Whiplash

We have all seen movies that were really good.  We have all seen movies that were really bad.  Every so often, we come across a movie that everyone says is really good, but ends up being bad.  This is one of those movies.  It hides its badness really well.  It thinks it has a compelling story.  It has great performances.  It has great pacing.  The excitement never lets up.  However, the first thing I said to my wife when the credits started rolling was, “That was hollow.”  I could not make that pronouncement until the last moment, because the movie was compelling enough to keep me watching, but the story did not measure up to the excitement of the experience.

Andrew Neiman is a 19 year old who is obsessed with the drums.  He ends up being selected by Terence Fletcher (JK Simmons, who deserves his Oscar for this, even though the movie doesn’t deserve his performance) to play in his studio band.  Most of the hour and forty five minutes of this movie is constituted by Fletcher berating all the members of his band with disgusting profanity and epithets.  He does tend to focus in on Neiman, and Neiman’s entire life becomes wrapped up in either pleasing or simply appeasing Fletcher.  To this main story line is added two subtexts.  First, there is an almost throw away love interest who Andrew does indeed throw away so he can devote himself to the drums.  This subplot is a dead end.  It tries to serve as a way to see Andrew’s desire to focus on his music, but instead succeeds in making Andrew less likable and less human.  Second, Neiman’s father (Paul Reiser) roots for his son but he seems to really only function as a motivating factor for his son.  Andrew seems to see his father as an artistic failure, and Andrew seems to use his father's story as a catalyst to be the next jazz drumming legend.  Neither of these characters serve the story that well, because the story is more interested in the conflict between Fletcher and Neiman.  This would be fine, but since neither of them are sympathetic, the father and love interest seemed to be slapped in to make us slightly more sympathetic to Andrew.  The characters of Neiman’s father and love interest are (I think) supposed to show is Neiman’s devotion to music, but instead they shine a light on his narcissism.  Whether or not I am supposed to root for Neiman is unclear.  I am certain I am not supposed to root for Fletcher.  Then again, this is art: maybe I am not supposed to root for anyone-but the movie does not have the conviction to take a stand.

The movie is hollow because it has no point.  Any point that it tries to make is blocked off by some competing view some where along the way.  Some movies don’t have a point or any gravitas, and that indeed is the point (a movie like “Airplane” comes to mind).  But to have such a compelling drama in front of us with so much potential and so little to say is a colossal disappointment.  After all, sometimes movies that are done well in so many ways are the biggest disappointments.  They give us something, then take it away because they don’t have a cohesive story or point of view.  The movie hopes to give us the dark side of “Mr. Holland’s Opus”, but instead ends up being about almost nothing.  

Leonard Nimoy

I can't think of too many actors I have spent more time watching in my life than Leonard Nimoy.  He was always the best part of Star Trek for me.  His character was the most interesting, and his willingness to come back for the JJ Abrams reboots really added gravitas to the films.  The character of Spock was, for me, a wonderful meditation (ironically) on what it means to be human.  Sometimes we feel out of place.  Sometimes we are not sure which part of us we should listen to.  Nimoy inhabited this role, and gave us all something to remember with it.

His best scene?  It has to be the end of Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.  After saving the Enterprise from the crazed rampage of Kirk's old enemy Khan, Spock is exposed to lethal radiation while affecting repairs of the ship.  His death scene with William Shatner is fascinating because it gets at the core relationship of the entire Original Series-this unlikely friendship between Kirk and Spock.  The scene was (in my opinion) effectively hat tipped in "Star Trek: Into Darkness" many years later, but the original scene stands out as the most emotionally evocative scene in any of the shows or movies of the Original Series.  It shows us Spock as he is: human and vulnerable, but also Vulcan and unapologetically logical.

Nimoy also directed the wonderful 4th entry in the film series.  Of course, by that point, the gyrations that had been made to keep Spock alive bordered on the inane.  But no matter, Spock lived on to give us more of the great character.

So much of the wonderful art that I love I do so because of the shared experience with my father.  Since my dad left this earth, there have been a few instances where things have happened that immediately bring him back to mind.  I think of the hours and hours at the dinner table watching Star Trek.  I think of my dad's unswerving goal of capturing all of the original episodes on video cassette (ironic to think how easy it was for me to procure the Blu-Ray set a few years ago).  And I think of the time in 2009 when I saw the "Star Trek" reboot with dad (which Nimoy anchored ever so effectively) and he burst into applause the moment the closing credits rolled.

Art does that.  It gives us appreciation for the artist.  But it also brings us as people closer together.  Thanks for all the ways you did that Mr. Nimoy.

Boyhood

Since I write a movie blog, the question does come up from time to time what my favorite movie is.  When one loves movies the way I do, that can be a difficult question to answer.  To make things simpler, I have a pat answer: "American Graffiti."  Perhaps one of the reasons I liked "Boyhood" so much is that it has many of the same sensibilities as "American Graffiti."  What makes "Boyhood" special is that while "American Graffiti" covers one night in the lives of a group of young people, "Boyhood" covers 12 years in the life of a Texas family.  The film maker actually took 12 years to make this film, so we see the young actor who plays the main character grow up in the almost 3 hour film. One wonders how much time must have been spent in the editing room poring over hundreds of hours of film, trying to select the best shots to tell the story that was trying to be told.  Director Richard Linklater might have had a simple story to tell, but he must have had to have a lot of patience and vision to bring it about.  What links "American Graffiti" and "Boyhood" in my mind is how real they both seem.  They both seem to be documentaries, but instead are very effective pieces of fiction.

It makes no sense to call the ordinary extraordinary.  But this movie about ordinary people doing ordinary things is an extraordinary piece of work.  The movie follows young Mason Evans Jr., who we watch from the age of about 6 until he goes away to college.  At the beginning of the film, we quickly discover that Mason's' parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) are divorced and that his mother has begun a relationship with another man.  Mason's father sees his children rarely at the beginning, but becomes more a part of his kids' lives when his mother moves closer to him.  At first, the father seems like he will fail them.  As the movie goes on, we begin to see that the parents' inability to work things out in their marriage has had serious consequences.  The other men that the mother brings around or marries are all troubled (one of them is an abusive alcoholic), while the father cannot begin to be the same influence because he is not present as much.  As the years go on, it becomes clear that the father had a luxury the mother didn't have:  time to mature.  The film doesn't show why the parents' relationship didn't work out, but it is clear that the mother ends up with the vast majority of the responsibility.  This unfairly allows Mason Sr. to grow up more, marry again and become more stable.  What is interesting to observe is that even though the father is always more immature than the mother, his children (particularly his son) are much more open with him about the struggles they face.  All the while, their mother seems to be able to connect with other people very well (she is successful teacher), but is unable to build a stable home life.  Her children keep their distance, and she keeps ending up in unstable relationships.

One could go on for hours about the complexity of relationships that are depicted in this movie.  The mother and father only have two conversations during the movie that I can remember, and one can find in those two conversations the character development of the parents.  It is also interesting to watch how much Mason's sister seems to thrive at school while Mason struggles.  Mason seems to be more affected by his father's absence, and the more involved his father becomes as the years go by, the more he seems to find a person with whom he can identify.  As the movie ends, he reminds me of many young people: full of promise, unsure of their future, and a little bit shell shocked by their own upbringing.  As I alluded to earlier, the power of this movie is showing ordinary life, the consequences of parents' actions, the possibilities that await us, and the missed opportunities of life that naturally emerge from the choices we make.  It could be that I am so mesmerized by this movie's concept that I am missing its shallowness of story (I did read a film critic who wrote just that), but I think not.  Too often what draws us to film or television is the extraordinary.  We watch things because people have unusual adventures, and that is what draws us to a story.  Here, we have an anti-story.  It is a somewhat normal story, and in a world where all the films around us are bells and whistles, an ordinary story hit home for me.  I could not help but look in the proverbial mirror after this movie.  What choices am I making as a parent that will affect my kids negatively or positively?  How can I do best by my kids?  Any movie that makes one think these kind of thoughts, in my mind, is doing its job.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

It's not often that one walks in and out of a movie a feels like they have seen something they haven't seen before.  While this movie has themes that have been explored before, the way it explores them sets it apart.  As Roger Ebert used to say, "It doesn't matter what  movie is about, but how it's about it."  Every moment of this movie crackles with wit and demands to be watched.

The movie covers a variety of human themes from triumph to suicide, from the need to feel accepted by many to the need to only be accepted intimately by one person.  Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thompson, a one time famous movie actor who is trying to mount a career revival by producing and starring in a Broadway play.  This is vital to him because he feels that he is only known for playing his most famous character, the superhero Birdman.  After one of his initial choices for the cast falls apart, he hires a volatile young actor (Edward Norton), who unleashes his own havoc on the production.  He does this all while trying to maintain a serious relationship with one of his costars, trying to keep the relationship with his daughter (Emma Stone) from destruction, and hoping to win the favor of a theatre critic whose one goal seems to be to submarine his play.  This would come off as pure comedy, but the darkness of the movie lies in the fact that Riggan is tormented by the voice of his alter ego the Birdman, and he sees this play as a deeper attempt to prove to the world and to himself that he is more than just the Birdman.

The plot, interesting as it is, also serves as a launching point for a brilliant exercise in style.  Three things stand out immediately about this movie's style:

1)  I have never heard a soundtrack quite like this movie's.  Much of the movie plays over the rhythms of jazz drummer Antonio Sanchez.  For someone like myself for whom melody and harmony are often times more accessible than rhythm, the sounds of the drums in this movie prove a revelation.  They are every bit as effective and evocative as any strain of melody that John Williams create.  Furthermore, the drums simply fit the plot and content of the movie.  Jazz drumming is often a improvisational art that still must be deeply rooted in patterns and timing.  In the same way, this movie feels very much like an improvisational work, but clearly the execution of the film took a great deal of planning and work.

2)  The setting is every bit as much of a character in the film as any person.  As the film is set in NewYork in a theater, every detail we see on screen gives texture to the world that is both otherworldly and deeply set in our world.  The paint is chipping in Riggan Thompson's dressing room.  The passageways backstage are narrow and claustrophobic.  One door could lead to a coffee break room or out into the bustling chaos of Manhattan's Mid Town.  The theater is a place of work, and the lack of glamor with which they shot the backstage scenes lends itself to the idea that while what these actors are doing is show business, they are in a workplace which shows the stresses and triumphs of a place of toil.

3)  The way that director Alejandro Inarritu weaves his story together is with an active camera that tells a story in an extraordinarily linear fashion.  The movie plays as if it is one continuous camera shot.  There are several visual tricks that maintain the illusion, and they are executed with craft and wit.  This style allows the movie to be paced by the events of what is going on on the screen.  There are times of conflict on the screen, but all of these conflicts take place in the workplace for these actors.  So, when Edward Norton's character is arguing with his girlfriend (Naomi Watts), it is happening while they are undergoing costume changes, makeup work, or even negotiating the crumpled quarters backstage.

In the end, the movie has a lot to say about the nature of art, and the nature of celebrity.  This is a movie which seems to be very much of our time, as cable television and social media make it more and more possible for us to spy on famous people and call it entertainment.  This satirical material would be a great movie on its own.  However, when we couple that satire with the great human interest story that is to be found in Riggan Thompson's story, it is clear that we are seeing a unique work of cinema.  It is hard to not notice the similarities between Riggan and Michael Keaton himself (Keaton played a superhero and only made two films as Batman).  I have no idea what Michael Keaton's status as a fulfilled human being is, but he does seem to fit into this role very well.  A couple of years ago, I remember asking myself, "What happened to Michael Keaton?"  I know he has not totally disappeared, but he has such great talent, and I have felt for awhile that we were missing that.  This movie shows him roaring back to the forefront, and it is a welcome reunion with us, his audience.

Family Films: Paddington

I told my wife on my way out of this movie that it seems like all of the romantic comedies and children's movies that I have liked best in the recent past seem to be British films.  This movie stays faithful to that trend.  I love this movie for the same reason that I find almost every Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks movie aimed at children lacking.  All of those movies often find it necessary to supplement their story by using hip, timely inside jokes that adults can appreciate.  This movie tells a simple story very well.  We recently showed our children a movie that was and is a family film, but the themes and the action of the movie deeply upset them.  This movie was a welcome change of tone for them.  It is fanciful, gentle, funny, beautifully shot, well acted and adorable.  

In the rain forests of Dark Peru, a British explorer comes upon a family of talking bears.  He becomes friends with them, and tells them that if they are ever in London, they can expect a warm welcome.  Many years later, after the Uncle Bear has been tragically killed in an earthquake, the Aunt bear sends her nephew bear to London, as she has decided to take up residence in a retirement home for old bears.  She remembers the kind offer of the explorer, and decides to send her nephew to London.  The as yet unnamed bear makes it to London on a cargo ship and finds his way to Paddington station.  There, the Mr. Brown (Hugh Bonneville) and family discover the poor bear, and while Mr. Brown is initially reluctant, they take the bear in and see what they can do to find out who the explorer was who invited him to London.  The Brown family name the bear Paddington after the station where they found him, and the name suits him wonderfully.  Unbeknownst to the Brown family, a local taxidermist (Nicole Kidman) has spotted the unusual bear, and wants very much to incorporate the little bear into her display at the Natural History Museum.

Three things stuck out to me about this movie.  First, the power of keeping the story simple is hard to overstate.  Paddington is a talking bear, but that is simply accepted without reservation by everyone in the story.  This movie (or the stories they are based upon for that matter) could have dissolved into some sort of Mr. Ed territory, but it doesn't.  It accepts the characters as they are in the story.  Second, I was struck by the movie's profound sense of color.  The colors in the film are all very bright.  They seem to be a living children's book.  Also, anyone who has been to the sections of London wherein this film is set can attest to the vivid colors of many of the houses and buildings in this section of the city.  And third, the performances by all the actors allowed this movie to rise above being a simple fairy tale to being genuinely funny and touching.  This movie reminded me in style and color of "Hugo".  Though the movies are very different, the driving force of initial tragedy followed by heartfelt hope and belonging worked very well.  It is remarkable how much tragedy informs so many classic stories, and this story is no exception.  This movie should be a classic, because it will be able to be watched by families for years to come.  It isn't often that we can say that.

Noah

This movie was made for someone like me.  An indie type director takes on an Old Testament story, complete with special effects and theological undertones.  I'm in.  Truth be told, I have not seen any of Darren Aronofsky's movies since his remarkable debut work, "Pi."  Since then, his work as certainly piqued my interest, but I have never ended up actually seeing any of his films.  When "Noah" came out last year, I really did want to see it, and like so many other things in life, I never got around to it.  However, I did enough reading about the movie that sounded fascinating, so I knew my time would come.

My time came on my flight from LA to Minneapolis last week.  This movie is a tough one to write about for me, because I had several reactions to it at once.  There are several narratives and nuances that are pulled from outside the Biblical narrative that try to give more texture to the narrative.  And while many of the additions and subtractions were disappointing, the core of the movie gets so much right that it is tough to look away.  By the way, when I say "gets so much right", I mean that I feel that in the movie, I see a genuine faithfulness to major parts of the Biblical Narrative, in spite of the extra biblical content.  One example of extra-Biblical content was the characters of the watchers.  From what I was able to understand, the watchers were fallen angels who end up being rock-beings.  They are on earth to help protect it from fallen humans.  As Noah begins his project of ark building, the watchers come to his aid and help protect him from fallen humanity.  There is also some conjecture in the film regarding meat eating and animal killing which is not consistent with the Biblical narrative of Genesis.  As the evil in the earth (characterized by violence) reaches its boiling point, the killing of animals for food and other purposes is seen as an act of wickedness.  This is not consistent with the Biblical narrative unless one sees the killing of animals in the film as excessive.  God Himself killed animals to clothe Adam and Eve after the fall, and God is pleased with Abel's animal sacrifice.  So the movie goes a astray here, it still is able to to maintain an important piece of faithfulness to the Biblical narrative.

The movie does not depict God as immature and capricious in his dealing with the sins of humanity.  As the church and the post-Enlightenment Western World have struggled to be honest with humanity's brokenness, it is quite surprising to see how openly Aronofsky depicts how desperately corrupt humans are.  One other extra biblical riff is depicting Noah as believing God has appointed him to reduce the animals but then to kill himself and his children so humanity itself is destroyed.  This is not faithful to the narrative, but it does create a character in Noah who is wrestling with the task that God (or, "the Creator" as he is called in the movie) has given him.  Noah looks around him and sees the wickedness not only of those around him, but also the wickedness in his own heart.  This conviction leads him to the belief (not mentioned in the book of Genesis) that his mission is to help the Creator destroy humanity.  The one common theme here is that humans are corrupt.  As an Old Testament student, I was also fascinated by the character of Tubal Cain in the film.  Tubal Cain is a descendant of Cain who is mentioned in Genesis 4 as the first person to work with metal after Cain's murder of his brother Abel.  Noah is instead a descendant of Cain's brother Seth.  Tubal Cain is appropriately shown as a child of fallen humanity.  But what made him even more interesting is that he doesn't deny the existence of the Creator, but he instead asserts that the Creator has abandoned humanity.  Noah counters with his own interpretation of the Creator, and in this way, the conflicts of the early chapters of Genesis are captured very well.  The entire arc of the story of Genesis 1-11 is how God preserves for Himself one line (the line of Seth) and extinguishes another (the line of Cain).  This movie does a fantastic job of depicting that part of the narrative, while it doesn't quite hit the mark on some other fronts.

While the movie's faithfulness to the text can be lacking, the amount of faithfulness to the text's spirit is actually quite good.  In my readings on this movie, I have come to understand how Aronofsky drew some of the nuances of his tale from other ancient Jewish traditions.  As he may not be making this from the same point of view as I would make it as a Christian, I think it is only appropriate to be patient with how he chooses to tell the story.  But still, it would be nice to see a filmmaker stay closer to the text itself and allow the extra biblical material flow directly from the narrative.  All the same, the performances of all the actors and actresses were great, the visuals were stunning, and the overall theme of judgment and redemption were very effective.

Family Movie Night: Fly Away Home (1996)

This is a great pick for a family movie night, which it was for us last night.  It has an unlikely premise (though apparently something close to it actually happened), but it is executed so well and with so much veracity that it ends up being very engaging.

The movie stars Anna Paquin as Amy, a 14 year old girl who has just lost her mother and has had to move from New Zealand to Ontario, Canada.  The beginning of this transition proves to be very difficult for Amy, as would be expected.  Her father (played very well by Jeff Daniels), is a kooky inventor who at first seems completely unable to relate to his daughter at all.  This is made more difficult by his involvement with another woman (Dana Delany), and an overall lack of ability to relate to Amy in her time of loss.  As Amy moves into the house, her father is trying to ward off a developer who is seeking to use part of his land for a new real estate venture.  One morning, a person with ties to the developer begins to tear up the land, and Amy's dad shows his true colors by bolting from his bed nearly naked to go into his yard to scream at the man driving the tractor.  In the wake of this destruction, Amy finds the nest of a mother goose who had been killed by the developer. She saves the eggs, watches them hatch, and becomes the mother goose to the goslings.  Her connection to the brood is so intense that she violently lashes out at a gaming official who attempts to curb Amy's efforts in taking care of the geese.  When the reality strikes the whole family that the geese must migrate south to North Carolina to survive, the broken little family concocts a way to show the geese a way home.  This project provides a needed connection between father and daughter, and it serves as a way for Amy to move forward in her grief, all the while deeply missing her mother.

As is the case with so many profound fables, death is the motivating force behind this whole story.  So many wonderful stories and fables are only profound due to deep grief.  Whether it's Harry Potter to Star Wars to Cinderella, death is at the heart of deeply human and true stories.  The depth of grief in Amy is the engine which makes this story go forward.  Anna Paquin realizes this grief in the character of Amy very well, and every moment she is on screen we know the depth of the experience of the character she is playing.  As we live this experience with her, we are forced to walk in her shoes.  We are made to imagine how we would feel if we lost our parent at a young age, and then we are made to move our life and school at the vulnerable age of 14.  It is with this back drop that the devotion she shows to the geese makes any sense at all.  Her father also is able to find a bridge to a daughter who was already distant, but is dealing with the added resentment of changing her whole life in the middle of such a trauma.  Ironically, the quirkiness which at the beginning causes a rift between the father and daughter serves to end up rebuilding their relationship, as his talent with air crafts and inventing finds them a way to show the geese a way home.

I truly love finding movies like this.  They are special fantasies that give parents a way to relate to our children by sharing a meaningful story.  All three of my kids were engaged for the nearly two hours of this movie (with four years difference between my oldest and youngest, this is no ordinary feat).  The longer I live, the more I see that broken lives truly do lead to wonderful stories.  As we who are broken pick up the pieces of our lives, sometimes the reformed pieces can make something beautiful.