Why Can't We Be Friends: THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

It can be difficult to make friends in adulthood, and even more difficult losing one. Sometimes that prospect can result in a friendship coasting on routine, someone you hang around just because, well, you have for too long to stop it now. And what would happen if you did? That’s the emotional crux of Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin. It’s set in 1923 on a small island off the coast of Ireland. Not a lot of options for socializing there, so the locals take what they can get. Sometimes they can hear cannon fire on the mainland—the Irish Civil War. That distant rumbling is a fine underlining of the story’s main civil strife: one man (Brendan Gleeson) suddenly deciding he doesn’t want to be friends with another (Colin Farrell). He doesn’t really have a reason. He just doesn’t want to talk with him anymore. For years, they’ve met every afternoon at the pub for a drink and a chat. But now, it’s abruptly over, and the man doesn’t even feel he owes a reason. From this simple—almost adolescent playground—declaration, this falling out is gossiped about and talked over by the whole tiny town. Word travels fast. But the facts of the case rest most heavily on Farrell’s befuddled loss. He’s desperate for his friend back, or at least an explanation.

McDonagh, the playwright-turned-filmmaker whose In Bruges was also a good blackly comic showcase for these two actors, gives this sure-footed narrative the purity of a folksy tale. It’s gnarled with colloquialisms and a straight-faced dark humor. And it’s carried along by a slow-rolling matter-of-fact shock—a then-he-did-what?—as the men’s interactions escalate. At one point Gleeson calmly says that if Farrell talks to him again, he’ll go home and cut off one of his own fingers, just to prove how serious he is. Unmoored from their only meaningful friendship, they both drift off into middle-aged melancholy. And McDonagh balances the story’s sympathies as it becomes a portrait of this kind of loneliness of adulthood, where connections can strain and fall flat or grow mercenary. Where time starts to weigh heavily through sheer inertia of habits, a dawning awareness of time slipping away every day creeps in with a sense of waste. The windswept fields and dirt paths and icy ocean views make a stark backdrop for this romantic—in the classic intensity of emotion sense—ennui, and the chattering daily grind of whispered rumors and stormy escalations. The characters are often separated by windows and walls, or going for long walks across chilly landscapes, and always fumbling to ruminate over the mysteries of their lives.

We get a sense that the smallness of life in the vastness of the terrain is brewing an insular despair. In this town, there’s an abusive constable and mean old ladies and well-meaning bartenders and docile animals and the town idiot and a firm-but-fair sister. Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon, as those last two, are especially sharp counterpoints to Farrell’s befuddled pity. Gleeson, for his part, plays one long exasperated sigh, as a man whose depressive clanging against the bars of his own mortality drags out his potential harm to himself and others. With this steady orchestra of personalities, McDonagh creates a grimly generous work, then, with a bleakly Irish ending. It reaches a logical conclusion like a short story that snaps shut with the most pleasingly logical ambiguity. The potent sadnesses and frustrations at the core aren’t exactly exorcised, but, like a local legend retold and embellished, they have revealed something real and true about the darkness lurking for the unfulfilled and the unsatisfied. That’s why it’s nice to have a friend. And nicer still to keep one.

What's Done Cannot Be Undone:THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH

Tragedy, in the most classic sense, is about consequences. It’s forged in the moment where characters are confronted, inescapably, with the cold, hard facts of their downfall and realize that they brought it on themselves. It is thus that Shakespeare’s Macbeth is perhaps his most tragic tale. Not the saddest, and not the most dramatic, necessarily, but perhaps the most tragic for it sits almost entirely in that moment of realization. Macbeth is quickly brought to commit treasonous murder—from inscrutable witches on the one hand prophesying his kingship, and from a scheming wife’s goading on the other—and the rest of the play watches as the weight of such a deed sends him to his doom. This deep engagement in what happens and what inevitably results from those happenings is something writer-director Joel Coen, adapting the play for his first film without his brother Ethan, understands. (Quite a brotherly compliment to replace Ethan with the Bard; they do share a love of language.) The Coens have made a career out of films, often some mixture of bleakly suspenseful and darkly funny, about characters confronted with the distance between what they think they can get, and what life’s circumstances have in store for them. I often think of an exchange from their 2009 effort A Serious Man, still perhaps the finest film in a body of work made up almost entirely out of excellent films. In this moment, a harried professor confronts a befuddling student, telling him: “Actions have consequences.” To which the young man replies: “Yes, sir. Often.” The professor’s immediate frustrated response: “No! Always! Actions always have consequences.” There’s no running from that.

So here’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, a stark and unsparing black and white feature shot in sharp digital closeups, filmed on spare stages cloaked in artifice and darkness, backgrounds that are bleary and sets cavernously empty. A boxy aspect ratio forms a proscenium around the performers, trapping the characters even as their proximity to the camera often causes a startling immediacy. You can see every pore in their face, every wrinkle, each subtle darting of the eye or twitching of the lip. The film is at once intimately engaged in its actors’ decisions and held back at a theatrical remove—a cold and distant picture that’s nonetheless inscrutably, uncomfortably near. Coen’s vision of this story, made vivid by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel and production designer Stefan Dechant, is one that’s part the high-contrast lighting of a film noir—a look that turns Lady Macbeth into a regal femme fatale—and the woozy constructed angles in crooked stairways and enormous windows of German expressionism—down to its extension of anxieties about dreams and realities. Coen at every turn emphasizes the moral confusion inside the characters by highlighting the foggy displacement around them. The opening shot looks like it is staring up into milky sky, a bird circling, until the fog starts thinning and we see it’s a vast expanse of pale dirt and puddle where crouches our otherworldly portents ready to unfold a grim tale in which its characters are cogs. In this warped world of oppressive contrast and artifice, the potential majesty of the throne is all implication—down to the landscapes terminating in blankness the color of a scrim, through which the castle can be only just barely glimpsed, a flicker in the distance like Kane’s Xanadu. You just know that’ll be unsatisfying for anyone who wants to rule there.

And that’s how Denzel Washington approaches the lead role, as a man who, perhaps unconsciously, already senses that achieving a royal status won’t solve the deep dissatisfactions in his soul. Washington takes his considerable charisma—he easily commands attention like few of his or any generation—and twists it inward in hesitation and guilt. His head hangs heavy even before the crown, like his mind really is plagued with scorpions, leading him to question his choices before, after, and as he makes them. He becomes a reluctant conduit for his own malevolence, and as such is almost going through the motions as a spectator. His soliloquies are hushed, tortured. His later outbursts of madness have none of the live-wire aggrandizement you might expect. Although he holds considerable power in the lives of the other characters, he always carries himself like a pawn. It’s an embodiment of what Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford, identifies as a central question of the text: “Is [Macbeth] in control of his own actions…or is he merely working out a part that has been written—by witches’ prophecies, by historical chronicle, by Shakespeare himself?” Washington’s approach wrings pathos from this uncertainty as he frets his hour upon the stage, worried that his life, in the end, will signify nothing. Coen’s film never once roots for his victory; it sees too well how this insecurity leads to his brutality. And Macbeth’s uncomfortable wracked nerves and slippery senses in this telling makes the characters plotting his downfall seem like an act of planning to put him out of his misery.

The movie constantly feels the crushing weight of inevitability. Other characters exist either in direct dialogue with Macbeth, or lurk outside of his notice, each playing their preordained part in the tale. There’s his wife (Francis McDormand), a brittle shiv of ambition whose inability to handle hiding their dark deeds marks the couple’s conjoined unraveling. There are assorted men of more and less power in the kingdom (Corey Hawkins, Brendan Gleeson, Harry Melling, Ralph Ineson, and more) who go under the knife or jostle for power in ways violent, righteous, and self-involved. (Stephen Root’s careless drunken babbling is a fine counterpoint there.) And then there’s the innocent, victimized Lady Macduff (Moses Ingram) sees her home and family burned to the ground by the cruelty of men’s ambitions. All are brought into the nightmare logic of the filming and of the tragedy, positioned as fellow travelers in what fate has in store. Everything is trapped in that aim, as just another facet of the design. Loud on the soundtrack are the steady drips of falling water, or blood—thuds and knocks in a regular rhythm like Poe’s tell-tale heart, or the clock that one should ask not for whom it tolls. We hear fluttering birds and heavy footfalls against cavernous castle walls, every action a reaction. The three witches, all deviously inhabited in the contorted body and raspy voice of the same performer (Kathryn Hunter), remain scarily ambiguous, clearly otherworldly and possessed of dark powers through shifting specters. Are they predicting the future or controlling it? Everything they say comes to pass. Yet dark forces unleashed by greed, guilt, and despair have their own cruel, predictable logic. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. Tragically, one can find too late the consequences of actions are all one’s left in the end. They can signify everything.

History of Violence: ASSASSIN'S CREED

The director, cinematographer, and stars of last year’s effectively muddy and bloody production of Macbeth have reunited for another movie about fate, ambition, and violence. Unfortunately, and confusingly, the movie is Assassin’s Creed, a murky, inscrutable video game adaptation that goes heavy on the action and portent but light on sense. How they ended up here, other than an eagerness to collect a paycheck, must have something to do with the material’s stupid clever conceit. A modern-day criminal is hooked up to a sci-fi contraption and sent to eavesdrop in the brain and senses of a violent ancestor living 500 years ago. (It’s a Quantum Leap with less responsibility.) There’s a nugget of a fascinating concept about historical inevitability and genetic determinism in this idea, but it is developed in a scattershot way, draining suspense and intrigue the more it tries to complicate matters. At first glance it may look and sound more important than the usual attempts to make action movies out of video games, but the longer it goes the worse it grows – tin-eared, nonsensical, consequence-free.

But you can’t say director Justin Kurzel isn’t trying. He has cinematographer Adam Arkapaw whip up a textured and dusty look for the past and a gleaming antiseptic blue-grey sheen for the future. Into these dark (dim, really) frames goes Michael Fassbender, bringing far more neck-bulging Macbeth emotion than the writing requires. He plays a man on death row who gets injected with the executioner’s chemicals only to awake in a covert institute in Spain where a mysterious Marion Cotillard (a little less Lady Macbeth-y) hopes to use his DNA to extract the history of a centuries-old assassin (also Fassbender) and his mission to hunt down the apple Eve bit in Eden. Yes, you read that correctly. This movie began pleasingly silly in the way plenty pompous pulp pictures do: with a wall of text. This one is describing an ancient battle over supernatural relics fought between the Knights Templar and Assassin’s Creed. The following confounding opening sequences are preposterous and exciting, cutting ruthlessly between slashing violence in the past and glowing doohickeys in the near future, trying breathlessly to tie two timelines and Fassbenders together into one nutty narrative.

By the time the swirling screenplay (by one writer who has adapted Shakespeare and two who adapted Vernoica Roth, if that indicates what’s going on here) settles into its main groove, the full incomprehensibility comes to the fore. We watch as our modern man gets attached to a giant apparatus that allows him to fully experience the sensations of his ancestor’s battles. Yet he can’t change the past. He’s merely an observer. And the company bankrolling Cotillard – and which also employs other great thespians Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling, Brendan Gleeson, and Michael K. Williams, all asked to speak in hushed monotone – simply wants him to see where the elaborate historical action sequences – galloping horses, jabbing swords, and medieval parkour – take the apple. Why they can’t take him directly to when the apple is dropped off somewhere is beyond me. And what will this apple do once found? Nothing less than give them control of Free Will, though what that looks like or accomplishes is left awfully fuzzy. But if you’re already accepting a technobabble process by which DNA can be decoded into the ultimate VR experience, what are one or two more disbeliefs to suspend?

We’re watching two timelines: one in which unknowable future people stare at monitors, and one in which preordained action plays out without suspense because A.) we know they get the apple, and B.) our protagonist’s only involvement is paying attention to it. As a result, my attention dipped dramatically once I got used to the silliness and saw the stasis of it all. Sure, it looks striking and Kurzel has a tremendous amount of acting talent playing along with the inherently goofy story done up in total straight-faced seriousness. It has the thunderous sound design and huge CGI budget of a big studio production, and the constant drumbeat of flashy spectacle and weightless violence required of its genre. But every second that goes by means less and less as the groaning sturm und drang adds up to hollow, pointless confusion. The pseudo-mystical medieval swashbuckler hidden under layers of contrived convolutions would be a lot more fun if it wasn’t tied to such a ponderous drag about Fate and Conspiracy and Revenge. By the end, with the action finally mattering as it (mild spoiler, if you care) erupts in the other timeline, as the Assassin bloodline has its revenge on the techno-Templar, I found myself wondering why they hadn’t done that an hour earlier and saved us all the trouble of sitting through the hectic nothing. No movie this stupid can afford to be so dull.

Whale of a Tale: IN THE HEART OF THE SEA

Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea tells of a whaling ship sunk by an enormous whale, this story nestled inside a framing device in which Herman Melville, many years later, interviews the last surviving crewman as research for writing Moby-Dick. This structure gives the movie a gloss of both history and literature, purporting to tell the real story that inspired a Great American Novel, while engaging with some of the same imagery and texture of the work itself. It’s a neat trick. The movie is slow and steady, lurching out to sea with the Essex and her crew of whalers, then watches patiently as rocky waves and clever whales go from a position of being conquered to the engines of the men’s ruin. It’s a sturdy maritime movie, of rudders and rigging, anchors and fish, hardtack and ambergris. The scenes of Melville earnestly listening to the old seaman’s tale are a bit obvious and clumsy, but the core of the picture is an admirably stripped-down survival story, vividly recreated, handsomely staged with convincing effects.

The screenplay by Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond), based on a book by historian Nathaniel Philbrick, introduces simple characters. The proud first mate (Chris Hemsworth), resentful after being passed over for a promotion, is driven to do what’s best for the ship. The captain (Benjamin Walker) is the son of the boat’s patron, and therefore worried about proving his toughness on this, his first whaling expedition. Meanwhile, the ship has a naïve newbie (Tom Holland), who has a lot to learn, and is therefore our guide into the blood and muck of harpooning a whale, butchering it on deck, and scooping out all the valuable goo inside it. (He’ll grow up to be Brendan Gleeson, reluctantly telling the story to Ben Whishaw’s Melville.) The rest of the crewmen blur together behind their tough beards and mumbling accents, a mostly undifferentiated ensemble to take orders, fill the frame, and get in harm’s way when the danger surfaces.

It’s not so much a narrative of character and incident as it is interested in details of sailing and whaling, in the sensations of life at sea, and in the specifics of the survivors’ endurance. Howard is always great with directing reenactments, from the space shuttle mechanics of Apollo 13, his best film, to the visceral car races of Rush and impressive fires of Backdraft. With his latest film, he has cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire) shooting from interesting vantage points, with a seasick woozy feeling to the cameras’ movements. Perhaps they were inspired by Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab’s experimental fishing documentary Leviathan, because they make liberal use of canted or otherwise unusual angles to show off details of labor at sea. A repeated shot will hold extreme close-ups of a rope or knife, an oar or bucket, the man manipulating any given tool in the extreme background as we focus on the work being done. In less stylized moments, dialogue scenes, the camera bobs and sways, rocking with the waves. It wouldn’t surprise me if people seeing this in IMAX get seasick.

There’s a certain element of spectacle in this film that’s big, satisfying, and striking. I’m thinking of a side shot of a rowboat, the camera just underneath the water, pulling downwards as a whale’s tail slaps, shattering the boat and plunging silhouetted figures into the depths. Elsewhere, wide-angle shots show tiny boats against vast expanses of sun-dappled water. And one late moment finds blurry fish-eyed angles on sea gulls chattering above, while a sun-dried groggy man (so starved he looks scarily skeletal) spies land. Howard directs with an interesting eye, perhaps the most visually experimental he’s ever been. You never know who’ll surprise you, I suppose. But where In the Heart of the Sea, which is otherwise often curiously unengaging, most resonates is in connections it draws between images that catch one by surprise and man’s hopelessness in the face of nature.

No wonder the characters are thinly drawn, and their journey simple. It’s not about individuals who are in conflict against the storm of unpredictable weather and wildlife. It’s more elemental, about a Herzog-ian conflict between the inherent dangers of the wild, and the struggle for men to make meaning out of it. The climax is not a moment of terror or violence, but a moment of grace, a man and a whale making eye contact, and finding some silent understanding. (From a whale’s perspective, Moby-Dick must be not only metaphor, but also a superhero.) The film is wrapped in a conclusion that tidies up the plot in comforting middlebrow ways on the surface, but underneath lingers the pain and struggle of the men’s survival, and the violence that we do to the creatures that share our planet. It’s a cycle: the power of storytelling to communicate the darkness we’re capable of committing to live to tell the tale.

Instant Replay: EDGE OF TOMORROW

Edge of Tomorrow is an action movie with an irresistible sci-fi hook. It’s the near future and humans are fighting a war against aggressive alien invaders. The creatures are fast, brutal, and seemingly unstoppable. Europe has fallen, occupied by the spindly, insidious beasties. The forces of Earth are mobilizing for a last-ditch effort to beat back the extraterrestrial beings before it’s too late. This is all laid out for us in one of those rapid-fire news footage montages that feature real anchors delivering this fictional news with grave sincerity. One of the army’s top public relations men (Tom Cruise) is asked to chronicle the impending attack. When he’s told it’s not a request, but an order, he tires to run. He’s branded a coward and a deserter. His punishment: a spot on the front lines. It’s there that he experiences first hand the carnage of the conflict. He’s killed in action and is surprised to wake up the day before. He’s caught in a time loop.

The rest of the movie features Cruise’s fearful, inexperienced soldier gaining strength and smarts by reliving the battle over and over and over. He repeats the day, getting a better grasp on the situational tactics and big picture with each replay. He’s like a gamer getting better and better each time through a level. The invasion is a chaotic sci-fi version of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Humans wear mechanized battle suits as they land on the beach, firing off into the distance at an unseen enemy as they trudge forward. The aliens burrow under the sand, then burst forward grasping, blasting, chomping. They are biomechanical, multi-tentacle beasts that look truly otherworldly, incomprehensibly strange and self-evidently dangerous. It seems mankind’s only chance is the trial-and-error suddenly available to this one man. Again and again he dies only to be born again, ready to fight the same fight once more, but this time with a slightly better idea of what he’s in for.

Cruise is a perfect actor for this kind of role. He not only has the sympathetic hard-charging action hero role down to a science, he makes it look new each time. As a movie star who has lived through action movie carnage that’d kill a real person dozens of times over throughout his career, it’s a shock to see him die, let alone in a context that’s quickly edited for an almost comic effect at times. At one point, there’s a training montage of sorts in which he’s killed with every edit. He’s shot, stabbed, exploded, run over, squashed, chopped, and otherwise destroyed, but still he bounces up again, waking on the day before. Here his professionalism and determination grow steely through a sense of discovery that’s fun and tense. A lesser actor might let the whole project grow repetitive or wearing, but Cruise charges forward, all energy and willpower.

He meets one person who believes him, a tough soldier (Emily Blunt) who once got caught in a time loop herself a few battles back. She immediately recognizes the symptoms in him and agrees to help him. Too bad he has to reintroduce himself every day after his every death. He gets her up to speed and they set out to plan their attack like two kids who’ve lost each time through a multiplayer level and are sure this is the time they have enough information to win. They look at their blueprints and diagrams like it’s a strategy guide.

The screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth, from the novel All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, constantly resets. Each repetition brings with it a new understanding of what needs to be done, or at least a reframing of what approaches won’t work. It’s cleverly plotted, if thinly developed. There’s not a lot to it, but what’s there is competently told. It’s all forward momentum, with the reason for the time loop tied inextricably to the way to win the war. It’s tightly wound and briskly told, no time spent on treacly backstory for our main duo, defining side-characters (played by good character actors like Brendan Gleeson and Bill Paxton) beyond their mere presences, or providing humanizing families back home. It’s lean and straight to the point.

Director Doug Liman, who, with the likes of The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, is no stranger to staging fun action scenes, gets to riff on one setpiece in a variety of ways. He moves through the hectic, gray, and muddy alien D-Day sequence multiple times from an assortment of angles. Cinematographer Dion Beebe finds fluid and exciting images that are cut together by editor James Herbert in a propulsive pace. It’s not a great action scene – it’s indistinct and often incomprehensible in its fog of war – but the variations develop smartly. I didn't feel it in my gut, but my head enjoyed the ride.

We get a little farther with some repetitions, and as the movie progresses we jump into the action at later and later points. We know Cruise and Blunt can fight their way so far. They’ve done it hundreds of times. No need to repeat every beat of the action when we can skip to right where they left off. The action is digitally enhanced rattling and battling with characters able to leap and shoot, running and gunning. Aliens flip and scuttle about, popping up and spinning around in a dance of death with the humans who slowly learn to anticipate their moves.

The movie makes smart use of its time travel mechanics. Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, Cruise takes advantage of his ability to predict behaviors simply because he’s quite literally been there, done that. There’s some wit in his knowledge of a multitude of possible events for any given scenario. At one point late in the movie, Blunt says, “What now?” Cruise responds, “I don’t know. We’ve never made it this far before.” Like most time travel movies, push a little and it doesn’t quite add up. But Edge of Tomorrow moves so unrelentingly quickly, features a pair of solid star performances, and features a plot-heavy script a tad smarter than you’d think. It’s a fine popcorn entertainment.

A Pirate's Life for Them: THE PIRATES! BAND OF MISFITS

There’s something so charmingly handmade about the stop-motion animation of Aardman, the British studio of Peter Lord and Nick Park, who have made the Wallace and Gromit films and Chicken Run. Knowing that every moment, down to the smallest detail, involved a painstaking process of moving the characters and props incrementally a frame at a time means that not a single sight gag or bit of background tomfoolery went without careful planning. These are dense movies with visual jokes layered and lovingly presented and yet their stories are so breezily charming in the telling it hardly feels like work. Repeat viewings reveal an even greater appreciation for the high level of consistent craftsmanship. It’s mighty hard work to feel this slight and effortless.

Perhaps that’s why Aardman’s forays into CGI have been a mixed bag. In Flushed Away (fine) and Arthur Christmas (a wee bit less than fine), some of the comedic appeal is still present in the writing. But for some reason seeing the same designs – round eyes, doughy faces, toothy grins – and detail in a shinier computerized package takes the viewing experience a step away from the handmade qualities that is clearly an integral part of the Aardman experience. It’s hard work to make a CGI movie, to be sure, but I never stop marveling at the level of dedication and planning it takes to pull off even the littlest touch with stop-motion.

And so I was predisposed to like the company’s return to that form of animation in a feature length way. Luckily, The Pirates! Band of Misfits rewarded my hopeful predisposition with a film that’s so silly it’d be hard not to get caught up in it all. It’s been adapted by Gideon Defoe from his book The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, a much better title. (In fact, it’s been released under that title in the UK.) The story follows a group of pirates in the late 1800s desperate to win the Pirate of the Year award for their captain Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) and prove themselves worthy scoundrels.

Pirate Captain has lost the award twenty years in a row, so he figures he is overdue. His crew, with the voices of Martin Freeman, Lenny Henry, Anton Yelchin, Ashley Jensen, Brendan Gleeson, and Al Roker (?), is a motley collection of peg legs, patches, a suspiciously curvaceous pirate, and one really fat parrot. They may not accomplish much in the way of looting and plundering, but they care about each other, so that’s nice. Besides, they seem much more interested in having fun waterskiing, putting on disguises and eating ham, though not all at the same time.

On their way to find “lots of sparkling booty,” they end up running into Charles Darwin (David Tennant), hence the original scientist-referencing title. Darwin and his trained monkey butler (a “man-panzee”) end up getting the pirates into a mess of trouble involving a maniacal Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) and the Royal Academy of Science, with special cameos from Jane Austen and the Elephant Man. From that alone, you can tell this is a movie refreshingly out of step with contemporary family film trends. It’s not a hipper than thou kids’ flick with contemporary pop culture references and grating lowest-common-denominator gags a la the Chipmunks or Smurfs updates or the worst of Dreamworks (or, even worse, sub-Dreamworks) Animation. It’s a movie that is content to reference late 1800s culture in all kinds of ways both subtle and obvious.

It’s a film of sophistication and class in that way, that rewards intelligence and curiosity, which makes it all the more giggly to descend into droll, good-natured silliness right along with these sweet, lovable rapscallions. These goofy pirates make this an animated period piece that’s an unabashed cartoon willing to rustle up historical context in which to spin out crazy slapstick, unexpected non sequiters, a handful of tossed off anachronisms and occasional meta winks in a beautifully straight-faced style. The whole story is a funny mix between a small (very small) amount of real history and hysterical silly fictions. Director Peter Lord and the whole Aardman crew go wild with the hilarious detail. I liked how Darwin’s taxidermy creatures all have terrified expressions on their dead faces and Queen Victoria’s secret-throne room floor is covered with trapdoors. The walls of all the little sets are plastered with small visual jokes that zing by so fast I know I didn’t catch them all.

Narratively speaking, the film is a tad bumpy. It takes quite a while for the plot proper to kick in and, because the characters are purposefully thin archetypes, it’s hard to get all that invested in their emotional arcs, such as they are. But it’s all so winningly detailed in dialogue that zigs and zags and visually, especially in action sequences with oodles of moving parts. And it’s such a well-played goof that’s it’s hard to mind so much that it’s ever so slightly uneven and ultimately a bit less satisfying than the best that Aardman has been. It’s the kind of movie where an island is known as Blood Island because “it’s the exact shape of some blood,” a pirate wonders if pigs are fruit, and Pirate Captain won’t sail a certain route because it would take them right through the spot where the map’s decorative sea monster resides. It’s the kind of movie where London’s scientists pick the Discovery of the Year with an applause meter, one of the attendees of a secret gathering of heads-of-state is Uncle Sam, and a monkey butler communicates through a seemingly endless number of flash cards. The whole film has a likable feeling of sharp, exaggerated silliness of a most lovingly handcrafted kind.

Burning Down the House: SAFE HOUSE

Safe House is a generic studio thriller on a preordained course to exactly where you think it’s going. That it managed to hold my attention for as long as it did is some small miracle. It’s a trust-no-one spy movie shot in quick cut chaos style with the kind of grainy, high-contrast look that’s become the stylistic shorthand for post-9/11 thrillers. There are few surprises to be found within but director Daniel Espinosa is smart to lean on his overqualified cast of character actors to carry out the clichéd plotting in David Guggenheim’s script and to allow Denzel Washington to use his considerable charisma to anchor it all. It’s a wholly forgettable experience, but at least it managed to hold my attention for most of the way through until it just fizzles out about two-thirds of the way in.

The film starts with rookie CIA officer Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) house-sitting a secure location in South Africa. It has seen nothing of interest, indeed not a single person, in the twelve months he’s been stationed there. When rouge agent Tobin Frost (Washington) is brought in for questioning, the excitement comes in greater quantities than the rookie could have ever expected. A small group of heavily armed, villainous men shoot their way in and almost catch Frost. But Frost talks the rookie into fleeing. The captive seems awfully calm about all this, even when Weston asks him to get into the trunk of the car. The younger man is under the impression that he is taking a dangerous captive to his superiors. The rouge master spy sure seems to be getting his way, though.

On the run from these unknown attackers and trying to coordinate with the CIA, Weston and Frost have an antagonistic partnership in which only one man really seems in control, even when he’s unarmed and handcuffed. Washington exudes a twinkling confidence and a gravity of intention that makes the early parts of the film a mostly competent diversion. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but it proves that, done well enough, the old tropes can be used to fine effect now and then. Reynolds mostly stands by and lets Washington dominate each and every scene, but he manages to hold his own. After unmitigated disasters of starring roles in the likes of Green Lantern and The Change-Up, it’s nice to see Reynolds sink back into an ensemble for a film that’s just barely north of mediocre.

The movie’s about men pointing guns, cars going fast, and intense phone calls in shadowy Langley conference rooms. Back at CIA headquarters we have the prickly Brendan Gleeson, the soulful Vera Farmiga, and the grizzled Sam Shepard talking strategy and ordering underlings around while they contemplate how to put an end to this situation. It goes without saying that they aren’t all on the same page and, in a page right out of the Bourne playbook, there’s a sense that they might not all be playing for the same team or with the same rules. If you’d guess that there’s going to be some ulterior motives to be revealed towards the climax, I’d say you must have seen a lot of the same thrillers that I have.

My early tolerance for the brisk, efficient action, including a decent car chase, turned into dismay over the lifeless confrontations that follow. By final few fight scenes I could rarely make heads or tails of the action. Instead of grooving with a visceral abstract chaos, the filmmakers just threw up blurriness and hoped the Foley artists did their job well enough. Weston, clutching a gun, edges around a corner. So does Frost. So do some bad guys. Where are they in relationship to each other? Who is about to encounter whom? Who knows?

As the double-crosses fall into place and the movie zigs and zags its way to where I figured it was headed all along, my interest fell off. When the true villain is revealed, I practically shrugged. When crucial, damaging information about the intelligence community may or may not be leaked, I found myself without a rooting interest one way or the other. As the plot tries to thicken, it just gets thinner and thinner. I found myself without a reason to care. I found myself wondering why the setting of the climax is given so many intermittently loud buzzing flies, which made me think of Emily Dickinson. I looked up the poem when I got home. “I heard a fly buzz when I died / The stillness round my form / Was like the stillness in the air / Between the heaves of storm...” When you’re sitting in a dark theater watching a dumb thriller of low ambition and find yourself thinking more about recalling a poem than the action on screen, you know the movie has lost you completely.

Traverse City Film Festival Dispatch #4

 Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (d. Rodman Flender)

In an age of pervasive access to celebrities everywhere from the so-called mainstream media to paparazzi and Twitter, the kind of access that Rodman Flender offers the audience of Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop is nothing short of astonishing. The film follows the comic and talk show host through the summer between his removal from NBC’s Tonight Show and his new gig hosting a late-night show on TBS. During that time he felt wronged, he felt furious, but rather than stewing in his own misery he fed his energy into a rapid 30-city tour of stand-up and freewheeling absurdity interrupted by toe-tapping musical numbers. Flender’s cameras follow Conan with remarkable access, capturing a hugely talented man and consummate entertainer who simply can’t stop cracking jokes, can’t stop moving, can’t stop interacting with everyone he sees, can’t stop being hard on himself. The energy of the film matches his. Flender keeps a close watch of his subject, making this behind-the-scenes slice of showbiz documentary turn into something of a tense and exhilarating entertainment. The tour is a precarious and ultimately successful comedic dance in which Conan risks pressing up against the limits of his stamina and talent. The film is a hilarious, musical experience that moves well past the pat platitudes of public persona and presents a celebrity as a richly complicated person.

The Guard (d. John Michael McDonagh)

            Brendan Gleeson is a small-town Irish law enforcement officer who seems to have a good heart under his rough exterior. He goofs around, runs his mouth off to his big-city superiors, and visits prostitutes and takes some drugs from time to time. But he also loves literature and music and often visits his terminally ill mother (Fionnula Flanagan). He finds his mostly comfortable, uncomplicated life, upended when an F.B.I. agent (Don Cheadle) tracks three dangerous international drug dealers (Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot, and Mark Strong) to this corner of the world. Perhaps these criminals have something to do with a recent baffling murder and a strange disappearance that has Gleeson stumped? He reluctantly works with this interloping American to sort through the tangle of mystery. It sounds like a standard buddy-cop movie and indeed there’s fun patter between Gleeson and Cheadle, but it’s also a nicely drawn character piece placed comfortably within a pitch-black comic thriller. The script is rich in character detail and the performers rise to the challenge, putting the details together to form deeply felt characterization. The film, with it’s quick shifts between splashes of violence and impolite jocularity, feels like it should be too clever for it’s own good, like a late-90’s Tarantino rip-off, but writer-director John Michael McDonagh, brother of In Bruges’s writer-director Martin McDonagh, has an agreeable confidence with his feature debut. He stylishly pulls together a great deal of familiar elements and combines them into a film that’s engaging, surprising, funny, exciting, and even a bit moving. It just plain works.

L’amour Fou (d. Pierre Thoretton)

After the passing of legendary French fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent, his longtime partner Pierre Bergé arranged an auction of their massive collection of art. L'amour fou follows the preparations for this event while Bergé reflects on their life together. Pierre Thoretton’s film casts a slow, subtle spell in passages that throw lovely, evocative slideshows backed with music or sound effects on the screen or entrancing sleepy sequences in which the camera merely wanders through the rooms of YSL’s homes. There's a sense of restraint to the film that holds the whole picture back. It has no interest in exploring Laurent's art or methods on anything other than a superficial level and, though his soft voice is quite lovely, Bergé only reveals a certain amount of their personal lives, leaving maddening and mysterious gaps from the exclusions. L'amour fou has beauty and patience but little desire to use these qualities to truly explore it's central subject of the way art accrues value and the value of artists. It's lovely, artful, and inert.

Rabies (d. Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado)

When the policemen in the world of Rabies, the first Israeli horror movie, eventually find the crime scenes, they will have a hard time tracing the reasons behind the carnage left behind by the end of the film. But as it unravels, it utilizes the tight nightmarish logic of screwball comedy to create a nightmare of deadly dangerous scenarios that collide and escalate in surprising and inevitable ways. At first, things look to be shaping up to be a fairly standard slasher picture. There are two missing persons, a brother and a sister, lost in the middle of nowhere in an exceedingly dangerous forest in which lurks a cold-blooded psychopath. A standard horror cast starts to assemble around them: a kind park ranger, a group of goofy teens, and two bumbling cops. What happens to these people in the woods becomes a bloody mess with predictable swiftness but what surprised me was the way first-time directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado pivot away from genre cliché and find that there's some surprise left in playing around with familiar horror conventions. This is a film that succeeds on its own wry nihilistic terms in which every character can be infected with the deep, dark potential for violence that lurks within everyone and every situation.

Troll Hunter (d. André Øvredal)

            Three Norwegian film students – an interviewer (Glenn Erland Tosterud), a cameraman (Tomas Alf Larsen), and a sound technician (Johanna Morck) – head off into the wilderness to track a half-glimpsed man accused of poaching bears. When they catch up to him they’re surprised not to find a rogue criminal hunter but merely a bored government functionary who is tired of his long-held position as Troll Hunter. It turns out that Norway has a population of trolls that are hidden from the populace by nothing more than a few bureaucrats. It’s a secret that has yet to be revealed simply because no one seems to care about asking the right questions. This found-footage monster movie is a straight-faced delight, calmly, sneakily hilarious, that doesn’t have scares so much as surprises. There are plenty of scenes of hunting that feel like padding and the structure – the group repeatedly hunts down a new troll species and must find a way to escape danger – feels at first glance too predictable. But just when I thought I had a handle on what the film is up to, it wriggles away and ups the ante. As the titular hunter, Otto Jespersen delivers a masterfully understated comedic performance. As for the giant trolls themselves, they’re cleverly straddled between cartoonish and menacing with exaggerated schnozzes and befuddled countenances paired with creepy booming sniffs and impressive pounding footsteps. That writer-director André Øvredal positions the world of the film between matter-of-fact mockumentary satire and cleverly detailed monster lore parts invented and parts folk-tale references (one troll is found under a bridge, naturally) is what makes this a particularly inspired and comic thriller.

Zoned Out: GREEN ZONE

For the second week in a row I found myself watching a highly-anticipated big-budget film from a director I quite like and, also for the second week in a row, I found myself enjoying the movie in theory, and in parts, but never as a whole experience. The films couldn't be more different, but I had more or less the same experience with Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone that I did with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. In each case, after the film ended I kept turning it over and over in my head. All the pieces were there for a good movie and, indeed, I found myself entertained from time to time, and yet I still left the theater with the dull ache of disappointment and ambivalence.

Maybe it’s because Green Zone wants to have its cake and eat it too. It’s an Iraq War movie based on real events immediately following the invasion in 2003, documented in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's great book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, yet it’s perched on the border between docudrama and actioner. In theory, it’s the perfect mix between two of Greengrass’s best films to date – the slam-bang wall-to-wall thrills of The Bourne Ultimatum and the gritty fly-on-the-wall history of United 93 – brought together with the commonality of the frenzied intensified continuity of his shaky-cam style. And yet it turns out that it’s just as unhelpful to burden a docudrama with pumped-up action beats as it is to make a straightforward action flick barrel through large swaths of exposition and context. It’s a volatile mix.

The film centers on a tough and loyal soldier played by Matt Damon. He’s a smart, perceptive, quick-thinking man of action, but he asks more questions than would make his superiors comfortable, questions like “Why is the intelligence wrong?” and “Where are the WMDs?” He’s obviously a composite character, a necessary compression of the facts in order for the film to be a traditional action-thriller with one central hero we can track throughout. This would be more agreeable if Damon had more of a character to play. The characterization is thin, very thin. He’s a type, not a person. The same goes for the uniformly impressive supporting cast from Brendan Gleeson as a crusty, infallible CIA agent, to Amy Ryan as a duped reporter whose articles helped in the lead up to war, to Greg Kinnear as a slimy stooge of the Bush administration, to Igal Naor as an Iraqi general. No matter how good these actors are at fleshing in small bits of character with very little help from Brian Helgevand’s screenplay, and they are fairly good, it still plays thinly on screen.

But you’d be surprised (or maybe not) how far a film can get on pure outrage alone. The film taps into a deep vein of dissatisfaction and discouragement about this current conflict. It feels a little too late for such a powerful statement though, and cutting corners on the facts does the heavy-handed message no favors even if you, like me, agree with the sentiment of what’s being presented. What would have felt radical a few years ago now feels much more commonly accepted. Just three years ago, the excellent documentary No End in Sight did a great job of swiftly, clearly, methodically, and powerfully laying out the long string of mistakes and the culture of single-minded denial that followed the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq, but in that case there was time to focus on that alone. Green Zone, on the other hand, needs to explain a great deal of history and context just to use it as a backdrop for chases, shootouts, and simmering tensions. It can be done, but not here. The film’s not quite up to that task.

Too often, the film plays like what a nightmare Hollywood version of The Hurt Locker would have been, and yet that film was great precisely because it reflected politics, presenting it through personal experiences of its characters and the understandings of the audience. Here, the politics are the experience, and the film can’t figure out the right balance of character and context. Most unfortunately, its message ends up seeming cheapened and convenient, even as the film throws veracity to the wind for a pat, though undeniably thrilling, action-packed climax.

And yet, (this is the kind of film that inspires a lot of “and yet”s) the true story of the WMDs is to this day still so murky and unclear, and there are so many who are still buying what the Bush administration sold on that topic, and no one real villain or sense of closure has yet to arise, the movie’s murky outrage and hazy factuality, and ultimately unsatisfying effect, can be seen as an odd commitment to the way this conflict did, and continues to, play out. Even though I can intellectualize that, it still does nothing to ease my dissatisfaction. For all its impressively mounted action, for all of its excellent actors, for all of its political tension, for all of its politics that I agree with, I still left the theater feeling disappointed.

Franchise Flashback: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

The third installment of the Harry Potter series was the first to really stick. The fourth, Goblet of Fire, is the first to pack a wallop. This time under the direction of British director Mike Newell, the film is, like the others, perfect in craftsmanship but is the first in possession of a well-crafted feeling of momentum. It’s all climax, sustained for two-and-a-half hours, without ever feeling its length, constantly besting itself creating faster, scarier, and more exciting moments throughout enough set pieces to sustain a half-dozen lesser films.

Benefiting from the structure Rowling used in her book – there’s a tournament going on and Harry is a participant – the movie tears from one moment to the next, always building, and never stalling. After a scene of true horror – with an elderly man investigating what should be an empty house –we start the film proper at the Quidditch World Cup, a sequence of sensational effects and gut-twisting heights. From there we have an introduction of visiting schools to Hogwarts, a suspenseful, yet whimsical, introduction to the Goblet of Fire, and then the tournament is about to begin. From there we have dragons and mer-people and ghosts and golden eggs and mazes and murders. The tension is heightened with each new feat of effects and emotion, so that by the time we get to a wailing-strings graveyard resurrection the movie is almost unbearable suspenseful. That this sequence is followed up by an evocative punch of paternal pain (it lingers long after the movie ends), a razor-sharp reveal of a double-agent, and a somber announcement shows that the movie isn’t stopping for anything.

The reason this relentless entertainment never gets numbing is the variety. Sure, we have sensational action sequences and moments straight out of a genuine horror movie, but sprinkled in amongst these are touching, sweetly human, character moments. These culminate in the middle of the film at a school ball which may be my favorite sequence of all the films so far. The music swells, the characters arrive, and the dance begins. It’s a sensational feat of staging, design and costuming, sure, but it also allows the teenaged characters to be just that, in a sumptuous yet relatable setting. The movies are at their best when they are mere magical twists on the most muggle of feelings, like the first film’s mirror scene of longing, the classroom moments, the clashes with odd teachers and boisterous bullies, hurt feelings, wayward children and young love.

But none of it, none of it, would work if it weren’t for the amazing cast that – young and old alike – grows in size and talent with each new installment. The kids, older again, and more talented too, improve once more, growing into fine young actors with infrequent clunky line readings and confident screen presences. Daniel Radcliffe has become comfortable with his relatable reluctant hero while Emma Watson and Rupert Grint have developed excellent comedic timing and wonderfully open faces that reveal turbulent emotions and thoughtful eyes. The adult cast’s comfortability with their roles grows stronger as well with Alan Rickman, with his jet-black hair and slow snapping of lines, a continuing standout.

New this time is Brendan Gleeson, in a gleefully ominous role, and Miranda Richardson, a hoot as the worst kind of gossiping reporter. Also new is a slinky, serpentine Ralph Fiennes as the evil Voldemort himself, in the trappings of what is surely one of the most creepily designed movie villains of all time, right up there with Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader. He’s truly terrifying.

Mike Newell directs with a sumptuous eye for color and detail. This is a pure visual delight that strikes the perfect balance between the storybook tableaus of Columbus and the dense and busy camerawork of Cuarón. The colors are vivid with eye-popping earth tones and gorgeously magical, ethereal even, bright blues. The tone is fluid, skipping effortlessly from creeping horror, pounding thrills, melodrama, laughs, tears and kisses and back again. Hogwarts feels the most like a real school this time with the emotions, playfulness, and drama of real high school students.

This is the most involving, the most fulfilling as a motion picture. It moves so fast, while still retaining both clarity and breathing room, I could have watched for much longer. It’s also the most expansive, the most dynamic, and the most dangerously menacing of the first four films. This is the Potter films at their best, successfully balancing while riding the lines between child and adult, fun and scary, tragic and tragicomic perfectly while also managing to capture Rowling’s tome’s tone.

Note: John Williams sits this installment out; that year alone he’d already scored Star Wars: Episode III, Memoirs of a Geisha, Munich, and War of the Worlds. He’s greatly missed, even though his replacement, Patrick Doyle, uses a few of Williams’ themes and creates some nice musical moments of his own.