Review: Hail, Caesar!

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Written by Joel and Ethan Coen

Starring Josh Brolin (Eddie Mannix), George Clooney (Baird Whitlock), and Alden Ehrenreich (Hobie Doyle),

Cinematography by Roger Deakins

Edited by Joel and Ethan Coen

Music by Carter Burwell

*Note, I'm going to discuss later plot elements, shouldn't be anything too spoilery, but if you want to go into your viewing totally clean, don't read this.

Religion, A-bombs, communists, kidnappings, drunken actors, gossip columnists, foul-mouthed actresses, hilariously heavy southern accents, and making movies! Oh my! After what seemed like a long wait after Inside Llewyn Davis, it's only the Coen Brothers' latest, Hail, Caesar! Their newest release is an unstable, yet delectable, cocktail of religious symbolism, political and philosophical discourse, dissection of the 50's studio system, and a playful, but respectful, send-up of the contemporary cinema.

At the center of the sprawling web of stories, conflicts, characters, relationships, and film shoots is Eddie Mannix, played wonderfully by Josh Brolin. Mannix is a "fixer" for Capitol Pictures, a job that mainly involves ensuring that the damaged private lives of the studio's stars don't get leaked to the public so their squeaky clean image can remain untarnished. Eddie's position is a perfect vehicle through which the audience can experience the insanity of the multi-layered story. The Coen Brothers rarely stick to standard narrative structures, and Hail, Caesar! is no exception. The plot hangs very loosely and often feels like a series of semi-related sketches (note this is not a critique). The fixer job is a neat writing trick that allows Eddie to insert himself into different, seemingly-unrelated scenarios, while still maintaining the core thread and themes. He's the straight man, that the other less put-together characters can bounce off of, and Brolin hits every note almost flawlessly. He nails just the right mixture of fifties sheen, comical frustration with the inanity around him, and genuine soul-searching about the direction his life is headed.

The main core of the aforementioned shaggy story involves Capitol Pictures' head star Baird Whitlock, another fine "idiot" performance from George Clooney. During the making of the eponymous film, he's taken hostage. Everything spins out from there as Mannix tries to ensure Whitlock's safe return and ends up  coming into contact with starlet Deeana Moran (Scarlet Johansson), tap-dancing sensation Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), aw-shucks cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich in a breakout performance), and politely uptight British film director Lawrence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes).

Eventually it is revealed that Baird has been kidnapped by communists! (bum bum buuummmm!), specifically a cell of the CPUSA composed of Hollywood script writers. Taking a detour for a moment, and speaking as someone who has haunted Marxist circles, the Coens' portrayal of that type of intellectual is actually fairly accurate. They even successfully replicate the specific lingo those groups drape themselves in. I'm guessing the two brothers were either lectured by a radical professor or had an excitable roommate/friend who was really into Das Kapital. Although, one major bit they get wrong is that one of the reds correlates to Herbert Marcuse, a thinker active in the 60's who was one of the major inspirations for the New Left. Marcuse's main focus was on the crippling effects modern consumer capitalism had on the ability of the working class and society in general to rebel and think critically. He was equally condemnatory of the repressive atmosphere of the "socialist" states of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, he was never a member of the American Communist Party, which by the 50's had nothing liberatory or emancipatory about it and had been a bureaucratic arm of the Soviet Union's foreign policy for decades.

But I digress, back at the pinkos' beachfront hideaway in Malibu, there is much talk about capitalism, dialectics, contradiction, economics, the body-politic, and The New Man. George Clooney's reaction to all of this is humorously blasé. When he first wakes up after being kidnapped, he immediately assumes that he just blacked out from a bender gone wrong, and 100% accepts what he's being told by his new friends after about oh... five minutes (he quickly returns to his standard blankness after Mannix slaps him and delivers the best line of the film: "If the picture has worth and you serve the picture, then you have worth"). The socialists' plan is ultimately revealed to be entirely spineless and ineffectual. This brings in one of the central themes of the film, and the Coens' oeuvre in general. That any plans you make and any larger changes you hope to enact, will always fail, both due to your own mistakes and quirks of the universe. Applying this to world of filmmaking is aces, and has been successfully mined by the Brothers before, albeit tangentially, in Barton Fink. The brief peaks we get at the different studio sessions all serve as examples of Murphy's Law. The star can't remember his lines, the starlet is pregnant, the dancer is gay, the cowboy can't pronounce his lines, the editor gets her scarf stuck in the projector, and the celluloid ends up burned. The image does not match reality. While this makes for some satisfying riffing and ribbing, it leads to an uncomfortable conclusion. That the good guys are those who don't ask too many questions, go along with the flow, and trust their guts (i.e. Hobie and eventually Mannix). To me, this is a conservative message, but I'll stipulate that I'm not certain that this is indeed what is being said. In addition, I would like to watch the film again and hear counter-arguments to my own, before definitively making up my min.

A few last thoughts before I wrap-up. Hail, Caesar! is rife with internal repression. Every player is hiding some type of secret or subordinating an inner desire in order to better serve the studio. An actual engagement with the real-life Marcuse's ideas would have been highly appropriate here. Particularly how mass culture can paralyze our capacity to discover our own thoughts, wants, and needs. I'm worried that, so far, I haven't given a good impression of how funny the whole picture is. The Coens will stop everything in order to deliver some clever wordplay or absurd joke. Like when they take a five minute break so Hobie can fumble his way through pronouncing "Were that (t)were so simple". Finally, Deakins does a stand out job (as he always does) of replicating the softness and color of the cinematography of the period, without over-doing it.

Review: Premium Rush

Directed by David Koep

Written by David Koep and John Kamps

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Wilee), Dania Ramirez (Vanessa), Jamie Chung (Nima), and Michael Shannon (Bobby Monday)

Cinematography by Mitchell Amundsen

Edited by Derek Ambrosi and Jill Savitt

On the surface, Premium Rush sounds like it should be fun time. Hardcore bike couriers, corrupt cops, a twisty crime saga. Unfortunately, there are multiple ways to craft the same story, and David Koep chooses the least engaging way to tell this one. It's a relatively serious action movie, with a little bit of (half-hearted) humor thrown in. What makes this outcome doubly frustrating is that there is a good film buried somewhere in Premium Rush. Part of the problem is that it tries to be multiple movies at once. The fun parts are the ones that tease at a Hot Fuzz-esque parody of extreme sports flicks. The moments that best represent this trend are the scenes of Wilee's "accident vision" where time slows down, he pictures the multiple paths he can take while riding his bicycle through New York City, and predicts that possible pileups that await him.

But the heightened, cartoonish tone is not maintained outside of those sequences. As a result, Gordon-Levitt's character absolutely tanks. If a more a satirical, over-the-top attitude had been consistently applied throughout the entirety of the film, Wilee's demeanor would have been a bit easier to take. As is, he comes off as an absolute douchebag. He rides a fixed-gear bike with no brakes, knowing that it will put pedestrians and motorists in more danger, just to get an adrenaline fix. It's extremely rare in my movie watching that I care more for random passersby's than the main character, but that's how I felt during Rush. I winced every time someone almost got hit or run into due to Wilee's stupid, entirely unnecessary antics, a reaction I can't say I experienced towards Wilee himself. That bike couriers' are presented as having an authentic, serious hardass culture that somehow places them above everyone else, only makes matters worse.

This points to another issue, because a singular tone is not kept up, the style and story ends up waffling and becomes unsatisfying. Neither the comedic nor dramatics beats hit correctly as a result, and the main plot is damaged badly by the inconsistency. A friend of Wilee's and Vanessa's (Nima) contracts their bike service to deliver a package to Chinatown. Eventually it is revealed that the parcel contains an immigration pass that Nima has worked extremely hard for in order to bring her child to America from an undefined Asian country. The plot line feels more befitting of a middlebrow/Oscar-bait picture. Alongside the comedic and action elements, it appears entirely shoe-horned in. Like the creators realized they didn't have much going on up on the screen, and tried to awkwardly fit in a sincere story in order to cynically manipulate a little pathos out of the audience. Same goes for Shannon's dick cop character, Bobby Monday. He should be a delicious, hammy villain, but Shannon doesn't quite go far enough for his portrayal to be memorable. Finally, like Nima's arc, Monday's fate is a little too gruesome for the rest of the picture, and causes everything to end on an unpleasant note.

Certain moments of Premium Rush make for an enjoyable, entertaining viewing experience. However, they are dragged down by a mistaken approach and the poor-fit of the dominant narrative.

Returning from a long absence

Well I've been away from the blog for about a year. I was reviewing films I saw through streaming and rental service, and in theater, pretty regularly (hopefully steadily improving at it as well). The last two things I wrote were a review of The Homesman and a jokey description of Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time. 

The majority of this blog was written between finishing college and finding my first job, so I had a great deal of free time that made it easy and enjoyable for me to watch, read, and write about a wide variety of films. After I attained gainful employment, it was far harder to find the space to keep up with cinema at the level I was accustomed to. It became a huge drain on my energy having to view so many films, and write about them as well, while going to work every day.

That's one of the main reason my blogging dropped off so precipitously. The other reason is that my interest in film waned. I started to get the sense that I had already seen everything there was to see, and it became rarer and rarer that I got that jolt of recognizing an amazing picture. Looking back, this was a foolish feeling, since just a few months after I stopped I saw Mad Max: Fury Road, which hit me in that way only a good movie can.

As my curiosity about celluloid flagged, I became more engaged with following politics, news, and history. Mainly I was concerned with learning about/keeping up with mass, working class-based social and labor movements. I also became involved in activism around workers' and tenants' rights. This activity was fun for a while, but was extremely stressful and strenuous to engage in. The same burnout I experienced with film culture has hit me with politics, so I'm going to take a break from that area and try my hand at media criticism once again. I would like to think that I'll be able to add a substantive political analysis from a progressive/leftist perspective to my writing now too.

From here on out, I'm mainly going to be focused on doing basic reviews of movies I happen to see. These will be both older and newer, since my main avenue for watching these things is through streaming services, and I plan an drastically increasing the number of theater screenings I attend. Eventually, I hope to do a series on Mark Cousins' The Story of Film: An Oddyssey, where I'll analyze all of the films that appear in the series while also doing an overview of each episode. I've gone through the entirety of the show before, but I would like to check it out again with the additional knowledge of having seen and analyzed all of the flicks that are brought up. I went through the most recent British Film Institute's Top Fifty Greatest Films about two years ago, and luckily, there are many films that appear on both lists, so I'll be able to cannibalize some of my work that was never posted here.

Anyway, cheers, looking forward to getting back into things again.

Under the Chewy Pink Boot

If the official Candy Kingdom propaganda program Adventure Time is to believed, the figure known as Princess Bubblegum is a benevolent ruler, gently guiding her candy “children” through strong leadership and scientific can-do. She’s fun-loving when it’s useful, stern when necessary, and ha a sparkly sense of style, Bubblegum looks the very ideal of a good leader. But how much is really known about her?

Her title of “Princess” raises multiple questions. From where does she claim her royalty? Does she age? How did she gain dominion over the Candy Kingdom and how does she maintain her control? And what right allows the continuance of her reign? These basic inquiries have no answers. Is Bubblegum afraid of what the release of this information will provoke in her citizens? Has she conspired to cover all this up?
Part of her control is maintained through technical know-how. Some will say that expertise bestows a measure of legitimacy. She’s the smartest and the brightest. Surely she can develop the Kingdom to its highest potential right? Setting aside the problems inherent to a technocracy, a closer look at her supposedly innovational track record brings to light a few cracks.

Not widely known is the development of the Kingdom’s current police state. One of the Princess’s actions in the halcyon days of candy-dom was to create a group of elite guards colloquially termed Rattleballs. Their moral programming was so binary and their tactics were so brutal, that the candy prisons quickly swelled to reprehensible levels.  In an ironic twist, the squads were soon useless, and, coded for nothing else, were liquidated for recycling purposes. The lesson of the Rattleballs is clear: even the most loyal are unsafe from the brunt of Bubblegum’s sticky fist.

The extinct corps’ organic cousins are the current Banana Guards. While nicer than their forebears, this is more due to general incompetence and cowardice than any decree from our Lady’s confectionary tower. Also related are the towering Gumball Guardians. These sentinels seem successful, but, while they may work in last-ditch push-backs, their design is terribly misguided. For Glob’s sakes, the sentries’ brains are encased in glass. A slingshot-pebble to the head is capable of incapacitating them.

Another, sadder story is obscured by these foibles. Generalissimo Gum is willing to mobilize a shameful amount of resources to build a military/prison-industrial complex instead of creating a candy safety-net for candies who, through no fault of their own, fall through the candy cracks.

Our dear leader’s foreign policy is ineffective, inhumane, and highly illegal. Hypocritical rhetoric is employed to justify the mucking about in other Kingdoms. Typically this is done with the help of the unbound-by-law vigilantes known as Finn and Jake (yes the same two “heroes” featured in Adventure Time). Claims of “spreading civilization,” “keeping our kingdom safe,” and “ending oppression” are frequent whenever she acts in the Fire Kingdom. That last statement is a joke, considering the massive surveillance apparatus that dutifully watches over all candy residents and her suppression of Princess Cookie’s revolt.

The Flame Princess was imprisoned for years with Candy Kingdom technology based on shoddy dossiers claiming she was “unstable”. This allowed the Flame King to continue his despotic reign unchallenged. It also directly contributed to the defection of Cinnamon Bun from his homeland in order to support the fiery heir’s coup.

Finally, there are whispers from Bubblegum’s inner circle that far darker doings are afoot. While the extent of their relationship has been kept cloudy, Bonnibel is chummy with Marceline the Vampire Queen (daughter of Night-O’-Sphere overlord Hunson Abadeer). Intense speculation has been brewing around right-hand man Peppermint Butler’s activities. Rumors indicate that he is a practitioner of the black arts and close friends with Death. What does the nature of Bubblegum’s company say about her? In times of extreme duress, Frau Preebs has been known to start exclaiming in a dead language called German. Long before the Mushroom Wars, legend tells of a tyrant who did the same.

The myths that Dictator P.B. has carefully cultivated around herself are a lie. I hope this report will be the first shot in ending them.

It's Still 2014 Right?...Right?: The Homesman

Directed by Tommy Lee Jones
Written by Tommy Lee Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald, and Wesley A. Oliver adapting Glendon Swarthout’s Novel
Starring Tommy Lee Jones (George Briggs) and Hilary Swank (Mary Bee Cuddy)
Cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto
Edited by Roberto Silvi
Released in 2014

Tommy Lee Jones’ second work has put me in a weird place. I can list off the qualities that make The Homesman a unique exercise in the western genre, but I can’t say that the film was satisfying and neither can I say why that is so. I walked out with more of a “well that was interesting” shrug than any strong thoughts or feelings positive or negative. Oh well, I’ll try to clarify what The Homesman does well and see if that leads to any concrete conclusions. 

Westerns have always been set in desolate locales. Even ones that take place in towns are separated from civilization or feature the creeping edge of civilization as a major theme. Often this isolation is kept to a general pall hanging over the film. Sometimes the hard-bitten landscapes will directly affect the characters that walk through them, like in The Searchers where the harshness of the surroundings shreds Ethan Edwards' psyche. Rarely have I seen vistas as barren, as lonely, as flat, and as boring as those in The Homesman. Swank’s Cuddy and Jones’ Briggs are required to deliver three insane women from Nebraska territory to Eastern Iowa. Once they set out, there are no changes in elevation and seeing a tree is like striking gold. Scene after scene consists solely of Cuddy and Briggs’ wagon slowly, agonizingly clunking along. It's constant creaking, a warning that it may fall apart at any second. Watching it all places the viewer in a blank state, like the hypnosis induced by driving through the Midwest times ten. 

As indicated by the setup, the position of women in the hierarchy of the western territories is a main concern. Why the three women are/become unstable remains unclear. Most likely, it's a combination of spousal abuse and neglect and mental illness. This goes back to my earlier comments about the scenery. The film shows that frontier life was so stacked with hardship and so removed from normal human contact that going insane was a sane response. Even Cuddy, who has managed to eke out a small measure of stability, quickly starts to fracture due to loneliness and stress. Briggs has developed the perfect persona to survive on the prairie. Loopy when it is advantageous for him to appear weak, spitfire mean and coldhearted when he has to face down an adversary, and sympathetically weary when he needs to quickly get through a standard human interaction. All things considered, his irrationality seems entirely rational

The focus on women's hardships and the mind-breaking struggle of homesteader life, both ably communicated through the cinematography, should provide plenty to ponder. The main reason I'm less than positive on The Homesman is due to certain turns that take place in the latter half. I’ll refrain from getting too specific. I think the purpose is to wrinkle the direction the story had been going up to that point. Unfortunatly, the later developments are more confusing and muddling than complicating. 

Find This Film a Home: Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's Hollywood

Getting the word out about films that have a spotty home video history

Directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill
Written by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill
Narrated by James Mason
Edited by Trevor Waite and Dan Carter
Music by Carl Davis

Common complaints lodged against contemporary culture are that we're too celebrity-obsessed, all media-drenched, searching for those fifteen minutes, and that our movies are silly, featherweight, and too focused on spectacle. Kevin Brown and David Gill's thirteen-part, television series, Hollywood, provides a longer view of history and reasserts how our current obsessions were just as rampant then (perhaps more so) as they are now. The evidence includes the enormous crowds that greeted Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford everywhere they went in the world, Charlie Chaplin's tramp character becoming an universally-recognized symbol, and the unsafe, often deadly, working conditions that sprung up around the wild plots pursued by filmmakers. Modern Hollywood can hardly compare. 

The directing duo attack the American movie industry of the teens and twenties from all angles. Their first move is to bury the misconceptions that surrounded silent film at the time of the series' release. It's less a problem now with proper restorations and home video releases, but silent film has long been plagued by technical issues. Improper showings on television and repertory theaters built-up its association with super-fast speeds and dinky, public domain piano music. Hollywood shows the world of difference that proper display makes. Brownlow and Gill then go on to interview a succession of actors, directors, and cameramen who eloquently make the case for the films of the time as worthy of serious artistic consideration. The bits about the elaborate palaces where movies were shown and the full orchestras that often accompanied their screenings will make you weep over the sad state of multiplexes. A movie was an event in a way it rarely is today. 

The sheer amount of historical detail present is miraculous. The background work for the series was started just in time to catch the main players of the era, snapping up informative interviews with Colleen Moore, King Vidor, and Karl Brown. It's a sad fact, but if the leaders of the project had waited even a decade later to begin, many of the principal subjects would have passed away. The beginnings of the film industry are shown to be wild, weird, and full of contradictions. The earliest studios weren't even set-up in California, but in New York and New Jersey. Gangsters were hired to star in front of the camera and bribed by rival outlets to break those cameras with bullets and beatings. The independents eventually moved to the west coast to escape the stranglehold of the big studios. 

Hollywood depicts an odd time in world history. Around the globe, monarchies and democracies existed within short distances from each other. World War I destroyed the European film industry, allowing American film to start its foreign domination that continues today. The Russian Revolution sowed the seeds of the conflict that would take up the latter half of the twentieth century. Within the movie capitol, cars, trains, and horses were all still in use. The west was dying, but given one last chance at immortality. Women and immigrants were given brief opportunities to ascend to the highest levels of artistic achievement despite living in a land that was still hugely racist and sexist (women wouldn't gain the right to vote until twenty years after cinema's start). 

My one complaint is that the series doesn't dig far enough below the glitz and glamour. The perilous positions camera operators and stuntmen often found themselves in are mentioned, but not fully questioned. The exploitation of masses of people for use as extras gets the same treatment. At one point, a star being interviewed compares the discrimination against "movie people" in the early days of the industry's settlement in California to that faced by African Americans.

Still, discussion of those matters, new broadcasts of Hollywood, and conversion of the program and its supporting materials into HD would help immensely in restoring interest in silent film. Brownlow and Gill's work would be a valuable tool in any film studies course, whether in high school or university. It's a shame it's been left to languish on VHS.


P.S.
The entire series is up on Youtube, but as with all copyrighted material that makes it way to the service, its status there is tenuous. Episode twelve has already been removed. If my description has made you keen to learn more, I'd start watching now.

Something Else: Sleeping Beauty

Random thoughts of random lengths on random films

Directed by Clyde Geronimi

Written by Erdman Penner adapting Charles Perrault's/The Brothers' Grimm/Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty"

Voice acting by Mary Costa (Princess Aurora), Bill Shirley (Prince Phillip), and Eleanor Audley (Maleficent)

Edited by Roy M. Brewer Jr. and Donald Halliday

Production Design by Ken Peterson

*Note: I don't know what the equivalent of "cinematographer" is in animation, so I just put down Ken Peterson. If I wanted to be fully accurate, I'd need to list every animator/visual effects artist.

Sleeping Beauty can be difficult to analyze. The characters are one-dimensional, there's barely anything going on thematically, and the plot is a wisp. Princess Aurora's only defining traits are that she's pretty and can sing. Her only desire is to get married. Prince Phillip is a drip, with the features of a Ken doll and the personality to match. Likewise, his one want is betrothal.

The title gives the wrong impression. The Beauty of note only appears for 18 minutes, long enough only to sing to some animals and prick her finger. If she is labeled the protagonist, the pacing seems lumpy. The majority of the action is jammed into the beginning and end, with a long, barren section in the middle. However, if our sympathies are re-centered on the three fairies, the structure makes more sense and the emotional arc becomes satisfactory.

Despite the aforementioned issues, Sleeping Beauty is an absolute pleasure for one simple reason: its animation and design are unique and astounding to behold. As a biochemist impersonating a cinephile with a limited vocabulary, the overuse of stunning, striking, amazing, and all their permutations in film writing is hugely frustrating. All of those words are accurate descriptors, but their "dead to language" nature doesn't properly communicate the experience of watching Sleeping Beauty, so I'll try to be more specific.

Next time you're perusing the film, stop on one of the scenes of Princess Aurora or Prince Phillip gallivanting about the woods. Notice that there is a clear distinction between the foreground (where the characters usually reside), the middle ground, and the background. The three look flat and separated from each other. This is different from the style developed in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, where fluid animation gives the impression of depth to the humans and the scenery is highly detailed.

The effect is like watching a stained glass window wrung through the Technicolor process or an illustrated medieval scroll that has gained autonomy. I began watching while eating dinner, and once the film opened with hordes of multicolored knights and villagers lined up at a castle, I had to stop just so I could gawk at what was onscreen. It's a cliché to say so, but nothing else looks like it, certainly nothing in the past or future of the Disney canon. If you venture outside of Walt's domain, Samurai Jack and The Secret of Kells come close, but they take the deliberately dimensionless aesthetic to further extremes. The style extends to the people. When in profile, they look cut-out and have multiple, discrete lines demarcating different parts of their bodies and clothing. When they move, this effect is slightly dampened and they appear fuller. Taken together, they twirl from 2-d to 3-d and back again in a mind-boggling manner.

Perhaps Sleeping Beauty's greatest asset is the malevolent Maleficent. She is a successful villain based not so much on what she does, but how she looks while doing it. Her scant few actions boil down to placing the famous curse and turning into a dragon after ineffectually detaining Phillip. And yet, she is awesome. Her garb of a black robe with purple lining and a horned headdress hides whatever human form might exist underneath, turning her into a shade or a wraith.

Walk? Ha! Walking is for mere mortals. Maleficent glides. Normal entrances are below her. A Maleficent entrance requires nothing less than transforming into an ominous green orb of energy and laughing maniacally. If you're inclined to approach Disney through its history of poor female representation, you could find your way to seeing her as the hero. She relishes the chance to disrupt a safe, hetero-normative relationship and attempts to bring down a monarchy by slowly torturing its boring heir. She even gets the film's most affecting scene, when she cries out in distress upon seeing her pet crow turned to stone. She is an ancient vamp and a middle ages femme fatale to Aurora’s straight-laced peasant/princess. How could you not love her?