Apocaloptimists: PROJECT HAIL MARY and THE AI DOC

Like The Martian, screenwriter Drew Goddard’s previous adaptation of an Andy Weir sci-fi novel, Project Hail Mary is a cheerful problem-solver of a space adventure. That earlier film was a gear-headed Ridley Scott picture with astronaut Matt Damon stuck on Mars. It cut between the stranded explorer and the scientists back home on parallel tracks thinking their way through complications to get him home. This newest film is also a stranded-astronaut story problem. It finds a science teacher (Ryan Gosling) waking up years from Earth, alone in a capsule as he regains his memories and finishes his mission. He’s supposed to figure out a way to make the sun immune to a space bacteria that’s causing it to burn out. He’ll do so by scooping up samples from a distant star. The movie’s parallel tracks are past and present. In the past, Gosling’s working with a team of researchers desperate to save the planet. In the present, he’s talking to himself—mostly. The halves joined by a seriousness of purpose and a cheerful optimism, a sense that if the world were to end tomorrow, the government would ask smart people to stop it today. Isn’t it pretty to think so? 

Gosling makes a fine star for such a feat, charming and self-deprecating and flustered, but ready to lock in and put his intelligence to work of all of us. He’s hugely likable here, and has great chemistry with his scene partners, both Earthbound (Sandra Hüller) and ones who are more imaginatively deployed later to help puppet scenes to a surprisingly moving climax. The movie surrounds him with convincing special effects of the kind of pop-art realism you’d expect from a movie that’s part Interstellar. It has the hard sci-fi edge with a sentimental open heart. It comes from Lord and Miller, the filmmaking team behind the joke-a-minute Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie, and who last directed 22 Jump Street twelve years ago. They’ve returned to us with their sense of humor intact, but proportioned well here as leavening to the stakes that enhance the emotions and the spectacle instead of deflating them. It actually cares. How nice to find a huge crowd-pleaser that valorizes intelligence. It watches Gosling connecting with extraterrestrial awareness with a sense of awe at mankind’s ability to solve problems with hard work and mental energy. 

It’s a stark, and welcome, contrast to those who think we can build computers to replace us. Consider those who talk endlessly at us about Artificial Intelligence. (I cringe even to use the term, a deliberately nebulous buzzword meant to obscure all manner of tech company advertising and spin.) There are those who think an emergent super-intelligence is going to bring about mankind’s abrupt extinction any day now. There are those who think it’ll hasten a dawn of a global golden age where no one will work and all disease will be cured. Those in the middle seem to think it’ll just enslave us to super-wealthy authoritarians. (Plus ça change.) A new documentary from Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell wants to serve as a level-headed primer on these issues. Its feint toward definitiveness is in its direct title: The AI Doc. Its quirky subtitle Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a signal of its whimsy. The movie’s a standard-issue talking-head doc loaded up with little stop-motion animations, showy transitions, and squiggly hand-drawn titles. And it’s wrapped around the personal story of the impending birth of Roher’s first child. He narrates and appears as an on-screen interlocutor, driven to wonder about these issues because he’s worried about bringing a baby into this uncertain future. 

He’s suitably curious. But the movie is largely credulous. Mostly confined to researchers and speculators, with a late stop at a few CEOs who hype up their products and playact concern, the movie mostly takes for granted the huge stakes, no matter the extremes expressed. It doesn’t quite understand that the pro crowd and the cons alike are merely falling into a fictional framework (call it Terminator v. Star Trek) instead of actually addressing the reality of the situation. He briefly invites on some humanities professors to poke at the bubble—let’s think about the resources, and who benefits from setting the discourse frame at peak freak out about the future that makes it, good or ill, seem inevitably world-changing. But they get shuffled off after a few soundbites. The movie reaches one of those issue doc call-your-congressperson QR-code endings. Its ambivalence ends up making the case that AI is, like so many problems of our modern day, something most people want to regulate, but financial pressures means no one will. But, sure, call a congressman about it. See how far that gets you. 

Shooting Stars: THE GRAY MAN and BULLET TRAIN

Netflix’s latest big attempt at making a summer blockbuster is The Gray Man, for which they’ve recruited Anthony and Joe Russo, the directors of Captain Americas 2 and 3 and Avengers 3 and 4. Those were huge financial successes, so I can see why the streamer thought their directors would be a good choice to helm an action spectacle the company hopes can compete with the usual warm-weather multiplex fare. A problem, though, is that the Russo brothers are comedy directors, and you can tell in their leaning on light quipping attitudes and a reliance on medium shots and close-ups. They started in sitcoms and never quite shook it. The best moments in Avengers: Infinity War, far and away their most enjoyable Marvel effort, are all the characters-in-a-room stuff, and the way it builds to satisfying character entrances and exits that even leave room for the audience applause the way a filmed-in-front-of-a-studio-audience series would. Their sense of spectacle is entirely farmed out to effects people pinned in by the lack of decisions—a flattening and deadening of space and place, the better to slot in their swarms of indistinguishable enemies. That means it’s better when it’s outer space or Wakanda than when they just set generic power contests on a wide open parking lot or civic center.

That their newest feature has distinguishable characters in something like real-world places serves their talents well. It’s a Spy vs. Spy setup with Ryan Gosling defecting from a covert assassin job and subsequently hunted by an unhinged rival assassin, played by Chris Evans. The Russos know they’re dealing with two marquee Movie Stars, and shoot with all due reverence. The men are shot from flattering angles, in perfect dramatic lighting, and spring into action in fluidly faked, CG-assisted prowess. And each role plays to the actors’ strengths. Gosling gets his earnest smolder, his underdog confidence. He’s been able to dial that in one direction (Drive) or another (First Man) or another (La La Land) throughout his appealing lead roles. Here he’s every bit the capital-s Star. On the other hand, Evans gets a gum-chewing character turn, cranking his Captain America gee-whiz can-do attitude into a malevolent Team America villainy. There’s some actual crackle to their antagonism. Then their world is filled out with choice supporting turns for familiar faces filling familiar roles for this genre. There are potential Deep State allies (Billy Bob Thornton and Ana de Armas), shadowy suits (Jessica Henwick and Regé-Jean Page), a girl in danger (Julia Butters), and an elder statesman with important information (Alfre Woodard). They’re all talented enough to be a little bit memorable but otherwise just exactly what they need to be to keep the shootouts and chase sequences flowing.

It’s all of a piece—a little samey, totally artificial, everyone written at the same de rigueur canted angle toward seriousness. Which is to say that it’s a blockbuster whose relationship to the world is only other blockbusters. To the Russos, and their screenwriters and craftspeople, the high-stakes shoot-‘em-up globetrotting is all about the real world and real stakes only insofar as we can glimpse them through a mirrored simulacrum—pointing backwards and through the Bourne movies and Bond pictures and so on and so forth. Sure, there’s something pleasingly frictionless about an entirely phony chase in, around, and through a train running down tight turns on cobblestone European streets. Cars flip and spin, sparks fly, bullets careen, and the leads shimmy away from rampaging computer effects. (It’s a little bit clever some of the time, too, like when Gosling uses his reflection in passing windows to guide his aim into the train.) It’s a weightless charge of motion and faux-danger.

That’s the case with all of the action scenes here. They have the form and pace of excitement, but are of mere passably diverting interest. I didn’t exactly have a bad time watching it, though. Its cliched convolutions and obvious developments, acted out by pros who could do this in their sleep, is, as the kids might say, totally smooth-brained. It slips right off the old dome painlessly and without interrupting one with anything worth thought or reflection. That’s right in the Netflix mode these days, as their plummeting stock price has resulted in the board room making noise that they want to cut back on expensive auteurist art pieces (sorry to Baumbach, Scorsese, Coens, Campion, etc.) and instead focus on these time-passing mass-market baubles. As far as their efforts there go—think Red Notice or The Adam Project—this one’s at least thoroughly fine.

A little better than fine is Bullet Train. This one’s a glossy theatrical studio picture with Brad Pitt in the lead. Now there’s a Movie Star. He knows how to hold the frame’s attention without even seeming to try. (His oft-commented upon blend of character actor charm and matinee idol good looks is one of modern movies’ great constants.) Here he’s a reluctant gun for hire who won’t even take his gun with him now that he’s taken some time off to work on himself. Wearing a bucket hat and glasses, talking almost exclusively in therapy speak—“hurt people hurt people”—he has easy, shaggy charm while cutting an odd figure for an action movie. But then again the whole movie is full of such figures. Based on a pulpy Japanese novel, the movie puts Pitt’s mercenary on a speeding bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. The mission: get on board, take a briefcase full of ransom money, and get off at the next station. If you suspect it won’t be so easy, you’d be right.

On the train are hitmen and schemers in a variety of styles and quirks. The cast is loaded with familiar faces and voices—Brian Tyree Henry, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Joey King, Logan Lerman, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michael Shannon, Sandra Bullock, Bad Bunny, and a few fun cameos, too. Each is given a splashy title card announcing their name, a scattered assortment of quick-cut flashbacks, and one or two whimsical character details. (One is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine, for example.) I’ve seen this movie’s manic post-modern approach referred to as if it was in the late-90s and early-aughts trend of snarky post-Tarantino, post-Ritchie crime pictures. But I think we should remember that that was twenty to thirty years ago, and in this case counts as a throwback. I didn’t mind that too much. The movie’s eccentricities fly by as quickly as its speeding set.

The result is a Rube Goldberg machine of an action comedy. Every actor and prop introduced circles back around at least once for another payoff, some expected and some surprising. The straight line simplicity of the main plot, one MacGuffin and one Final Destination in perpetual motion, is interrupted by a jumble of obstacles in each train car, some recurring irritants and some a constant danger. Meanwhile the story curlicues with unexpected doubling-backs—sometimes cutaways within cutaways or long montages that build backstory for a sudden reversal or reveal. This results in some enjoyable scrambling, separating or delaying effects from causes or vice versa. It’s all quite clever and pleased with itself, and the movie bounces along with the music of comedy without quite the words to make it really sing. It’s a constant juggle of witty cutting and awful violence—a kind of cold karmic comeuppance for its largely disreputable and dangerous cast of characters.

Director David Leitch has made this jocular mood for bloody combat cleverness his stock-in-trade. After co-directing the dizzying choreography of John Wick, he’s given us the likes of Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, and Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw. He shoots action brightly and legibly and knows how to frame with and hold for impact. But those pictures all have a rather flippant bravado, charging hard at action while characters skip across the implications. They leave a high body count behind them while twisting out of spectacular slam-bang dangers. Any respect for human life is gone, the better to gawk at all the ways bones snap and vehicles crash. Bullet Train might be Leitch’s best post-Wick effort simply for giving in to that breezy carelessness entirely. It treats the smacks and thuds and stabs as staccato punctuation—literal punch lines—for sleazy characters ground under by twists of fate. Pitt floats above it all, desperately trying to talk it out, and inevitably pulled back into violence. That he survives any of his attackers' onslaughts is almost an accident. And all the while he keeps bemoaning his bad luck. I guess it really is all in how you look at it. As far as violent distractions go, this one at least starts at a fast pace and never lets up.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Love? BLADE RUNNER 2049

Ridley Scott’s proto-cyberpunk sci-fi noir Blade Runner is revived as a ponderous Villeneuve somber spectacle in Blade Runner 2049. Over thirty years after the original, which imagined a dystopian future L.A. with contours – smoggy rain; polyglot class stratifications; enormous looming digital neon advertising – setting the stage for many imitators, the new film digs into the implications of its world. Before, Harrison Ford played a cop tasked with hunting down rogue cybernetic beings called Replicants. Decades later, a new model Replicant played by Ryan Gosling is hunting down the last of the old models who are still hiding out under the radar, living lives of quiet desperation, their illegal problem programming allowing them just enough free will to shake off the yolk of their makers’ expectations. In the opening sequence Gosling flies his hovercar over a vast dried up terrain to a far-flung farm where a gentle giant of a Replicant (Dave Bautista) sighs in resignation, fighting back in futile self-preservation before the younger bot breaks him down and checks him off the wanted list. Sounds like pulp fun, but look and listen to the film’s atmosphere, director Denis Villeneuve using the suspense techniques honed on the likes of his Prisoners and Sicario to turn out slow, carefully considered images with grey-air-and-glowing-screen palates and a soft quiet unsettling as a pot boils in the background. These filmmakers mean to take a movie about robots, holograms, flying cars, and corrupted files very seriously indeed. 

After last year’s Arrival found Villeneuve working with a deep, powerful strain of emotional content – wrapping an egg-headed first-contact story around an effective contemplation of parenthood, memory, and grief – he takes a step back into ice cold dread. This late Blade Runner sequel is merely a speaker-rattling drone, a slow drip accumulation of dread and despair gorgeously lensed by the great Roger Deakins. He paints in greyscale gunmetal tones and harsh neon lights gracefully arcing across beautiful faces and austere jumbles of concrete-and-polymer industrial parks and towering brutalist architecture. This is a future world at once sparse and ornate, underpopulated and overstuffed. The place, brilliantly built out from the iconic look of Scott’s original, is tactile and disturbing in its all-absorbing qualities. The entrancing score – so often sounding like a window-rattling motorcycle engine roaring by outside, or like a pitch-distorted, extremely slowed down dial-up modem – and the beautifully photographed production design does the heavy lifting. Characters here are poses; worldbuilding is ominous terse monologue; emotion is as crisp and empty as watching an android kiss a hologram. We’re to be contemplating the chilly romanticism of digital beings, but it’s hard not to shake the feeling we’re watching ones and zeroes execute their complicated programs. That’s partly the point, but there’s a frustrating surface-level satisfaction to the movie’s long, languorous, cavernous contemplation of its eerie images. I loved a scene where a hologram slides over a human woman and syncs to her movements, an imperfect process of digital possession that creates ever-so-slightly overlapping images. But it looks cool more than it is actually intellectually stimulating.

The film runs nearly three hours, and its pleasures are absorbing but fleeting. Its appeal sits entirely in stoic characters wearing fabulous wardrobe – stiff high collars, starkly starched trench coats – and inhabiting handsomely striking sets – echoing rooms, windswept irradiated landscapes, a theater of holographic entertainers on the fritz, thunderous man-made waterfalls, junkyards exploding in sudden District-9-style bodily harm as sudden death rains from above. It’s the sort of movie interested in exploring the differences between mankind and artificial intelligence, probing the deep mysteries of what makes a soul and what it means to create life, but in which man and robot alike are equally placid and monotone in demeanor. The ace supporting cast – Robin Wright, Sylvia Hoeks, Ana de Armas, Mackenzie Davis, and even Jared Leto (who is fine in his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turn) – are directed to be effective elements of the art direction, moving and emoting so precisely and mechanistically it makes a mockery of any sense you could figure out who’s real and who’s created. They’re all ghosts in the machine. Villeneuve’s style of handsome foreboding is admirably sustained, putting the script’s grinding inevitability and tangled, deliberately-paced core who-am-I? mystery plotting through a lens of impeccable craftsmanship. I was never bored, but never involved, always stimulated but never fully invested. It’s a remarkable technical achievement, but a hollow emotional and intellectual exercise. It’s incredibly cool and totally cold.

Song and Dance, Man: LA LA LAND

I saw La La Land a few weeks ago and, though fun, the more I’ve thought about it the less I’ve thought of it. There’s much to admire about its shaggy fastidiousness bringing the movie musical to an aw-shucks shuffle and mumble aesthetic bursting with glitter at the margins. Writer-director Damien Chazelle glides the Steadicam with dancers great and small, dialing up the colors in the smooth cinematography to just shy of Technicolor vibrancy. The songs don’t exactly burst forth in memorable wit or hummable melody, but noodle around with a passive aggressive earworm tendency to quietly wrap a measure or two around the back of the brain. There’s something appealing about sitting in the theater watching it unspool, but little to stick with you beyond the feeling of having seen something largely pleasant, a mostly empty exercise in style and self-satisfaction. But that's not so bad, considering.

It begins with one of the most exuberant curtain raisers in recent memory, pure joy as a traffic jam erupts in dance, buoyant and colorful gestures totally swept up in moving to the beat. The movie ends with an even better sequence: one of the loveliest sustained passages in any movie I’ve seen lately. I held my breath as the film steps into a poignant, melancholy, graceful dream ballet about fleeting moments, about love and loss and the fantasy of what might have been. In between the film isn’t quite as enchanting and transporting, but it’s really trying, you know? Chazelle has traded in cachet gained from the gruff, buzzy, and percussive Oscar-winning drama Whiplash for the chance to make an original movie musical. We don’t get too many of those anymore, let alone evocations of a Jacques Demy style peppered with allusions to MGM’s Freed unit fare all nestled in a quipping romantic comedy (another genre that’s fallen fallow of late).

Like his earlier film it’s an exploration of artists pushing their talents to the limit, unsure whether their passion is enough to get them to the level of success necessary to make a living, let alone becoming a Great. But instead of that film’s dark central relationship – a jockeying for power between a domineering professor and an aggressively ambitious student – this film is a fuzzy and light romance, as charming as can be while still maintaining a simmering striving sadness underneath. This film’s central couple is a pair of dreamers trotting through a fantasy Los Angeles. She wants to be an actress like her studio-era idols. A huge Golden Age Hollywood poster covers one wall of her tiny bedroom in a cramped apartment shared with three other girls, a place to crash between auditions and barista shifts at the Warner Bros. lot. He wants to run a jazz club. In the meantime he’s obsessively hording artifacts from when jazz was king and piecing together savings from small time gigs playing background noise piano in restaurants or New Wave cover bands at shallow parties.

She is Emma Stone. He is Ryan Gosling. They turn up the movie star charm and crackling chemistry as they perform the expected rom-com moves, starting out prickly, jabbing at each other with glowing conversational daggers. They don’t like each other, each quick with an insult. But they dance so swimmingly in sync, a soft shuffle of steps, a sudden graceful motion, a swooping flourish. In true Astaire and Rogers fashion (in spirit, but definitely not in skill) feet tell the real story of feelings. We know they’re meant to be, and soon they’re giving it a go. Their only problem is being young in 2016, a time in which it’s awfully hard to make jazz pianist or glamorous star a career goal. (Not that it was ever easy to succeed in those professions, but it sure was a lot smoother when there was popular demand.) This makes La La Land, a self-consciously colorful and charmingly artificial romantic musical, a bittersweet tale of people who just weren’t made for these times. They bond over artistic passions – he explaining jazz, she taking a backlot tour – and fall in love, before the demands of selling-out start them on separate paths.

Chazelle makes use of his leads’ appealing banter and expressive moves, turning this into a slight two-hander. No time to flesh out others, it is a duet for young talent with enough experience to shoulder the demands of the roles and smooth-enough faces to play striving ingénues and ambitious self-starters. They are figures conjured for genre play, the types we’d expect to find in a movie like this, their movements and behavior dictated by the way a dress should ruffle, the way glitter should float on a puff of breeze, the way a hop-skip-slide should gleam under a lamppost at night. It’s all rather sweet, but narrow. Their pursuit of success (and each other) is the movie’s exclusive interest, crowding an ace supporting cast (fleeting glimpses of Rosemarie DeWitt, J.K Simmons, Finn Wittrock, and others) out of the chance to strut their stuff. And in the end, even their relationship is lopsided – far more interested in his jazz than her acting – and remains vague on their actual progress to career destinations.

The central question for the characters is whether or not they’ll be true to their artistic ambitions – he likes real jazz; she prefers serious roles – or give in to temptation. And maybe choosing one means losing the other, or each other. That their potential sell-out moves – a gig playing fun popular music with a John Legend type (played by the man himself); a role on a series described as Dangerous Minds meets The OC – sound at least as, if not more, fun than their dream art maybe muddies the movie’s point. Gorgeous widescreen colors stretch across the screen, and the film’s protagonists’ swooning, naïve worship of modes of artistic expression fallen from peak popularity (clinging to an ideal that keeps their prospects slim and dusty instead of embracing the actual mess of creating art) is mirrored in the fussy (and sometimes fusty) evocation of genre gone by. I was frustrated by all this inconsistency, but then there’s that final dreamy conclusion that practically lifted me out of my seat. And, hey, it was worth hanging in there after all. Any movie with two great scenes bookending a technically accomplished (if hollow) middle can’t be all bad.

On the Case: THE NICE GUYS

The Nice Guys is a good old-fashioned 70’s-style detective movie: loose, swaggering, hilarious, exciting, shaggy, and involving. A big crowd-pleaser of a period piece, it creates a convincing vintage stage on which to play out its antics, which happen to add up to one of the most compelling mystery plots in recent memory. Sharply directed and wittily written, think of it as the faster, dumber (in a good way), energetic pop flip side to Paul Thomas Anderson’s hazy Inherent Vice. It is impeccably mounted and high on 1977 Los Angeles detail. Pants are tight, morals are loose, wardrobes are bright, the oldies are current hits, cigarette smoke and polluted smog fills the air, and a low-level simmer of cynicism is everyone’s emotional baseline. It’s the perfect seedy environment for two low-level mismatched unlikely partners to stumble into a big conspiracy and try to sort it all out, and line their pockets, before the bad guys get worse.

The reluctant duo in a buddy action comedy is filmmaker Shane Black’s preferred dynamic, running through works he wrote (Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight) and directed (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3). But it has never been better expressed than here. One is a private eye hired to track down a missing girl. The other is an unlicensed freelance tough hired by said girl to stop those searching for her. Events go south and get shady, so the two decide to work together to unravel the whole nasty tangle in which they’ve found themselves. Someone (or several someones) else is after the girl, and she has her own suspicious reasons to remain missing. In typical pulpy mystery fashion, the men wander through a story full of clues and qualms provided by an array of eccentric and unseemly types played by an exquisitely memorable ensemble, while the center holds around the electric grumbling chemistry between our incompatible, but secretly super compatible, leads. It’s great fun.

Russell Crowe plays the tough guy. It is one of his finest performances, a lumbering physical presence with light and lithe comedic timing. He carries a Wallace Beery weight and gravitas, growling and tough, a heavy heavy, but soulful and wounded. He’s lonely and a loner, and a little sad about how alive brawling and tussling with bad men makes him feel. Even worse, he starts to feel a kinship with his unexpected partner. He’s Ryan Gosling as more a con man than a P.I., taking sweet little old ladies’ money for easy jobs. (One widow wants to know where her husband, “missing since the funeral,” is; Gosling glances at the urn on her mantle and solemnly promises to cash her check and find him.) He’s a squeaky, lean, scared, in-over-his-head scrambler, getting by with luck and happenstance. But he’s still sharp enough to piece together clues with the help of his precocious potty-mouthed 13-year-old daughter (Angourie Rice) who loves spending time with him, driving him around when he’s too buzzed to do it himself, which is often. He, too, is loath to admit that he’s found a new pal.

Together Crowe and Gosling, playing to and against type (a neat, compelling trick of star power), make a fine pairing – the straight-faced serious guy, and the flailing comic. They’re bickering and bumbling through a rough-and-tumble plot full of gumshoe incident and interestingly loopy interrogations often spilling over into pratfalls and slapstick stuntwork as malcontents, scumbags, and suspects cause trouble. There are gunfights and car chases, and plenty of instances of people falling out windows or rolling down hills. A vast scheme unravels in knots as a large cast (including Margaret Qualley, Kim Basinger, Keith David, Jack Kilmer, Lois Smith, Matt Bomer, and Yaya DaCosta among the recognizable faces) stringing along the various episodes from one clue to the next. Then, with shrewd timing, the story reaches surprising and satisfying roundabouts that spin the investigation off in fresh directions. To even suggest the shape it ultimately takes would be unfair to the film’s brilliantly structured sense of discovery. It eventually involves pornographers, eco-activists, experimental filmmakers, hitmen, Detroit auto execs, and the justice department, arriving at immensely satisfying smash-bang conclusions as every moving part clicks into pleasing place.

A deeply satisfying work of genre fiction, The Nice Guys is an engaging and confident trash beauty, with handsome nostalgia surfaces in slick frames provided by cinematographer Philippe Rousselot polishing a cavalcade of violence, nudity, swearing, and seamy underworld spelunking. All that is mixed in a screenplay flowing with wordy personality and hilarious physical beats, and story unfolding so cleverly that as its bighearted love for its characters’ connection sneaks in sideways it sweetens the suspense with genuine feeling. We want them to crack the case, but also become better people by learning to work with a new friend. It’s delightful even as it is brutal, a hard-charging lark. So fast and funny, driven by charismatic performances and compelling mystery, this somehow manages the trick of making the old new again. It’s at once sturdy throwback appeal and a fresh spin on material that could be tired, but isn’t here. Black’s preoccupations with bantering buddy dynamics expressed through action and intrigue are given their purest, most complete expression. This is a groovy, most completely enjoyable action comedy.

House of Cards: THE BIG SHORT

The world economy collapsed in 2008, brought down by the banking industry’s unchecked power to make gigantic risky bets on the housing market, an investment they’d somehow deluded themselves into thinking was a sure thing. Bankers decided to treat the savings and loans of millions upon millions of people as poker chips in their own personal casino. Eventually, they lost, and we were stuck bailing them out. But maybe poker is a bad metaphor. Maybe it was like they were playing blackjack, or spinning the roulette table. No, perhaps it’s more accurate to say they were playing Jenga, and when people in over their heads couldn’t make payments on subprime mortgages, the whole tower fell down. Wait, maybe it would help you understand it better if you thought of bankers bundling bad debt to resell as investments like chefs repurposing leftovers and hoping no one would be the wiser. But forget the metaphors for a second. Would you rather hear all this from a gorgeous woman in a bathtub?

Writer-director Adam McKay tries out every metaphor above and more too, even stooping to cutting to a lady in the bath to spice up exposition, as his latest movie, The Big Short, attempts to explain the 2008 financial crisis in a narrative feature form. You’d think the whole thing would be better suited to a documentary. (That’d be Charles Ferguson’s masterfully comprehensive doc Inside Job.) On the basis of this film, you’d be right. McKay’s clearly burning with anger over the conditions of unchecked, unregulated greed that led to these problems, and the stasis that led to exactly nothing being done to fix them in the years since. He communicates this fervor by bringing a raucous pace to scenes (shot in jittery style by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd) of men in suits sitting around talking numbers. But he also doesn’t trust his audience to follow along, and so drags down a rapid-fire pace and zippy editing with endless narration, fourth-wall breaking lectures, snarky asides, and endless explanations.

Inspired by the well-reported book of the same name by Michael Lewis (Moneyball), McKay, with co-writer Charles Randolph (Love & Other Drugs), focuses the story on the handful of people who, in the early 2000s, saw the housing bubble growing and braced for the impact of the burst. There’s an eccentric hedge fund analyst (Christian Bale), an angry money manager (Steve Carell), a high-stakes trader (Ryan Gosling), and more (including Brad Pitt, Hamish Linklater, Finn Wittrock, and John Magaro). They’re not really fully formed people, more like representations of worldviews and information, conduits through which we are shown aspects of the larger looming problem. Bale and Gosling concoct a scheme to short securitized subprime mortgages. Carell and his employees get in on the action, then research the instability in the housing market on the ground, visiting sleazy loan sharks, underemployed homeowners, and shallow realtors. Everyone’s laughing them out of meetings for betting against the housing market. But the more the characters we follow uncover about the financial system, the more they’re convinced catastrophe is around the corner.

These guys are smart enough to figure out the problems, but only use this knowledge to make themselves money off the inevitable calamity. Sure, they try to tell people about their discoveries – colleagues, journalists, credit rating agencies – but nothing is done to avert the crisis. No one wanted to hear. Powered on frustration and fury, McKay builds an argument that the economy as we know it is essentially a mass delusion built on stupidity and fraud. We the people will believe anything if it’s in rich people’s interest to make it seem true. As difficult as it is to watch this recent history reenacted, it’s even harder to take realizing it could easily happen again. The large ensemble does fine work communicating these ideas, condensing and dispensing piles of spreadsheets at the expense of becoming actual characters, but the movie goes ahead and overexplains anyway.

He’s usually directing comedies (Anchorman, Talladega Nights), but here McKay shifts to a serious message movie out of clear passion. After all, he’s the guy who put in the end credits of his 2010 buddy cop comedy The Other Guys a biting PowerPoint presentation explaining how Wall Street is essentially a Ponzi scheme. The Big Short is well intentioned, and argues a sharp political point. But it’s so tediously expositional and smirkingly condescending. The narration acts like the information it recounts is boring or complicated, often pausing to say, “Confusing, right?” It’s a faux jocular tone that assumes the audience will quickly lose focus on the jargon or get lost in the overflow of technical dialogue. McKay loads the film with celebrity cameos explaining concepts, characters lecturing to the camera, and rapid-fire pop culture signifiers representing the passage of time. It’s basic, but overcomplicated, a deeply irritating approach. I’m not saying the roots of the financial crisis are necessarily simple or quick to grok, but I bet the sorts of people who would go see this movie in the first place might be interested enough to keep up.

Heart of Dullness: LOST RIVER

Ryan Gosling makes his directorial debut with Lost River, an impressively controlled artful nothing. It’s 95 minutes of misfiring aesthetic signifiers coming from the same impulses that led him to work with Nicolas Winding Refn twice (in the good Drive and awful Only God Forgives). Here Gosling loves to provide striking images, woozy with neon and darkness, blood and fire. There are slow motion tracking shots to nowhere, lingering on hardships, and long looks at extreme violence real and imagined, literal and figurative. Dripping with empty visual interest, it lays out its graphical approach quickly, and then grows monotonous. As for character and story, his screenplay regards them as just more elements of design rather than features unto themselves. As a result, the film is a static, uninvolving slog, shorn free of narrative momentum and symbolic importance alike.

That’s not to say the movie is devoid of ideas. It’s a vague statement on the decrepit state of the American dream at its lowest points. Finding his story among the marginalized and impoverished, Gosling films Detroit’s ruins as a stand in for a fictional city, Lost River, drowned by economic disaster. Residents are fleeing. Structures and infrastructure are crumbling. Exploitation and arson are common activities. A nearby dam was once a promise of progress, but has only left an underwater neighborhood to show for it. In all this decay we meet a single mom (Christina Hendricks) about to lose her home, unable to pay her predatory mortgage. Gosling piles on miseries and films them with a surface beauty, taking aesthetic pleasure in pain.

Hendricks’s sons, a young man (Iain De Caestecker) and a toddler (Landyn Stewart), are smudged and sad. Their neighbors, a mute old woman (Barbara Steele) and her granddaughter (Saoirse Ronan), live amidst stacks of hoarded garbage. There’s a depressed feeling hanging over it all. Where’s the hope, when they’re the last remaining people on the block? Those who’ve remained can barely scrape out a living. A sleazy bank manager (Ben Mendelsohn) sees how desperate Hendricks is to make payments and offers her a job at a macabre nightmare burlesque run by a horror-loving madam (Eva Mendes) quick to splash fake blood. Meanwhile, her older son makes money selling copper scavenged out of abandoned buildings and runs afoul of a self-proclaimed scrap metal kingpin (Matt Smith).

This villainous presence – a howling buzzcut weirdo driven around in a vintage car with an easy chair attached in the back – is just one of many oddball elements presented entirely straight-faced.  (I didn’t even mention his habit of cutting off people’s lips with scissors.) There are strange rituals, dreadful recurring symbols, talk of a town curse, a scene where a woman slowly cuts her face and peels back the skin, and a musical interlude involving a creepy rendition of an old Bob Nolan western song. There’s certainly a dreamy animating spirit behind this, tumbling from odd sight to surreal aside. But there’s never a coherent worldview aside from how cool it’s supposed to look and how seriously we’re to take it, sub-Lynchian bafflement without a point.

The actors are mostly left to their own devices, doing as much as they can with as little as they’re given. Gosling doesn’t appear to be interested in using actors for anything other than how his cinematographer Benoît Debie (Spring Breakers, Enter the Void) can place them in the frame. The result is a movie of moments and images without connective tissue logical, emotional, narrative, or political. There are feints towards all of those, but no actual strikes. Gosling proves himself a filmmaker of terrific aesthetic control. He could be a great director someday. But this is a most enervating start. He’s proven he can conjure an interesting look, if one borrowed from Refn, Cianfrance, Malick, and even some directors he hasn’t worked with. If he gets behind the camera again, let’s hope he can find something to say.

Forsaken: ONLY GOD FORGIVES

Only God Forgives is the kind of movie you get when a talented group of people goes off in completely the wrong direction following hypothetically interesting aesthetic impulses down a dead end street to emptiness. It’s not that this is merely a bad film. It’s such a colossally and profoundly bankrupt and phony production that I couldn’t even sit back and appreciate the self-serious kitsch of it all. This is film that lingers equally on graphic bloody violence and straight-faced karaoke ballads in a repulsively exoticised Bangkok landscape that is made to look something like a velvet painting under a red blacklight. That director Nicolas Winding Refn is a great composer of images, but quite terrible at making them add up to anything meaningful, is the only thing keeping the film merely disappointing instead of outright maddening, although it’s without a doubt the longest 90 minutes I’ve sat through in a long time.

The film muddles along through a story about an American drifting through Thailand's criminal underworld. As played by Ryan Gosling, who appeared in Refn’s previous film, the far more successful arty thriller Drive, the man is an inscrutable enigma. The role calls only for Gosling to move imperceptibly between two expressions: blank stares and hollow stares. Early in the film’s runtime, his brother (Tom Burke) kills an underage prostitute. The girl’s father, in turn, kills Gosling’s brother. It’s a mess. A policeman (Vithaya Pansringarm) allows this retribution to happen, but punishes the dead girl’s father by ritualistically slicing off his hand. News of the ordeal reaches Gosling and he’s understandably upset. So it becomes a revenge drama, except only in the most turgid, circuitous sense. Through it all, few words are spoken, and even fewer actions are taken. It’s as if Refn heard the mainstream audience complaints about the slow, meditative passages of Drive and figured his mistake was including all those exciting parts around them.

Refn’s a talented designer of striking images, here with assistance from cinematographer Larry Smith, but he exerts little effort in letting them add up. It’s a film in which every person and event is so devoid of emotion, it’s practically comatose. Here, whole characters are nothing more than signifiers, monstrous constructs that fly in fully ensconced as symbols first, people later, if ever. I’m thinking mostly of the great Kristin Scott Thomas who shows up as Gosling’s mother, a great stormy performance in a film of artfully calm chaos. She’s a tormentor and a destructive presence in her son’s life, quick with a vulgar insult and, as a criminal herself, the inescapable mood of the movie has her on an inevitable journey to a nasty end. When it arrives, it’s nastier than you’d guess. Nastier still is the sense of embarrassment that grows watching such a game performance receive absolutely no support from the rest of the cast, let alone the film around them.

But to say Only God Forgives is a film of narrative is a disservice. This is a film of mood, a heavy machismo that slides along carrying slickly packaged violence and dread. Accompanied by a throbbing score by Cliff Martinez, the camera slowly pushes in on ornate panels and decorative designs, the color red washing over the frame in oppressive consistency. Hands, blades, and blood are repeated visual motifs. If only the design were more than design. This is a film enamored with concepts of Freudian anxiety, honor, and criminality, but refuses to bring them into a coherent or engaging film on any level. It’s a failure as narrative only because it never intends to rise to that level. Its true failure is as cinema, mistaking sadism for entertainment and posturing for profundity. It’s telling that Refn includes repeated shots of empty interiors throughout the film, a no-doubt unintentional symbol of the film’s true, repetitively vacant nature.