reasons: Edward Zwick, the director of Glory, and Anthony Hopkins, whom I am yet to see give a bad performance in anything (and given his volume of work, that’s saying something).  I drove 45 miles to a “decent” movie theater, as I did for most all movies in those days, as my local theater was only worthy of bad porn.  I braced myself for what I was sure was going to be one of the best films of that year, as I sat in the dark and marveled at the panoramas of the Montana countryside, so beautifully photographed by Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll.  I fell a little in love with beautiful Julia Ormond, who so sadly vanished from the American movie scene for so many years after this film was released.  And then I left the theater greatly disappointed.

Why, you ask?  Because the hero and central focus of the movie, Brad Pitt’s Tristan, is a JACKASS!!  A completely spoiled rotten, irresponsible, unethical, self-centered JACKASS!!  Have I made it clear enough that he was an utter and total JACKASS!!??  I hope that I have.  Allow me to explain.

Hopkins portrays a grizzled old veteran of the Indian Wars of the 1870s, bitter at the Indian policy his government ordered him to enforce.  He ranches cattle now, a few years shy of World War I, and has three sons on this ranch, along with several Native American hangers-on.  His wife has long left him, but his youngest and oldest sons have their mother’s disposition.  Only the middle son, Pitt’s Tristan, is his father’s child.  After the youngest child, played by E.T.’s Henry Thomas, brings a European fiancee’ (Ormond) home, he leaves for the war in Europe, where he promptly dies.  This leaves the other two brothers to fight for their dead brother’s fiancee’s hand.  Got it?

I had thought that now, twenty years later, I might would see this film again and find something I had missed the first time and see it in a new light.  After a Braves game a week or so ago, insomnia sets in, so I spent an evening flipping around Netflix and stumbled across it amongst the suggestions the service so all-knowingly provides.  Never let it be said that wisdom will overpower insomnia, as I did the dumb thing and cued up the movie, and alas, two hours and fifteen minutes later, I find that I’m going to have a very long day at work the next day, and that my take on this flick hasn’t changed.

Just as I remembered, almost all of the parts here are wonderful, except for one very essential property: a worthwhile hero.  The plot comes from a novella of the same name, written by author Jim Harrison, whose work has been compared favorably to Faulkner’s and Hemmingway’s.  Of course, I’ve not read the source material, so I cannot speak as to how faithfully Zwick and his screenwriters adapted Tristan’s actions for the big screen.  I can (and will) speak of the film, and will state that the movie is not horrible at all, because it has several good things going for it.  The locations are lushly photographed, the costumes and sets are perfectly detailed, and all of the performances are terrific, even Pitt’s.  Here’s an example of how one can assemble the perfect cast, the perfect director and the perfect crew in the perfect setting and begin to make a can’t-miss film, only to end up with something less than perfect.  It is not the performance of Pitt’s character that lessens this film; it is the character itself.

Legends of the Fall has the feel of a grand American Epic, in the fashion of Red River and The Big Country (both of which are amongst my favorite Westerns of all time).  The story winds through the years after World War I and the Prohibition era, with the characters aging and changing as they advance in years and alter their outlook on the world.  In that sense, it is an epic.  However, in the course of the epic events happening in these characters’ world, we’re presented a case study of a family that is dysfunctional in epic proportions, and the obvious hero of the entire story is so self-centered, immature and asinine in his choices and behavior that I can feel no sympathy for him, only for the folks whom his choices affect, often disastrously so.

Leaving a woman who loves him alone with HIS family for years while he wanders the Earth in “search of himself” (and not even having the decency to drop her off in Europe with HER family while he’s headed that way) is just one of numerous instances where this odd son puts those closest to him through absolute Hell.  I’m reluctant to go into much more detail, because as I much as I may loathe this particular character, he is the protagonist of the film and describing his actions in detail would give away too much of the story.  But shouldn’t a protagonist be likable, or least bearable?  It must suffice to say that while I understand a tragic figure can make for good drama, a selfish, stupid one just makes for a tragically wasted film.

Tarantino lays it on pretty thick with "Django Unchained"

Ah... the Antebellum South.  What a fairy-tale land, awash in mint juleps, and excellent manners.  What a grand time of ladies in hoop skirts, nattily-dressed gentlemen, and children who actually understood that they were meant to be seen and not heard.  What a more genteel world it must have been back then!  Even the indentured servants were happy with their lot in life (or so we were always told…).  If this is your notion of the Antebellum South, dear reader, then Quentin Tarantino spits great, big, fat loogies on it, and with Django Unchained, paints a two-hour and forty-five minute picture of him doing it.

Django Unchained is Tarantino’s Western, or his “Southern,” as he himself calls it, which is perhaps a more appropriate term.  It’s his homage to the Spaghetti Westerns he so loves, which suits me fine, as I’m rather fond of the few of them I’ve seen, too.  Borrowing his title character’s name from the 1966 Italian-made Western Django, Tarantino crafts a story of Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist/bounty hunter (played by the baddie from Inglourious Basterds, Christoph Waltz) who obtains a slave (Jamie Foxx) who can identify some certain wanted men Schultz is seeking.  Django has been separated from his wife as a result of their being sold to separate buyers, but Schultz offers Django a partnership of sorts – if Django helps him find his quarry, then he’ll grant Django his freedom and help him find his wife.  They eventually find her in the ownership of plantation owner Calvin Candie, played repulsively by Leonardo DiCaprio, and being supervised by Candie’s chief House slave Stephen, played almost-even-more repulsively by Samuel L. Jackson. 

As a general rule, those of us who are Tarantino fans like his work, and those of us who aren’t his fans don’t like his work.  I count myself among his fans, and I find that there’s usually not much to be gained by trying to convert a non-fan – either you is a fan or you ain’t.  First and foremost, I love his dialogue.  Sure, some folks grouse about the gratuitous profanity his characters spew, but I've never found it to be outside of the logic of whatever story he's telling. Tarantino has consistently created characters and situations full of interesting and/or hilarious conversation, and the number of pop culture reference-worthy quotes we all find familiar is proof of how good at it he is. 

Secondly, it’s hard to deny that Tarantino has a great eye.  He shows us yet again how wonderfully he can frame shots, with Schultz and Django traversing snowy mountains, muddy frontier towns and sprawling cotton plantations.  Some great locations in Wyoming and Northern California, and Louisiana substituting for Texas and Mississippi, help him compose images that we might expect to see in some Sergio Leone picture from years ago. 

The first two acts of the movie progress quickly through Django and Schultz’s forming their partnership and hunting the owners of Django’s wife.  It seems that Django is a “natural” with a gun, and takes to the bounty-hunting business like the proverbial fish to water.  He makes Schultz a great partner, as well as a good friend.  These two characters are alike in so many ways, yet so different in their societal place, that the way they interact and deal with the situations in which they find themselves is fun to watch. 

It’s the final third of the film, however, where the story starts to lose me.  Django has a final showdown with his wife’s owners and their lackeys, which any good Western would be remiss to not include, and of course, that showdown must be a shootout.   Everyone understands that violence exaggerated to ludicrous levels is a Tarantino trademark, and is most often used by him for comedic effect, but I don’t recall the splatter and spray from his earlier films being anything near what he utilizes here.  Sure, sure, I should probably expect a tad more crimson in a Western (Southern) shootout than I would from films like Jackie Brown, or even Inglourious Basterds, but geez, Louise!  Even the two Kill Bill chapters, which are basically revenge movies, don’t have the geysers of blood flowing like is flowing here.  I don’t mind gore one bit when it’s logical, but it seems to me that, for the first time in his career, Tarantino has shoveled it on to the point it’s a distraction from the story he’s trying to tell, and no good movie should ever take the audience out of a story’s flow. 

Tarantino has publicly said that he intended to tackle the horrible subject of slavery with this film because no one else has had the nerve or the right to do so, but I don’t think he recalls numerous other works (Spielberg’s The Color Purple, or Alex Haley’s books, to name just two) that have addressed the subject, and done so with a bit more level-headedness.  For example, I certainly hope his inclusion of “Mandingo fighting,” gladiator-like fights to the death between slaves, is merely an exercise in artistic license, as there is no historical evidence that any such practice ever took place.  Quint may have been born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but it seems his living in California since the age of two has purged him of any allegiance to the Land of the old Confederacy he might have had. 

Django Unchained is a pretty good film on the whole, but not Tarantino’s best.  As a fan of his work, I’m glad I saw it, but I hope the subject of his next movie is one about which he might be able to exercise a bit more artistic restraint.