"Batman V Superman: Dawn (and morning, and midday, and afternoon) of Justice"

In my nearly half-century of life, I have spent more than my share of time and money on comic books.  There are Marvel Comics fanboys and there are DC Comics fanboys.  I have no loyalties - I am a comics slut and give my love freely to ‘em all, and then some!  This admission means, of course, that I am instantly and unashamedly incapable of giving an objective review of the first movie depiction of DC Comics’ “Holy Trinity” of superheroes, namely Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.  Like many geeks, I have been longing for such a movie the majority of my life, so it would take a pretty atrocious film of these characters meeting and doing battle to earn a horrible review from me.  Is this an atrocious film?  Absolutely, positively not.  So, is it a fantastic film?  Absolutely, positively not.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, a mouthful of a title if ever there was one, is directed by Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen), who also directed this film’s predecessor, Man of Steel. The movie opens with that film’s climax, but showing us the mass carnage of Superman’s (Henry Cavill, back again) battle over Metropolis from ground level this time.  The seemingly World War III-ish destruction from that film is not glossed over, and serves as the impetus for this one.  Bruce Wayne’s (Ben Affleck) financial empire has holdings in Metropolis, and he is there that day, seeing his property and, more importantly, his employees, being crushed by the aliens engaged in a death-match all over the city.  Who’s to blame for all this?  Sure, Superman saved the world, but a world now with a few hundred thousand fewer people alive.  Congressional hearings are held, CNN spends large chunks of airtime debating the issue, and lots of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump voter-types go wacko in voicing and showing their opposing fervor on the subject of this “alien” who may be our salvation or our doom. That thought drives both Bruce Wayne and Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) to decide we’d be better off without him, and each begin making moves to act on that belief. Let the battle begin!

This movie is breakneck-paced from the opening titles to the closing credits. With a two-and-a-half hour running time, and so much material to cover, Snyder gives us a visual orgy of explosions and costumes and vehicles and heat-ray-emitting monsters that would make Michael Bay blush.  We bounce around disjointed events from around the globe, and the movie hopes we can keep up and string them all together in our minds to see the overall picture. We’re beaten over the head with Hans Zimmer’s score (credited along with something/someone called “Junkie XL,” whatever that is), and see enough CNN on-air personalities that we’re absolutely certain that Warner Bros. owns them, too.

On the other hand, the pace also prevented Snyder from wasting time retelling us things we of which probably didn’t need reminding. Wayne is driven to almost-psychosis over the mayhem and destruction he witnessed, and the movie conveys just enough to convince me of that and moves on.  As he did with Superman’s origin in Man of Steel, Snyder does not bog us down in the minutia of Batman’s beginnings, as he’s confident in our knowledge of the broader strokes of how Batman came to be.  Sure, he gives us two minutes of Bruce Wayne voicing over a dream/remembrance of his parents’ deaths early on, but that’s it, and it’s enough.

But is the movie good or bad? Well, The Good - the majority of the cast’s headliners do excellent work.  Henry Cavill has Superman down-pat now, and while his performance in Man of Steel was probably more personal and touching, that movie was meant to be more emotional than this one (an actor’s gotta do what he’s given to do, right?).  Affleck is fantastic as Bruce Wayne AND as Batman, instantly shaming all those haters who went wild upon his casting announcement two years ago.  Oh, he may get some ribbing for adopting the Christian Bale gravel-voice while wearing the cowl, but that’s actually explained as a plot point and shouldn’t be held against him.  As stated, Wonder Woman makes her debut, played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot, and if you don’t applaud when she appears in costume for the first time, then I don’t want to talk to you.  She doesn’t have much opportunity to take over any scenes, and given Godot’s previous work, that may be a good thing (I guess we’ll find out if she can REALLY act in next year’s Wonder Woman solo flick), but she sure as Hell LOOKS the part, and that’s enough for me so far.

Now The Bad - Chris Terrio and David Goyer’s screenplay doesn’t do Lois Lane (Amy Adams, also back for more) any favors, and Jesse Eisenberg was a horrible Lex Luthor.  Lois, while portrayed to be more independent and less bumbling that almost all previous incarnations of the character, is still basically a catalyst for rescue situations, and disappointing, given Adams’ talent.  The Luthor character is the movie’s biggest and most glaring disappointment, though, being played as something akin to Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, but with Parkinson’s or something.  Every time he was on screen was like nails on a chalkboard to me, and while one is supposed to be somewhat turned off by a movie’s villain, Eisenberg’s performance turned me off in the wrong way.

The overabundance of characters and plot points, of course, serve as seeds that will someday bear fruit as spinoff films and a Justice League movie. Yes, the two minutes or so that teases the soon-to-be-members of the Justice League feels shoehorned into the narrative (and may literally have been, as rumors have it that the sequence was filmed many, many months after principal photography wrapped), but I understand the purpose the sequence serves, and it didn’t take me out of the movie.  A less geeky viewer may find his or her experience somewhat different.

The movie is far from perfect, but it’s far from a failure, too. I can understand how a more casual moviegoer would find the movie’s pace almost too frenetic to allow him to keep up with all these characters and their possible motives.  I can tell you with all-but-certainty that the half-hour of excised footage that Snyder and Warner Bros. have promised us for the three-hour R-rated Blu-ray release of the film is sorely missed.  Batman v Superman doesn’t make any pretense about being “Hamlet,” however - it’s a superhero movie.  It’s a flick about dudes (and dude-ettes) in brightly-colored spandex blowing stuff up and bashing the crap out of each other, and setting the table for more such movies to come. If that’s your cup of tea, as it is mine, then you may enjoy it as much as I did.

"Deadpool"... and loving it!

Did you see X-Men Origins: Wolverine seven years ago?  Do you remember Ryan Reynolds portraying a character named Wade Wilson in that flick?  Do you recall he became a mutated monster they called “Deadpool” in that movie’s final act?  If you don't, then it's just as well, because we can now just pretend all that never happened. God knows comic nerds across the land have been trying to do just that, and Ryan Reynolds himself has been doing his darndest to make amends for that abomination ever since.

So, what is THIS movie?  Is it a Superhero movie?  Is is a love story?  Is it an Action/Revenge flick?  The short answer to all of these questions is “yes.” In the sense that the title character has appeared in various Marvel titles for the last twenty-five years, it’s a “Superhero” movie.  In the sense that we’re shown two seriously screwed-up individuals have a stereotypical movie “Meet-Cute” (as far as a disgraced mercenary and a prostitute can have a “Meet-Cute”) and realize they were meant for each other… and we as an audience actually buy into it, it’s a love story.  In the sense that a “British Bad Guy” kidnaps said girl and our hero will maim/mutilate/dismember/kill countless henchmen along the way to rescuing her, it’s an Action/Revenge movie.  Most of all, in the sense that Deadpool is a character that requires someone who is good at talking trash to play him, and Ryan Reynolds can certainly talk trash with the best of ‘em, then it’s a comedy… and possibly one of the raunchiest comedies you might see this year.

If any actor was ever born to play a certain role, Ryan Reynolds was born to play Wade Wilson, a former Special Ops soldier who, after being dishonorably discharged, becomes a mercenary, but has fallen to such menial work as protecting a college girl from a stalker. Wilson soon meets the love of his life, Vanessa (“Gotham” and “Homeland”'s Morena Baccarin), and the two find giddy teenaged-type raunchy happiness in each other until Wade is diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Rather than subject her to a life of having to watch him waste away, he disappears, but is found by a mysterious man from the same Weapon X program that produced Wolverine. This man in black (or “Agent Smith” as Wilson dubs him - rewatch The Matrix if you must) offers him a chance at curing his cancer while also gaining superpowers by means of procedures that involve extreme amounts of torture at the hands of the combination mad scientist/bodybuilder supervillain Ajax (Ed Skrein from Transporter: Refueled).  Wilson does have his cancer cured and does gain superpowers, mainly, the ability to heal himself from any wound, but it also permanently disfigures him.  After Wilson escapes the Weapon X program by blowing up the building and waiting while it burns down around him (he can heal from anything now, remember?), he assumes the name Deadpool and vows to find Ajax and have his revenge.  Pretty simple, right?  

Produced on a shoestring budget of $30 million (well, “shoestring” when compared to most other hundred-million dollar movies in the genre), Reynolds as producer and director Tim Miller take advantage of the lack of resources by having only two major action sequences and focusing on Deadpool’s acerbic personality, the very trait that has most endeared him to comic readers.  I can’t help but think that 20th Century Fox must have been collectively thinking, “Hell, we’re not giving them any real money, so let ‘em do whatever they want.”  After forty-plus years of watching movies, it is rare that I see something in a film that I haven’t seen in some shape or form before, but Deadpool provides that the instant the lights go down.  The opening credit sequence contains snarky descriptions that many a cynical moviegoer has said in his own head while reading credits before, but never actually seen written on screen.  Suffice to say that any director who credits himself as “Overpaid Tool” and his star as "Some Douchebag" has earned a little respect from me.  

Oh, sure, the framework of Deadpool is pretty stereotypical, in that we have the wise-cracking Best Friend (T.J. Miller, no relation to the film's director), the love interest, the afore-mentioned British Bad Guy, and a plot that doesn’t vary much from a Charles Bronson revenge yarn. What sets Deadpool apart is that it is a hyperactive, almost ADD-riddled exercise in fanboy-made cinema, and I don’t mean that as an insult. Deadpool is the superhero character (a term used very loosely in this case) you've never seen in one of these movies before, as he breaks the "fourth wall" a la Ferris Bueller on several occasions, addressing the audience directly, acknowledging the movie he’s in and even pointing out some of the tropes we all assume we’ll see in other superhero-type flicks.   

The insertion of a couple of X-Men trying to get Deadpool to temper his murderous ways throws yet another change in the mix, and also establishes that this story is set in the same universe as Fox’s other X-Men movies. Knowing this extremely R-rated story is taking place in the PG-13 world of X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past makes some of Deadpool’s in-jokes and asides all the more hilarious (“I just can’t keep up with all these changing timelines!” he even quips at one point).

There’s no doubt that Deadpool is not for everybody.  If you love Ryan Reynolds in a way that drove you to buy multiple copies of that People magazine that named him “Sexiest Man Alive” a few years back, then you may think this movie is for you.  It may not be.  Then again, you may be deranged enough to enjoy it.  I happened to think it was a tremendous, riotous hoot, but there’s no way I can tell you for sure what your take might be.  I’ll merely provide this bit of advice - this movie ain’t exactly Van Wilder with a mask and swords, but it’s sure as Hell not the Deadpool we were given in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  You can decide for yourself what to do with that assessment.

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.

"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.

Fathers and Sons and "Star Wars"

While this is not a review (that will come this weekend), I do have some relevant thoughts and feelings about Star Wars: The Force Awakens I'd like to share.  Please bear with me, dear readers, for they are a bit personal.

Tomorrow is December 17th.  It is "The Day." There will be a new Star Wars movie on screens tomorrow night.  This is a day that nerds like me have been awaiting for years, a day we once thought we'd never see again.  It will be a day of excitement and happiness that more serious-minded folks just won't understand (to their detriment).  I am a small part of this enormous community because my father introduced me to it, and given tomorrow's date, and how Star Wars has (so far) been a story about fathers and sons, my dad will be with me tomorrow, even more so than he is every other day.

My dad took me and a friend to see Star Wars in the summer of 1977, at the then-known-as Camelot Twin theater in Orangeburg, South Carolina. I was a spoiled-rotten brat of nine years at the time, and actually didn't want to go to the movies that day for some reason that I honestly can't remember, but for some other mysterious reason that'll I'll never know, Dad was adamant that we go, and he was Dad, after all, so his vote ended the argument.  I don't think he even really had any idea of what we were going to see, but maybe he did.  Regardless, he was responsible for introducing the Star Wars universe to me, a universe of characters and stories that has been running rampant through my imagination ever since that summer afternoon thirty-eight years ago.

On May 19th, 1999, Episode I - The Phantom Menace debuted in theaters, and whatever opinions anyone may have about it or any of the other prequels are irrelevant to me right now, because that day was a day much like tomorrow will be.  People like me were stoked about a return to that galaxy far, far way, and I wanted to share that happiness with my dad.  I was an adult by that time, so it was my turn to insist that he accompany me to the movies, as to my mind, it was only appropriate that I take him to this new chapter in Star Wars history, just as he had taken me twenty-two years earlier.  Caught up in the moment as I was, I loved that first viewing of Episode I, but whatever doubts I may have had about Dad's level of interest were put to rest when, as we were leaving the theater, he asked "now that little kid was Luke's son, right?" Geez...

Tomorrow is also ten years to the day that my dad entered a hospital and never left.  Cancer had been doing its best to take him down for almost a year, and it was finally getting the upper hand.  I was the one on the "night shift" at his bedside when he gave up his mortal coil.  I had been listening to his Darth Vader-like breathing because of the ventilator that had been keeping him alive, until it was removed.  He hadn't spoken for several hours before passing, so he had no final words of wisdom for me, but I'm confident he was thinking of Mom, my sister and me.  We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day making his final arrangements, and much like Luke cremated his father's remains in the forest on Endor's moon, I scattered my father's ashes along the wooded banks of a river several days later.

It's hard to explain how much my mom, my sister and I have missed Dad this last decade.  Looking back through the years and recalling my childhood, I can now see how often I was the petulant Anakin-like child, spouting off at the mouth and doing stupid things, and how Dad was the wise, stoic Obi-Wan-figure, patiently trying to show me wisdom and steer me along the proper path. In the years since Dad's passing, my sister has often described him as our "Yoda," the wise elder who was always the calm in the center of whatever family storm we encountered. Oh, how right she is.

Sure, I'd have probably discovered Star Wars on my own if he hadn't dragged me to the movies that summer afternoon, but he DID drag me to the movies that summer afternoon.  It was he who pushed me in front of this spectacle that was so incredible in its day and changed how we all see movies forever, and even though he didn't think that afternoon trip to the movies was anything life-changing, it actually was, and I have him to thank for it.  Oh, he liked Star Wars himself just fine, as I'd find him watching the movies on VHS on the occasional Sunday afternoon through the years, but he was never as devout in his worship of George Lucas' creation as I was.  That's okay, though - Anakin Skywalker was never as pure in his devotion to the Force as his son was, either.  Maybe it's just a Father's job to show his Son the proper way, and mine certainly did, and as such I can directly trace my life-long love of Star Wars to him.

While my wife and I are sitting in the theater tomorrow night, hearing that blast of John Williams' B-flat fanfare and seeing that huge yellow logo zoom out into the starfield, I will be feeling all the geeky giddiness that will fill that auditorium.  How often do we get to have the experience of sharing such excitement and joy for something with several hundred perfect strangers?  If that ain't the best way to feel the Force binding the galaxy together, I don't know what is.

I just hope I can also catch a glimpse of Dad's "Force-Ghost" in the flickering projector-light.  It wouldn't feel right if my Dad wasn't with me for a new Star Wars flick.  If the Force is with me, then surely he will be, too. 

The "Spectre" of Bond films Gone By...

I said in my review of Skyfall that I’ve never viewed the Daniel Craig Bond films as a strict continuation of the Bond franchise.  Producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson stated that Casino Royale was a reboot of the property, and I’ve always taken them at their word and mentally separated these movies from their predecessors.  It took a while for me to find a place in my consciousness for the Craig-era films, though, as they most certainly don’t take place in the same world as the first twenty movies.  The now-four films of this series occupy a different place for me than do the six Connery films, the seven Moores or the four Brosnans (I sorta tack on the one Lazenby flick with the Connerys, though - it was that good).

While I have thoroughly enjoyed the Craig films (yes, even Quantum of Solace - it’s grown on me over the years), none of the first three has quite felt like a “Bond Movie” to me, although Casino Royale came pretty dang close.  Spectre, however, has the “feel” of a Bond movie for me.  It has the patterns we expect of a Bond movie - the pace, the rhythm.  The gun-barrel opening is here, for the first time in the Craig era.  There’s a journey by train (and one hell of a fight), a la From Russia, With Love; a mountaintop health retreat, a la On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; a 1948 Rolls Royce appears out of the desert, a la Goldfinger. All of these winks to Bond’s past (and a few others) pop in and out of the plot, but director Sam Mendes and his screenwriters, all back from Skyfall, wisely don’t shove them in our faces.  

The pre-title sequence is a seemingly one-take, Touch of Evil-ish scene through the streets of Mexico City during the Day of the Dead festivities, leading to a three-way fistfight in a helicopter above a crowded city square.  It seems there’s yet another shady criminal organization trying to take control of the world’s intelligence services, one with which Bond has been unwittingly crossing paths for three movies now, and this ring carved with an octopus is the clue Bond has been needing all this time. Through real-world Snowden-like dealings in the British government, the 00-programme is on the verge of being shut down, so Bond is once again on his own, off to Italy to infiltrate what seems to be the secret society’s annual shareholders meeting and have a fantastic car chase. Then off to Austria to collect the required female adventuring companion, one Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), and ultimately to Tangiers in pursuit of the everyone-says-he’s-dead Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz, looking quite like Charles Gray and dressed remarkably like Donald Pleasence… hmmm...) in his secret desert hideout.  Now if all that doesn’t sound like a Bond flick, just what the heck would?

Spectre’s almost two-and-a-half hour running time didn’t phase me, but despite all of that screen time, there are characters that are sadly underdeveloped or underutilized.  Monica Bellucci, whose casting was much ballyhooed by the press as being novel, in that there was finally an age-appropriate actress as a “Bond Girl,” is in-and-out of the movie fairly quickly, and the sequence with her character almost so unnecessary to the plot that one might forget about her once it’s over. While M and Q (Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw, both fantastic) are involved in this story better and more entertainingly than any incarnation of those characters ever has been before, Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny is sadly underused, a disappointment after the potential for growing her and Bond’s relationship at the end of Skyfall.  Even the almost-obligatory scene where the primary baddie has Bond in his clutches falls prey to the spy-thriller trope of the monologue-ing villain, leading me to hear Seth Green in the back of my mind, screaming to Dr. Evil in the first Austin Powers movie to just pop the hero in the head so we could get on with things.

Spectre is not a letdown after Skyfall by any means, but it is a different movie, and one should keep that in my when buying his ticket. It is not as in-depth as Skyfall, but it is more fun, with Bond exhibiting a bit more of the dry humor we’ve loved from the character these last fifty years. Craig actually seems to be enjoying the character more than he ever has before, although you’d never suspect that from all the public griping about being Bond he’s doing to the press these days.  I once complained that his portrayal of the character was more James Bourne than James Bond, but the part has evolved in these last two movies, and he in the role, turning it into something more familiar, yet all his own at the same time.

If you go to this movie basing your expectations on your experience with Skyfall, you may be disappointed, so don’t fall into that line of thought. Spectre seems to be more about the tone of Bond’s world than the particulars of any story set in it.  It has a different pace than Skyfall because it tells a different story, about a character in a different place in his life, and yet it’s still exactly what you should expect of your Bond flicks - an extraordinarily entertaining action/fantasy thriller, and one you’d be glad you saw in a theater.

Some Fictional Character Named "Steve Jobs"

Steve Jobs was an asshole.  There’s no denying that.  I pity the gifted and talented people who worked with him and for him over the thirty-five years he raged across Silicon Valley.  There’s also no denying he helped change our world.  His vision drove those gifted and talented people to create things we had previously imagined only Dick Tracy or George Jetson could ever possess, and his genius led to ways of demonstrating to us how we couldn’t live without those things.  Any two-hour attempt to tell even a portion of the story of his life with any accuracy is doomed to failure, and it is with just this one caveat that I give Steve Jobs praise.

While the opening credits state the film is “based on the book by Walter Isaacson,” I wonder if anybody can get sued for such an arguably false statement, as there isn’t much more that book and this movie have in common than the title.  Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, The American President, and gobs of episodes of "The West Wing") has crafted a fascinating three-act stage play depicting a character named “Steve Jobs” at three major events in Jobs’ life - the launch of the first Macintosh, the introduction of the NeXT workstation and the unveiling of the iMac.  His whip-smart, rapid-fire dialogue, combined with Danny Boyle’s (Slumdog Millionaire) deft direction and some world-class acting all combine into an incredibly gripping character study.

Despite Boyle’s not being the first choice to direct this film, it’s apparent he found the material fascinating, possibly appealing to his interest in theater direction.  His choice of utilizing different film formats (grainy 16-mm, standard 35-mm and crisp, high-def digital) for each of the movie’s three acts was brilliant, giving each period of time a distinctive look, evolving in quality over time, much as we hope the main character does.  He keeps his camera moving about his characters as they also move in the pre-opening curtain nervousness before these product unveilings, and keeps the movie’s rat-a-tat pace from ever feeling rushed.  

Sorkin’s screenplay doesn’t worry itself so much about any blow-by-blow depiction of actual events in Jobs’ life, instead using these three thirty-minute periods as the setting for showing how he interacted with the people in his life.  He omits Jobs’ acquisition and re-invention of Pixar Animation Studios, and how his transformation of that company became another of his contributions to our culture.  He omits Jobs’ happy marriage to Laurene Powell and their three children entirely.  He combines conversations from various times in Jobs’ career, reintroduces people whom he never saw again, and depicts the poor relationship Jobs had with his first daughter as lasting much longer than it actually did, all of these in the name of dramatic license.

Michael Fassbender gives a tour-de-force performance as this tortured egomaniac, struggling to balance his emotion, his vision and his ambition (his looking absolutely nothing like his subject actually helped me accept the movie as fiction). Kate Winslet is fantastic as Joanna Hoffman, Apple’s marketing head-honcho for so many years and, at least as depicted here, the only one who could herd Jobs in any direction, physical or emotional. Even Seth Rogen as the teddy-bear Steven Wozniak gives a strong performance of a character who was never as forceful in reality as he is depicted here (Wozniak has praised the movie, but admits that he and Jobs never had any conversation as confrontational as their final one shown in the third act; he wasn’t even present at the latter two events depicted in the movie).  

The emotional anchor of the story, however, is Jobs’ first daughter Lisa, played at three different ages by three wonderful young actresses (Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo and Perla Haney-Jardine).  Sorkin uses this relationship’s evolution as a parallel for Jobs’ own evolution into a man who can finally admit that he is “poorly-made,” a startling admission from someone who is obsessed with perfection in his products.

To their credit, both Sorkin and Boyle have stated to the press that this film is not a “bio-pic,” choosing to call it an “impressionistic painting” instead, trying to capture the essence of Jobs and how he changed in the intervals between these three events in his life.  Melding and mashing instances of numerous people entering and exiting Jobs’ life at various times into these three events makes for a never-dull, almost rapid-fire depiction of a personality, not a person.  Watching this Steve Jobs-character gave me the impression I was seeing an evolution along the same lines as watching that of Charles Foster Kane, but moving a hell of a lot faster and reaching a happier conclusion.

Do not take my concerns with the movie’s accuracy, or lack thereof, as any displeasure with the finished product.  Steve Jobs is a wonderful piece of filmed fiction.  Any issues I have with this movie’s playing fast-and-loose with actual events are my own, and yet I can still accept this movie as the entertainment it is intended to be.  If you enjoy seeing wonderful actors depicting smart people talking intelligently and emotionally about the problems they have with the world and with each other, then you should see this film.  It will almost certainly be a Best Picture contender, and more than one cast member will be eyeing Oscar gold come next February.

However, If you want to know more about what the real Steve Jobs was like, you owe it to yourself to read Isaacson’s book, and even some others, afterwards.