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Quick Takes August/September

Hi. After several abortive attempts to resurrect this blog that I didn’t have time to execute, I’m going to try writing about what I’m watching to capture what I learned (or didn’t learn) about storytelling. Here we go.

The White Lotus

Mike White’s Hawaiian resort set mini series is the closest thing to a filmed adaptation of the iconic subreddit r/AmITheAssHole that we’re ever going to get. That question is the best way to describe nearly every permutation of character interactions that make up the show, and with a few exceptions, the answer is ESH: Everyone Sucks Here.

Bleak? Yes, very. White doesn’t give us a character that we can back 100%, which in less skilled hands could be a real problem. But like that subreddit that I spend too much time scrolling through, these dynamics are so interesting and so painfully realistic that you can’t look away. The promise of a dead body given in the show’s first moments wasn’t even necessary to keep me glued to the screen.

As a side note, Mike White being a huge fan of (and participant in) reality TV make me feel better about the fact that I’ve watched five seasons of Love Island in a fiscal year.

Learned: You don’t need any conceptual bells and whistles to make something incredibly compelling IF you’re good enough at writing characters.

Meanwhile, at Hulu…

Nine Perfect Strangers

When compared to The White Lotus, this ended up being a useful study in suspense versus mystery. Nine Perfect Strangers leans heavily on the implication that the strangers in question, and their weirdo Galadriel meets Gwyneth host played by Nicole Kidman, are hiding a lot. Much of the character information is doled out via rapid-cut silent flashbacks, which compared to the sharp character writing in White Lotus feels like a tiresome cheat.

I was mildly interested in the mechanics of what Kidman was trying to do to these people (mystery), but getting there wasn’t enough fun for me to stick around. I made it about five episodes before jumping ship.

Learned: A Big Question isn’t enough to sustain drama. You have to have interesting stuff going on the entire time.

Another Round

In September, I was thinking a lot about what it means for a film to have a concept, or premise. It’s easy to know it when you see it (or don’t see it) but a bit hard to define concretely. One way to say it could be the following: a good premise is an idea that inherently suggests character action.

An example I heard discussed on a podcast recently was Bruce Almighty:

Jim Carrey becomes God for a week.

That is a premise. I could have a decent idea of how to approach writing it. As a counterexample, Napoleon Dynamite does not have a premise. It is about a strange person’s boring life. Am I saying Bruce Almighty is better than Napoleon Dynamite? No. Napoleon Dynamite is one of the great films and you can quote me on that. But its creation was an act of God that cannot be replicated.

I am not Jared Hess (or Mike White) and it is not 2004, so if I want to get paid to write someday, I need to stick to punchy concepts. This month I was on a five-hour flight, so I decided to go through the airline’s selection of streamable films to hunt for premises. After a few minutes I came across the description for Another Round:

Four high school teachers embark on an experiment to see if a constant level of alcohol in their blood will improve their lives.

Hell yes. Now we are talking. Hijinks must ensue!

I won’t go too far into analyzing the filmmaking of Another Round, but it was an absolute joy to watch and delivered on its premise in both humorous and heartbreaking ways. I did cry on the airplane.

I think this exercise was useful in separating out the ideas of premise/concept and world. Generally, when people think “high-concept”, they think elaborate world building, which in turn implies budget, vfx, and genre. The two can go together and frequently do, but they are not the same thing. Another Round is a concept-driven film populated by normal people in a normal place. Just because you have a lot of fancy visual stuff in your idea does not mean that you have a solid concept.

Learned: Concept-driven does not equal big budget genre studio film.

Motherless Brooklyn

This was another film that I found on my airplane premise hunt. The concept is not as strong as Another Round, but a 1950’s PI with Tourette’s syndrome was hooky enough for me. And having just visited Brooklyn for the first time, I was an easy mark.

Based on a novel, Motherless Brooklyn contains lots of interesting New York history, but the characters are all fictional. I think this is a better way to do historical drama. Being married to the facts can bring a lot of tedium and stilted storytelling to these type of period films, and the visuals frequently follow in the same boring vein.

This movie was… just really cute? The small-time gumshoes played by Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bobby Cannavale, and Dallas Roberts have a sweetness to their dynamic that you don’t see often in this type of movie. These guys really care about each other, and that’s what holds our interest more so than whatever detective plot mechanics are going on in the background. This warmth makes Motherless Brooklyn feel like a lot more than the sum of its fairly basic parts.

Learned: Warm character relationships go a long way towards making a movie fun to watch. We care about characters when we see them caring about each other.

Ocean’s 13/ Ocean’s 8

I joined my friend as she went through the Ocean’s movies for the first time, giving me the chance to watch Ocean’s 13 and Ocean’s 8 back to back. This afforded a stark illustration of the difference between great and just passable screenwriting. I’m not going to do a full forensic analysis of what went wrong with Ocean’s 8, but I will focus in on one moment that was illuminating for me.

My working understanding of plot is that events need to follow each causally, not just temporally. Matt Stone and Trey Parker formulate this idea as the “But and Therefore Rule”: between each plot event, you need to be able to insert a “but” or a “therefore”, not just a “then”.

In Ocean’s 8, Sandra Bullock gets out of prison, and THEN wants to rob the Met Gala. The screenwriters are aware of this glaring THEN in the middle of their first act, so they try to turn it into a THEREFORE with dialogue (recreated by me in WriterDuet):

Not even Cate Blanchett’s character is buying this narrative band-aid. If anything, the problem is made worse by drawing attention to it.

I also can’t help but feel that Bullock was miscast as the lead here. She plays Debbie as “cool” and unaffected, which just reads as her not taking much joy in any of the fun crimes she’s committing. This is agonizing, because robbing the Met Gala is the most fun crime I can think of!

On a bright note, Anne Hathaway’s performance is incredible and it alone makes the movie worth watching.

Learned: Do not try to fix fundamental story issues by acknowledging them in dialogue.

Some Thoughts On Stranger Things 3

I have been through all of the stages of grief with the conclusion of Game Of Thrones, ultimately arriving at a state of zen. Stranger Things 3 was much more disappointing to me, so I am going to record my thoughts here with no particular formal structure while the wound is still fresh. Incidentally, there are a lot of fresh wounds in this show.

This contains spoilers.

Finn Wolfhard at the most awkward point in his life, and possibly anyone’s life who has ever existed. He is not quite a person, merely a pair of legs with a bowl cut. This stage of human development should never be depicted on screen. It’s too graphic.

Everyone in this show is screaming at each other at all times. Nancy and Jonathan – screaming at each other. Steve and Dustin – screaming at each other. Mike and Lucas – screaming at each other. Hopper and every other character – screaming at each other. NO ONE IS NOT BICKERING AT ANY POINT DURING THIS INTERNET TELEVISION PROGRAM.

In fact, Hopper was such a belligerent jackwagon that I was actually very pleased to see him thrown into the upside down. Of course he will un-die in the next season, hopefully in a less screamy form.

Despite having to be Hopper-adjacent for most of the show, Joyce Byers still rules. Winona can do no wrong. I would watch a show of JUST Joyce Byers solving minor mysteries. I also want access to her collection of ringer T’s.

A law of the universe that became apparent when I was watching this: all sci-fi monsters MUST have mouths within mouths. If you don’t have at least THREE telescoping mouths, you are not a proper sci-fi monster in the year 2019.

Eleven’s powers have no logical parameters and feel like a deus ex machina every time she uses them.

I’m sorry, having the passcode of an important vault be a mathematical constant is overwhelmingly stupid. I understand that it serves a plot point, but there is just no plausible justification for anyone choosing that over a random string of numbers.

The resulting scene is one of the strangest things (LOL TITLE OF THE SHOW) that I have ever seen. It’s so weird, so bad, and so uncalled for that it’s almost beautiful. I have to admit I have watched this youtube clip upwards of ten times.

Maybe I should just watch The NeverEnding Story?

Christine VS 80’s Round 4: Horror Edition

I didn’t grow up watching horror movies, and until recently never thought I was missing out on anything. Horror is the only genre that seems acceptable to completely opt out of — people don’t say they never watch action films, or never watch period dramas, but I have plenty of friends who categorically refuse to go to scary movies. Horror is different because it aims to induce a visceral reaction in the viewer in addition to presenting a narrative. Because of this, many commercial horror films seem content to be effectively horrifying but narratively lazy, like a poorly designed roller coaster that’s still going to go fast and jerk you around. This tendency has always made it difficult for me to parse through what’s good in bad in the genre.

Although I would love to roast some of the more absurd specimens of 80’s horror, I think I should first look at some good examples to give myself a baseline. To cover two of horror’s major subcategories, slasher and supernatural, I’m going to start with Nightmare on Elm Street and Poltergeist.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

By 1982, college English professor turned writer/director Wes Craven already had a handful of horror film under his belt, most notably The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, and less notably Deadly Blessing and Swamp Thing. While taking a break from directing, he met Bob Shaye, founder of the now uber-succesful but then struggling New Line Cinemas. Shaye scraped together enough funding for a low-budget production while Craven penned the script for Nightmare on Elm Street.

Nightmare’s premise was groundbreaking for a slasher because it blurred the lines between reality and imagination. Four teenagers all have similar nightmares involving a grinning burn victim in a red and green sweater with knives for fingers, later revealed to be dead-ish child murderer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). When one of them is actually killed by Freddy from within their dream, survivors Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) and Glen (a very young Johnny Depp) attempt to figure out how to get rid of their attacker (mostly Nancy does this), while avoiding death by staying awake (Glen is less successful at this).

If all horror movies in some way mirror real-life traumas, Nightmare is focused on losing reliance on one’s parents in late adolescence. Nancy’s mom is a drunk and her dad is distracted and condescending, overprotective but simultaneously unable to protect her from the real danger of Freddy. While she’s still very emotionally attached to her parents, she has to let go of her trust in them to face the danger herself.

The vanquishing of Freddy by means of Nancy’s smarts and bravery is undercut by a goofy tacked-on dream sequence in which the kids are trapped in a Freddy-colored car (apparently an imposition from Shaye, who had some misguided directorial ambitions).

The car is Freddy I guess?

Nightmare is an old-school monster movie as much as it’s a slasher — Freddy Kreuger’s simple and instantly recognizable design calls back to iconic creature feature villains of the thirties and forties. Of course you can’t just make one monster movie: Nightmare spawned eight sequels and remakes starring Freddy. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) was the only one written and directed by Craven himself — a meta-narrative in which the fictional Freddy invades the real world. The 2010 reboot Nightmare on Elm Street apparently put the nail in the franchise’s coffin, attempting to make Freddy dark and gritty by exploring the peodophilic implications of the character’s backstory. Fun!

Watchability: 3/5. The lack of budget shows, and Nancy is the only fully fleshed-out character.

Scariness: 3/5 for me. Freddy’s persona is so pre-engrained that I wasn’t terribly surprised by anything he did.

Stranger Things Callbacks: A tough high schooler named Nancy, hands stretching through walls, booby-trapping a house before summoning an inter-dimensional monster, parents who just don’t get it.

Poltergeist (1982)

I’ve always thought of Poltergeist as that Speilberg movie I’ve never seen, but it was officially directed by Tobe Hooper, a horror guy known for Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Accounts of the film’s directorial authorship vary, with many cast members claiming that Spielberg was calling most of the shots on set. I’ve never seen anything else by Hooper, but visually, Poltergeist feels like Speilberg’s work.

True to Speilbergian form, Poltergeist focuses on suburban family, featuring Craig T. Robinson and JoBeth Williams as mom (Diane) and dad (Steve) to two little kids and a teenager. They’ve just moved into a new planned community where Steve is a real estate developer. Because the title of the film is Poltergeist, we can reasonably guess that their new house contains a poltergeist. It does.

Compared to Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist is a more fully-formed movie underneath its horror premise — Speilberg’s aim was clearly to elevate the genre with believable character work. To this end, the film has a lengthy build up, focusing heavily on defining the family relationships before anything strange happens — including a scene where the parents casually smoke weed in their bedroom, feet away from their sleeping children.

The initial ghost activity, which includes rearranging chairs and sliding stuff across the floor, is kind of benign and charming, but things get real when the little girl is sucked into the television. From there Steve and Diane have to figure out how to communicate with their daughter and extract her from the limbo-like state she’s trapped in.

The creepiest thing about this movie is Tagina, a tiny clairvoyant lady hired to help retrieve the child and expel the ghosts from the house. While the dialog in Poltergeist is generally great, she gives us this hilariously dubious exchange at the edge of the ghost-portal:

Tagina: I’m going in after her!

Diane: She won’t come to you! Let me go!

Tagina: You’ve never done this before!

Diane: Neither have you!

Tagina: ….You’re right, you go.

I expected to see only standard ghost stuff, but Poltergeist treats us to a full gamut of awesome practical horror effects, including a kid being consumed by a possessed tree, a guy ripping his face apart, and an entire house imploding. The ending is definitive, avoiding the horror trope of obviously telegraphing a sequel in the final seconds (not that they didn’t make a sequel).

Watchability: 4/5, easily the best supernatural horror film I’ve seen (granted I have not seen many).

Scariness: 3.5/5. Lots of unexpected scares.

Stranger Things Callbacks: Mom trying to communicate with child trapped in other dimension, using a rope as a tether while entering said other dimension, coming back from said other dimension covered in stringy goo.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – A First Step Into a Larger World

This review contains mild spoilers for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. If you haven’t seen it yet, sorry not sorry.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is Disney and Lucasfilm’s first entry into the promised slate of Star Wars spin-off films, which will eventually include stand-alones focusing on Han Solo and Boba Fett. Cribbed from the opening crawl of A New Hope, the Rogue One details the exploits of the Rebel spies who stole the plans for the Death Star, remedying one of Star Wars’ biggest plot holes in the process.

Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the lost daughter of reluctant Imperial weapons designer Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), has been recruited by the rebellion to find her father and with him the plans for the Death Star. She’s accompanied by the ruthless and handsome and ruthlessly handsome intel officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and K-2SO, a reprogramed Imperial security droid with the personality of Sheldon Cooper. Along the way, they pick up a crew of rebel and rebel-ish misfits, including a defected Imperial pilot and a couple of out-of-work Jedi temple guards (Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang). The characters are all fun and each have their own memorable moments, although there’s no time for real exploration of their backgrounds and relationships. It’s also just really hard to keep track of six different Star Wars-y names, even on a second viewing.

Rogue One’s production was fraught with re-shoots, and it shows in the final product. Some elements of the plot aren’t well explained — how did Jyn go from being rescued by Saw Gerrera to being incarcerated by the Empire? It seems like a lot of the connective tissue got lost in the shuffle. Luckily these issues are relegated to the first third of the film, but it takes a frustrating amount of head-scratching to get fully immersed into the story.

But if a standalone Star Wars film’s purpose is to expand the universe, then Rogue One is a success in spite of the rocky start. The world feels huge and detailed, bringing us deeper into the mythology: we’re introduced to Jedha, the holy city of the Jedis, and kybers, the Force-attuned crystals that power lightsabers (and also giant spherical super-weapons, turns out). We learn that the Rebellion isn’t a united front: fringe groups with no qualms about civilian casualties threaten to compromise the efforts to restore the republic, blurring the usual stark lines between good and evil.

If there’s one thing that Rogue One nails, it’s the texture. While Force Awakens set in the future and therefore free to establish its own aesthetic, this film had to match the look and feel of A New Hope exactly. Everything is there, from boxy, hard-edged user interfaces to 70’s-style mustaches. It all matches so well that I didn’t even notice that several shots were actual footage cut from the original series.

In the slightly less nailed category is the computer generated visage of Peter Cushing mapped onto the head of actor Guy Henry as Grand Moff Tarkin. The effect is not bad by any means, but the technology isn’t quite to the point where it’s visually seamless. Since director Gareth Edwards got his start in the VFX industry, it’s understandable that he would want to push technological boundaries — whether it was worth taking the audience out of the story for an experiment is debatable. CGI Tarkin might not age very well.

The most common criticism I’ve seen leveled at Rogue One is that it’s “fan service”: just a bunch of cheap references to the original series. I’m not sure what reference-free Star Wars movie these people are imagining. Rogue One ends literally minutes before A New Hope begins. It’s narratively impossible for the two films not to be intimately linked. Maybe it is fan service. But it’s well crafted and fun fan service, so I’m not complaining.

If there’s one thing all Star Wars fans can agree on, it’s that Rogue One fixes one of the only narrative flaws of the Original Series: why was the Death Star so easy to just blow up? Gareth Edwards and co. give us a satisfying answer. For that, the Force will be with them, always.

Stray Observations:

Seriously, I have no recollection of Donnie Yen or Wen Jiang’s characters ever being referred to by their names. I’m sure it happened at some point?
Re: the re-shoots/re-edits: I threw down $26 for a C2-B5 (evil R2-D2) action figure, thinking that he was going to be a major player. He was literally nowhere to be seen in this film. I could have gotten a K-2SO and now I regret all my life choices.
This movie gave me an uncontrollable urge to read a Star Wars novel, so I read Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel by veteran Star Wars author James Luceno. It actually has nothing to do with Rogue One per se (marketing I guess), but instead focuses on Galen and Lyra Erso, Orson Krennic, and the planning and construction of the Death Star. It’s completely fascinating and by my not-too-experienced estimation, well written.

Picks for Kevin

I was discussing HBO’s Westworld with my college buddy, Kevin, when he mentioned that he had never seen Blade Runner. In general, he felt that he was lacking in the classic sci-fi filmic knowledge appropriate to a card-carrying nerd. To remedy this situation and to help him to expand his overall cinematic palate, I offered to come up with a list of movies for him to watch.

Here you go, K-Money. My hope is that each movie listed here can be a jumping-off point into a different genre or era of film that I think you’ll enjoy. I’ll take it for granted that Blade Runner is already on your to-watch list, and I KNOW you have Blu-Rays of Alien and Aliens, because I saw you stand in line to get them at Comic-Con a year and a half ago. You should watch them.

Total Recall (1990)
Since 2015 brought us an ultra-realistic look at life on Mars in Ridley Scott’s adaptation The Martian, I thought you might like to check out an earlier sci-fi depiction of the Red Planet. Even though it was released in 1990, Total Recall is quintessential 80’s action. Directed by Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Basic Instinct), it’s full of ridiculous body horror and brutal fight scenes along with dumb, awesome one-liners by Arnold Schwarzenegger, in one of his best non-Terminator roles.

Set in 2048, Arnold plays construction worker Douglas Quaid, who’s plagued by nightmares about a mysterious woman on Mars. To remedy this situation (I guess), he decides to try Rekall, a service that will implant the memories of a trip to Mars in his consciousness. Of course craziness ensues, with Quaid finding out that his entire life might not be what he thought it was.

It isn’t just mindless fun, though. Total Recall is an early predecessor to movies like The Matrix and Inception, that deal with questions of the nature of reality. Like Inception, the movie itself is a puzzle that may take a handful of viewings to really crack, if there’s really an answer at all.

WarGames (1983)
As a software engineer, you need to see this film because it’s widely, and I think correctly, regarded as the greatest hacker movie of all time. Additionally, it’ll give you some much-needed context for the book Ready Player One and its forthcoming film adaptation, which is going to be directed by Steven Spielberg. Ready Player One is drenched in 80’s nostalgia, and WarGames is one of its major touchstones.

A pre-Ferris Bueller Matthew Broderick plays a young Seattle computer hobbyist who accidentally hacks into the military’s nuclear control system. He thinks that he’s accessed a nuclear-war themed computer game, but soon discovers that his tinkering has triggered real-world panic.

As much a Cold War movie as it is a hacker movie, WarGames tapped into the long-standing nuclear panic of the 80’s combined with the very new concepts of computers and hacking. At the time of its release, most people didn’t even have computers in their homes, let alone access to the internet. The idea that any person with a computer could influence events on a global scale must have been utterly mind-bending. WarGames even ended up helping to shape our national policy: the film evidently made such a huge impression on President Reagan that it prompted him to launch extensive investigations into the threat of cyber warfare.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
I know you’ve seen this at some point, but it’s worth revisiting. Although only a handful of Steven Spielberg’s films can be considered science fiction, he’s influenced the genre as much as any other director I can think of. His cinematic fingerprints are all over contemporary film and TV. If you re-watch Stranger Things, you’ll notice that multiple shots are directly lifted from his films.

Close Encounters features 70’s everyman Richard Dreyfuss as a father and husband whose relationships are threatened by his growing obsessions after an encounter with a UFO. While most films in the alien invasion subgenre rely on the aliens being a hostile threat to create tension and drive the plot forward, Close Encounters instead builds suspense as the protagonist gradually pieces together what’s happening to him. As a result, the pacing is slower than typical modern sci-fi, but it’s worth the patience that it requires.

If you haven’t seen the recent Arrival yet, I’d recommend watching this first if you have a chance. In many ways, Arrival is a spiritual descendent of Close Encounters, and in my opinion the first film in the genre to really approach the powerful sense of wonder that Spielberg brought to his film.

Chinatown (1974)
Director Roman Polanski and writer Robert Towne’s 1974 neo-noir is essential for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of cinematic storytelling. Set in late 1930’s Los Angeles, Chinatown features Jack Nicholson in one of his most well-known roles as Jake Gittes, a tough private detective who’s hired to surveil the city’s chief water engineer by a woman claiming to be his wife. The gig turns out to be a set-up, launching Gittes into a web of deception and intrigue.

Every screenwriting book I’ve ever read uses Chinatown as an example of rock-solid story structure, pacing, and dialog. It can also serve as an entry point to New Hollywood, a renaissance era of filmmaking that stretched from the late sixties to the early eighties. Kicked off by Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate in 1967, the movement was heavily inspired by French New Wave Directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and focused on the importance of the director as the film’s primary creative force, as opposed to the film studio.

Some Like it Hot (1959)
Let’s bring it back even further with a comedy that I think you’ll enjoy. Some Like it Hot was written and directed by Billy Wilder, one of the most prolific and versatile filmmakers of the twentieth century. It follows a pair of jazz musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) who witness the 1929 St. Valentine’s day Massacre and escape by pretending to be women and joining an all-female band. This results in some surprisingly nuanced gender commentary that pushed cultural boundaries at the time of its release in the late fifties. It’s also a masterpiece of screwball comedy, ranked the Funniest Movie of All time by the American Film Institute. Some of its classic one-liners have become so embedded in the zeitgeist that you’ve probably heard them already, even if you’ve never seen it.

Rope (1948)
I thought that this would be an interesting entry point into the world of Alfred Hitchcock, which you’ve yet to delve into. Rope is unique within Hitchcock’s oeuvre of suspense movies in that it takes place in real time over the course of one evening in an apartment, and was edited to appear to be one long, continuous shot. This gives it a stagey quality that I think you’ll appreciate as a theater guy. It’s actually extremely reminiscent of The Hateful 8 (minus all the gore), to the point that I would bet money that Tarantino was strongly inspired by it.

If you want to explore more Hitchcock, I’d follow this up with Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and Vertigo.

Double Indemnity (1944)
Classic 40’s film noir is both a genre unto itself and a hugely influential cinematic style, so I thought I would recommend the noir-iest of all noirs, as determined by this super scientific infographic .

Double Indemnity also happens to be one of my favorite movies ever, a film that I find myself going back to over and over. Directed by the same guy who did Some Like it Hot (he had some serious range), it follows an insurance salesman who gets talked into plotting his own wife’s murder.

The noir style had a massive influence on comics as well as film. Batman (especially Frank Miller’s interpretation), Watchmen, Daredevil, Hellboy, and many others can trace their stylistic DNA back to the dark, crime-focused movies of this era.

Netflix Pick: Force Majeure

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Force Majeure is slow, uneventful, and thoroughly entertaining. Ruben Ostlund’s arthouse black comedy is a disaster movie in which the disaster never actually materializes, leaving its characters to deal with a much bigger emotional catastrophe, to both dramatic and humorous results. It’s pretty rare to find great foreign films on Netflix, so if you’re looking to expand your cinematic palette a bit, this one’s a great place to start.

Smug Alpine vacationers Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), and their two young children are the image of upper-class familial perfection at a pristine, sterile, and expensive hotel. They ski together, brush their teeth together, and sleep together in one bed wearing matching long underwear, in an image that could be mistaken for an L.L. Bean advertisement. Their bliss is abruptly interrupted by a near-miss with a controlled avalanche that sends Tomas sprinting for cover, leaving his wife and screaming kids to fend for themselves. The avalanche doesn’t hit, but Tomas’s blatant cowardice throws the family into an existential crisis.

Tomas coolly plays off his gaffe as an involuntary survival reflex, but Ebba and the kids know better. The kids ice out their parents, while Ebba questions the very foundation of her marriage. A conversation with casual polyamorist Charlotte (Karin Myrenberg) has her arguing fiercely for the value of monogamy and the traditional nuclear family, but she’s trying to convince herself more than she’s trying to convince her new friend. If it can fall apart so easily, is a family even worth having? Charlotte’s arrangement has none of the values of exclusivity, commitment, and longevity that are important to Ebba and Tomas, but she’s the happiest person at the hotel. If her relationship situation changes, fine. Her identity isn’t wrapped up in who she spends her life with.

While Ebba desperately tries to rationalize her life choices, Tomas spirals under the realization that he’s not the protective, heroic man that he’s supposed to be. Unable to face up to what happened, he copes by lying to himself, his wife, and anyone else who will listen. Although his initial action was reprehensible, his ultimate betrayal of his family lies in his inability to be honest with them in the wake of the crisis.

On top of the emotionally heavy subject matter, Ostlund’s directorial style would seem to demand a lot from the audience’s attention span. The cinematography is composed primarily of static shots, many of which last several minutes without a cut. Slow pacing and lack of conventional narrative cues also present a challenge to the viewer. But Ostlund’s clever and skillful use of “artsy” stylistic elements contribute to both comedy and suspense, making Force Majeure grippingly entertaining even at two hours running time.

In the funniest scene, we get nothing but an endless wide shot of Tomas and buddy Mats (Kristofer Hivju) lounging outside at the ski lodge, beers in hand. They are interrupted by some young ladies, only one of which we see, who build up and then promptly demolish the men’s egos. It’s a joke we’ve all seen play out before, but Ostlund’s direction makes it fresh. A typical director would likely include a number of cuts in this type of scene, but the voyeuristic nature of the static camera makes the moment feel realistic and spontaneous.

Ostlund’s deliberate style is also used to great dramatic effect. Long periods of inactivity build suspense to the point where we’re certain something is about to happen, even though the plot gives us no indication as to what that might be. Far being boring, the tension kept me glued to the screen.

Force Majeure has been on Netflix for quite a while, so I’d give it a try before it gets booted, even if you’re not typically inclined to arthouse fare. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Get Excited About Jeff Nichols

I saw the sci-fi mystery Midnight Special on a whim one Friday night, drawn in by an understated advertising campaign that didn’t give much indication as to the film’s plot. In a cinematic world dominated by sequels and adaptations, it’s rare to go the theater without knowing fairly well what you’re getting into, and even rarer to see an original sci-fi film by a rising young director with an indie bent. I came out of the theater wanting more, and eagerly burned through two more of his films. What I found is a filmmaker with a new, unique voice, making original, thoughtful films.

I saw Take Shelter, Mud, and Midnight Special out of sequence, but I’ll talk about them here in chronological order.

take-shelter-grab-the-kid

Thoughts on Take Shelter

Take Shelter is actually Nichols’ sophomore effort, following up his 2007 debut, Shotgun Stories. Michael Shannon plays Curtis, a blue-collar Ohio man haunted by otherworldly dreams of an impending disaster. Convinced that his family is in real danger, he sets to building a tornado shelter in his back yard, which alarms his wife (Jessica Chastain).

The feeling that something very bad is about to happen is inescapable at the moment. In Take Shelter, Nichols’ uncanny storm feels like a stand-in for every brewing apocalyptic nightmare plastered across our social media feeds and cable news. This disaster itself and its consequences are of secondary importance within the story: the focus instead zeroes in on the relationship between Curtis and his wife, and its ability to survive an outside threat that may or may not be real. These two people have to get on the same page, or they’ll lose each other.

It’s difficult to imagine this film working as well with any actor other than Michael Shannon in the lead role. He is able to evoke dread without ever actually freaking out as his character goes about his life under a looming terror. It’s no wonder he became Nichols’ go-to leading man.

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Thoughts on Mud

Mud is a tense and evocative take on the coming-of-age genre, set in Nichols’ native Arkansas. The Mark Twain-tinged story centers on 14-year-old river dweller Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his pal Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), who happen upon a lovelorn drifter named Mud (Matthew McConaughey) during an excursion to find a boat in a tree on an island and end up involving themselves in their new friend’s mission to find his girlfriend (Reese Witherspoon). Meanwhile, Ellis’ home life begins to unravel as he watches the erosion of his parents’ marriage.

Mud takes a different look at romantic relationships: their beginnings, their ends, and the lengths that we will go to preserve them, even when we shouldn’t. Ellis, desperate for an example of real love, latches onto Mud’s relationship as a prototype when his parents’ fails. He tries to replicate that love himself, and ultimately finds that it isn’t the ideal that he had hoped for.

A striking aspect of Mud is its sense of place and time. Nichols obviously knows the area intimately and captures it in its beautiful, mundane glory. It’s recognizably the South, but is devoid of the stereotypes that often plague Hollywood depictions. All of the lead players are natives of Southern states, lending a dose of authenticity to the performances and dialog. In front this rich backdrop is the most resonant depiction of American boyhood that I can recall since Stand By Me. As in that film, young men are faced with a situation that pushes them over the edge into the adult world, with all the emotional upheaval that goes with such a transition.

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Thoughts on Midnight Special

If Nichols dipped his toes into the sci-fi genre with Take Shelter, he takes the plunge with Midnight Special. Tapping into a budget twice the size of his first three films combined, he’s got a much bigger sandbox in which to play with the genre. Nichols wisely eschews CGI-laden spectacle in favor of solid storytelling and suspense, resulting in one of the most entertaining and genuinely spooky films of the year thus far.

We drop into the story as Roy (Michael Shannon) smuggles his young son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) away from a cult-like religious group’s rural compound, accompanied by off-duty state trooper Lucas (Joel Edgerton). From there, details about who Alton is and the purpose of the mission come out in small doses, keeping the tension relentlessly high as both the religious group and the federal government pursue the boy.

The directorial approach is unapologetically Spielbergian, combining economical pacing with arresting, otherworldly imagery and more than a handful of lens flares. Nichols is able to capture some of the awe and magic of the eighties sci-fi classics without falling into the territory of homage, employing more restraint than JJ Abrams did in his unabashed throwback Super 8 (2011). Midnight Special’s aesthetic serves its story, not the other way around.

Beneath the sci-fi conceit, Midnight Special is a story about the lengths to which parents will go for their children, especially in the face of outside judgement and opposition. Shannon’s performance crucially captures the stress and joy of parenthood, while young actor Jaeden Lieberher gives Alton enough realism to make the father-son dynamic work.

Throughout Nichols’ films, we see different versions of human relationships that are struggling to survive. Nichols plays with genre and visuals in interesting ways, but only to the extent that they support the human-centered stories. It’s an extremely encouraging pattern to observe in an up-and-coming director’s work.

Quick Takes: Finding Dory, X-Men: Apocalypse

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Finding Dory

There’s a moment in Finding Nemo when Dory explains her short-term memory loss: “I forget things almost instantly. It runs in my family. Well, at least I think it does. Hmm. Where are they?” A long pause follows, allowing us to wonder.

If a sequel had to happen, this was the right story to tell. Through Dory, Stanton and co. are able to touch on what it means to live with a disability, and what it’s like to care for someone who struggles with one. The effort is noble and the results are entertaining, but the story itself isn’t as perfect as its predecessor.

Somewhat strangely, we come back to our characters very shortly after the events of Finding Nemo. Nemo isn’t any bigger and still goes to school with Mr. Ray, and Dory forgets that the sea anemone will sting her every few seconds. Following a blow to the head, Dory’s origin story unfolds through flashbacks as she remembers bits and pieces of her childhood, including her parents’ anxious efforts to guide her through life with a memory disorder. These scenes are gut-wrenching: despite their best efforts, we know they’re going to lose her. The more Dory remembers, the more she realizes how much of herself she’s lost.

While the emotional moments work, the story lacks the scale and sweeping arc that made the original so memorable. Finding Nemo was at its core a road movie — it spanned a great distance both spatially and narratively as Dory and Marlin traversed the ocean to rescue Nemo. Perhaps in an effort to avoid repeating the formula of the original, Dory truncates the travel and spends most of its time around one place. Unfortunately, this often makes the film feel like it’s spinning its wheels. I found myself wanting to get back out into the unknown depths.

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X-Men: Apocalypse

Following up an impressive outing in the 70’s with Days of Future Past, Apocalypse is the latest installment of Fox’s hit-or-miss X-men series, set a decade later. The verdict: it’s a miss, but it’s a fun miss.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around the re-appearance of ancient über-mutant Apocalypse. The good guys have to stop him. That’s about it.

Oscar Issac is completely wasted in the title role: he’s goofy, oddly unthreatening for being the most powerful mutant ever, and the victim of a really bad makeup job. It’s bad, but also a little hilarious. Other new additions to the cast are more welcome. Tye Sheridan does a respectable job emoting as Cyclops, a guy who wears sunglasses one hundred percent of the time. I enjoyed Sophie Turner as Jean Grey, but that may just be because I like her so much on Game of Thrones.

The real reason to go to this movie is Evan Peters’ Quicksilver. His rescue sequence is pure 80’s soundtracked joy, despite some questionable visual effects work that make it look like he’s saving cardboard cutouts as opposed to real human beings. That’s only one example of the VFX problems that riddle the film, which is baffling because Days of Future Past had no such issues.

Apocalypse’s shortcomings don’t ruin the experience — they’re endearing and funny. The campy nonsense and laughable effects are actually a nice tonal break from the airtight, relentlessly well-produced Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sometimes you just want to turn your brain off.

You Need To Watch Bob’s Burgers: 6 Episodes for the Uninitiated

For the discerning T.V. fan, “animated sitcom” isn’t necessarily a phrase that inspires confidence. The Simpsons is stale at twenty-six seasons, and not everyone delights in the gross-out sensibilities of Family Guy or the controversy-a-week approach of South Park. Given the rest of the roster, one might be tempted to lump Fox’s Bob’s Burgers in with its peers.

Don’t make that mistake. Bob’s Burgers isn’t just an excellent animated sitcom, it’s become one of the best shows on television, combining zany, anarchic humor with sweet family dynamics and inventive storytelling. While family shows tend to lean heavily on stereotypes, there isn’t a generic character in the bunch. Deadpan father Bob Belcher (H. John Benjamin) and his relentlessly enthusiastic wife Linda (John Roberts) run their family’s burger restaurant, a welcome change from the unspecific white-collar gigs occupied by most animated patriarchs. Rounding out the family are conscientious and very pubescent middle-schooler Tina (Dan Mintz), oblivious eleven-year-old Gene (Eugene Mirman), and precocious, snarky nine-year-old Louise (Kristen Schaal).

The show’s greatest strength is its willingness to take storytelling risks. There is no typical episode of Bob’s Burgers; each week brings unexpected situations that bring out new facets of the characters’ personalities. Many episodes experiment with different genres, often in the form of homage. Beneath the innovation, though, Bob’s Burgers maintains a solid emotional core: it’s about a family that loves and supports each other.

Bob’s Burgers had a rocky start before it hit its stride, so Episode 1 might not be the best point of entry. Instead, here’s six episodes that show off what makes the show so special.

1. Speakeasy Rider: Season 5, Episode 9

Speakeasy Rider is one of the best examples of the show’s effectiveness in playing with genre, this time the racing movie. Tina, Gene and Louise are determined to beat Bryce, a fast-talking go-kart racer with a habit of throwing raisins at his adversaries. The kids convince their motorcycle gang friends (that’s a whole other episode) to help them trick out an old bumper car, and the classic underdog-versus-reigning champ saga ensures, eventually testing Tina and Louise’s loyalty for each other. The genre references are well-observed and funny, complete with training montage and some killer smack talk from Tina: “Way ahead of you. Literally”.

2. Topsy: Season 3, Episode 16

Topsy is centered entirely on a piece of historical esoterica, with hilarious and actually educational results. Habitual slacker Louise is at a loss her when her new science teacher forces her to complete a science fair project about Thomas Edison. A tip from a neurotic librarian leads her to the true story of Topsy, an elephant electrocuted to death by Edison in an attempt to demonstrate the supposed danger of Nicola Tesla’s alternating current. In representative Louise fashion, she takes things to the extreme to antagonize her teacher, enlisting musically-inclined Gene to help put on a full-blown Topsy musical starring Tina as the ill-fated elephant.

3. O.T. The Outside Toilet: Season 3, Episode 15

O.T. The Outside Toilet shows just how insane of a premise Bob’s Burgers can pull off. In a left-field reworking of Spielberg’s E.T., Gene befriends a high-tech, talking toilet that he finds outside in the middle of the woods. You’d think this would lead to an avalanche of scatological humor, but it doesn’t. Gene overcomes his usual bumbling ineptitude to help his new friend, showing us the compassionate and loyal dimensions of the character’s personality. Eighties cinema fans will smile at the Spielbergian easter eggs, but the episode works with or without the context.

4. Ambergris: Season 4, Episode 18

Another odd yet effective experiment of an episode, Ambergris opens with the Belcher kids’ discovery of a funky-smelling object on the beach that happens to be worth several thousands of dollars; the catch is that it’s illegal to sell. Louise’s criminal instincts kick in, and she butts heads with a scrupulous Tina over whether or not to cash in the ambergris on the back market (meanwhile Gene just wants to put the thing in his mouth). The pure absurdity of the situation combined with the kids’ personalities bouncing off of each other make for one of the funniest episodes in the series, made even funnier by a welcome guest voiceover role from Bill Hader as an inept dealer of illegal goods.

5. The Runway Club: Season 5, Episode 16

Bob’s Burgers has a deep bench: minor players like the Belcher kids’ schoolmates are all fully-realized individuals with as many specific quirks as the main characters. Genre mashup The Runway Club is a great showcase these characters, including Tina’s lisping crush Jimmy Pesto Jr. (also voiced by H. John Benjamin), his loudmouth buddy Zeke (Bobby Tisdale), and mean girl Tammy (Jenny Slate). A when a fight lands all of the kids in detention, school counselor Mr. Frond (David Herman) decides that the best form of rehabilitation is a forced fashion design competition, shifting the homage subject from John Hughes to Project Runway.

6. Hawk and Chick: Season 5, Episode 21

Hawk And Chick is one of many episodes that dial in on a relationship within the Belcher family, in this case Bob and Louise. The pair bond over their shared love for a series of movies about a father-daughter samurai team, Hawk and Chick. When Hawk himself comes to town looking for his now-estranged daughter, Bob and Louise decide to put on a Hawk and Chick film festival to bring their heroes back together. In the process, they end up confronting their own fears about the future of their relationship. Unlike every other animated sitcom, Bob’s Burgers doesn’t feel the need to maintain a cynical edge: it allows its characters to show genuine affection for each other, as real families do.

Quick Takes: The Jungle Book, Captain America: Civil War

Thoughts on The Jungle Book

The Jungle Book is the latest giant-budget effort from a Disney machine hell-bent on remaking its entire back catalog of animated movies in live action. No one asked for this movie, but darned if it isn’t great. Director Jon Favreau resists the obvious pitfall of attempting translate an essentially whimsical story into reality by making it dark and gritty (read: somber and boring). The animals and environments look photo-real, but the world remains pure fantasy. The scenery and compositions are otherworldly in their beauty, nothing about the premise is over-explained, and no apologies are made for the animals breaking into song. Although it’s a reverent homage to the Disney classic, it also forges its own path: don’t expect a beat-by-beat reproduction of the original’s plot.

Celebrity voices are recognizable but not stunt casting by any means: Bill Murray makes sense as Baloo (I’d have gone with Jeff Bridges), and Christopher Walken is kind of a genius choice for King Louie.

The Jungle Book was shot entirely (not almost entirely) on blue-screen sets in a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, with everything other than Mowgli and a few small sets and props created in CG. Fxguide.com has excellent coverage of the production, especially of the lighting strategy. FX supervisor Rob Legato explains that the approach was based on “our collective memories of what a movie looks like, which is photographed, as opposed to perfected”.

If Favreau’s Jungle Book was too much fun for you, never fear — Andy Serkis is working on a version for Warner Brothers that he promises will be “darker”.

null — Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War..L to R: Hawkeye/Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), Scarlet Witch/Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), and Winter Soldier/Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan)..Photo Credit: Film Frame..© Marvel 2016

Thoughts on Captain America: Civil War

After a string of outings dealing with intergalactic concerns, Captain America: Civil War brings the Marvel Cinematic Universe squarely back down to earth, finally addressing the problems inherent in superpowered justice. Our heroes clash over philosophical differences, and the film doesn’t cop out of the interpersonal conflict by giving the opposing sides a clear bad guy to unite against.

Cap gets the title, but Civil War is an Avengers movie, minus Thor and the Hulk. Taking these two out of the mix was a smart move — the absence of a literal god and a giant green man help to ground and streamline the proceedings. We have more than adequate replacements in the form of a charismatic and mysterious Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and what’s probably the best on-screen depiction of Spider-Man to date, played by an actual teenager (Tom Holland).

Although not as narratively tight as either Winter Soldier or the first Avengers installment, Civil War comfortably surpasses Age of Ultron and serves as an effective set-up to Marvel’s Phase 3. Alas, now we must begin the arduous year-long wait until Spider-Man: Homecoming hits theaters. Yes, Spidey was that good.