Ending 2015 With a Flurry of Films

I just wrote a comment on a blog that suggests that The Hateful Eight, a neo-spaghetti western with a damsel in need of rescue, is all about hate. Here's my response (You can see a longer analysis here, but there be spoilers):

I saw it twice now - I'm a big Tarantino fan. From a plot p.o.v. it's clearly tied to Django, but I think the style is more reminiscent of From Dusk to Dawn (which he wrote but didn't direct - so it doesn't count in his tally). He gave a brief interview in which he explained that the movie started as a continuation of Django, but then he decided to change the character to remove any hero in the film to ensure the film is devoid of a moral centre.  

I didn't pick up on hatred as a primary theme, however, despite the title. It felt more to me about a discussion of justice. They each have a personal moral code, although some waver more than others. There isn't one who stands out as the good guy in the bunch, but the film explores their reasoning behind their actions and allows each character's motives to be understood. The murders are either a means to enact a sense of justice or a mere necessity in furthering their own survival or that of a loved one (using the term 'love' loosely). When the original gang get to Minnie's, they don't kill the lot out of hatred - they feel no ill-will towards the women whose deaths are quick and relatively painless - but as a necessary step in their plot to save one of their own. Couldn't that be called an act of love?

Despite my second viewing, I didn't actually love the film as much as some of his others, well, all of his others. It's got some superb acting, and I agree with the hate-themed blogger that Jennifer Jason Leigh steals some of the pivotal scenes. Her quiet little grin speaks volumes. Many of the characters have likeable aspects and moments when they charm the viewer. But it's a movie about patience, and it's not just the characters who need it. It's a really long, claustrophobic film, for better or worse. I'd give it a B+, but do go see it.

The New Yorker links it to The Revenant. I had read much about the extremes Di Caprio had to endure to film this. He was excellent in it. There are some amazing, gut-wrenching scenes, but I didn't care enough about him to be fully engaged in the film. I wasn't emotionally affected by any of the deaths. It's just a brutal story of one man's quest for revenge. It's a beautifully shot film, but it's also really long! I'd give this one a B-. It's well done, but if it came to Netflix, I'd give it a pass.

Completely unrelated, except for the death of the main character, is The End of the Tour about one weekend in the life of writer David Foster Wallace. It's had some mixed reviews, but I was captivated. For most of the film, it's just two guys talking, mainly in a car, and reviewers have made the obvious connection to My Dinner with Andre. Eisenberg is pretty much exactly the same as he was in The Social Network: jittery and defensive. We kinda feel badly for him except he's pretty dickish. But Jason Segel was bang on. And what a stretch from anything else he's done! After the film, I obsessively watched a ton of interviews of Wallace, and Segel nailed his mannerisms, his dismissiveness, and his raw openness with others. It was similar to watching Will Ferrel in Stranger than Fiction. I'll give it a qualified A-. I think I liked it more than most people would.

The movie I really wanted to see, though, was Trumbo. And, unfortunately, it didn't live up to my expectations. I love old movies and old TV shows, and there's a marked difference in the way people move and interact in the films that can be seen in the talk shows and game shows of the period. Everyone has been schooled, from a young age, in walking and greeting and standing in a way that is lost on us now. I remember as a child being pulled upright in my desk by my hair by the teacher if I forgot my manners for a moment and dared to slouch. Sitting erect was mandatory as we listed to math drills - and that was 25 years after this film was set. That might go unnoticed except the film is otherwise seamlessly meshed with actual footage of the time. Bryan Cranston is solid, but, and I hate to say this, Louie CK's performance was jarring. It took me out of the film at every scene. I'm not sure if I've just seen too much of his stand-up to believe him in anything else, but he didn't have the same effect for me in American Hustle. I'll actually go so far as to suggest he ruined the film. It's a qualified C+. I might have just built up my prior expectations too much.

Spotlight was fantastic. A great cast. A suspenseful story. Excellent timing and story arc. It was excellent. Go see it. It's an A-.

Finally, Mommy, a Quebecois film about a mother with a son with extreme ADHD, was excellent. The actor who played the son, Antoine-Olivier Pilon, nailed the part. The behaviours were strikingly similar to those I've seen in my classroom over the years.  It's an exercise in extremes of mood taking us through back-to-back scenes of violence and joy repeatedly. This is no coming of age film. A-.

Left on my list:  The Big Short and Anomalisa. Neither are playing anywhere convenient, so I'll have to wait until I have the will to learn a new bus route.

On Intelligence

"If anyone thinks they're going to change the world by appealing to the morality of human beings, they're not going to get very far.  Human beings are not very moral." - Paul Watson

I watched Limitless and Eco-Pirate, both about reaching beyond typical human potential, then had a horrifying apocalyptical dream.  In the dream, everyone in the region had to meet in a large forested area on Tuesday.  I was curious about the purpose.  I thought it had something to do with the new food rationing system, something that made me very nervous because we were already so hungry.  But one woman, who was high up in whatever organization was running things, told me we were all going to kill ourselves at once to decrease the surplus population.  Our region had been chosen, and it was our duty to comply.  I spent the rest of the dream trying to organize my kids and their friends for an escape - and wondering how we had let everything go so wrong, how we had stopped being able to produce enough food so that mass suicide was the only option left.

I think I'm a little stressed-out about the state of the world.

We Can't Make It Out of Here Alive

I started the year off with two films about impending doom.

I woke up early to watch Melancholia, a film about a depressed woman who gets married a few weeks (months?) before another planet is possibly going to collide with Earth. Of course the depressive is the only confidently realistic one in the bunch.  Happy people are happy because of the illusions they foster.  It's a very stressful ride as we near the deadline and hope the planet will just pass by.  It's reminiscent of Last Night, a Don McKellar film about how a variety of people deal with the end of the world - mainly they search for connections, that one last kiss.  In this film, they scramble for hope.  But no matter how you slice it, death is imminent.  Life is short, enjoy it while it lasts!



I love Kirsten Dunst as she wavers between cute as a button and completely dead inside.  Her face and eyes change dramatically from scene to scene.  And I've loved Kiefer Sutherland since Bay Boy.  But most of the rest were irritating.  It's hard to tell if the people were all acting strangely because death is potentially at their doorstep, or if they were all just strange.  It wasn't a good strange, an interesting strange with a glimmer of brilliance.  It was just weird and mean.  But Dunst was captivating.

Every year on New Years Day I take my kids to a movie.  It's a tradition that's shifted over the years from the older ones to the youngest.  So today we treated ourselves to a cab to check out Happy Feet 2.  It's got some of the characters of the first one, but the mood is substantially darker.  At one point when it appeared that all was lost and hundreds of penguins were going to perish, my little one said, "I hate this movie!"  Yikes.

But of course all creatures large and small pitched in to save the day.  Whew!  



There are philosophical krill that make a few jokes about free will that don't work on any level except that they rhyme with krill.  And they argue about their purpose in life which also doesn't work because, well, they're krill.  But the animation was amazing.  The snow sparkled like diamonds, and the underwater scenes were a delight.  The singing and soundtrack was a lot of fun too.  I had to restrain myself from singing along to this...



And this...



And this....



And, maybe (?) this.

It's got that whole don't try to rise above your station thing going on.  Accept yourself and your limitations, like penguins can't fly and krill are at the bottom of the food chain, but don't be afraid of challenges along the way.  We can do anything if we all work together.

But the kiddies need a warning before hand that it's all going to be alright.

Don't we all.

Movies about Moms

It's bizarre how often I hunker down for a line up of random movies I found on Netflix or elsewhere, just random choices, and they turn out to have very similar themes or plots or something. The first time it happened, years ago, back when I went to rental stores for my movie options, I found Rachel Getting Married and The Tracey Fragments - both about a girl whose little brother died while under her care. That's a pretty specific plot line to randomly select twice in a row!

The two movies I just saw that were remarkably similar: Away We Go and Sunshine Cleaning. They both got mixed reviews. I loved them both.

They both featured a woman and her sister (to a lesser extent), and how they dealt with losing their mothers at a young age. Both movies made me miss my mom fiercely. They play opposite one another well with respect to relationships: Away We Go has a couple that seems to get on swimmingly. The guy adores his pregnant girlfriend. In Sunshine Cleaning, the main character can only get men to want her, not stay with her. Such is.

But where Sunshine Cleaning shines a little brighter, despite its harsh reviews, is in the attitudes both women have about fitting in with the cool kids in their respective lives. In SC, she figures out that she really doesn't want to hang out with snotty rich women anyway. She loves her weird job, and who cares if they have an issue with it! In AWG, she doesn't feel like a real adult, or anything more than a total mess-up, because her house isn't nice enough. She's not happy until she has a house that looks right - that looks like the type of house an adult (a wealthy adult, really) would have. I kept hoping she'd pull a "there's no place like home" and just add some insulation to her old place. But she doesn't. The stuff in her life is what develops her character.

A shame.

Canadian Content

I saw three movies lately that are all Canadian-ish. So, I'll be like the CBC and play up the Canadian content. (Very few spoilers - a bit in the very last sentence.)

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to try to be a good man and how to discern what that really means. Men don't have much in the way of really positive role models. To what extent can a guy successfully tease less, yell less, shove and kick less, without a strong alternative offered that doesn't come across as wimpy? Then I saw this beautiful film, Lars and the Real Girl. Don't avoid it because it's about a guy who dates a blow-up doll; I promise they don't have sex (she's religious).

(Ryan Gosling was born in London, Ontario, then grew up in Cornwall.)

The part of the film I want to download and play on a loop is when Gus, the older brother, is explaining to Lars how to know when you stop being a boy and actually start being a man:

"Well, it's not like you're one thing or the other, okay? There's still a kid inside but you grow up when you decide to do right, okay, and not what's right for you, what's right for everybody, even when it hurts.... Like, you know, like, you don't jerk people around, you know, and you don't cheat on your woman, and you take care of your family, you know, and you admit when you're wrong, or you try to, anyways. That's all I can think of, you know - it sound like it's easy and for some reason it's not."

The best part of this speech is he says it all as he's making dinner, then continues after he excuses himself to do some laundry when he hears the dryer buzz. Being a man is not about being the most powerful, being waited on, being the one who can take on all others or the one who gets to call all the shots. It's about being strong and courageous enough to do what's right. That's really hard work, and it's not acknowledged enough when someone rises to the challenge. But it's also not about being perfect. It's about trying your damnedest to get it right once in a while.

The next movie had a fascinating depiction of a not-uncommon triangulation between mother, son, and husband. Ages ago I bought the movie Spider out of a bargain bin. Then the other night, by chance, I decided to give it a try. I had just made it through Eastern Promises, which is brutal but very good, and I needed something to take my mind off it before going to bed. It was a Cronenberg double-bill. Spider, the main character, just got released from an "insane asylum" to a half-way house. As he scribbles in his journals, the film flashes back to his childhood to when his problems first started. As he hit puberty, he started to see his mom as a sexual being, and his dad as the cause of the change, the one who turned this woman from a doting mother into a "slut," actually believing his dad killed his mother then brought home an impostor to live with them.  It's all very Freudian.

(David Cronenberg was born and raised in Toronto.)

It's necessary to see people in three dimensions. I don't believe we can love in part - that we can decide we'll love only the bits we like about a person and hate the rest. We have to love the annoying or disturbing parts too. We all get to a point when we see our parents as human beings separate from us. It can be a difficult step, and many never quite make it.

Being a mother often includes being nurturing, caring, warm and loving. Being a woman often includes being sexual and sensuous, even enjoying a bit of hedonistic excess. But can we be accepted and loved when we're not in our desired role?  That's the trick.

Finally, I saw Juno. What a delight. I actually think the soundtrack with songs by Kimya Dawson really made the film. It's got a fantastic female lead, and the love interest is a guy who's reserved but not passive. He actually shares his feelings without looking ridiculous, and he refuses to be stepped on. In a nutshell, girl meets boy, girl ditches boy, girl makes an effort to get boy back again. But what hit home for me was how she got him back.

(Both Canadian!)

Relationships can't always survive hanging on to a few initial expressions of affection: the poems and letters, home-made trinkets, or even a three-month-salary ring.  We sometimes need on-going reminders of acceptance and concern; we need gestures.

Not much beats a mailbox full of tic-tacs.

Naked Apes Outta Control

We are too stupid to live.

It was just plain luck that a new movie came out, Sharkwater, AND the director/producer/cinematographer was going to be present for one night only to give a talk and answer questions. I could ask Rob Stewart questions all day long (and he’s from Ontario no less). I only got one in amidst a flurry of some really annoying questions that were clearly answered in the film. But he happily re-explained the film for everyone over and over. He's a hot environmentalist and a nice guy.

It’s a must-see movie. I recommend it over Shortbus even. But it’s not for the little ones. It’s got the kind of real-life violence I had to watch through the gaps between my fingers. Violence against sharks that is. And turtles and seals and other beautiful creatures of the ocean.

The survival of sharks means the survival of the whole food chain - and us. I can't explain it all here. Just go see the film already!

I knew that fishers (the gender-neutral term for fishermen?) tend to catch a lot of stuff they don’t want – I remember the anti-tuna years because too many dolphins were being caught in nets. But I love the analogy used in the movie after showing a 60-mile long stretch of bated hooks in the ocean. It’s like running a line of traps 60 miles long through the forest when you hope to catch, say, some deer (or perhaps a better analogy would be using these traps in the forest to catch cows and pigs). It would trap all sorts of unwanted animals – moose, rabbits, foxes, dogs, porcupines, bears, baby foxes (I love foxes), pregnant deer, etc. Thousands of animals would die a slow painful death, and be left there to rot.

Happens every day in the ocean.

Stewart told us it wasn’t the film he intended to make. He was going to make a pretty movie about the beauty of sharks. But he caught a ride to a Costa Rican island with a bunch of activists headed by Paul Watson, one of the founding members of Greenpeace. They all got charged after trying to stop a group of illegal shark-poachers, and the movie dramatically changed course.  Watson gave a perfect speech on the power of a small group of individuals to change the world.

Stewart says his next project will be creating a reality show with biologists and conservationists, and have them travel to different parts of the world with the challenge of affecting the environment in some way – and, at the same time, sleeping with each other and stabbing each other in the backs like any group of 15 people might do if kept in close quarters for long enough (he didn't say that last bit, but I could tell he was thinking it).

I can’t wait!