Film Criticism Archives - Page 2 of 3

The Coen Project Part 4: Barton Fink

As I mentioned briefly in my last post, Joel and Ethan went to New York City for a three-week break in the middle of writing Miller’s Crossing, which they were struggling to complete. While there, they wrote the script for what would become their fourth feature, Barton Fink. While the film stood on its own when I first watched it a few years ago, putting it in the context of the time and place of its writing unlocked meaning that I didn’t pick up on before. Although set in 40’s Hollywood, Barton Fink is a cautionary tale that the Coens are telling themselves, a revenge story in which the titular New York writer is punished for his pretension. It’s as if the Coens needed to take a step back and think about who they were and what their goals were as writers, resulting in the most personal of all their films that I’ve seen thus far.

After his first Broadway play is a critical and financial success, Barton Fink (John Turturro) is given the opportunity to head west and write movies for Capitol Pictures (the fictional studio that would eventually make a comeback in 2016’s Hail Caesar). Barton laments that going to Hollywood would mean abandoning his “new, living theater, of and about the common man,” not considering the possibility that common men could frequent movie theaters. He goes anyway, and ensconces himself in the run-down and vaguely unsettling Hotel Earle. Assigned by the fast and loud talking Capitol Pictures boss Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner) to write a “wrestling picture,” Barton posts up at his typewriter and is unable to write a single word.

It’s difficult to discuss this movie in any depth without giving away a significant plot reveal, so if you haven’t yet seen it and are planning to, I’d bail out now.

The Coens wrote the role of Barton Fink specifically for John Turturro, who they were working with on Miller’s Crossing. Turturro masterfully plays a man who is so obsessed with what he thinks he has to say as a writer that he is blind to his own delusions, toeing the line between Barton’s naive sincerity and his abrasive self-importance. Opposite him is John Goodman as Charlie Meadowes, the “common man” that Barton claims to empathize with so deeply. He has plenty of his own stories, but Barton isn’t interested in hearing them. When Charlie turns out to be very uncommon indeed, Barton pays the price for his pomposity.

“I could tell you some stories”

Goodman’s performance is even more remarkable than Turturro’s: he has the uncanny ability to be simultaneously charming and sinister, drawing us in with his charisma even as we know something isn’t right with him. Even though on paper he ends up being the bad guy, I can never fully turn against him as a character. He’s not terrorizing Barton for no reason, he’s teaching him a lesson that ultimately catalyzes his change as a person and, we can surmise, as a writer.

Barton Fink is the first out of three Coen Films that are set in Los Angeles, but I don’t think of it as an LA movie. The version of LA in the film is heavily (and purposefully) filtered through Barton’s own anti-Hollywood, east-coast centric perspective. Barton refuses to experience the city on its own terms until the final sequence where he sits on the beach in the aftermath of all that’s happened to him. The symbolism of the young woman aside, I read this scene as the moment Barton becomes an Angelino.

Stray Observations:

I didn’t even get into the character of W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), the novelist-turned-screenwriter who disillusions Barton with his alcoholism and nonchalant attitude towards his craft. He’s based on William Faulkner, who’s real-life first Hollywood writing gig was a wresting picture called Flesh.
How great is Steve Buscemi as Chet (Chet!), the weirdly pedantic and friendly hotel guy?
Although it didn’t even make back its budget at the box office, Barton Fink pulled off a rare hat trick at the Cannes Film Festival, nabbing the Palm d’Or as well as Best Director and Best Actor. This caused the Cannes critics to enact the rule that any one movie could only win two out of the three.

The Coen Project Part 3: Miller’s Crossing

For their third film, the Coens took yet another genre deep-dive, this time with a Prohibition-era gangster film based loosely on Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Glass Key. Although it doesn’t skimp on the violence, Miller’s Crossing has far less interest in guns than it does in interpersonal dynamics and emotional struggle as explored through the lens of Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), a conflicted mob consigliere. Despite a return to a more serious type of film, many of the comedic trademarks cultivated in Raising Arizona carry through, including the now time-honored tradition of characters repeating goofy phrases over and over. It may be set in a indeterminate east coast city in the 20’s, but it’s recognizably the Coen-verse.

Rival gang bosses Leo (Albert Finney) and Johnny Caspar (John Polito) come into conflict over the grifting bookie Bernie (a slimy and hilarious John Turturro in his first film with the Coens). Caspar wants Bernie dead for swindling him, but Leo hesitates because Bernie’s sister is his would-be girlfriend Verna (Marcia Gay Harden). Our protagonist and Leo’s advisor Tom attempts to keep the peace between the two sides, all the while sleeping with Verna. Adding to the tension is Mink (Steve Buscemi), a bartender at Leo’s establishment who is carrying on affairs with both Bernie and Eddie “The Dane” Dane (J.E. Freeman), Caspar’s right-hand man.

The most heavily plotted Coen film I’ve seen so far, it takes at least two viewings to fully absorb Miller’s Crossing in all its intricacies. The story is complex in and of itself, but is made even more challenging to understand by its telling: characters frequently refer to other characters who have not yet appeared on screen, and the 20’s-era Italian and Irish gangster slang adds another layer to parse through. I’m not leveling these observations as criticisms — it’s deeply rewarding to watch it a second time and fully understand what’s going on while absorbing more of the richly textured dialogue. Ultimately, Miller’s Crossing can be understood in terms of its two central love triangles: one involving Bernie, Mink, and The Dane that drives the plot forward, and one involving Tom, Leo, and Verna that comprises the core emotional conflict of the film.

Regarding the first love triangle, it’s pretty incredible that three of the key characters in a prohibition-era gangster flick are gay men, although none of them ever appear on screen at the same time. Steve Buscemi’s Mink only appears (alive) in one brief scene, but he’s the lynchpin of the plot, whose doomed connections with Bernie and Caspar’s acolyte The Dane set off the gang war’s violent conclusion.

In my last post I addressed the futility of analyzing the symbols in the Coens work, but It’s impossible to talk about Tom’s character and his relationships with Verna and Leo without talking about his hat. The opening title card features a hat on the ground in the forest, which blows away in the wind. This mirrors a scene later in the movie when Tom describes a dream in which he chases his hat through the woods. In short, the hat is Tom’s armor. It represents his ability to violently suppress his emotions in favor making the right business move.

Tom might really believe that love doesn’t drive him, but Verna is able to cut through his bullshit, forcing him to come to terms with his real motivations. Byrne and Harden play this tension masterfully in their scenes together, especially one in which Tom invades a womens’ dressing room to confront Verna, who is utterly unfazed by his violent showboating. This gives us my favorite exchange of the film:

Tom: “Intimidating helpless women is part of what I do.”

Verna: “Then go find one and intimidate her.”

It’s pretty fist-pump worthy moment. The Coens were writing gutsy, interesting roles for women way before it was cool.

In order to help make sense of some of the slang, I present a Miller’s Crossing glossary for first time viewers:

Schmatte: a hebrew word for a rag or tattered garment, used here as a derogatory word for a Jewish person
Dangle: Go, leave, get lost.
The high hat: Any form of condescension, impudence, or deception perpetrated against Johnny Caspar
What’s the rumpus: What’s going on, what’s up. Used by every character regardless of background
Twist: a female, especially one perceived as having loose morals

Stray Observations:

The Coens themselves had a hard time with the plot: they got such bad writers block that they took a three week vacation to New York to work on a script about a Hollywood writer who was having trouble with his screenplay. This ultimately became Barton Fink.
I’d have to think that Miller’s Crossing had a huge impact on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. I’ve only watched the first few episodes of the series, but it’s very similar both stylistically and thematically.

Christine VS 80’s: Round 3

1984 was a pretty big year for movies. Ghostbusters, The Terminator, Sixteen Candles, Temple of Doom, Footloose, The Karate Kid, Friday the 13th, and my beloved Beverly Hills Cop were all released that year. Since Stranger Things 2 is going to be set in the fall of ’84, I figured I had better brush up. Let’s get into two flicks that I’ve never seen before, Dune and Gremlins.

Dune

I recently completed a master’s degree, which was difficult, but not as difficult as completing the audio book for Dune, Frank Herbert’s ~classic sci-fi novel~. Dune is the story of a young asshole named Paul aka Muad’dib who becomes even more of an asshole due to drug use and power. It’s basically Game of Thrones in space, which is not nearly as much fun as it even sounds.

David Lynch is a director whom I was aware of but had no real knowledge of. I figured I would try out his version of Dune, mostly because I was curious to see how anyone would approach adapting the book. I do not recommend Dune as an introduction to Lynch’s work, but if you’re up for it, it’s… something.

The road that Dune took to production is a lot to unpack, but the short version is that it was originally optioned to be adapted by OG cult director and noted crazy person Alejandro Jodorowsky, who planned on casting Salvatore Dali, Orson Welles, and Mick Jagger in key roles, as well as his own twleve-year-old son as the lead. Jean “Moebius” Giraud (who would later contribute to Alien) was set to handle production design, and the soundtrack was to be composed by Pink Floyd and Magma. If this sounds kind of insane to you, you’re not alone. The studios balked at Jodorowsky’s overly ambitious adaptation (it would have been over twelve hours long) and instead hired David Lynch.

Because Dune is such a long and dense story, there’s an almost impossible amount of exposition that needs to be conveyed in order for the film to work. Lynch attempts to accomplish this in two ways. The film begins with a straight-up five minute explanatory monologue by the Princess Irulan, who in the book serves as type of narrator through excerpts of her written historical works that begin each chapter. She briefs us on the planet Arrakis (aka Dune), the houses of Antreides and Harkonnen, and the Spice, the all important drug that makes space travel possible. In addition to the crash course, we hear the characters’ inner thoughts through voice-over to convey extra information. It’s not just the protagonists, it’s everyone, down to minor characters. This works in the novel because it’s a novel and that is how novels work. On screen, it kind of seems like everyone is just talking with their mouths closed for no reason.

Lynch adds his own weird touches of questionable narrative purpose, perhaps most notably the inclusion of a gigantic wrinkled worm thing floating in a tank. It’s supposed to be a Third Stage Guild navigator, which is something that isn’t in the first novel. Because this was not gross enough on its own, Lynch also includes many extended shots of the weird worm thing’s mouth flapping open and shut. Other fun touches include cat milking (not kidding) and the Baron Harkonnen drinking blood straight out of his servant’s chest.

The stoic director pictured with his weird worm thing.

Some good points: Lynch smartly cast uber-likeable Kyle MacLachlan as Paul, who does a good job of making me not hate him. Patrick Stewart is a welcome familiar face as Paul’s right hand man. Beyond that I am mostly grossed out and confused by this movie.

There is one important element of this film that cannot escape my mention: the puppies. The opening sequence includes a horde of bulldogs, and characters tote around pugs in many key scenes. The image of Patrick Stewart charging into battle with a giant laser gun in one arm and a pug under the other is forever burned into my brain. I am neither kidding nor exaggerating.

Watchability: 2/5

80’s Ness: 4/5

The Takeaway: PUGS NOT (Spice) DRUGS

Gremlins

When I was a child, someone foolishly gave me a Furby, 1998’s hottest and most horrifying toy trend. My overactive six-year-old imagination had me fully convinced that the thing was going to murder me in my sleep. My parents mercifully removed the object from our home, but my fear endured.

Because I am to this day repelled by anything remotely resembling a Furby, I have been putting off watching 1984’s Gremlins. But I have done it for the sake of this series, and I think my courage should be commended. Produced by Steven Spielberg and written by future Harry Potter director Chris Columbus, it’s an 80’s touchstone that I would be amiss not to tackle.

Turns out the fluffy Furby-esque thing that I was afraid of is actually not a Gremlin, but a Mogwai. Small-town aspiring inventor Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) steals one from an extremely sketchy Chinatown shop as a present for his son Billy (Zach Galligan). No one questions the existence of this creature. No one is impressed or even surprised that it can speak primitive English and reproduce by a form of water-induced mitosis. The Mogwai itself (named Gizmo) is actually rather cute, but I’m not holding my breath because much like Titanic, I know from the title that this situation is going to go south very quickly. Sure enough, although Randall was given clear instructions on the safe care and feeding of the Mogwai, all of the rules are promptly broken, creating an army of scaly and mischievous Gremlins from a single Mogwai. They are still less scary than Furbys.

The Gremlins of course wreak havoc on the town, ultimately taking over a movie theater where they enjoy a screening of Snow White and The Seven Dwarves. I was kind of jealous of the Gremlins in this scene. I would love to watch a classic Disney movie on the big screen with all my buddies and unlimited snacks.

The funnest party ever.

Director Joe Dante added lots of classic movie references to Gremlins which are cleverly chosen and fun to spot. The setting in the small town of Kingston Falls is a nod to Bedford Falls from Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which Billy’s mom is watching in the kitchen. Billy watches Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another film featuring monsters who incubate in cocoons. You can see posters for Road Warrior and the classic giant ant horror flick Them! in Billy’s room, and the town’s theater marquee features “Watch the Skies”, the original title for Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Due to an abundance of monster gore and some really dark discussions between the teenaged characters, Gremlins is one of the films along with Temple of Doom that prompted the creation of the PG-13 rating that year at Spielberg’s suggestion.

Columbus’ original script for Gremlins was apparently was even darker and grosser than the version that got made, since he was just creating a writing sample that he didn’t expect to go to production. Spielberg was so impressed with its originality that he bought it despite knowing that it would have to be toned down drastically to be family-friendly enough to sell as a kid’s movie. Even so, it’s pretty obvious that the spirit of the original spec script comes through in the final product. It’s a work of pure imagination, motivated by a deep love of cinema.

Stray Observations:

Quentin Tarantino straight-up lifted the ending of Inglorious Basterds from this movie, right?
Turns out I wasn’t the only one who noticed the Furby/Mogwai resemblence: Instead of suing, Warner Bros. struck a deal with Hasbro to produce a Gizmo Furby. It’s a huge improvement over the standard Furby. I would probably be ok with being in the same room as it.

Watchability: 4/5

80’s Ness: 5/5

The Takeaway: Gremlins just wanna have fun.

The Coen Project Part 2: Raising Arizona

After seeing Blood Simple, you’d be likely to peg Joel and Ethan Coen simply as promising writer-directors of drama. Three years later (1987), you’d be proven very wrong. When the brothers set out to make their second film, their primary goal was to create something as different from their debut as possible. Since Blood Simple was dark and realistic, the obvious choice of direction was a comedy. Enter Raising Arizona.

At least in the context of film and television, the American Southwest often feels like blank slate where anything can happen. Maybe it’s the literal blankness of the desert, maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s the sparseness of population. Could you imagine Breaking Bad taking place in, say, Boston? New Mexico and Arizona are places where you can believe a high school teacher getting away with selling meth, or a young couple stealing a baby to cope with infertility. It’s the perfect place to stage a comedy about crazy people doing crazy things.

With a bigger but still modest budget of $5 million to work with, Joel and Ethan don’t waste a single frame: an eleven-minute voice-over sequence packs in an entire act of narrative before the opening credits even roll. We’re introduced to convenience store robber H.I. “Hi” McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) who meets police officer Edwina (Holly Hunter) while having his mug shot taken. Over the course of several repeat offences, the pair fall for each other and marry after Hi gets out of jail and vows to keep on the straight and narrow. They decide that they should have a child, reasoning that “…every day we kept a child out of the world was a day he might later regret having missed.” Alas, Ed is infertile: “her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase,” laments Hi.

Devastated by their rejection from adoption agencies due to Hi’s delinquency, the unhappy couple hear an interesting news flash: local furniture mogul Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson) and his wife Florence (Lynne Kitei) have welcomed quintuplets. Hi and Ed figure that since five is a lot of children, the parents would not “overly” miss one. They head out to get them a baby, and the insanity that follows never lets up.

In my last post I talked a little bit about cartoons, and how they’re typically driven by characters rather than situations. The live-action comedies that I enjoy the most take a similar approach, turning a handful oddballs loose in some environment and seeing how they bounce off of each other. Raising Arizona does this in a more literally cartoony way than a typical comedy. Many of the characters play on cartoon archetypes: Hi is a human Wile E. Coyote, disheveled and running around the desert, a constant victim of his own ineptitude. John Goodman and William Forsythe play Hi’s pals Gale and Evelle, a pair of prison escapees who aren’t far off from trouble-making cartoon duos like Ren and Stimpy or Pinky and the Brain, although Goodman comes off more Foghorn Leghorn than anything else. Hell, the baby quints even have cartoon names: Harry, Barry, Larry, Garry, and Nathan Jr (he’s an awful damn good one).

In stark contrast to Blood Simple’s naturalistic dialog, the characters all have eccentric ways of speaking, a mix of hick talk with solemnly biblical proclamations. The juxtaposition of lower-class criminals speaking in such a heightened manner drives much of the film’s humor. In an interview the Coens said that the dialog sprang from a mix of regional dialect and what they imagined these people would be reading, namely the newspaper and the Bible.

Although little Nathan Jr. is the MacGuffin that drives the action, Raising Arizona’s central conflict isn’t really about a baby, it’s about Hi’s struggle between what he believes to be his innate criminal nature and his desire to become stable and respectable, motivated by his love of Ed. Maybe the funniest way this inner battle plays out is the scene where he expounds upon how he’s a changed man while simultaneously shoving several firearms into his pants. He just can’t help himself.

It might be worth talking about why Hi and his menacing biker antagonist Leonard Smalls (Randall ‘Tex’ Cobb) share the same Woody Woodpecker tattoo. I’m wary about delving into speculation about certain symbols within the Coen Brothers’ films, mostly because from what I’ve read they tend not to put as much specific meaning into them as their fans would like to believe. That said, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Smalls is a manifestation of Hi’s criminal side. A lot of people online suggest that Smalls is actually Hi’s father or brother, but that kind of enters the realm of fan theory. I just love the fact that it’s Woody Woodpecker, because it’s an explicit cartoon reference in a deliberately cartoony movie.

Stray Observations:

The Coens had originally planned to film The Hudsucker Proxy next, but the budget it would’ve required was too large for their studio. If you look closely at the jumpsuits worn at Hi’s job, you can see a “Hudsucker Industries” label.
I love the emergence of the Coen’s tendency to repeat a certain phrase or word over and over, like “sombitch” and Nathan Arizona’s incessant use of “butt”.
Is it just me, or is Gale and Evelle’s emergence from the mud outside of the prison eerily similar the spawning of the Uruk-hai in Lord of the Rings ?
Favorite moment: Ed feeling the need to blare her police siren while rushing to inform Hi that she’s “barren”.

Netflix Pick: Chicken Little

In 2005, then Pixar chairman Steve Jobs and Disney CEO Robert Iger were in the middle of negotiating over the extension of the deal in which Disney marketed and distributed Pixar’s films, an already impressive roster including Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and most recently 2004’s The Incredibles. The talks hinged on the release of Disney’s first CG animated film produced in-house: Chicken Little, a loose adaptation of the sky-is-falling children’s tale. If the film was successful, Disney could argue that they didn’t have to depend on Pixar for 3D content, giving them the upper hand in the negotiations.

Chicken Little made $40 million in its opening weekend, tying The Lion King for Disney Animation’s biggest opener. While it didn’t fare as well with critics, it struck some kind of chord with thirteen-year-old me and my brothers: we watched our DVD copy over and over again and quoted it endlessly. When I saw it pop up on Netflix, I had to check it out to see if it held up.

For the past five or so years, we’ve all gotten used to Disney Animation cranking out beautiful, well-made CG features. They’ve done this in large part by embracing the narrative and artistic sensibilities of Disney’s hand-drawn classics. Although they don’t adhere strictly to their source material, mega-hits like Tangled and Frozen are essentially earnest musical retellings of fairytales (Rapunzel and The Snow Queen, respectively).

Disney didn’t arrive at this strategy overnight. At the outset, they tried to replicate the success of the less traditional offerings from Dreamworks and Pixar. From its opening frames, Chicken Little makes a concerted effort to distance itself from Disney’s old fairytale tropes, mocking both the classic storybook opening introduction and the beginning of Lion King.

From there we’re thrown straight into the inciting incident, in which a diminutive high-school aged Chicken Little (Zach Braff) insists that he’s seen a stop sign shaped chunk of the sky on the ground, causing panic and destruction in the animal town of Oakey Oaks. Little’s embarrassed father Buck Cluck (Gary Marshall) plays it off as an innocent gaffe, but Little can’t quite live it down. This makes high school rough for him and his misfit pals Abbey Mallard (Joan Cusack, an Ugly Duckling), Runt of the Litter (a rotund piglet), and Fish Out of Water (a fish wearing a diving helmet full of water).

After an unlikely baseball victory puts Little back in his father’s and the town’s good graces, another chunk of sky crash-lands in his bedroom. Turns out it’s actually a lost cloaking panel from an extraterrestrial spacecraft. From there the story becomes a goofy take on a War of the Worlds style alien invasion plot.

Compared to the recent sweeping epics like Frozen or Moana and the serious social parable Zootopia, Chicken Little feels like a feature-length Saturday morning cartoon, but that’s what makes it so much fun. As in the best cartoons, the humor comes from the characters, who are much broader comedically than those in typical Disney films. Runt of the Litter, played by the always funny Steve Zahn, is a perpetual over-reactor with a penchant for classic pop music. The wonderfully expressive Fish out of Water is unfazed and delighted by everything that happens to him, up to and including being abducted by aliens. He gets some of the best one-off bits, including constructing an Empire State Building out of homework papers and re-enacting the climactic scene of King Kong while the other characters have a serious discussion. My favorite character as a kid was the snotty popular-girl antagonist Foxy Loxy, whose pre-dodgeball declaration “PUMP IT, PUMP IT, PUMP IT UP!” became a go-to celebratory mantra for me and my brothers. She’s still pretty damn funny.

In addition to the cartoony fun, Chicken Little actually has a decently affecting emotional core in the form of Chicken Little and Buck Cluck’s relationship arc. Countless animated films are about the importance of family, whether they be biological or those constructed from unlikely companions. This can often feel a little vague and tacked-on, but Chicken Little narrows the focus down to the relationship between a father and son, and the social expectations and anxieties that go along with it.

The CG doesn’t hold up nearly as well as Pixar movies from the same time: the textures, fur simulation, and fluid simulations are all clunky and primitive looking by comparison. Nearly all of the non-hero characters are variations on the same generic animal model. Some of these cookie-cutter characters even have speaking roles, like the announcer at the baseball game. But none of this really distracts from Chicken Little’s strengths in terms of humor and characters. It’s an awfully fun movie with a great heart.

Stray Observations:

Some clever foreshadowing — check out the pattern on Chicken Little’s bedspread.
Disney originally produced Chicken Little as a Silly Symphony short in 1943, an allegory about the dangers of believing in rumors during wartime. It’s pretty dark — Foxy Loxy literally reads passages from Mein Kampf. If you look at the title card, you can see the same hexagonal pattern seen in the 2005 movie. Either that’s a weird coincidence, or the Disney designers took some inspiration from it.
This movie definitely relies heavily on musical montages, but I’ll forgive it because they’re so much fun. I had that Barenaked Ladies song stuck in my head for days.
It’s pretty incredible to compare Chicken Little‘s primitive animal crowds animation to the crowds work in last year’s Zootopia, in which according to fxguide featured 64 different species and 800,000 different character models.
For some reason, Abbey Mallard’s reaction to the cloaking panel cracks me up every time: “Bizarre!”

The Coen Project Part 1: Blood Simple

I love the Coen Brothers. I can’t remember when exactly their films came into my life, but I think saw Oh Brother Where Art Thou first, probably in high school. Later on, The Big Lebowski and Fargo became two of my favorite movies ever. So far, I’ve seen twelve out of their seventeen features.

Despite spanning many genres, the Coens’ films all seem to have a little of everything that I love about movies: memorable characters, a weird sense of humor, occasional violence, great song choices, masterful visual storytelling. But I have a hard time articulating much else about why their movies are so great. My hope is that by revisiting (or watching for the first time) each film in order, I can work out the common threads and detect some patterns in the body of work, both cinematically and thematically.

I’ll start with a little background on the filmmakers themselves, just to give myself some context to talk about their first feature-length effort, Blood Simple. Joel and Ethan were born in a suburb of Minneapolis in 1954 and 1957, respectively, to Rena, an art historian, and Edward, an economist at the university of Minnesota. According to wikipedia, the boys had a Vivitar super 8 camera, and used to re-make the movies they saw on television together.

Joel Coen went to NYU film school, where he made a 30-minute thesis film, Soundings. This is the only professional film Joel ever made without Ethan, and based on the IMDB description, that’s probably for the best. Ethan went to Princeton, where he earned a degree in Philosophy. Joel got his start in the film industry as a production assistant in New York, eventually meeting director Sam Raimi while assisting the editor of Evil Dead. Ethan joined him after graduating, and their writing partnership began.

After finishing the script for Blood Simple, Joel and Ethan made a proof-of-concept trailer under the encouragement of Sam Raimi, with Bruce Campbell as a stand-in for the lead role (Campbell had starred in Evil Dead). They used the teaser to pitch to investors, eventually raising about half of a million dollars to put towards production, which began in the fall of 1982 in Texas.

The result is as self-assured a film debut as you could image. Blood Simple opens with the narration:

“The world is full of complainers. But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. Now I don’t care if you’re the pope of Rome, President of the United States, or Man of the Year. Something can always go wrong.”

It’s not only a great intro to this particular film, but also to the entire Coen-verse, in which more or less everything goes wrong all of the time.

I had previously thought of 2007’s No Country for Old Men as the Coens’ most purely serious piece, the end result of their progression as filmmakers who previously focused on comedy. This is likely because my point of reference for “early” Coens was Raising Arizona, one of their goofiest. But Blood Simple is the most similar to their Oscar-winning masterpiece than any other of their other films that I’ve seen. In reality, No Country is a return to where they began with Blood Simple: a dark, blood-drenched Southern drama.

Bartender Ray (John Getz) is having an affair with his boss’s young wife Abbey (Frances McDormand). The boss, Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) enlists a leisure suit-wearing private detective (M. Emmet Walsh), who finds evidence of the already suspected cheating. Enraged, Marty offers the P.I. ten thousand dollars to kill the pair. This sets off a chain reaction of violence, the characters making increasingly bad decisions out of greed, desperation, and panic. As Roger Ebert put it in his review, “one damned thing leads to another”.

The Coen-verse (I’m just gonna keep using this term) is full of stupid people doing stupid things and getting in way over their heads. Blood Simple is about the things that make us stupid, or in Texas terminology, “simple”: money, love, jealousy, violence.

Many of the Coens’ stories are tightly woven into to their locations: think Los Angeles in The Big Lebowski and the Upper Midwest in Fargo. Like No Country for Old Men, Blood Simple takes place in a Texas where you’re truly on your own: “Go ahead, complain, tell your neighbor, ask for help — watch him fly.” continues the opening voiceover. Law enforcement isn’t likely to show up either; the police are not seen or even mentioned.

Here’s an awesome video I found, explaining how the Coens use storyboards to plan their shots. It’s incredible how much discipline and craftsmanship these guys had right out of the gate in their careers.

Stray Observations:

This is also the debut of actress Frances McDormand, who married Joel in 1984 and would go on to star in five more Coen pictures, including her Oscar-winning turn in Fargo.
Apparently the Coens’ penchant for their characters throwing up started right at the beginning.
I’ll never think of that Four Tops song the same way again.

Christine vs. 80’s: Round 2

After several abortive attempts at a second entry in this ~series~, I am back with two more 80’s flicks. Both are considered to be cult classics, both lived up to their reputations, and both are available to rent on iTunes. Again, I’ll be rating them in terms of how much I enjoyed watching them and in terms of their general 80’s-ness.

LadyHawke

It’s a lady. It’s a hawk. It’s LadyHawke, the 1985 medieval comedy starring Matthew Broderick that you’ve never heard of. Full disclosure: I hate Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I think it’s an insufferable ode to nihilism and entitlement. Despite this deep flaw in my character, I still love some adorable ‘lil young Broderick, especially in War Games, so I was excited to jump into Ladyhawke.

Our young protagonist, Gaston (Broderick), is a small-time thief and recent dungeon escapee who runs into a mysterious black-clad knight named Navarre who carries around a hawk. Turns out the hawk is actually the lady Isabeau (Michelle Pfeiffer). Here’s the deal: Navarre and Isabeau were in love, but a jealous, evil bishop cursed them. Isabeau becomes a hawk during the day, and Navarre turns into a wolf at night, preventing the pair from being together in human form. What’s even more of a bummer is that they don’t retain their human minds when they animorph, nor do they remember any of it, which totally defeats the purpose of turning into an animal. They have to go find the bishop to break the curse and end up enlisting the help of Gaston.

The tone isn’t as strictly comedic as, say, The Princess Bride, which is probably the first movie you think of when you think medieval comedy. There are times when you almost think you’re watching a semi-serious period piece, but then the heavily synth-laden soundtrack kicks in. It makes no sense, but it’s kind of amazing.

As I expected, Broderick is his absurdly charming self, and gets all the best one-liners. I was not expecting this movie to have such pervasive religious themes and references: Gaston is in constant dialog with God, bargaining, promising, and explaining. The main antagonist is a disloyal bishop who has aligned himself with Satan. The seal of confession is a major plot point. There’s a Lent joke. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a comedy that engages with Catholicism so sincerely. Both the drama and humor rely on religion, but it’s never the butt of the joke, nor is it portrayed as inherently bad, despite the rotten clergyman.

Watchability: 4/5
80’s-ness: 3/5 for the soundtrack alone

The takeaway: “The truth is, sir, I talk to God all the time, and no offense, but He never mentioned you.”

Mad Max 2: Road Warrior

Like everyone who saw it, I was completely mesmerized by Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller’s revisitation of his earlier action trilogy starring Mel Gibson. I have been meaning to check out the original movies, but the first Mad Max was released in 1979, so obviously I had to skip ahead to Mad Max 2: Road Warrior for the sake of this very important journalistic endeavour. This didn’t end up being a problem, since Road Warrior starts out with a nice recap of prior events, setting up how Max came to be a lone wolf in the parched Australian post-apocalypse.

Narrative-wise, Road Warrior is a textbook old-school western. A group of settlers must find a way to defend themselves from the cadre of bad guys who are about to to ransack their home. Max is the hardened mercenary who reconnects with his humanity by selflessly lending his services to the community. Just sub out the climactic gun fight for a car chase laced with explosions and gore.

The pacing is slower and the effects are obviously less sophisticated, but Road Warrior is more similar to Fury Road than I expected, in terms of both visuals and tone. The manipulation of frame rates to create jerky, surreal motion is already present. There’s plenty of weird, colorful characters, including a boomerang-toting feral child. Although the dialog-to-action ratio is higher, Max is very much the same steady and reticent hero. One big difference is the hair. Shampoo is apparently much more readily available in the 2015 version of the world.

Watchability: 4/5

80’s-ness: 2/5

The takeaway: Not all boomerangs can be caught. Also, why don’t I have my own mini helicopter?

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.

Quick Takes – Arrival, Trolls

Arrival

I have been anticipating Arrival since I saw the trailer running before Ghostbusters this summer. It didn’t disappoint. Sicario director Denis Villaneuve’s adaptation of a short story by sci-fi author Ted Chiang is a thoughtful and mature genre piece that delivers on its premise in a way most similar films fail to do.

The world has been visited by twelve huge, Pringle-shaped monoliths, each in a different country. These “shells” open up every eighteen hours, allowing a small number of human beings to enter and have an audience with their occupants.

Arrival doesn’t waste any time building up to the reveal of the extraterrestrial visitors — it thrusts linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) into their presence before she even has time to decide against becoming involved. What the creatures look like, a mystery that so many films of the alien subgenre rely on for suspense, doesn’t really matter. What matters is what they have to say, and how they say it.

While the trigger-happy military brass look for the first excuse to open fire on the shells, Banks methodically works to understand the visitors and their intentions. What they learn from each other ultimately transforms them both.

trolls-movie-2016-trailer-poster

Trolls

The Trolls property is nothing more than a line of weird little poofy-haired dolls, so the creators at Dreamworks had a pretty blank slate to work with when developing it into a feature film. In the mythology of the movie, the tiny, colorful Trolls are menaced by the frankly much more troll-like Bergens, who must eat them in order to be happy. This is a refreshingly dark premise for a film geared towards children.

While the plot doesn’t take the setup to a very interesting or original conclusion, Trolls’ style makes it worth seeing, especially for well-versed animation fans. Both the humor and animation call to mind the goofy, left-field sensibilities of Cartoon Network’s current creative renaissance, including shows like Adventure Time, Regular Show, and Uncle Grandpa.

I was rendered a little skeptical by this film’s marketing campaign, which heavily featured characters with A-list celebrity voice talent singing pop songs. The musical numbers are a little hit-or-miss, but the best ones are cleverly chosen and accompanied by delightfully weird visuals; the Bergens’ stomping rendition of Gorillaz’ Clint Eastwood in a declaration of their Troll-starved misery is possibly one of my favorite movie moments of the year.