Time is on His Side: ABOUT TIME

It was Pauline Kael who said “melodrama with a fast pace can be much more exciting - and more honest, too - than feeble pretentious attempts at drama.” So it is with About Time, the new film from Richard Curtis, the writer-director of Love Actually, that sentimental hydra-headed Christmastime romantic comedy that some say drowns in sappiness as if that’s a bad thing. His new film is a romance about falling in love with a woman, but even more so about falling in love with life itself, helped along by important relationships and Big Moments – births, deaths, weddings, funerals – that make one stop and appreciate time as it goes by. To this is added a light dusting of high concept sci-fi that’s at once easily digestible and, just below the surface, as incomprehensible as any time travel plotting can grow when one stares at it for too long. But anyway, this isn’t a movie that one experiences with the head, intending to chart it out for one’s date afterwards, arranging straws into timelines on the dinner table. This is a movie that socked me in the heart early and often, terrifically emotionally manipulative and much more involving than feebler fare.

It starts with Tim (Domhnall Gleeson, a Weasley son) turning 21 and learning a family secret, so secret neither his mother (Lindsay Duncan) nor sister (Lydia Wilson) knows. His father (Bill Nighy) calls him into his study, sits him down, and says that all the men in his family can travel through time. “It’s not a joke,” he so flatly states it must be true. With this information comes knowledge of the ability’s restrictions, learned, we’re meant to assume, through generations of trial and error. He can only travel within the space of his own lifetime. He can only travel backwards, other than returning to the present, of course. He can only return to places and times he knows. To achieve this feat, he simply has to stand in the dark, clench his fists, and think his way there.

It all sounds so simple, and in practice it is. The film uses the sci-fi hook to power its storytelling and uses the rules to keep the plot from spinning out of control. It’s silliness treated if not literally seriously, than emotionally seriously. It helps that Nighy is such a warm presence, eager in his fatherly insistence on ethical uses of time travel. Look not for riches or manipulations, he says, but for generating more chances to do what you love. What’s he done with this gift? He says he has found more reading time, mostly.

Tim wants a girlfriend and at first sets about creating his own personal Groundhog Day in order to gather information to woo his crushes. Once he realizes that no matter how often he tries to redo moments to make them just right, others will behave in unpredictable ways, he simply moves on with his life. He moves to London, gets a low level job at a law firm, meets new friends, and falls in love at first sight with a young woman (Rachel McAdams, exuding sunny appeal) he meets by pure coincidence. In this story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl by going back inadvertently changing their meeting. He erases it, in fact.

He must win her back by going back, using his powers not to control, but only to be a better flirt and a better lover. He’ll still redo social stumbles, but he’s just as likely to jump back and relive a great moment. There’s a funny bit where he selfishly relives a Big Deal three times, and then is too exhausted to go again when McAdams asks him to. He time-traveled and didn’t even have to.

As the film progresses through moments romantic, comedic, and dramatic, it builds up a picture of a young man learning to come to terms with the finite nature of life. Sometimes the story will even take a break from its mild sci-fi possibilities and go for a stretch without bringing up its central premise at all, playing out as tasteful, sentimental melodrama. It works on that level quite nicely. Principally a romance between two characters rather charmingly portrayed (Domhnall and McAdams have an on-screen connection that instantly provoked my rooting interest) this is a movie full of tender, warm, heartfelt moments of swooping, swooning true love and all that mushy stuff. It’s a movie about learning to experience life as it happens instead of always striving for some ideal life you feel you aren’t living, but could be or should be.

About Time uses its modest time travel trappings not as plot mechanics, but as metaphor for learning how to manage and truly appreciate the time you have with those who love you. It’s a warm and fuzzy movie that tells comfortable, but no less moving, truths. It has the romance of a cozy rom com, the philosophy of a greeting card, and the sentimentality of a life insurance commercial. But the combination comes together so wonderfully that it won me over all the same. It’s all a slick and lovely artifice through which Curtis can movingly and sweetly find some great emotional resonances. A lush piano score that dances around the tune of one of my favorite Ben Folds songs ties together a story that’s small in scope, telling only of one young man’s maturation through complications both romantic and temporal. And yet its syrupy life-affirming implications are so grandly expressive. It’s a movie of broad feeling and overflowing heart.

Note: This is undoubtedly the mildest R-rated film I’ve seen in quite some time. It has a handful of stronger profanities deployed tastefully and a few non-explicit references to sex. Why that’s not considered a PG-13 here when I’ve seen worse in PG-13s past (in trailers, even), is beyond me. 

Slave Narrative: 12 YEARS A SLAVE

Solomon Northup was a talented violinist who was hired to play for parties and other social gatherings near his home. He lived in upstate New York with his wife and three children. Because he was born in 1808 and was black, it is important to note that he was a free man. But that would not always be the case. British director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, based on Northup’s memoir of the same name, tells the story of how, in 1841, this free man was kidnapped, taken to the South, and sold into slavery. It is not a film about slavery, but about a slave. In the process it becomes a catalogue of injustices that can only hint at the depths of depravity the American slave trade contained. Told wholly from a black perspective, the film belongs to a rich history of slave narratives, a harrowing literary genre that has rarely made the leap to the movie screen so intact. Too often softened and glamorized by interjecting noble white presence into the core of the narrative arc, this film finds at its center simply, powerfully, Mr. Northup. The kidnapping is only an extra layer of injustice, to most fully embody the tragedy of slavery and make thoroughly real how dehumanizing an institution it is.

Slavery is something that many Americans understand historically and academically, but here is a film that says look, feel the pain, understand. This is a film of unrelenting brutality. Though I sat through the whole film, I must admit to averting my eyes at the worst of the violence. A scene late in the film lingers on flesh torn from a slave woman’s back as the plantation’s master whips her. The bloody ripping and slicing is a monstrously effective visual that’s uncomfortable and upsetting. It feels honest, not exploitative of real world violence nor mean-spirited towards the audience. It’s simply presented, raw and exposed. It at times recalls Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ with its commitment to showing battered bodies, torn flesh, and logging blows of whips and cudgels. The sound design blasts these strikes out of the speakers loudly, rattling the audience’s eardrums with their force and violence. When Northup is first captured, he pleads for his freedom, citing his free man status. “Show us your papers,” the kidnappers snarl. When Northup cannot – nor could he move his manacled hands even if he had papers – his back is bludgeoned in one long take, each smack one of terrifying force, physically and aurally.

Viewed in conjunction with McQueen’s other films, the prison hunger strike procedural Hunger and sex addiction drama Shame, it’s clear he’s a director interested in the human body in relationship to the human soul and the limits past which both can be pushed. In 12 Years a Slave, the sins of the country’s moral negotiations are raked across the bodies of the enslaved, while others go about their business, aware, but unable or unwilling to help. In a harrowing moment of sustained painful suspense, McQueen’s camera watches for an agonizingly long period of time as a slave hangs from a noose on a low branch, saved only by standing and shifting on his tiptoes slipping in mud. On all sides, those who live on the plantation – black and white alike – continue their routines, eyes averted. In the distance, we can hear the sound of children playing.

There are no dates placed on screen to mark the passage of time. The title plainly states the narrative’s duration. We know that Solomon Northup will remain enslaved for 12 long, painful years, but we’re as lost in the accumulation of incident as he is. Time is a blur of terrors and anxiety that slowly gives way to reluctant resignation. He is trying to survive. At the center of the film is a monumental performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor, long a welcome screen presence in films as diverse as Inside Man, Love Actually, and Children of Men. Here, Ejiofor shows remarkable restraint, never overplaying the emotional journey, trusting the facts of the narrative and subtle shifts in his behavior and expression to sell the depths of horror Northup saw and the resilience Northup displayed. John Ridley’s script follows him from a slave market overseen by Paul Giamatti to several different plantations owned by the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender, Sarah Paulson, and Bryan Batt. Though there are some differences between them – some moderately kinder, others ruthlessly cruel – they all are doing their part to perpetuate poisonous beliefs and uphold a horrendous institution.

Though the film is pitched at a relentlessly grim and miserable abusive level, one can never feel prepared for the cruelty to come. McQueen’s use of carefully composed, sleek cinematography and studied framing (with his usual cinematographer Sean Bobbitt) doesn’t get in the way of the impact. When a plantation owner’s wife suddenly hurls a glass at a slave woman’s head, object making contact with skull with a sickening crack, it is startling. This is a world where that doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. And that’s what horrifying. The writing for and acting of the ensemble has a sense of overwhelming specificity. The film never stoops to viewing either blacks or whites homogenously. Much like the owners have their differences, we see here slaves who become favored (Alfre Woodard), who agitate for rebellion (Michael K. Williams), and who are singled out for specific abuses (Lupita Nyong’o). There’s a variety here in a film that finds much diversity in corners of history that too easily are reduced into types. It helps keep the film from finding false notes of victory. When Northup’s 12 years are up and he’s finally freed, he finds no retribution and only his own personal victory. As he’s driven away, he leaves every other character behind, still slaving or enslaved. 

We’re currently living through a time in this country in which a great many people find it politically convenient not to know things about our history, to play fast and loose with facts and behave cavalier towards context. We’re living in a time when people of a certain political persuasion can not only seriously speak lies like slavery was “a blessing in disguise” or that the South’s economy was not built on the backs of slaves, but have a great many people believe such erroneous sentiments. Here is a film that lays out the facts of history unblinking, in all its horror and heartbreak, in all its soul-draining sinfulness and tells us to look at just one story, to feel just a fraction of centuries of pain, and to see anew our history as it is recreated in front of our eyes.

Old, Tired, Mean: BAD GRANDPA

When Amy Poehler was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show earlier this week, she talked about her disdain for pranks. Ellen showed her several YouTube videos of people going to elaborate lengths scaring friends and family. After each one, the camera would cut back to Poehler, brow furrowed, mouth drawn into an exaggerated frown. “How about that one?” Ellen would ask. “Nope,” Poehler would grunt. I’m glad she did that, not just because it was a funny bit, but also because it helped me know what my face probably looked like for most of Bad Grandpa. It’s a loosely plotted movie that is wall-to-wall hidden-camera pranks, most of them bizarre, upsetting, or filthy behavior that happens in the vicinity of strangers. As I watched, I felt my face scrunch up for so long I was nearly worried it would stay that way. As the antics played out across the screen, I spent my time debating logistics – how did they film this? – and worrying about the well-being of the innocent bystanders.

These are no Candid Camera good-natured goofs. The movie comes from star Johnny Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine, the pranksters behind the Jackass show and movies in which a team of like-minded buddies would egg each other on into masochistic pranks involving shock gross out squirminess and threats of bodily harm, all for our ostensible amusement. Here, the humor comes from staging dangerous and crude stunts in front of the general public. It’s no longer masochism; it’s mean-spirited. Take, for instance, an early scene in which Knoxville, who spends the entire movie in convincing old-age makeup playing the Bad Grandpa of the title, hosts an estate sale. He sits down on an adjustable bed and goads a middle-aged woman, who thinks she’s just a customer at an average sale, into testing the bed’s buttons. It predictably goes haywire, snapping upright from both ends and trapping Knoxville inside. The camera lingers on the trembling woman in glee as Knoxville extricates himself. Relishing the poor woman’s fright isn’t funny. It’s just cruel.

The plot, such as it is, involves the Bad Grandpa on a road trip to take his eight-year-old grandson (Jackson Nicoll) to the boy’s dad. It’s mainly an excuse to stage moments like shoplifting from a convenience store, which culminates in the manager yelling at them in the parking lot, saying quite rightly that the boy should be taken away from him. Another gag involves a funeral with invited strangers, thinking they’re helping a poor old man’s grief, witnessing the body (fake, of course, but awfully real looking) falling out of the casket, after which Knoxville proceeds to dance with it while angrily insisting the congregation sing a hymn. Other gags include a malfunctioning mechanical contraption launching the Bad Grandpa through a plate glass window, the old man pushed in a shopping cart up to a drive-thru window, a bout of explosive diarrhea that splatters a diner wall, and a crashed beauty pageant featuring a risqué drag performance by the little boy. Bystanders are often more perplexed and weirded out than anything else, especially when, say, Knoxville takes his old man character into a male strip club and tries to muscle his way on stage.

Compare the slack, mean pranks here to Sacha Baron Cohen’s not unproblematic overrated Borat and underrated Bruno. There Cohen tends to go after satirical targets with his hidden-camera improv stunts. He’s hilarious and cringe-worthy at once, precisely because it’s calibrated to tweak racist, xenophobic, and homophobic undercurrents, blowing past the limits of propriety to make a point. When he gets a group of people to sing his fake folk song “Throw the Jew Down the Well,” it’s as upsetting and unnerving as it is hilarious for the bias he unearths. When he throws a cage match in the deep south and suddenly begins making out with his opponent mid-bout, the howls of protest from the drunken crowd give the whole thing an edge of danger and upheaval for the ultimate benefit of all involved, if for nothing else than the societal observation it provokes. When Bad Grandpa goes to a bingo game, drinks the ink out of his markers, pours lime juice down his pants, and aggressively flirts with all the ladies around him, it’s ultimately pointless. I felt bad for those women. They’re the butt of the joke in a scenario that exists only to have us laugh at their discomfort.

I make Bad Grandpa sound like an unendurable experience. I’ve no doubt that for many it would be. For me it could have been and nearly was, but I must confess to laughing right out loud maybe three times, even though all those best jokes are lifted from Little Miss Sunshine and Borat. And there’s some genuine camaraderie between Knoxville and Nicoll that generates a few freestanding moments of mild entertainment when the two characters simply scamper around pulling pranks on each other. Maybe they work well together because they’re on a similar level of juvenile dumbness, a mix of fearless energy and unchecked mischievousness. It’s too bad the movie’s so sour it can’t even capitalize on their chemistry for the sappy grandfather-grandson bonding conclusion it so desperately tries to pull off. For me the biggest laugh comes not from any of the elaborate dangerous or crude stunts the production pulls, but from a comment a woman on the street directs towards the boy when confronted with the pair: “I feel like I should take your picture and see if you’re on a milk carton somewhere.” Otherwise the movie kept waving its pranks in my face asking, “How about that one?” To which I could only reply, “Nope.”

Drug War: THE COUNSELOR

A murky drug war thriller, The Counselor keeps its focus on the people in the middle. This isn’t a story of drug lords and D.E.A. agents. It’s a story of lawyers, money launderers, logisticians, and truck drivers. There’s the Counselor (Michael Fassbender), a lawyer who finds himself nebulously floating between a sleazy nightclub owner (an unnaturally tan Javier Bardem) and a guy with connections (Brad Pitt) as a whole lot of drugs are making their way across the border and through the American West, with Chicago, and a $20 million payday, as a final destination. These three men form the core of the film, although there are choice roles for women (Cameron Diaz and Penélope Cruz) who have more and less power than you’d initially assume. These people are involved to greater or lesser extents in moving drugs and money around the world. They all seem to be in control of their part of the plan, but unexpected variables bring danger quicker than anyone expects. As Pitt explains, for the cartels, decapitation isn’t a result of anger or malice. It’s just business.

The screenplay is by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy. In his unflinchingly hard-bitten narratives like Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road (the latter two adapted into recent films), he specializes in prose so economical and spare he doesn’t even have time for such frills as quotation marks or indented paragraphs. In The Counselor, he finds something of a cinematic equivalent as scenes unfold pertinent information slowly, leaving plenty of gaps that may or may not be filled. It’s a thriller that doesn’t hurtle with propulsion, but rather takes its time rewarding patient and indulgent attention on the part of the audience. It’s a chilly red-blooded literary accumulation of details. The sparsely characterized cast of characters shows us these details through their actions, their personas, their crisply written dialogue that leans heavily on its sense of drive and negotiation. Characters are always jostling for the upper hand, feeling each other out, and moving with confident wariness. When not speaking of negotiations and logistics, they’re prone to speaking in sour metaphor or baring their souls accidentally in eccentric anecdotes.

McCarthy invents characters so tersely individual and specific that it’s little wonder that the Coen brothers are the only ones to get his prose exactly right on the screen. Here, without the benefit of his tough descriptions, his narrative leans on the strength of the cast to imbue the characters with life. They do, creating characters who are at times as inscrutable as they are committed to whatever their goals happen to be. It’s a story that finds a new, welcome character actor around every corner, with room for a diamond dealer played by Bruno Ganz, a prisoner played by Rosie Perez, a priest played by Edgar Ramirez, a supplier played by Dean Norris, and more. Each arriving for only a scene or two, they add immediate richness around the edges, a sense that the world of the ensemble contains multitudes, options and tracks that fade out as the plot narrows its focus and the dangers of the game begin to tighten around our leads’ necks.

Long build ups of methodical process, trucks of drugs packed and unpacked, secret meetings in hotel lobbies, revelations of who is spying and who is being spied upon, move along slowly and glossily. Violence comes fast, frightening, and ends just as quickly, leaving only eerie silences behind. Sudden gore gives way to sudden nothing. It’s all subdued, elegantly terse tension, nasty in a dour, matter-of-fact way with flashes of odd dark humor. A motorcyclist’s severed head sits in its helmet. The murderer hits the top with a thwack, sending the head flying out with a thunk. It’s as awful as it is strangely funny in execution, an extra little detail in a production that’s obsessed with finding moments like these. It’s a muted, grimly determined thriller that’s sleekly designed, handsomely photographed, and loves to get darkly strange from time to time. It’s appealing and unpleasant, sensual and a little funny. Just listen to Bardem’s monologue about what Diaz did to his car and tell me that it’s not all of the above.

Director Ridley Scott, in one of his rare modern day efforts (no Gladiator or Blade Runner here), takes a perfume commercial approach to glassy modern architecture and grimy black market transactional back alleys alike. (Scenes set around Bardem’s pool can’t help but unconsciously echo Scott’s 1979 work for Chanel.) When he, with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, finds an image like a pet cheetah stalking a jackrabbit in a southwestern desert, or severed fingertips falling onto wet pavement, he lingers with stoic stylishness, finding the fussy details, but showing them with minimal excitement beyond their visual punch. He and McCarthy blend styles quite nicely here. They were at one point working together on an adaptation of Blood Meridian, but this eccentric original screenplay manages to blend their styles in ways a straight adaptation might not. It’s big, striking, and commercial, but granular, elusive, and specific as well. The Counselor is a movie that looks like a big Hollywood thriller, but it moves with sometimes-unexpected tones and rhythms. It is beautifully ugly, fitting for a movie that regards its characters and story with the cold logic and icy gaze of a predator moving in on its prey.

Hurt People Hurt People: CARRIE

Stephen King’s novel Carrie and the 1976 Brian De Palma film based on it are not particularly frightening examples of the horror genre.  Emphasis is on something more emotionally upsetting than surface scare. They have blunt force pulp power, bludgeoning and disturbing. What makes them something approaching classic is that truly distressing and upsetting material comes well before an ostracized teenage girl has a nasty prank pulled on her at prom and finally snaps in a frenzy of telekinetic fury. No, what’s upsetting about Carrie is the all-too-real horror of everyday cruelty. She’s a girl who is abused at home by a tyrannically religious mother who preaches a twisted gospel of self-loathing and shame, bullied at school by packs of mean girls and boys who perpetuate a cycle of trauma that is seemingly endless. When one girl snarls that Carrie’s “been asking for it since the sixth grade,” it’s hard not to wonder why this wounded young woman could ever been seen as anything other than psychologically brutalized. Sadly, compassion is something easily lost in adolescence, especially in group dynamics when one’s qualms can get swallowed up in mob mentality.

Where the new version of Carrie, a fresh adaptation scripted by Lawrence D. Cohen (he wrote the 1976 version) and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (a writer for Marvel comics as well as TV’s Glee and Big Love), goes right is in its sharp psychological eye in these early sequences of casual real-world cruelty. (Take the writers’ previous works of high school campiness, a focus on religion as familial strain, and a splash of King horror intruding on small town normality, and you have a good start on understanding this film’s approach.) Unlike De Palma’s brash showiness, with its nearly-exploitative eye for bodies on display in all their various states, this adaptation is inspired by the characters’ interiorities. Carrie, who is slowly realizing her telekinesis, is painfully shy, guarded. She’s preemptively defensive and rightfully so. After the opening scene, in which she’s relentlessly mocked in the gym class locker room, her mother picks her up from school. Full of sickly maternal rage, she punishes Carrie, telling her if she hadn’t been sinful that wouldn’t have happened. The poor girl is abused by her peers and then comes home to further punishment. For Carrie, there is no such thing as a safe place. 

Played here by Chloe Grace Moretz, Carrie is a pretty teenage girl who hides it well. She’s restlessly wary, hunched, arms held perpetually in a cautious defensive posture in front of her body that is swimming in formless oversized clothes. Her eyes dart, ready to find the next source of pain. A smile teases across her lips as she comes to realize that she has the ability to move things with her mind, along with a tremble of worry that if anyone found out, she’d only invite more mockery. Her mother (Julianne Moore) has wild hair and tends to hurt herself, pricking her thighs with her sewing needle, clawing at her wrists with her fingernails in religious fervor. It makes sense that she thinks the only reason she has a child is because of spiritual weakness, momentary lapses of sinful behavior. She keeps her daughter in line with threats of violence and confinement. When Carrie gets up the courage to announce that a cute boy (Ansel Elgort) has invited her to prom, her mother responds by telling her not to go. When Carrie pushes back ever so slightly, her mother hits herself repeatedly.

The boy feels sorry for Carrie and has invited her upon the request of his girlfriend (Gabriella Wilde), who regrets the bullying. A far more typical response comes from the ferociously catty mean girl (Portia Doubleday) who blames the victim when bullying gets her banned from prom. “We didn’t even do anything!” she cries, completely missing the point. She, along with her scary boyfriend (Alex Russell) plans to get even, blaming Carrie for missing out on prom. The nasty act they plan – the iconic Carrie prom moment that’s about as spoilable as Psycho’s shower scene, but I’ll avoid mentioning it anyway – is what sets off the more typically horror filled finale. In it, this film, like De Palma’s, becomes bloody. But unlike De Palma’s, this is a tragedy more than a spectacle, a film about a bullied girl who finally gets the strength to lash back at her tormentors and becomes a super-bully in the process, mangling indiscriminately. Even a kindly, well-intentioned teacher (wonderfully played by Judy Greer) gets caught up in the conflagration. This is no mere revenge fantasy. It’s troubling. When the nastiest bullies get taken out in spectacular horror film kills – staged here with freshly inventive jolts and jabs – it’s not only comeuppances. It’s a lament that it has gone this far.

The director here is Kimberly Peirce. Her first two films, 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry and 2008’s Stop-Loss, were haunting dramas that end up as tragedies. They’re about late-adolescent and early-adulthood yearnings, desires, and fluid identities in the process of stabilizing brought up short by intolerance and injustice. Here, in Carrie, those intolerances and injustices do their part in forming Carrie’s identity until the time when she has the empowerment to take control – take full command of her powers, both literal and metaphorical – and seizes it with great violence and only flashes of regret. Peirce handles the interpersonal relationships tenderly and sharply, so that by the time the violence of the finale emerges, almost right out of a comic book adaptation in its splashiness, like an X-Man gone sour, it’s as sad as it is shocking. Peirce makes a sympathetic portrait that’s never a voyeuristic freak show. She looks compassionately and sadly upon the events of the story, finding notes of embarrassment, anger, shame, and pity. Without attacking the material with the same outward bite and sleaze of De Palma, Peirce has made a humane, haunting and affecting adaptation from the inside out.

Unhappiest Place: ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW

As a gigantic international corporation with a carefully guarded reputation as a gleaming beacon of childhood entertainment for the whole family, the Walt Disney Company is certainly ripe for satirical potshots. What little there is to enjoy about first-time filmmaker Randy Moore’s Escape from Tomorrow comes from the moderately naughty fizz that comes from knowing the movie, a black and white indie about a middle-aged man descending into an increasingly hallucinatory mental breakdown while on vacation with his wife and kids, was shot covertly at Disney parks. There’s initially a funny sense of outmaneuvering a would-be omnipotent corporate force to create a film about how, taken to its extreme, omnipresent entertainment in the happiest place on earth can exacerbate a fragile mental state. But after no more than a few minutes, that all wears off and what we’re left with is a scattered and hollow provocation.

Filmed on consumer-grade digital cameras, the movie has a nightmarish home-video quality as the man (Roy Abramsohn) bickers with his wife (Elena Schuber), ignores his children (Katelynn Rodriguez and Jack Dalton), and finds his eye drawn lecherously towards two young French teenage tourists (Danielle Safady and Annet Mahendru) with whom he crosses paths both purposely and accidentally throughout the day. There’s nothing about that premise that needs Disney. Sure, there’s a minor jolt from seeing an early hallucination in which the “It’s a Small World” marionettes appear to glare at the man, but the film largely plays out as a meandering bad-trip travelogue that slowly turns into a darkly loopy sub-Lynchian bit of stupid surrealist posturing.

As soon as it’s clear that the movie would be more or less the same if it took place at Six Flags or Wally World or an abandoned lot, the movie only grows emptier and more unpleasant as it drags itself at an interminable pace towards its conclusion. Are we really supposed to give points for difficulty in assessing this film? It was certainly some kind of feat to sneak into the parks without permits or permission and choreograph the necessary scenes. Moving actors into position and getting dialogue recorded couldn’t have been easy. What about multiple takes? I wonder how they managed that without arousing the suspicion of security?

But these are all questions of logistics and execution. I’m sure the filmmakers would rather me chuckle along with their mildly transgressive (mostly for the contrast with the setting) violent and sexual content, enjoy the half-baked corporate commentary, and feel a twinge of sympathy for a man who is slowly driven insane by trying to survive the happiest place on Earth. But none of that resonated with me. It felt strained and false awfully quickly, coasting on its assumed transgression without making meaning out of it. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t get on board with a movie that could only generate interest in its content insofar as it feels like they’re putting one over on the theme park of its setting. Escape from Tomorrow is a movie with a deadened and deadening prankish spirit married to slight, awkward, ultimately pointless filmmaking. I cringed at the endless stiffly written scenes and at a few obviously green-screened shots, and sat with my arms crossed, waiting for it add up to anything at all, or, failing that, for it all to be over.

Just Business: CAPTAIN PHILLIPS

Exhausting and exhaustive, Captain Phillips is a process-oriented film of unrelenting tension. Detailing the true story of how, in 2009, a band of Somali pirates managed to board an American freighter in international waters off the coast of Africa and ended up holding the ship’s captain hostage for four days, the film’s approach finds the distance between us and them drawing small. The opening scenes are all about world economics, with two groups of men setting sail with very different, but ultimately convergent, goals. The freighter is loaded with cargo while Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) makes last minute checks, running down the corporate checklist. In a village in Somalia, a band of pirates are spurred to action by the local warlord, gathering boats and crew to go hunting for vulnerable targets in the ocean beyond their shores. They’re all in it for the money.

In the opening scene, the theme of global economic forces is made all too clear as clunky thematic exposition is spoken between Phillips and his wife (Catherine Keener). The world is changed, he says, wheels are moving, forces beyond their control. By the time the captain of the pirates (Barkhad Abdi) comes face to face with Phillips, he tells him their piracy is “only business.” Late in the film, he explains his boss will expect money when they return. “We’ve all got bosses,” Phillips replies. The film splits cleanly in two, the opening an extended setup that brings the freighter and the pirates into contact and crisis, leaving the second half dedicated to cutting between the military rescue operation and the increasingly claustrophobic and desperate events on board as a heist becomes a hostage situation. It largely shifts thematic gesturing to off-hand remarks, driving forward with ticking reportorial momentum.

The film reflects its preoccupations with process and business in its simplicity. A tense reenactment of a story that was all over the news in recent memory, there’s a factual frisson to the way the film unfolds. The screenplay by Billy Ray is, a clunky first scene aside, relatively restricted to jargon, strategy, and jostling for power and advantage in an increasingly difficult scenario for all involved. Though it could easily become an overpowering triumphalist picture, with one of the most likeable movie stars on the planet terrorized by third-world criminals and eventually rescued by the firepower of the United States, there is a remarkably balanced approach that finds the terror of the situation in how inescapable it becomes. Everyone is simply doing the job they’ve been given, responding to variables according to the best of their professional knowledge and abilities.

Hanks does strong, nuanced work here as a man with a professional imperative to keep his cool to save his crew and cargo, as well as an inner strength, his will to survive driving him to keep all parties from becoming irreparably inflamed. He’s not a hero, merely a smart, capable man who keeps a level head. The final stretch of the film, when he’s pushed past the breaking point and enters a state of shock, is some of the rawest acting Hanks has done in years. Abdi, as the leader of Phillips’s Somali captors, is clearly orchestrating a criminal and inexcusable act, but his performance captures shades of doubt and pride that prevent his characterization from becoming abstract villainy. He’s a desperate man in desperate circumstances, finding it hard to control a situation he thought would be easy ransom as it spirals out of control and it becomes clearer that it’ll be hard to make it out. It’s almost sad when, late in the film when it’s clear to all involved he and his men will more likely be captured or killed than receive riches, he’s asked why he continues to hold Captain Phillips hostage and replies that he’s come too far to turn back.

Directed by Paul Greengrass, the film jitters with his trademark shaky-cam verisimilitude. With exceptional action films The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, he helped set the standard for chaos cinema, painting action as scrambling sequences of elaborate franticness, pushing blockbuster cinema towards a standard of abstract adrenaline that few filmmakers could match. Many would borrow the techniques, but few could copy the effects. His you-are-there docu-thriller immediacy did claustrophobic wonders for his dread-filled United 93, a real-life disaster picture that valorizes the passengers who died diverting a hijacked airliner on September 11, 2001. In Captain Phillips, Greengrass brings a similar sense of weight and tension, a sense of enclosure of space and situation, cinematographer Barry Ackroyd's widescreen framing refusing to open up. Even wide shots of ships at sea feel trapped, the weight of the suspense crushing down even there.

The film uses its sensations to simply recreate a recent event and it’s admirable how even-handed it manages to be. Even better, how the film refuses to give easy relief. The final minutes are extraordinary. The saving gunshots come fast, leaving the scene bloody and resolutely resisting celebration. Hanks’ final scene is not one of calm, but one of safety slowly quaking its way into a body still shaking with unbelievable stress. Greengrass leaves us with scenes much like those we’ve been watching the entire runtime, professionals simply doing what must be done. Tension may be released from this particular narrative, but the world goes on just as before.

True Love Never Did Run Smooth: ROMEO AND JULIET

A Shakespeare adaptation has an inescapable feeling of repetition. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, provided those behind the scenes know how to make the text work for them. The main question becomes whether the new production works. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, there are two scenes that are absolutely crucial to making a worthy retelling. The first is the balcony scene, the moment where the audience needs to fully understand the attraction between the star-crossed lovers. The second crucial scene is the finale, the result of bits of coincidence that create the conditions for the tragic conclusion and must seem to flow naturally, reaching a poetic climax of heartbreak. In the newest big screen adaptation of the play, these scenes worked for me. My heart swelled when Romeo calls up to Juliet and they speak hushed infatuation. My eyes were a tad wet when the tale terminates in woe. With those moments locked down, the film can’t be all bad. The center’s too strong. That Shakespeare knew what he was doing.

This adaptation is a solid work that tells the well-known story with an earnest and heartfelt approach, tremblingly scored, capably performed. It was filmed on location in Italy with a cast dashing and gorgeous in period-piece appropriate clothing, speaking in Masterpiece Theater accents. The immortal narrative of two households, both alike in dignity, where ancient grudge leads to civil blood making civil hands unclean, has its inherent interest and power intact. Julian Fellowes, screenwriter of Gosford Park and creator of Downton Abbey, wrote the script, which stays true to the tone and shape of Shakespeare’s original play. It is not, however, an adaptation of total fealty to the Bard’s text. It’s not simply a matter of abridgment or subtly shifted emphasis. Some scenes are invented; lines are reworked and reworded. It’s distinctly Romeo and Juliet, but shifted ever so slightly away from the language on the page.

But that makes it sound like a calamity, a gross modernization, and it’s not that. Much of the original text’s most famous passages – “Wherefore art thou?” – remain nearly verbatim, while the rest of the film proceeds with not disastrously rewritten lines that remain true to the essence of the play. And, though Fellowes is talented, he is not Shakespeare. Still, the new dialogue clangs not to these ears, even if it’s not exactly at the same level. The original narrative is so strong, not to mention unscathed, and the production so dedicated to the feeling and tone of the text that it moves with a resonance that rings true to the play’s spirit, if not always its linguistic specifics. The cast finds the dialogue easily tripping off their tongues, smoothly and with great feeling.

In the leads are Douglas Booth, new to me, and Hailee Steinfeld, the remarkable young woman who stole the show in the Coen brothers’ True Grit. They make a very pretty Romeo and Juliet, she with her youthful open countenance and emotive eyes, he with prominent cheekbones and male-model smolder. But they don’t only look the part. There’s a fresh-faced adolescent impulsive obsession in their romance, a quivering discovery that vibrates on a tastefully melodramatic level. We don’t have to believe it is True Love, only that Romeo and Juliet think it is. As Taylor Swift once sang, “When you’re fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you’re going to believe them.”

Filling out the supporting cast are plenty of character actors doing good work with classic roles, from Homeland’s Damian Lewis as Lord Capulet to Let Me In’s Kodi Smit-McPhee as Benvolio, frequent Mike Leigh collaborator Lesley Manville as Nurse, and Stellan Skarsgård as the Prince of Verona. Best of all is Paul Giamatti’s Friar Laurence, who in this telling takes on a terrific twinkle in his eye, is tickled by his plan to help wed, and later reunite, the lovers, and is fantastically distraught when it all goes wrong. As the characters go through the paces, the movie rushes along, finding sometimes-awkward transitions. A cut from a covert wedding to Ed Westwick’s Tybalt scowling while practicing his sword skills is a tad laughable. But in general, the film does the play justice.

The cinematography by David Tattersall is handsome; the costumes are appealing. It’s not exactly a lavish production – a bush in the balcony scene is a bit of conspicuous fakery – but it’s largely nicely done. Director Carlo Carlei, a relative unknown here in the States having worked mainly in Italian TV, is the least interesting aspect of the film. He’s no George Cukor or Franco Zeffirelli or Baz Luhrmann, far better directors who brought (wildly dissimilar) cinematic styles to their versions of Romeo and Juliet. For better and worse, Carlei brings only the stuffy, undistracted gloss that you’d find in any blandly proficient prestige project. The best that can be said is that he stays out of the way. This is Fellowes’ project through and through, and even he plays second fiddle to Shakespeare. This is Romeo and Juliet and all that implies. My heart swelled. My eyes got wet. Because the film gets the most important aspects right, it works.

Killer Toy Stories: CURSE OF CHUCKY

When Chucky, a chirpy red-haired doll possessed by the dead soul of a cold-blooded killer, was introduced in the 1988 horror film Child’s Play, I’ll bet no one would’ve guessed he’d be around for at least 25 years, let alone spawn a franchise that would last six films. Yet here we are. That first film is surprisingly entertaining and holds up well. The doll scampers about in a darkly funny, genuinely scary movie that builds up to one of the greatest pre-kill one-liners of the 80s, or any decade for that matter. (Having it spoken by a darling little kid, his hand defiantly holding the match that’ll hopefully light the killing flame, is a definite plus.) With clear inspiration from the plethora of slasher pictures floating around at the time, the movie manages to make Chucky scary in two ways. First, there’s the creeping terror of a supposedly inanimate object that slips away when your back is turned. Secondly, there’s the placid, safe, kid-friendly plastic face that suddenly screws itself into a wrinkled grimace as the killer’s personality bursts through, the cold rubbery lips spouting hurtful, violent, vulgar intensity with a chilling vocal performance by Brad Dourif.

The movies that followed tried to duplicate the mix of scarily silly kills, largely missing what made Child’s Play such an unexpected blast. The franchise’s next best idea came when Chucky got a girlfriend, Tiffany, an equally psychotic person played by Jennifer Tilly who, you guessed it, ended up stuck in a doll body of her own. Now they’re homicidal partners in what becomes the only killer doll romance that I can think of. Like so many 80s slasher villains, Chucky started out pure evil and ended up somewhere closer to the role of protagonist, creating the kind of icky cognitive dissonance wherein an audience starts to root for the killer simply because he’s our only recurring character, the most charismatic known quantity on screen, and the only reason the plot moves at all.

It wasn’t until 2004’s Seed of Chucky, the fifth in the series, that a notable movie bubbled up out of the formula. It’s a movie that’s difficult to recommend, but hard to ignore, busting down every known category and sitting confidently in several boxes at once. To call the movie outside the box is to assume writer-director Don Mancini (making his directorial debut after having written the entire franchise to date) is aware that there is a box at all. I have admiration for Seed, which finds Chucky and Tiffany in Hollywood and devotes most of the runtime to the dolls terrorizing Jennifer Tilly (playing herself as well as voicing Tiffany). It’s a slasher movie, a showbiz satire, and a fearlessly tasteless gross-out comedy. Besides, any movie that steers into territory so bonkers and meta while still finding time for a subplot involving kinky cult filmmaker John Waters playing an amused paparazzo can’t be all bad.

Now, nearly a decade later, Don Mancini is back wearing the writer-director’s hats for Curse of Chucky. The sixth in the Child’s Play series, and the first to go direct to video, Curse begins when a woman (Chantal Quesnelle) and her twenty-something wheelchair-bound daughter (Fiona Dourif) receive a mysterious package in the mail. It’s a Chucky doll, something vaguely remembered from the 80s. Neither of them ordered it, but there’s no time to ponder the mystery. The mother falls from their second floor balcony and dies that very night. In the wake of this tragedy, the girl’s older sister (Danielle Bisutti), with husband (Brennan Elliott), daughter (Summer H. Howell), and nanny (Maitland McConnell) in tow, show up at the house, marking time before the funeral mourning, reconnecting, and arguing about what to do next. Their minds are so otherwise taxed, there’s scarcely time to wonder why that Chucky doll keeps going missing and turning up in the strangest spots.

The movie is stuck in a limited space, barely stepping foot outside the house for the duration. We’re with a small number of characters over a short period of time, the stakes escalating slowly but surely over a trim runtime. That’s a sign of the budget and DTV status for sure, but Mancini is resourceful, getting great shadows and ominous creaks out of the big old house in the country. It’s the scariest of the series since the first one, effectively building up jumps and kills, grabbing a few genuine chills along the way. It turns out there are still some good scares left in Chucky. For once, he’s used sparingly, although as the plot goes on he gets chattier and Mancini can’t help but pull in the franchise’s laborious narrative history. It’s better than your average fan service, though. Cleverly thought through, Curse is respectful of what’s come before. As one with affection for the series, I found it pleasing enough. I doubt the movie’s winning over any new converts, but it’s a solid treat, rewarding long-held interest in the material.

Fiona Dourif makes a most sympathetic protagonist, while her father, returning once again as the voice of Chucky, slips easily into the little creep’s brusquely singsong tones. Mancini stages a couple clever switcheroos of scripting, a few fun sequences – an early highlight is a sort of Russian roulette chili dinner, the audience aware that one bowl has been spiked with poison, but unaware who has received it – and some creative gore. By the end I was growing a little tired of the sometimes-predictable horror hack and slash, but it’s ultimately diverting enough. It’s all a bit of a throwback, less exploitative than you’d think (for good and ill, come to think of it) and easily the least overtly goofy (again, for good and ill) the series has been in quite some time. It’s a fitting entry in this long running series and a fine mid-October surprise.

Note: For some reason, this October sees only one wide release horror film. Why Curse of Chucky didn’t get the bump to theatrical release, I don’t know. It’s bankrolled by a major studio – Universal – and seems modestly budgeted without appearing cheap. Surely it would’ve been worth the chance. 

Needs Sharpening: MACHETE KILLS

With Robert Rodriguez, there’s never a question of authenticity in his pulpy prefabricated cult films. He’s a filmmaker following his passions and interests, which largely sit squarely within a desire to reconstitute comic books, B-movies, and exploitation pictures in a variety of partially-postmodern configurations. At his best, he doesn’t just borrow from iconic and disreputable genre ideas and finds a way to create some honest iconic moments of his own, images that stick in the brain long after context starts to fade. I’m thinking of the opening rival-spies-in-love montage of Spy Kids (his greatest), Johnny Depp’s bleeding eyes partially hidden behind sunglasses in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and Laura Harris soon to stalk out of the skin she’s showing off to reveal her otherworldliness in The Faculty. His best movies are movie movies, pure playful pleasure.

That’s what made Machete, the 2010 expansion of a spoof trailer from his Grindhouse collaboration with Tarantino, enjoyable. Its clever blend of button-pushing political commentary and bloody Tex-Mexploitation action swirled around a stoic performance from craggy tough guy character actor Danny Trejo as the eponymous ex-federale defender and protector of underdogs everywhere. The movie was knowing without being too knowing, laugh-out-loud exciting, not because of faux-shoddiness, but through sheer force of earnest silliness. You could never accuse Rodriguez of being above cartoony violent gags. I still smile when I recall the sequence that found a baddie stabbed with a meat thermometer, a funny enough moment that becomes even better when the building explodes and the man’s corpse flies into frame, the thermometer still in place, now reading “Well Done.”

Rodriguez is always having fun. The question is whether the audience gets to have the fun with him. In the case of Machete Kills, there’s not a single moment as enjoyable or memorable as what happened to that meat thermometer. It’s a movie that’s content to run its gory gags into the ground. I mean, you’ve seen one guy get sucked up into the propellers of a helicopter or boat engine, you’ve seen them all. One is a shock. A dozen is quite literally overkill. The deliberately silly sequel finds Machete recruited by the President of the United States (Charlie Sheen, credited here under his birth name, Carlos Estevez) to track down Mendez (Demian Bichir), a Mexican madman. This mastermind wants the U.S.A. to invade Mexico with the goal of cleaning up the drug cartels and thinks threatening to launch a missile towards Washington D.C. will help make up the President’s mind. Not while Machete is an option.

The convoluted plot soon involves a motley and intriguing cast made up of Oscar winners and nominees, disgraced celebrities, a sitcom actress, former child actors, and a pop star. Amber Heard plays Miss San Antonio, who is secretly a federal agent assigned to be Machete’s handler on this mission. On his way to find Mendez, he runs across a brothel filled with militant prostitutes (led by Alexa Vega, a dozen years ago a co-star of Spy Kids) under the direction of a madam (Modern Family’s Sofía Vergara) who takes the term maneater uncomfortably literally. Her daughter (Vanessa Hudgens) supposedly knows how to find Mendez. Complications arise, and soon a string of assassins (killer cameos for Walton Goggins, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Antonio Banderas, and Lady Gaga) and a villainous weapons tycoon (Mel Gibson) want a piece of Machete too. Eventually Michelle Rodriguez, returning from the first film with her army of underground justice-seeking Mexicans, rolls into the picture as well.

It’s all fairly self-involved as it largely ditches the sociopolitical digs of the first film for adolescent snickering, repeating gags over and over with diminishing returns and otherwise overstaying its welcome. The balance is all off, running through CGI viscera repetitively splattered, twisting around without much momentum, and picking up a nasty habit of offing its female characters with little thought the instant the plot is done with them. This is a movie that thinks a machine gun bra is the height of humor and then proceeds to go no further. It’s worth a smirk, but not much else, especially when the whole movie plays out like one half-baked idea after the next. I bet screenwriter Kyle Ward (working from a story from Rodriguez) thought they seemed funny at the time.

And yet, as exasperating and only fleetingly entertaining as I found Machete Kills, Trejo doesn’t overplay his hand. Machete remains a great pulpy character, tough and no-nonsense, ready to get the job done. Even as the film grows unsatisfying around him, he’s a steady presence that keeps things from falling apart entirely. The movie doesn’t end so much as stop, a series of faux-advertisements promising that Machete will return in Machete Kills Again…In Space! These clips from an as-yet-unmade film, a groovy sci-fi shoot-‘em-up with late-70’s Roger Corman-style effects, are the best part of the very real movie you have to sit through to see them. Now that looks like fun. Maybe Machete Kills is too much of the same thing. I’m ready to launch with Trejo and Rodriguez into the stratosphere and they’re stuck retreading the same old ground.

Free Falling: GRAVITY

A relentlessly suspenseful technical exercise, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is a visual marvel. It tells a story of survival as a space shuttle is destroyed by a cloud of debris mid-space walk, leaving two astronauts adrift. For the next 90 minutes or so, they scramble to survive in a plot that’s spare and tough, unblinkingly and unceasingly orbiting with these imperiled characters. It’s just one thing after another going wrong, the cold hard cruelty of physics throwing ever more obstacles in the way. The film is an absorbing astonishment of virtuoso visual expression and aural detail. The plot is so simple and yet the feeling of floating unmoored and unprotected in the dead of space, scrambling to find some way, any way to safety is harrowing and overwhelming. The sense of isolation and sensory alienation is vast and impressive, a tension that tightens early and doesn’t even begin to let up until barely before the end credits roll.

I would describe the film as containing sequences of sensational special effects, but it’s more accurate to describe the entire film as one fluid effects sequence. Cuarón’s camera, guided by master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, floats freely and smoothly in long takes in stunning 3D that contain staggering amounts of visual information, subtle details of stars twinkling in the far background as our planet sits below, the astronauts walking outside their spacecraft near foreground. Careful attention is paid to the ripple effects of one motion in the void of space, tethers twisting, metal shifting, a screw slowly floating away once loosened from its position. The opening scene has tranquility about it, a subdued sense of motion as if the characters were simply underwater. It is silence and perspective that shows otherwise. When the first wave of debris hits, disaster unfolds in eerie near-total silence, metal ripped to ribbons and twisting in the vacuum of space with nary a sound but the ragged gasps and exclamations of the panicked survivors.

It’s a scenario that’s instantly chilling. As the actors in the suits, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney need not push too hard to make the sense of peril and hopelessness known, surrounded as they are by so much black, cold space. As performers, they’re two of the most naturally likable screen presences around, but though that’s part of the attraction here, they’re also delivering terrific pared down performances. These are impressive physical performances, fit and expressive in movements and body language, working seamlessly within precisely calibrated shots filled with exacting and convincing computer generated detail. Bullock especially does fantastic work here, for a character in which determination and hopelessness exist in close proximity, a mournful resignation that’s scraped away by steely determination. It’s all about the essentials. They’re people struggling to survive, all business, but for some light conversation that attempts to flesh out a token amount of backstory. Their characters move forward, proceeding to the next logical step, then the next. I found myself wondering how they could possibly get out of this situation.

The events of the film seem completely rigorously plausible, at least within the heightened movie nature of it all. As I’m not a scientist – far from it – I can’t comment on that further or more specifically. But the film proceeds with a cool, observational approach to its resolution that both makes sense and provides constant surprise from the characters’ combinations of resourcefulness and skill. The wonder of the film is not the characters behaviors or even, strictly speaking, the events of the plot. The film’s constant astonishment is the way it is shown, in smoothly composed shots of seamless digital amazement. There are moments I can’t wait to see again, mostly to wrap my head around the complexity with which they unfold, quickly and gracefully, as I gaped at the screen trying to process it all.

Cuarón has always been something of a visual master, from his sci-fi masterpiece Children of Men (2006) and fantasy adaptations A Little Princess (1995) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) to even something as deceptively grounded as his earthy relationship drama Y Tu Mamá También (2001). His camera’s curiosity and exquisitely choreographed (and digitally assisted) fluidity in conjunction with his characters’ inner lives is his trademark source of amazement. In Gravity, he pushes the visual immersion of his style as far as it has ever been. It is the work of one of our most visually accomplished filmmakers showing off. Its rigorous simplicity is a constant source of wonderment. Nothing more or less than a feat of technology creating an impressive, immersive experience, I spent Gravity in a state of tense awe.

Speed Racers: RUSH

It’s amazing to see how anyone’s life turns into biopic cliché when run through the Hollywood prestige drama machinery. There’s the early rising promise, the problems with health and/or addiction, and then the inevitable triumphant comeback. We’ve seen it all so many times before. Where Ron Howard’s Rush steps smartly and does much to combat the pitfalls of its genre is in the way it bifurcates the based-on-a-true-story of 1970’s Formula 1 racing rivals Niki Lauda and James Hunt. It’s two biopics in one, gaining excitement and energy from crackling two variations of the clichés off of the other. It allows the men to seem in some ways equally insufferably arrogant and admirably dedicated to their careers. We can see why they’d come to see each other as professional enemies, as well as why they’d come to admire the other’s professional bravery.

As James Hunt, Chris Hemsworth (Thor himself) humanizes what could’ve easily been less a man and more a monster of machismo. Tall, blonde, muscled, he’s a rippling mass of self-satisfaction and self-confidence. He’s a jerk. It’s hard to care about him, but Hemsworth’s brings to the part creeping insecurities that sometimes temper harsh judgments without excusing his behavior. Similarly, Niki Lauda could be seen as only cold and calculating, using technical precision and cutting remarks to win without caring what others think of him. But as played by Daniel Brühl (the Nazi propaganda star from Inglourious Basterds) he becomes a man whose unstoppable need to prove himself is intensely sympathetic and just as much a potential danger.

Tracing their rivalry, the film follows their careers in the 1970s as they meet again and again on the racetrack. Their ascents are intertwined; one’s biggest failures on the track the other’s biggest successes. Between races, much attention is paid to the politics of corporate sponsorships and relationships with pit crews and mechanics. There’s also a token amount of romantic interest as Hunt and Lauda each find women (Olivia Wilde and Alexandra Maria Lara, respectively) who love them enough to have the thankless task of serving as cutaway reaction shots during the races to underscore how dangerous it all is. They’ve got something to lose.

The screenplay by Peter Morgan (of The Queen and Frost/Nixon, among other films like them) has his characteristic insight into the based-on-real-people characters’ psychology and their relationships with each other. It also suffers from his characteristically stiff dramaturgy and the kind of clumsy narration that often insists on telling us exactly what people are thinking when the acting on display would and could do just as well. But for all the clunky dialogue and routine biopic paces, the film takes off at top speed, hurtling through cliché with a blistering sense of stirring, energized sports’ movie hokum. I’d like to think a movie about any job, even, say, rival pencil-pushers, could have a great deal of entertainment value if done right, but the fact that these men have careers racing cars is a gift that the filmmakers sure don’t squander. It becomes the film’s greatest asset.

Foregrounding Hunt and Lauda’s needs for speed in a continual quest to best the others, Rush is muscular, speedy, and masculine. Pistons pump, sparkplugs fire, and motors roar. The film bursts with bruising sound design and a thunderous Hans Zimmer score. It’s practically Bruckheimerian. Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography rattles at top speed, images blurring, edited to smash one into the next, then the next, next, next. The cars fly down the track at top speeds, danger around every corner. The death defying nature of the sport is never far from the film’s awareness, an appreciation reflected in the film’s visual bombast. It’s all movement, a blitz of frames Howard marshals with atypical freneticism. No stranger to fast cars – his directorial debut was the 1977 Roger Corman production Grand Theft Auto, after all – he takes Mantle’s propulsive camerawork and makes out of it a film that outraces the sometimes rigidly formulaic writing.