J.J. Abrams' winking preoccupation with the conundrum of logic seems to be at the heart of Star Trek Into Darkness, a fun and thrillingly illogical story about warmongers and warriors hellbent on vengeance. For every logical question we, the viewers, might pose of the screenwriters (why hide the Enterprise under water, for instance, when orbit would do?), there's a playful and irreverent answer, which usually sums up as something like: the logical answer just isn't as fun, damn it. And yet: Into Darkness defies logic with one hand while knotting it securely as a central theme with the other, and this, landing-ships whipped vertical on their axes aside, is perhaps the movie's most nimble maneuver. In the end, Kirk learns that the logical choice is also sometimes the moral choice, and moral choices always have consequences when they go counter to orders and instinct. The movie's inversion of the climax of Wrath of Khan is not a gimmick but a genuine exploration of a grand what-if: what if Kirk, not Spock, gave his life to save the crew? It's inconceivable that Shatner's Kirk could have ever done that; after all, he doesn't believe in no-win scenarios. Here, Pine's Kirk earns a genuine character arc. So, when he's playing with spaceships, there's no denying it: Abrams just knows what cool is, both in terms of his visuals and his stories. He remembers how exciting a ship firing off at lightspeed warp can be, and he makes me feel it (and remember it). There are those, of course, who say that's not what Star Trek is. To those few, I point the way back to what is, essentially, a pirate movie, a movie that followed closely on the heels of the supremely serious Star Trek: the Motion Picture. Anyway, it's all academic now. This is, friends, like it or not, a brave new universe.
4 BANANAS
Written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof
Directed by J.J. Abrams
2013
Iron Man 3 is a smug, self-satisfied blockbuster. It knew it was a hit before the cameras captured shot one, and so it's no surprise that the storytelling smacks of bloat and laziness. The first act is downright dull, eschewing the great advice of the late Sam Fuller: always open with a bang. Instead, Iron Man 3 opens with the twin laziest devices in scriptwriting: a voice over and a flashback, featuring Bad Guy Pearce in a bad guy wig (is there any actor in Hollywood so eager to obscure his face in bad make-up in service of a paycheck?). Not too spectacular. For most of the movie, we get little heroics, hardly any Iron Man, and far too much of the same old Tony Stark, less charming this time around, more a prat. The film's best idea: post-Avengers, he's got a mild case of PTSD, which raises an interesting question − what does entering an alien wormhole do to a guy? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is never fully explored with any dramatic heft. Instead, Shane Black's script opts for a subplot involving a kid and Christmas and weird, misplaced commentary on the commercialization of Hollywood and the strong-arm tactics of the United States military. Both utterly cynical and hypocritical stances. Baffling. I kept thinking, after Tony's house was destroyed, that someone from S.H.I.E.L.D was going to show up and offer him a place to bunk, or at least some kind of temporary assistance against this international terrorist who can hijack satellite feeds all over the planet, but no, the super-agency is inexplicably busy, I guess (probably getting their television show off the ground). But the greatest storytelling misstep of all? Stark isn't even inside his own armor when it saves fourteen people from a falling plane. He's piloting it by remote, from a safe and sound boat. It's a surprise twist at the end of the sequence, underscoring the fact that Tony Stark's heroism, like the movie's moral center, is about as hollow as a tin can. It all points to one conclusion: Joss Whedon should have killed the character off at the end of The Avengers. Instead, Iron Man 3 promises yet another return for Tony Stark, all the while proving there's nowhere left for him to go.
2 BANANAS
Written by Drew Pearce and Shane Black
Directed by Shane Black
2013
As fresh and thrilling as ever, Sunset Boulevard gives us another incarnation of Billy Wilder's Los Angeles, a kind of haunted, dream-like graveyard, the road to which, it seems, is paved not so much with ambition as the mere instinct to survive. Joe Gillis's hungry screenwriter drives into a tomb, not a garage. He just doesn't know it. He tries to find his way out, but Norma Desmond is the fading star imploding, a mini-apocalypse in a vine-choked mansion, her demise obliterating everything within her orbit.
5 BANANAS
Written by Charles Brackett; D.M. Marshman, Jr.; and Billy Wilder
Directed by Billy Wilder
1950
Los Angeles is the epicenter of myth-making like no other city in America, thanks to Hollywood. It's an interesting experiment, I think, to view the city through its fictions, both the landscape and the characters who litter it. Litter being the right word in the case of a fellow like Walter Neff, totally amoral and capable of only too little too late when it comes to redemption. Billy Wilder shoots Los Angeles almost entirely at night, all wide, empty boulevards and dangerous curves. There's a funny lie in Double Indemnity, the idea that L.A. is a walking city. Maybe that's why Neff's story could only be set here, in a place where the landscape is ever-shifting and changing to suit the stories it wants to tell. There's something almost sentient about the city, the way it plays silent observer to the low schemes of its citizens, or the way it refuses to return the echo of Walter Neff's shoes, reminding him he's a dead man with every step.
5 BANANAS
Written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler
Directed by Billy Wilder
1944
Jurassic Park makes the case for 3D on every level, from the visceral to the cinematographic. The terror of being trapped in a car with a dinosaur, the pulse-pounding, heart-in-your-throat fear of running from a charging tyrannosaur. A rich atmosphere of rain and fog and jungle heat, all brought into sharp relief and popping anew. The visceral aside, the 3D also highlights Spielberg's masterful use of depth. There's not a shot in Jurassic Park that doesn't seem designed for 3D, and so the conversion, imposed twenty years after the movie was made, never feels labored or strained, highlighting the fact that most 3D in today's blockbusters is grossly and wrongly used. What's even better, the movie hasn't aged a day, and in this we can rediscover the true magic of movies. Or great movies, anyway. The ones we can return to with our wives and husbands, two decades after seeing them with high school friends, and find them every bit as wondrous and new. Maybe this is Spielberg's true talent as a director, this ability to find an ageless quality in his material. At his best, he makes popcorn movies with philosophical intent, light-hearted entertainments anchored by big ideas. His flicks aren't always successful in that regard, but Jurassic Park remains, perhaps, his last great success in the vein of Jaws − a movie that was made under the constraints of technology's limitations, a movie that changed the industry forever, and a movie that still frightens and thrills today.
5 BANANAS
Written by Michael Crichton and David Koepp
From Crichton's novel
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1993
The first line of Roger Ebert's autobiography, Life Itself, is the kind of opening line most writers wish they had written: "I was born inside the movie of my life." It's an elegant, humble start to the story of a writer who became the only movie critic to ever win the Pulitzer prize. The only movie critic, it is said, that many people ever read. Well, for the sake of movie critics everywhere—and here I think Roger Ebert would agree with me—I hope that's not true.
Ebert left behind a lifelong career of loving movies, a body of written work unparalleled, save maybe in the works of the great Pauline Kael, a body of work he planned to continue building even as his own body was failing him. I knew him through his writing, and I found his prose always to be warm, witty, and eloquent, even when he was being downright acerbic. His criticism I sometimes liked less, as he occasionally got his facts wrong, misremembering or misquoting. Still, he always had an eye for the loving details, as in his review of Star Wars, where he notes Luke's landspeeder reminds him "uncannily of a 1965 Mustang."
Ten years ago, when I began watching movies in earnest—which only means, with aspirations to write about how and why they move me—I usually disagreed with Ebert's overly generous, three- and four-star reviews of popular American films. His reviews of the great movies, though, I absorbed, so conversational and approachable was his style. As the years have gone by, I've mellowed in my own conversations, gotten more approachable myself when it comes to movies, and I see his work now in a different light. He was that rare and gifted writer who bridges the gap between his subject (cinema) and his readers (everyone). No small feat in a nation that still holds little respect for movies as art.
Tonight I watched McCabe & Mrs. Miller, one of the greatest movies ever made about longing, isolation, love and loneliness. Ebert wrote this about it, in one of his finest reviews: "It is not often given to a director to make a perfect film. Some spend their lives trying, but always fall short. Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Miller. This is one of the saddest films I have ever seen, filled with a yearning for love and home that will not ever come—not for McCabe, not with Mrs. Miller, not in the town of Presbyterian Church, which cowers under a gray sky always heavy with rain or snow. The film is a poem—an elegy for the dead."
It's a fitting kind of mourning, I think, to revisit this movie tonight. Ebert has been an undeniable influence upon this blog, just as another writer I once knew, Barry Hannah, was of immeasurable influence upon my fiction. I once thought Warren Beatty's achingly beautiful line—"I got poetry in me!"—might have been attributed to Barry, who spent some time in Hollywood in the seventies and worked with Robert Altman doctoring scripts. A friend chased that theory down and, straight from Barry's mouth, debunked it. But it's still the kind of line Barry would have written, probably wished he had, when he thought about it. And so McCabe & Mrs. Miller has always held a special place in my heart as the movie that reminds me of a writer who taught me, who teaches me still. Now, I guess, two such writers owe the film a debt.
In Life Itself, speaking of his own death, Ebert says, "What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins's theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, cliches that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting, and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes."
That list of memes seems like a thing McCabe might rattle off to himself, mumbling his heart out before a mirror, putting bullets in his pistol. Unlike McCabe, Ebert will be remembered for a much longer while, and he never mumbled.
Somewhere in the long, plodding second act of Les Miserables, my wife looked over at me and confessed that she had farted. I tried to think of a better way to open my review of this movie and just couldn't. So there it is. I will say that somewhere in Tom Hooper's adaptation of the much-beloved musical there is a good movie. The first act is stellar, but the movie almost immediately falls apart after "The Master of the House," when we're forced to endure a long and tedious young lovers' subplot set against the Revolution the June Rebellion, an uprising made no way personal, relevant, or engaging by Hooper's direction. The final scene tries to pull it all together in a kind of we're-all-happy-in-heaven-now number, but it fails, as Jean Valjean's struggles on earth are far more moving. And this is how it goes with everyone else: the misery of the first act is so large and epic that Eponine, for example, singing of her unrequited love in the rain can only fall flat. It's 45 minutes on an emotional roller coaster followed by 2 hours of meh characters and directing. I couldn't have been happier when the French soldiers put a few bullets in that snaggle-toothed, cockney-voiced urchin. If these were the best the intelligentsia had to offer, maybe it's best everyone just went home.
1 BANANA for Anne Hathaway; she earned it.
Written by a lot of people who probably also wrote the musical
Directed by Tom "I Hope You Get a Bond Movie Someday" Hooper
2012
It's been a long time since I've seen a movie populated by such delightfully despicable characters. Even minor Miyo, the servant who plays victim to Etsuko's nasty machinations, is quick to agree to an abortion and then blackmail her former master for suggesting it. And yet: Kurahara directs these awful people with such a sense of humor, layering in sights and sounds reflective of their absurd hysteria, from screeching chickens to spurting blood. They all deserve each other, seems to be the point of a late dinner scene, in which the son gets drunk and reveals to everyone, with a lampshade on his head and Beethoven's 5th playing in the background, that his sister-in-law is actually his father's mistress. The joke's really on him, of course, as every one of these vipers already knows it. They're all just too polite to say it!
4 BANANAS
Written by Shigeo Fujita and Koreyoshi Kurahara
From the novel by Yukio Mishima
Directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara
1967
I'm a sucker for movies about the journey from innocence to experience, coming of age, etc., but in Ivan's Childhood there is no innocence — just the memory of it. Ivan's former life with his mother is little more than a dream, while his day-to-day experiences along the Soviet front are a waking nightmare. The brilliance of Tarkovsky's movie is its blurring of the line between those two states. A war-torn landscape that turns from bright sunshine to night, enemy flares firing constantly over swampy bogs. A boy in a bunker, dirty, clean, dreaming. Playing. Playing at killing. What a strange, sad, beautiful movie.
5 BANANAS
Written by Vladimir Bogomolov and Mikhail Papava
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
1962
Clouzot's films never disappoint. Le Corbeau is a wartime-study in mass hysteria and paranoia, but it's also an intriguing whodunnit. Great moviemaking.
4 BANANAS
Written by Louis Chavance
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
1943
