The latest Tom Ford design - "Nocturnal Animals"

Lost love is “lost” because not only is the love gone, but you are misplaced as well, changed into something you weren't before, and it may be years before you realize it. When the crying is done, you move on - you adjust, you grow, you heal.  Maybe you’ll end up meeting someone better than that awful person who ripped up your heart - someone who makes you feel alive and free, someone who makes you forget and forgive the pain your last love caused.  Or instead, maybe you’ll slowly slip into despair, longing and regret.  Maybe you’ll sit and wait for that text, or that e-mail, or that phone call… all but certain that none of them will ever come.  Maybe you’ll sit and wait and watch the door, hoping he/she will come through it.  Maybe he/she will even be smiling when you next see him/her… or maybe they won’t.

Nocturnal Animals, the second film from Tom Ford, the fashion designer who so impressively made his foray into filmmaking with A Single Man seven years ago, is based on a novel that bears little resemblance to this movie.  Ford discovered the novel "Tony and Susan" by Austin Wright and contemplated how to actually adapt the book into two different films. The more he churned the story in his mind, however, his imagination began to formulate something that resulted in this offbeat, non-linear tale of a woman who believed she was growing into a better person by casting her first husband aside, then comes to realize over the next decade how guilty she was of hurting him and destroying her own happiness.

Beginning with images so incredibly silly, yet so awfully uncomfortable to view, Ford instantly sets a tone that will make discovering all the traits of these characters, both the “real” ones and the characters in the novel-within-the-movie, all the more impactful.  The images are part of a conceptual art exhibit hosted by Amy Adams' Susan, a gallery-owning high roller in the Los Angeles art world.  Susan is beautiful and haughty, living an extravagant lifestyle funded largely, we assume, by her husband Hutton, played with born-into-privilege knowingness by Armie Hammer, and thoroughly, thoroughly miserable.  After her opening, Susan gives herself a nasty paper cut opening a package: the manuscript of a first novel by Edward Sheffield, Susan’s first husband.  She’s disturbed by the package and the accompanying note, telling her that he has dedicated the novel to her.

Susan soon settles in with Edward’s novel.  Without warning, we cut to Susan’s visual interpretation of the book.  This story-within-a-story begins with Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal) driving his wife, Laura (Isla Fisher), and their daughter, India (Ellie Bamber), to a weekend home.  They’re driving through the night on barren Texas roads, and in an instant, things go very, very wrong.  It isn’t fair to describe what Tony and his family endures, as to do so would diminish its horror.  I will say that this scene of roadside terror is one of the most frightening things I’ve seen on film since, maybe, Blue Velvet. This has nothing to do with physical violence, as none is shown, but the scene takes its time tormenting us.  It is so realistic, and it could happen to any of us - you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and your world is forever altered.

Susan is so disturbed by the novel that the almost subliminal questions she’s been having about her life begin to make their way to the surface.  Is this text some fictionalized version of some horrific event that happened in her and Edward’s own shared past? Her memories of life with Edward then present a third line of narrative, with Edward (also played by Gyllenhaal) and Susan as young and idealistic lovers.  He encourages her to pursue art - not as a business, but as a calling.  She wants him to be more responsible, or realistic.  She dreads turning into her materialistic upper-crust mother, but he’s not so sure she really dreads it.  Emotional damage ensues, but nothing like the stuff that happens in Edward’s novel. This is a movie that, among other things, trusts the viewer to make sense of it, or maybe demands the viewer make sense of it.  All the threads pull together, we presume, when Edward and Susan (whose current life continues to turn to rot as she makes her way through Edward’s novel) agree to meet again in “real life.”

The triumph of the film is how the individual stories are kept in the air so beautifully by Ford, and how the individual actors can convey so much about their jaded, miserable characters with a minimum of exposition (Armie Hammer’s Hutton, away on business, is cheating on her so blatantly he’s almost too bored to hide it anymore).  Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the scumbag who terrorizes the novel’s “hero” shows a side of his ability audiences have never seen before, and of course, Amy Adams is her usual spectacular self.  Michael Shannon also achieves a career high (and an Academy Award nomination) with his dry but enigmatic portrayal of a Texas lawman with nothing left to lose.

The final scene is one that, I presume, intends to have viewers debating as they leave the theater, and I admit that I would have welcomed such a discussion had I not been alone when I saw the movie.  I suppose that without the benefit of a human sounding board for my reaction, I found Nocturnal Animals to be a reminder of how much the loves we leave behind form us in such ways that continue to shape our outlook on life.  Whether those past loves were good or bad, happy or sad, we will have suffered damage of some sort along the way, and even inflicted some of our own.  Seeing such a simple lesson in dealing with adult emotions told in such a powerful fashion may have been a tad uncomfortable, but it made for a movie that is definitely worth seeing.

"Man of Steel" lives up to the hype

As one raised a Southern Baptist, and who has lived in the heart of the Bible Belt his entire life, I’ve always thought I have a fairly good notion of how I believe people in general would react to evidence of, or contact with, an extra-terrestrial intelligence.  The short answer is that I don’t think folks would handle it very well at all (the Robert Zemeckis film Contact depicted that possibility more believably than any other film of which I can readily think).  So many of us are unable to conceive of anything greater than ourselves or our image of God, or even worse yet are conditioned by religion and societal norms to consider such thinking as heresy, that having evidence to the contrary dropped in our laps would most likely result in some pretty ugly reactions.  This is the premise from which director Zack Snyder (Watchmen, 300) and screenwriter David S. Goyer (Christopher Nolan’s three Batman movies) approach their telling of that story with which we all are so familiar, how an alien baby came to Earth, adopted it as his home and became its champion and protector.

Man of Steel (an interesting title, not even mentioning the name he’ll have assigned to him by humanity) begins with a prologue depicting the few days leading up to Krypton’s demise, with Russell Crowe as Jor-El, an eminent Kryptonian scientist, and his wife Lara, both of whom have bucked their society’s notions of reproductive morality and produced a child the old-fashioned way when Jor-El deduces that Krypton is doomed to destruction due to environmentally-disastrous practices.  We see General Zod (Michael Shannon), commander-in-chief of Krypton’s military, attempt to assume control of the government and save their people in his own way.  This vision of Krypton is one we have not been shown in previous iterations of the Superman story, as the twenty minutes or so of the prologue gives us so much more of Krypton’s technology, government, wildlife and landscape than Superman: The Movie gave us thirty-five years ago that we can feel more sense of loss when this civilization comes to an end. 

The film, however, doesn’t go sequentially from there to baby Kal-El crawling from his spacecraft into a Kansas cornfield.  No, it quickly jumps to young-adult Clark Kent (Henry Cavill, an excellent casting choice), already grown and off into the world, attempting to find some sense of self.  Since we all know the Superman story, we really don’t need to have it all spelled out note for note again, and to their credit, Snyder and Goyer don’t even try.  We revisit important moments in the Superman/Krypton/Kent family mythos via flashback when those moments apply to current happenings in the film, a brilliant move on the filmmakers’ part.  As Clark comes to critical points in the plot, he’ll recall life-lessons instilled in him by his adoptive father Jonathan (Kevin Costner, whose understated acting style is the perfect tone for conveying fatherly wisdom), and his Earthly mother, Martha (Diane Lane, in some fairly-impressive aging makeup in later scenes).

The second and third acts are of how Clark’s existence, but not his identity, is revealed to the world by the arrival of Zod and his henchmen, having escaped from banishment to another dimension before Krypton’s destruction.  Zod’s vision of “saving” Krypton’s civilization require Clark/Kal-El’s death, and subsequently, Earth’s destruction, leading first to mankind’s question of accepting Kal-El as trustworthy, then to an all-out battle for Earth’s survival.  I liked how the movie takes a little time, even during all the carnage, to show how we might would go from hostile distrust of a being such as Superman to even accepting him, using a few Army officers’ coming to grips with him as a metaphor for society in general.

Oh, and Michael Shannon as Zod is fantastic, folks.  Shannon always has a borderline-psychopath look in his eyes, and he must be aware of it, as he always seems to find some way to utilize that physical characteristic to some advantage in whatever character he’s playing. Mania does not always necessarily equate to evil, and Zod honestly believes he’s pursuing a noble cause, and that his zeal in pursuit of that cause makes his actions just.  I think Kal-El/Superman even realizes this on some level and knows he must destroy Zod, anyway.

I suppose my only complaint (and I’m a little reluctant to use that word) is Amy Adams being cast as Lois Lane.  I’ve not been very happy with any of the actresses cast in that part in any of the previously-produced Superman films, with Kate Bosworth being the biggest joke of them all, and I was hoping Adams would break that streak for me, as I’m such a fan of hers.  Alas, the streak continues, but I’m not totally sure if my hesitation in accepting her is any fault of her own, or am I just unsatisfied with how David Goyer wrote the character.  The character isn’t anywhere near as annoying as Margot Kidder’s Lois, and is even written as having some empathy and restraint, but she still whines and cries a bit too much.  But, I guess if this is the biggest quabble I have with the movie, there must not be very much to quabble about.

Man of Steel is most certainly a product of the time in which it was made.  It seems that superhero films of this day and age must portray their primary characters full of angst and self-doubt, and loved ones will die, and there must be orgies of carnage and property destruction, and sure, those qualities are all present here.  That said, I found all of them appropriate here, and without any sense of stereotype.  First Contact, when that time comes, WILL result in mass hysteria and destruction in some form or another, so seeing New York City (and let’s face it, gang – that’s what “Metropolis” is) almost razed to the ground when aliens do battle there sorta makes sense.

While the term “reboot” has been applied to this film, that term often is self-defeating.  Sure, by definition, it means that it’s a new starting point for a potential series of stories, yet it seems that most folks never, ever allow themselves to forget the history of the source material, or keep that history from skewing their opinions of the new product, generally to the negative.  I admit I’ve been guilty of this myself on occasion (Casino Royale in particular), but I’d like to believe myself objective enough to overcome such gut-reactions.  Seeing this film with fondness or nostalgia for the Christopher Reeve films of the 70s and 80s, and expecting something similar would be a great mistake on a viewer’s part.  This movie is a science-fiction film at heart, and I suggest you see it with that mindset.

At least "Premium Rush" gets the "rush" part right.

If you’ve ever wondered if there was a way to make a bicycle chase exciting onscreen (and Lord knows I have…), then your wondering should be put to an end after seeing Premium Rush, as this movie finds a way to make at least three of them pretty darn effective.  While browsing the iTunes store last night on the Apple TV looking for something/anything that I might have missed in the theater earlier this year, I stumbled across this little action-thriller from writer/director David Koepp, the screenwriter of such flicks as Carlito’s Way, Mission: Impossible and the first Spider-Man movie, among others.

It stars Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, who has been one of my favorite actors of the last several years, starting when I saw him in the little-seen Brick several years ago (sorry for being behind the curve, folks, but I never watched “Third Rock from the Sun”), and his more recent roles in this year’s Looper and The Dark Knight Rises has kept me following his work with great interest.  In this flick, he’s Wiley, a former bicycle trick-rider who, after graduating law school, found the prospect of life stuck at a desk so unattractive that he didn’t bother taking the Bar exam and continued his student job as a bicycle courier.  He tells us early on that his bike doesn’t have brakes or gears because hesitating and stopping is always more dangerous than just going all-out, a philosophy that makes him a good courier, but also makes hanging on to his fellow-courier girlfriend pretty difficult.

Desperate for some extra work late one afternoon, Wiley accepts an envelope from his girlfriend’s roommate and is assigned the task of delivering it halfway across New York to an address in Chinatown within three hours.  Wiley doesn’t know he’s holding the claim-check for several thousand bucks in the hands of Chinese mobsters, but crooked cop Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon) sure does, and has every intention of getting his hands on that moolah.  Almost immediately, he’s accosted by Monday, who demands the envelope, but of course, Wiley isn’t about to compromise a job by failing to deliver to the proper recipient (or get pushed around by some “douchebag”), so the chase begins. 

We jump about via flashbacks to different points of the 8-hour day, seeing how all of the characters come to be at the points we find them in Wiley’s adventure.  Koepp’s mix-and-mash chronology is very interesting and does a fairly-good job of fleshing out the characters and their motivations without dragging the narrative to a stop.  The camera stays low to the ground, in a sort of riders’-eye view, showing us Wiley looking several blocks ahead and mentally mapping out how to avoid the perils of opening cab doors and lane-changing delivery trucks.  It seems that all those honking horns we hear whenever we see a movie or a TV show set in New York are ALL meant for bicycle couriers.  These guys might all have a death wish, weaving in and out of insane traffic, dodging pedestrians or piggybacking on school buses and other municipal vehicles when they need an extra mile-per-hour or two, but that very daredevil quality might just be what makes them sorta useful.  They’re paid for speedy delivery, after all.

Some of the other characters might not be as developed as much as you might like (a poor put-upon bicycle traffic cop factors into the story early on, but is sort of dumped from the plot unceremoniously near the end, and without much fanfare), but Michael Shannon deserves some extra mention in that regard.  His portrayal of Detective Monday is yet another entry on his list of roles that make good use of that natural creepiness that always seems to be right behind his eyes.  Monday is so sociopathic that it’s almost comical, and his simmering/steaming/bubbling-over whenever Wiley escapes his grasp gives the movie the combination of smirk and tension that a good action movie just has to have.

Good action movies should take you for a ride, so to speak, and this one does.  Sure, it’s pretty much a “formula” movie, but it’s a well-made one, and would definitely make a great mid-weeknight Netflix or iTunes rental.