F9 – The Ninth Extension of the Extended Family of “The Fast and the Furious”
“F9” extends the high-octane fun of an East L.A. street racing crew introduced in the 2001 crowd-pleaser “The Fast and the Furious.” Cars race, cars crash, kin clash, kin bond. The collateral damage in escalating chase sequences is incalculable, yet no blood is visibly shed in this PG-13 fare.
Long-standing father issues and sibling rivalry fuel a screenplay by Daniel Casey and Justin Lin. Lin directs. It’s his fifth in the series. He is also listed as director of the upcoming tenth. A “chapter” is how Universal Pictures identifies each feature in what it publicizes as its “most-profitable and longest-running franchise.”
The studio booked free screenings of all eight prior chapters in the weeks leading up to the release of “F9.” A press release quotes Jim Orr, President of Domestic Theatrical Distribution: “The Fast films are all about family, and Universal wanted to find a way to thank our huge family of Fast fans around the country for their passion and loyalty over the past 20 years.”
Actor-producer Vin Diesel plays Dom Toretto, a father-figure leading a loyal band of outliers, if not outlaws. His character is among those originally created by Gary Scott Thompson. In supporting roles appear Michelle Rodriguez, Nathalie Emmanuel, Tyrese Gibson and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges.
In initial chapters the ever-expanding family-like crew makes deals with law enforcement to take down local bad guys. On missions further and further from Los Angeles County, Dom and his crew take on bigger and badder bad guys offering muscle car muscle for an off-the-books CIA guy.
Now they’re tasked “to stop a world-shattering plot,” as Universal promotes “F9. ”Unclear who to invoice for their services this time, since the deniably CIA-affiliated Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) and his jet were mysteriously intercepted over the Montequinto jungle near Mexico’s southern border during a prisoner transport of cyberterrorist Cipher (Charlize Theron), a carry-over character from the eighth chapter.
Techno terrorist treachery is the accelerator for more thriller vehicular action. Diesel– his last name fits Dom’s calling in the petro sector– ratchets up the gamut of vehicles from film to film. Airborne crashes abound in “F9.” The first occurs on a professional race track in 1989. They get bigger and bigger. The ultimate iteration is literally orbital. Amateur rocket scientists soup up a 1984 Pontiac Fiero to ram a satellite.
“As long as we obey the laws of physics we’ll be fine,” advises a wheelman not known for obeying traffic laws. Trash talk is the usual sidekick dialogue in downtime between action sequences. Add earnest cliches for lead characters like: “Is this who we are?” and “This isn’t who we are.” A clever touch— “No sign of Mr. Nobody”— is occasioned as Dom’s team searches the wreckage of his jet downed in “a deeply militarized zone.”
No body is found. Just half of a green military grade polyhedron that cues the first in a winning string of meta lines: “What the hell is this?” As much asked of the screenwriters who scripted that question, as asked of other characters in that scene.
It’s half of the thing they will devote the rest of the 145-minute running time to finding the other half of. Before the bad guys get their hands on both halves and upload the thing that then “reboots the world order.”
The good guys and bad guys must also find the secret key to trigger the thing, “a weapon so dangerous it should not exist for another half century.” Tech for hacking all the weapon systems of the world via satellite came from Project Aries. It’s a significant upgrade of God’s Eye, the global surveillance gizmo from the seventh and eighth chapters.
Quests to locate things with great powers is a trope found in any number of action thriller plots, as well as supernatural, horror and space fantasy films where evildoers and those who would undo them seek ancient curse-empowered things across the centuries or the cosmos. I imagine the screenwriters on “F9” tossed in this mindless device as self-satire.
Another example of playing the meta card is a line dissing the good guys: “You’re all the heroes in your own stories.” That’s why there are stories, right? Elsewhere there’s an extended exchange about which of three different “Star Wars” characters inspires bad guy Otto (Thue Ersted Rasmussen).
One of Dom’s crew does some deep thinking out loud about how it’s even possible he and his companions have survived so very many near-death experiences in their missions. We must be– can we possibly unbelievably truly be– “invincible”? Only a virtual survivor of screen action sequences could ask that. At least only in a franchise screenplay full of over-the-top action.
“F9” characters pose another existential question of mortality when Han (Sung Kang), supposedly killed in the third chapter, is now resurrected. “I’m still trying to figure out how you’re still alive,” asks one fictional character of the other. Flashback to a tragic
fiery crash on a Tokyo street. Handy explanation: “Mr. Nobody had a way of making things look real.” Implying you-know-who is coming back in the tenth film.
Political messaging is negligible in “F9” although no doubt Q-Anon cultists are already busy researching its covert signals. After all, three days before the release of “F9” Donald J. Trump released a statement promising more vote “information”: “It’s coming out FAST and FURIOUS. The 2020 Presidential Election was rigged!”
“The world is run by spoiled rich pricks,” opines Otto, speaking only of and for himself.
“Where’s My Roy Cohn?” Not in White House.
Where’s My Roy Cohn?
directed by Matt Tyrnauer
written by Tom Edge
scored by Lorne Balfe presented by Sony Pictures Classics
MPAA-rated PG-13 for thematic content, some sexual material and violent images.
running time: 97 minutes
by Bill Stamets
“Roy Cohn, Aide to McCarthy and Fiery Lawyer, Dies at 59” reads the obit in the New York Times on August 3, 1986. That’s the epitaph Roy Cohn predicts in a “60 Minutes” interview clip that Matt Tyrnauer places near the end of his diligently researched documentary “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” Although the insistently in-your-ear score by Lorne Balfe – whose credits include the documentary “Salinger,” the biopic “Churchill,” the action thriller “Mission: Impossible– Fallout” and the video game “Assassin’s Creed III”– may fit Cohn’s histrionics, it can at times over-amp this true crime chronicle.
On the day of the film’s release the New York Times ran an op-ed headlined “Roy Cohn Is How We Got Trump” with the sub-headline “From McCarthyism to the mob to Trump, Cohn enabled evil. Why did elites embrace him?”
Where did Tyrnauer– a Vanity Fair chronicler of elites– get the title for his latest documentary? From a January 4, 2018 New York Times article. “Obstruction Inquiry Shows Trump’s Struggle to Keep Grip on Russia Investigation” indicated: “the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama. Mr. Trump then asked, `Where’s My Roy Cohn?’ He was referring to his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986.”
“Joe McCarthy’s Roy Cohn tells it like it was” announced Esquire’s cover for an article by Cohen in February 1968. Trump’s current attorney general, William Barr, is not in Cohn’s league. To adapt a rehearsed 1988 riposte from a vice presidential debate in Omaha, a 2019 observer could taunt Trump’s attorney general William Barr: “I knew Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn was a friend of mine. Attorney General, you’re no Roy Cohn.” Nor is Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City.
Tyrnauer opens with a close-up of a tape recorder meter. In a voiceover writer Ken Auletta recalls interviewing Cohn for Esquire. We hear the original audio transcribed in subtitles. “What makes Roy Cohn tick?,” asks Auletta. “A, uh, love of a good fight, uh, a certain pleasure I derive from fighting against power and the establishment. I will take on a cause against practically anybody. I hate hypocrisy.” Cohn lived for irony– and to play the press– imply those last three words.
Esquire headlined its December 1978 cover story “Don’t Mess with Roy Cohn, The Legal Executioner.” Auletta there asserts: “He is a self-proclaimed `cynic’ who nevertheless calls many of his cases `causes.’”
Fights, fees and infamy drive this cynic more than any cause, even if vigorous anti- Communist endeavors launched Cohen’s career. Right out of Columbia’s law school, he started as a Special Assistant Attorney General and earned notoriety during the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. From there he became chief counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations run by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cohn’s contemporaries and later historians suspect he was more of a sinister opportunist than an ideologue. Ever the provocateur, he gave Auletta this quote: “I believe there’s going to be a Communist world someday.”
Cohn put “cause” in quotes when testifying before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice in Congress: “[B]ehind the Rosenberg agitation is the hand of the world Communist movement which ritualistically sparks `causes’ and uses well-meaning people with sincere beliefs to unknowingly further their ends.” Seven months before the Rosenbergs were executed by electrocution in 1953, an internal FBI document reported that an agent in its Manhattan office “said Roy Cohn, Special Assistant Attorney General has informed him that attorneys for the Rosenbergs are out to get Cohn. Cohn assumes that his office and home telephones are tapped and that his office contains hidden microphones. He asked for an FBI check.”
Drawing on family lore shared by three cousins, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” traces the birth of Cohn to brokering by the well-heeled, well-connected kin of “the ugliest girl in the Bronx,” as the mother of one cousin put it. “Nobody would marry Dora [Marcus] so they cut a deal with a young lawyer named Al Cohn. If he would married Dora they would make him a judge.” He did and they did.
Only child Roy received overmuch attention from his mother, who lived with him until her death in 1967. Roy’s father made him sit with his political and business cronies at the dinner table and the whip-smart lad imbibed their lessons. According to Auletta he “began speaking at political rallies at the age of nine.” Tyrnauer relates Cohn fixing a traffic ticket for a high school teacher. Cousin-by-marriage Ann Roiphe, interviewed in the film, once wrote that Cohn’s parents “thought he might grow up to be the first Jewish president of the United States.”
“Why would a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx, the son of a renowned liberal Democratic judge, choose to make his name by prosecuting the Rosenbergs and working for Joe McCarthy?,” asks Cohn in his posthumous autobiography edited by Sidney Zion. The press kit Sony Pictures Classics hands out for Tyrnauer’s film does not answer Cohn’s flippant query but makes a diagnosis: “Cohn’s tinderbox of fury and insecurity contributed to his raging need to control his world and administer pain on his adversaries. The irony of his life is that his key adversaries were representations of himself: Cohn was a homophobic, anti-Semitic member of the establishment.”
Contradictions inscribe Cohn’s identity. He participated in government anti-gay investigations, sneered at smears aimed at himself, and denied on his death bed he was gay and AIDS had anything to do with his participation in an experimental AZT drug trial arranged by his friends President and Nancy Reagan. Cohen spent his last four weeks in a National Institutes of Health clinical center in Bethesda, Maryland. Among the causes of his death listed on the death certificate: “dementia” and “underlying HTLV-3 infections.”
Al Pacino plays an ailing Cohn in an HBO film adapted from Tony Kushner’s stage production “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” James Woods plays him in “Citizen Cohn,” another HBO production. “Cohn loved to cast himself in the classic American role of the charismatic, maverick individualist,” writes Stephen J. Bottoms, a prof of contemporary theatre and performance.
“Roy was the definition of a self-hating Jew,” testifies his cousin Dave Marcus in Tyrnauer’s film. Marcus, formerly a Miami Herald reporter, contributed “Roy Cohn’s Last Days” to the August 1987 issue of Vanity Fair. He asked Cohn, his father’s cousin, about AIDS. “Roy said, his anger apparent even in his feeble voice. `It’s a smear campaign.’”
Cohn was honored by Jewish organizations in New York City. The American Jewish League Against Communism, Inc. presented a plaque saluting his efforts, at age 25, “in the cause of Americanism and for noteworthy devotion to the principles of Judaism” at the Hotel Astor on June 18, 1952. His after-dinner comments, placed in the Congressional Record, display bravado in laying bare his rhetorical devices.
In accepting this award I realize I must abide by the customary code for the recipient of an award in making his acceptance speech. He must disclaim any right to the award and try to modestly persuade the committee that they have the wrong man. But he must do so in such an intelligent and persuasive way that committee is more than ever intrigued into believing that they have acted wisely in making their selection.
A month later Jewish Life published “Letter to Roy M. Cohn” wherein Arthur D. Kahn slammed him as “a representative of the American Judenrat, which like the German Judenrat and the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat, hopes to buy security for itself… You will be remembered like the German and Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat members, if at all, along with the traitors, renegades, opportunists, sycophants… who are a disgrace in the history of every people.”
The Chicago Tribune defended Cohn by invoking a different moment of European history. “Purging the McCarthy Committee” editorialized on July 17, 1954: “To a legion of Americans who detest Communists, Roy Cohn could take on something of the quality of an American Dreyfus.” Towards the end of his life Cohn had an Irish wolfhound named Disraeli, presumably after Benjamin Disraeli. The two-time British prime minister was born into a Jewish home but converted to the Anglican Church at age 12 after his father’s death.
Cohn returned to the Hotel Astor on July 28, 1954 for another American Jewish League Against Communism gala. Senator Joseph McCarthy was the keynote speaker. The Catholic opinion weekly Commonweal picked up on a theme from the accusatory letter in Jewish Life, noting the event’s “indomitable godliness, the constantly repeated thought that Heaven had put a blanket security clearance on the activities of Joe and Roy (God bless them) and personally endorsed their crusade.”
Cohn attended a League luncheon the following year. Two years later he delivered a McCarthy eulogy at a League luncheon. News accounts identify Cohn as the League’s president at various times. One mentioned its listed address was the same as Cohn’s law firm.
In his 1968 Esquire cover story– with the snide headline “Believe me, this is the truth about the Army-McCarthy hearings. Honest”– Cohn describes letters he received from viewers of the televised proceedings: “One woman said candidly she had been a strong anti-Semite until she heard my testimony about my work and the fight against communism. Now she no longer believed that all Jews were Communists.” Besides “a number of marriage proposals,” he got “some business offers.”
Notoriety’s upside is marketing. Tyrnauer cues up a 1978 video from Tom Snyder’s television show. When the host quotes derogatory phrases from Auletta’s article, Cohn parries with his bad-mouthers: “The worse the adjectives the better it is for business… scare value.” Wording threats is lawyerly tradecraft. “We just tell the opposition Roy Cohn is representing me, and they get scared,” Cohn client Donald Trump once bragged. Auletta writes: “`The mere sending of a letter from Roy Cohn has saved us a lot of money,’ says builder Donald Trump.”
A month before the 2016 Republican National Convention nominated Trump, a New York Times profile noted: “One of Mr. Trump’s executives recalled that he kept an 8-by-10-inch photograph of Mr. Cohn in his office desk, pulling it out to intimidate recalcitrant contractors.”
Tyrnauer finds a television clip of Cohn showing off his photo with Trump: “Let me tell you about this. This is a picture of Donald and me in which he says `Roy is my greatest friend’… By the way, this picture hangs in my office directly next to a picture I treasure of the president and Mrs. Reagan, two of my favorites.” A 2017 Vanity Fair article titled “How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America” claims Cohn gushed, “Donald is my best friend” after throwing a birthday party for him. The byline is Marie Brenner’s. This co-producer of “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” makes a few appearances on camera.
Trump was just 23 when he introduced himself to Cohn at Le Club and asked what to do about Justice Department charges that Trump and his father Fred did not rent apartments to blacks. Cohn began representing Trump. “`I made Trump successful,’ he would occasionally boast, according to Mr. Marcus,” reports the New York Times under the headline “What Donald Trump Learned From Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand Man.” That article also quotes “Mr. Cohn’s lover… [who] spent a great deal of time with Mr. Trump”: “Donald was certainly his apprentice.”
Brenner speculates about Cohn’s regard for Trump in a transcript of a 2018 interview for a Frontline documentary: “He was his confidante. He was an ersatz father… who had a crush on Donald Trump as a young man.” She quotes Marcus in her 2017 piece: “`Donald fit the pattern of the hangers-on and the disciples around Roy. He was tall and blond and… frankly, über-Gentile. Something about Roy’s self-hating-Jewish persona drew him to fair-haired boys…and Donald was paying homage to Roy… I wondered then if Roy was attracted to him.’”
Although Brenner shared with Frontline that “Trump, in his early 30s, had a kind of adorable-monster quality,” his mentor is hardly coddled by a contemporary in Tyrnauer’s film: “Roy Cohn’s contempt for people, his contempt for the law was so evident on his face that if you were in his presence you knew you were in the presence of evil.” Less vituperatively, Life magazine in 1969 called him “a corporate manipulator of the first order” and “a masterful lobbyist… with but a single client: Roy Cohn.” Three years later a document in the FBI’s file on Cohen contained a handwritten note at the bottom of a typed letter: “[redacted] is like an [redacted] spewing forth its black fluid to hide his true character.” If the author of that simile is comparing Cohn to an octopus, he is using an anti-Semitic trope, knowingly or not.
Marcus writes that at his last New Years party Cohn told guests: ”I thank you all for coming, and with great confidence I look forward to seeing you next year. Since our president cannot run for office again, I want you all to know I am available in 1988.” The cunning mechanic of witch hunts during the red scare mentored a future president who rants against “witch hunts” without a clue what that means.
Cohen taught Trump to accuse his accusers in kind. During prolonged proceedings to disbar him, Cohn told the Washington Post in late 1985: “What McCarthy was accused of practicing is actually being practiced against me.” Among 37 character witnesses for Cohn was Trump: “If I summed it up in one word, I think the primary word I’d use is his loyalty.” One intimate tells Tyrnauer: “Roy was incredibly loyal to friends, and he was intensely loyal to Donald Trump. Trump took his legal business to somebody else when Roy had AIDS. He stopped seeing Roy and calling Roy and hanging out with Roy.” If loyalty is a measure, Trump manages to make Cohn look good.
Cohn once asked Trump for a hotel room for a lover dying with AIDS. Trump owned the Barbizon Plaza Hotel and that’s where the man would die. Trump billed Cohn. “He refused to pay,” reported the New York Times. The paper also learned Trump once gave Cohn a pair of diamond cuff links. Another lover of Cohn who survived him inherited them. He had Bulgari baubles assessed. “The diamonds turned out to be fakes.”
“Donald Trump did not respond to multiple requests to be interviewed for this film,” announces a final title in the documentary. Tyrnauer had better luck with access when making his documentaries “Valentino: The Last Emperor” and “Studio 54.”
Seven years before Cohn died he told the Washington Post: ”I won’t be saying ‘please forgive me’ on my deathbed.” An epitaph he could not foresee was sewn by an anonymous contributor to The Names Project AIDS memorial quilt: ”Roy Cohn Bully Coward Victim.”
©2019 Bill Stamets
The “Hustlers” Hustle
Hustlers
written and directed by Lorene Scafaria
acted by Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Stiles, Keke Palmer, Lili Reinhart, Lizzo, Mercedes Ruehl, Cardi B, Madeline Brewer, Trace Lysette, Mette Towley
produced by Elaine Goldsmith Thomas, Jessica Elbaum, Jennifer Lopez, Benny Medina, Will Ferrell, Adam McKay
distributed by STX Entertainment
MPAA-rated R for pervasive sexual material, drug content, language and nudity.
running time: 110 minutes
by Bill Stamets
New York City predators enjoy the company of their own kind in “Hustlers.” Promoted as a “comedy-drama,” this business saga backfires as a condescending satire of excuses that exotic dancers make for drugging Wall Street execs and maxing out their credit cards. I admit my take could be idiosyncratic: no one else at the preview screening laughed at lines I did.
Writer-director Lorene Scafaria opens with Destiny (Constance Wu, “Crazy Rich Asians,” ABC-TV’s “Fresh Off the Boat”) looking into a mirror. She’s backstage at a “strip club” where no one is seen stripping. The MPAA rates “Hustlers” R “for pervasive sexual material, drug content, language and nudity.” Only background players with no lines appear topless. Establishments of this sort are also called “gentlemen’s clubs” to stroke customers tossing cash at gyrating women in g-strings.
On the club sound system Janet Jackson speaks her intro to the song “Control”: “This is a story about control, my control/ Control of what I say, control of what I do/ And this time I’m gonna do it my way/ I hope you enjoy this as much as I do.” Fantasy framing segues into bombast usually heard in a boxing ring or wrestling arena. It’s time for “round one” so “make some noise for the new girl!” booms he club announcer, after informing the crowd, “We’re now accepting all major cards.” Destiny debuts. At the very end of the film it’s: “Time to go home gentlemen.”
The club’s longtime top-earner Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) mentors newcomer Destiny: “This game is rigged and it does not reward people who play by the rules. Stand in the corner or get in the ring.” Ramona strategizes: “We’ve got to start thinking like these Wall Street guys. You see what they did to this country? They stole from everybody… When they come into club, that’s stolen money. That’s what’s paying for their blow jobs. The fucking fire department’s retirement fund. Fuck these guys.” Figuratively, that is.
Scafaria takes Ramona’s side. “Hustlers”– to borrow words from its publicity material– entertains the bare minimum of skepticism about Ramona’s “ethically questionable tactics” as she targets “Wall Street kingpins” who treat her and Destiny as “playthings.”
Recruiting Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart), the sisterly crew launches a start-up in the service economy of after-hours Wall Street. Profile men in upscale bars to pick up and take to private backrooms at clubs. Stupefy prey with a dose of custom-blended MDMA and ketamine. Get pin numbers, passwords and even mothers’ maiden names. Bleed credit cards. Give a cut to the club. Victimlessly, insist the hustlers.
“They’d do this anyway,” rationalizes Ramona, when Destiny admits her doubts. “We’re just helping them do it. Nobody gets hurt.” She sees the big picture: “But everybody’s hustling. This city, this whole country, is a strip club. You’ve got people tossing the money, and people doing the dance.”
The filmmaker and her corporate backers are on the same page. STX Entertainment press notes relate: “Scafaria interjects that she includes herself in that category of ‘hustler.’ `I know what it’s like to hustle – to “dance” for the money to make these movies!’ she says, with a laugh.”
Ramona schools Destiny: “You’re just another deal to them and that’s all they are to you. It’s business and it’s a more honest transaction than anything else they did that day.” Buying into that ethos pays off. Destiny boasts “I made more money that year than a goddam brain surgeon.” and “I was CFO of my own fucking corporation.” The foursome celebrate their success: “We are a family now. A family with money!”
Deploying phrases from feminist theory, STX Entertainment places “the ladies” in “a broken system that has left them at the bottom of a patriarchal hierarchy that’s been in place since, well, forever.” The press notes add: “Constance Wu enthuses, ‘Because it wasn’t about the male gaze; it wasn’t about any gaze at all.” Yet costume designer Mitchell Travers makes a distinction: “the dancers’ wardrobe… was all about `the difference between the way women dress for each other, and the way they dress for the male gaze.’”
“Hustlers” is partly pitched as “social commentary.” Irony-free, a capitalist manufacturer of mass escapism, STX Entertainment, tells us, “these tycoons have long been making money off the broken dreams of everyday Americans, and, the ladies’ reason, it’s time to turn things around.” Lopez’s spin: “It’s an amorality story about the slippery slope of the hustle… It’s about right, wrong, and how far you’ll go to hustle for your dreams.”
Scafaria’s you-go-girl biz biopic defaults to the plot cliché of flash-forwards of Elizabeth (Julia Stiles) interviewing Destiny and Ramona for a magazine article. The audience is tipped off onscreen: “Inspired by a true story.” Specifics come in the end credits, sporting irregular capitalizations like Trump tweets: “Inspired by the Article Published by New York Magazine entitled `The Hustlers at Scores.’”
The resulting film “Hustlers” lacks the criminal mechanics, sociological detail and economic context of such recent films as the insider-angled “The Big Short.” Adam McKay directed that 2015 drama based on a 2010 nonfiction book by Michael Lewis. McKay then produced “Molly’s Game” in 2017, which is based on the 2014 memoir “Molly’s Game: The True Story of the 26-Year-Old Woman Behind the Most Exclusive, High-Stakes Underground Poker Game in the World.” Along with Lopez, he is a producer of “Hustlers.”
For realism Scafaria brought on both a Stripper Consultant and a Wall Street Consultant, and shot inside Show Palace, “New York’s #1 All Nude Gentleman’s Club.” Production designer Jane Musk must have gotten it right. “The club’s owner was so pleased with the changes, that he retained them after filming had wrapped at the site,” report the press notes. Plugging its “newly renovated space,” the web site of the Long Island City club says, “Show Palace’s majestic chandeliers, bronze railings, plush carpeting, and granite accents add to its atmosphere of grandeur.” New talent is welcome. “No experience? No problem!… Make $500-$1000 a shift (no kidding)… XXX Porn stars who have graced our stages include… STORMY DANIELS.” The New York Daily News reported on January 20, 2018: “Queens jiggle joint has been shuttered amid allegations of prostitution.”
To enhance pre-screening ambiance at the AMC River East 21, fake five dollar bills littered the hallway carpet where “Hustlers” invitees had posed for photos as if they were strippers showered with cash. Inside there was a pole by the screen, courtesy of a local business: “Fempress Fit is a pole dance, aerial, and fitness studio in Chicago with a variety of classes that emphasize the necessity of sisterhood and fun… We use movement to connect in a feminine, fit, fun, feisty way with the Empress inside all of us,” hypes its internet site. Besides the usual yoga and Pilates, classes include “pole fitness” and “sensual pole.” No stripping transpired before the lights came down. Nor after, as far as I could see.
Realist touches on the screen include a phone call between Destiny and Elizabeth wherein the last name of one of the hustled is beeped out twice. Earlier in the film, following two close-ups of a tape recorder, Destiny orders Elizabeth to turn it off. The sound abruptly drops out for rest of that scene. Another nice choice is ten selections of piano music by Frédéric Chopin that strike my ear as aptly tacky– classy tinkly and faux deluxe– in a Liberace way.
Dialogue on the soundtrack is pseudo-deep whenever characters moralize and psychologize. The one-liners employ similar lightweight wordplay. After the film’s equivalent of “The Hustlers at Scores” is published, Destiny phones Elizabeth: “So I was just reading the article again and maybe the reason why we did what we did was because hurt people hurt people.” That’s also what Greta Gerwig’s character says in Noah Baumbach’s 2010 film ‘’Greenberg.”
“Hurt people hurt people” is traced to a 1959 column in the Amarillo Globe-Times. An elementary school principal said it at a parents meeting. In 1971 the same columnist who quoted the educator ran another turn of phrase by him: “Sometimes a man doesn’t want his way– he just wants his say.”
The four-word truism is found in a second-hand Oprah tweet and a song by Two Feat. It occurs in the titles of studies on female bullying and post traumatic stress disorder. It’s invoked in “Bullying and Being Bullied: To What Extent Are Bullies Also Victims?” Jessica Pressler, who wrote the “inspired by” source article in New York Magazine, reports Roselyn Keo, the woman who inspired Destiny’s character, was enrolled in an Introduction to Psychology course when hustling.
The producers of “Hustlers” thank Keo and her co-hustler Karina Pascucci in the end credits. “Pascucci is working on her associate’s degree in criminal psychology,” reported ABC-TV on the day “Hustlers” opened. The banner “The Hustlers” aired and streamer with all the “Hustler”-related segments the company broadcast on Good Morning America, 20/20 and Nightline.
Samantha Barbash, the hustler inspiring the character played by Lopez, is not thanked by STX Entertainment. She declined an interview with ABC but asked them to tell Keo: “Make the money, don’t let the money make you.” Echoing passages in the script, the press notes repeat the phrasing style: “Destiny’s most important lesson is… you must hustle or be hustled.”
On April 3, 2019 Barbash complained about Lopez to the New York Post: “It’s my story she’s making money off of… If she wants to play me, then she should have gotten the real story… They’re going off a false story… This is a living nightmare so now I’m going to have to do a lawsuit. I’m getting a gag order.”
Irony is not a thing in “Hustlers.” Here’s another one it omits. The year before Pressler wrote “The Hustlers at Scores” for New York Magazine, she contributed the 12th best in the magazine’s list of “Reasons to Love New York” issue: “Because a Stuyvesant Senior Made $72 Million Trading Stocks on His Lunch Break.” Afterwards the Huffington Post posted: “Bloomberg News rescinded a job offer this week to New York magazine writer Jessica Pressler after her profile of a teenage stock-picking multi-millionaire proved to be a hoax… The student had lied about making tens of millions of dollars on Wall Street.”
Destiny tells Elizabeth in their third interview: “You don’t have to believe me. I’m used to people not believing me.” That scene could be inspired by this parenthetical aside in Pressler’s original December 28, 2015 article: “(I say `according to Rosie’… because Rosie is an admitted liar with multiple pending felony charges. Still, she is occasionally prone to offering up indisputable truths. `American culture is a little fucked up,’ she mused. `You know?’)”
Hustlers always hustling. That’s an excuse, not a critique, in “Hustlers.”
©2019 Bill Stamets
“Angel Has Fallen” – Protecting a president from a traitor and a profiteer
Angel Has Fallen
directed by Ric Roman Waugh
written by Robert Mark Kamen and Matt Cook & Ric Roman Waugh
story by Creighton Rothenberger & Katrin Benedikt, based on characters created by Creighton Rothenberger & Katrin Benedikt.
acted by Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Danny Huston, Jada Pinkett Smith, Lance Reddick, Tim Blake Nelson, Piper Perabo, Nick Nolte
MPAA-rated R for violence and language throughout.
running time 114 minutes
by Bill Stamets
United States Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) in the Presidential Protection Division goes to work and before he gets home– he puts in a lot of overtime– SUVs, semis, motorcycles, boats and helicopters will crash, burn or blow up; landmarks, monuments and buildings will topple in clouds of white dust and smoke like the collapsing World Trade Center; and public servants, private contractors, arms dealers, terrorists and civilians will die not of natural causes.
Gerard Butler stars as Mike Banning in “Olympus Has Fallen” (2013), “London Has Fallen” (2016) and now “Angel Has Fallen.” Butler is a producer on all three films, directed by three different directors. Banning heroically protects the president in all three president-in-peril installments. Duty calls for stabbing bad guys through their skulls.
Above par action-thriller product directed Ric Roman Waugh, “Angel Has Fallen” gets into the head of Banning amidst the mayhem. Three different characters will tell him things they see in his eyes. Waugh directed “That Which I Love Destroys Me” about traumatized Iraq vets. Reworded, the title of that 2015 documentary turns into a repeated line in “Angel Has Fallen” but no one will will say PTSD out loud.
Workplace stressors have scarred more than Banning’s spinal cord. His doctor warns: “You’re a disaster waiting to happen.” He has an enemy within. So does the Oval Office.
Banning’s nemesis in “Olympus Has Fallen” was a North Korean terrorist embedded in the inner circle of South Korea’s prime minister. In “London Has Fallen” it was a terrorist in Yemen. Both targeted Banning’s protectee. Now the target is President Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman).
Trumbull was Speaker of the House in 2013 and Vice President in 2016. Banning’s own career path: White House detail, transferred to U. S. Treasury, reassigned back to the White House, and now he is in line for Director of Secret Service. When that doctor– the fourth he’s seen in the past six months for migraines, dizzy spells and insomnia– asks his about his “line of work” Banning lies, “Computer sales.”
Banning is a target too. Hunted by bad guys– and by good guys this time. “The Hero Becomes The Fugitive,” states the film’s poster. The first words we hear are: “Target is on the move.” Outnumbered by heavily armed operatives, Banning takes violent evasive measures inside an abandoned industrial building. As he exits a paint ball pellet hits his upper chest and terminates a highly realistic training exercise. “Fuck! In the fucking heart. I think I’m fucking dead,” Banning shouts with a grin to former army buddy Wade Jennings (Danny Huston).
Jennings is a civilian in the private sector now. He runs Salient Global on a 5,000-acre site in Virginia and desperately needs contracts from the Department of Defense. Typically cast as a disloyal weasel, Huston from the get-go looks like bad news for our designated good guy. Of course one of the first lines Huston’s character delivers to Butler’s character is: “As they say, looks can be deceiving.” He will repeat variants of that truism. The transparency is unsubtle.
“You can come up with any scenario you want here and put it to the test,” Jennings boasts to Banning. That hunt in the opening scene turns out to be a run-through for an interstate chase with real bullets that takes up most of the 114-minute running time with Banning on the run and Trumbull in a hospital.
Jennings and his ex-military minions deploy killer drones in an attempt to assassinate the president during a fishing trip on Banning’s watch. Salient’s terrifying A.I. swarm is a thrill to watch in action. Because the bad guys in the “Fallen” franchise always have the coolest tech. Banning at times must get by with just his knife, plus guns borrowed from dead guys.
Each black-winged drone is outfitted with long-range lensed cameras, facial recognition software and personnel dossiers, including head shots, of the entire Secret Service team on duty. Precision targeting ensues. Banning is purposely spared. He must survive for the Salient scenario to work.
Evidence planted in advance by Jennings soon enough surfaces to incriminate the president’s trusted agent as a treasonous insider colluding with the Kremlin. Jennings earlier placed $10 million in an offshore account he secretly created in Banning’s name. Digital breadcrumbs lead “to a state-owned bank in Moscow.” Another one of those looks designed to deceive. Banning is framed as a sell-out.
“President Trumbull’s top guardian angel has fallen tonight,” intones a TV newscaster, helping us get the film’s title. (“Angel” was the classified callsign for Air Force One when President Bush was in the air on 9/11.) The “Angel Has Fallen” screenplay outsources a lot of plot exposition to TV clips with the obligatory Breaking News chyron. In “Olympus Has Fallen” we overheard an emergency transmission tipping us that “Olympus” was the Secret Service code name for the White House. Three months after its 2013 release, another action-thriller with the same setting and set-up hit theaters; its title was “White House Down.”
“Angel Has Fallen” screenwriters Robert Mark Kamen, Matt Cook and Waugh ground more of their plot in the beltway than geopolitics. In the two prior “Fallen” films screenwriters Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt made up names for heads of state– South Korea, U.K., Canada, France Italy, Japan– except for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was named once but not seen in “London Has Fallen.” Creighton and Benedikt, who share a “story by” credit in “Angel Has Fallen,” also invented an arch-terrorist for “London Has Fallen.” Onscreen text identified his location as Sana’a, Yemen.
U.S. President Donald Trump is out of the picture. “Angel Has Fallen” appears to digitally erase him from news video appearing to show a G20 group photo op wherein Morgan Freeman’s character appears to stand near Putin. As Jennings likes to say, “looks can be deceiving.” The end credits of “Angel Has Fallen” name the networks– CNN, FOX, MSNBC– of TV reporters who are played by actors.
A more telling real world reference is when Jennings cites government cutbacks that affected his company “after the Blackwater shit happened.” Blackwater USA was a Salient-like private military and security contractor for the Department of Defense, Department of State, and Central Intelligence Agency. “We became the ultimate tool in the war on terror, pushing a thousand contractors into Iraq and hundreds more into Afghanistan,” boasted former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince in his 2013 book with Davin Coburn.
Prince– his sister Betsy DeVos is Trump’s Secretary of Education– launched the company in 1998 on a 6,000 acre site in North Carolina near the Virginia border. On October 12, 2002 terrorists hit the U.S.S. Cole in Aden, Yemen. That got Blackwater a $35.7 million contract for “force protection training” of U.S. Navy sailors. Between 2004 and 2007 Blackwater suffered and inflicted casualties in Baghdad, Fallujah and Najaf. Since then the controversial company changed its name twice.
When Jennings mentions “the Blackwater shit” he means things like Blackwater killing 17 civilians in Nisour Square on September 16, 2007. The Independent of London called it “Baghdad’s `Bloody Sunday’” in a September 21 headline. “I had to investigate some of Salient’s messes when I was over in Iraq,” notes FBI Agent Thompson (Jada Pinkett Smith), who confronts Jennings in the course of investigating the Trumbull assassination attempt.
The most topical lines in “Angel Has Fallen” come from Vice President Kirby (Tim Blake Nelson), who is sworn in as acting President and has no first name for some reason. Claiming that suspect Banning had “full support of top levels of the Russian government,” Kirby warns if the U.S. takes no action against the Russians “they’ll remain ambiguous as to their involvement so we look weak just like with their election tampering.” To not look weak, Kirby continues: “ I have just signed an executive order calling for the use of a bold and strong private contractor force to be employed in our strategy.” Salient will get what we can presume is a big no-bid contract. There’s a hostile take-over inside the White House.
“Fallen” film evildoers are variously motivated by profit, revenge and lastly ideology.
In “Olympus” Kang (Rick Yune) told kidnapped U.S. President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart): “I’m working for justice, to give millions of starving men, women, and children a chance at more than just subsistence. To end the civil war your country interrupted so long ago.” For revenge he hacked warheads in U.S. missile silos. “Your country will be a cold dark nuclear wasteland. Now too America shall know suffering and famine,” he predicted.
“London” opens with a newscaster briefing us: “International security experts say the Barkawi family is now instigating violence in remote capitals to foster instability and thus fuel massive arms sales around the globe.” Vice President Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) explained: “This man is responsible for more deaths than the plague. Sells arms to every failed state in the world. He has a vast array of connections. Terrorists, mercenaries, corporations.” G-8 leaders authorized a U.S. drone strike targeting Aamir Barkawi (Alon Aboutboul) at his daughter’s wedding. He survived. So did his two sons. The bride did not. Barkawi sought revenge.
“Angel” includes a White House press conference before Trumbull goes fishing. Reporters ask: “Mr President, with Russia continuing to extend its military well beyond its borders what is your strategy from stopping them from reforming the old Soviet Union?” and “There are rumors in the White House that your new foreign policy will broaden the use of private contractors to help bolster American troops who remain scattered around the globe. Is there any truth to that?” Pissed at the leak underlying the latter question, Trumbull tersely vents, “I’m tired, sick and tired, of a handful of people profiting from our military” and walks out.
Not that anyone invested in “Angel Has Fallen” is anti-profit. Lionsgate press notes quote producer Butler: “[W]e wanted to put in as many epic sequences as we could possibly fit. That’s exactly what they accomplished. Olympus and London each had about 13 action sequences. Here we’ve upped that to 23 sequences, which is a lot. It never stops. And they worked to make sure the audience feels every bump and explosion.”
Banning is not into nuancing international policy. In the first two films he told overseas bad guys to go back to the United People’s Front of Who-Gives-a-Fuck and Fuckheadistan, respectively. In “Angel Has Fallen” the battered agent turns inward, heading into a theta wave state at a Zero Gravity Center to get “unfucked.”
©2019 Bill Stamets
Capital sacrifice is family value in “Ready or Not,” a satirical splatter
Ready or Not
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett
written by Guy Busick & Ryan Murphy
acted by Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O’Brien, Henry Czerny, Andie MacDowell, Nicky Guadagni, Melanie Scrofano, Kristian Bruun, Elyse Levesque, John Ralston.
running time: 95 minutes
MPAA-rated R for violence, bloody images, language throughout, and some drug use.
by Bill Stamets
Donald Trump and Fox News apparently feel America is ready for Fox Searchlight’s “Ready or Not”– but not ready for NBC Universal’s “The Hunt.” Both films show rich Americans hunting other Americans.
On August 9 Trump had seen neither film when he attacked “Liberal Hollywood” in a two-part Tweet: “The movie coming out is made in order….” “ ….to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence, and then try to blame others.”
Trump never named “the movie coming out” but White House watchers guess he watched Fox TV coverage of the postponed release of “The Hunt.” “Ready or Not” comes out today with no alarms about screen violence. Yet Trump– and his informants at Fox News– did not imagine that “Ready or Not” is in fact an attack on fiscal evil underlying his three-generation family wealth?
“Ready or Not” begins on a stormy night in a big old house as a well-armed family in evening clothes hunts down a bloodied man scared witless. Two little boys witness this gory hide-and-seek played by grown-ups upholding the Le Domas family tradition that stipulates a game must be played at midnight on every wedding day. Or else. The game’s loser wed into this weird family earlier that day.
Thirty years later one of those brothers, Alex (Mark O’Brien), weds Grace (Samara Weaving) at the Le Domas mansion. Raised by foster parents belonging to a much lower tax bracket, Grace fears her new in-laws hate her. “Your family is richer than God,” she tells to Alex.
They are getting frisky in bed when Aunt Helene (Nicky Guadagni) interrupts to instruct the new member of the Le Domas family she must play a game. If Grace signed a pre-nuptial agreement, it no doubt omitted a line she hears once she is in play: “When you marry into this family you have to play a game and if you don’t you die. You have to play.”
Grace draws a card from an odd wooden box. It’s for Hide-and-Seek. An unseen hand drops the needle on vintage vinyl and the cheery creepy “The Hide and Seek Song” echoes throughout the house: “Run, run, run! Time to run and hide!… Tick tick tock, Are you ready or not?” Grace runs indeed in her yellow Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers. Tears her wedding dress again and again. It gets bloody. She does too.
“Ready or Not” is the second feature by directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who made the 2014 horror-thriller “Devil’s Due.” Both begin with a wedding. Writers Guy Busick and Ryan Murphy offer imperiled-woman-survivor-without-a-savior-chase fun with cynical flair.
First touch is cuing Beethoven’s Ninth as bridal fanfare. Then we glimpse the first of Aunt Helene’s malevolent glares at Grace. Seated in the front row for the vows, Helene wears a black suit accessorized with morbid purple. Observe her severely coiffed silver hair and chiseled sunken-cheeked mien. This sight gag package can steal a scene. She icily greets a wedding guest: “Brown-haired niece, you continue to exist.”
The script eviscerates the family values of the Le Domas clan. One accuses Alex, I think: “Thanks to you now we’re all now fucking fucked.” Grace deploys “fuck” with a winning array of line readings, including this for less-than-forthcoming Alex: “Fuck your fucking family!” At first they are merely “your moderately fucked-up family.”
Alex’s kin are comically monstrous. Each gets at least one sympathetic moment that belies caricature. Even the Le Domas with a pronounced incompetence in killing, as two luckless lookalike nannies discover. “Every character has a very fun death,” states executive producer Tara Farney in the film’s production notes. “In the days we shot those scenes, everyone’s getting bloody and there’s blood everywhere. It’s absolutely disgusting… Everyone was having a lot of fun with it.”
The family’s money and its curse are intertwined in Le Domas lore about a Civil War card game entrepreneur and his mysterious investor who exacts sacrificial dividends from descendants. One of whom yells at the painting of the ancestor for his artless dealmaking: “You couldn’t have negotiated better terms? Talked him down on the whole eradication clause?”
“Fucking rich people!” screams Grace after failing to get help from a sports car speeding by her on a dark road outside the estate. That got a laugh at the screening I went to. Ditto the last line of her new father-in-law Tony (Henry Czerny): “I played by the rules and I am in control.” Supernatural payback for skipping a payment ensues.
“It’s true what they say,” admits Grace’s new brother-in-law Daniel (Adam Brody). “The rich really are different.” There’s a little irony there but none at all when he judges himself and his relatives: “we all deserve to die.” Maybe excepting his new sister-in-law. She delivers her last line when an off-screen paramedic asks, “Jesus Christ, what happened to you?”
“In-laws,” answers Grace.
“Ready or Not” might not be what Trump had in mind when he recently told reporters: “What they’re doing with the kind of movies that they’re putting out is actually very dangerous to our country. What Hollywood is doing is a tremendous disservice to our country… They treat conservatives, Republicans totally different than they treat others. And they can’t do that.”
There’s no clue how many members of the Le Domas family voted for Trump, but I can imagine him tweeting or retweeting a defense of them as victims of the “Liberal Elite” in Hollywood. Would he endorse the outlawing of a 1913 film by the Ohio film commission, as reported in Motion Picture World?: “The picture was rejected because the censor thought it wrong to satirize the hypocritical rich and to reflect critically upon one of the evils of the existing social order.”
Trump might even buy the next sentence repurposed for the Putin era: “This is the Russian way of dealing with mediums of expression.”
©2019 Bill Stamets
“Men in Black International” neuralizes as usual, not a problematizer
“Men in Black International”
directed by F. Gary Gray
written by Art Marcum & Matt Holloway
based on the Malibu Comic by Lowell Cunningham
acted by Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, Rebecca Ferguson, Kumail Nanjiani, Rafe Spall, Laurent Bourgeois and Larry Bourgeois
rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for sci-fi action, some language and suggestive material
running time: 115 minutes
by Bill Stamets
“Men in Black International” is a workplace romance about attractive co-workers in cool black suits earning promotions. Everything else going on in the fourth “Men in Black” iteration fails a performance review. Most notable misappropriation of franchise resources: in the time of Trump, omitting topical allusions to alien immigration, the defining premise of this sci-fi comic action series from Columbia Pictures that’s based on a 1990 three-issue comic book series by Lowell Cunningham.
Agent M (Tessa Thompson) and Agent H (Chris Hemsworth) will prove their value to their employer while slowly falling a little bit in love. Their banter pits “logic” against “passion.” The one who read “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking at age six insists: “Physical attraction is nothing more than chemical reactions in your brain. Can’t trust them. They’re not real.” The other counters: “Isn’t the whole universe a chemical reaction? Pretty sure you can trust that. Feels pretty real.” Spoiler: there’s no kiss.
The twosome works for Agent High T (Liam Neeson), who works for Agent O (Emma Thompson). Men in Black (branded MiB) is “the best kept secret in the galaxy,” shares a secret-keeper in an earlier episode. This off-the-books bureau “licenses, monitors and polices alien activity on the planet earth.” Recruits are instructed: “You are no longer part of the system. You are above the system, over it, beyond it. We’re ‘them,’ we’re ‘they.’ We are the Men in Black.” Do not look for any deep state quips, though, in 2019 dialogue.
The original “Men in Black” in 1997 opens with a U.S. immigration border patrol pulling over a truckload of Mexicans– plus one alien in disguise who does not speak Spanish. Men in Black in a black sedan drive up. Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones)– a key character in three MiB films and now MIA– lets the human immigrants into the U.S., overriding border authorities. Then he blasts the non-terrestrial trespasser into goo.
A treat in those films– all directed by Barry Sonnenfeld– is the detailing of intergalactic travelers passing through MiB customs, New Yorkers mostly. Dossiers out celeb aliens among us: Newt Gingrich, Sylvester Stallone, Dennis Rodman, among others under MiB surveillance. This time we get blink-and-miss-it headshots of Elon Musk and Jussie Smollett, I think. In one film Michael Jackson plays himself as an alien applying for work at MiB through its alien affirmative action program.
The first three Men in Black films are scattershot-scripted by different screenwriters. Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (“Iron Man,” “Transformers: The Last Knight”) write “Men in Black International” without winning touches. The plot is like its precedents: a new agent helps save Earth amidst intergalactic alien-on-alien intrigue involving a planet-deleting super-weapon.
The titular internationalizing leads to off-putting lines like the film’s very first, delivered by a Londoner at the Eiffel Tower: “God do I hate Paris.” That city was the site of “the first alien migration.” Other locations are ill-served. Director F. Gary Gray is derivative in rote chases through Marrakech markets. The old-fashioned Orientalism on view is worse than passé.
Except for Agent M, key characters– earthly or alien– are not who he, she or it appear to be. Bogus hints attempt to augment a plot about a MiB mole colluding with enemy aliens acquiring armaments. A long-running schtick throughout the series is how resourcefully aliens disguise themselves to pass for humans.
Apropos of appearances, the signature suits worn by the men and women in black are stellar, thanks to design collaborators Penny Rose and Paul Smith. The same cannot be said for the fetishy display arrays of silly silvery ray guns.
Other series motifs are twins. This time it’s literally Les Twins, French brothers Laurent and Larry Bourgeois. Their agenda– incroyable!– is not what it appears, until one throwaway line in the last reel clarifies things. And once more characters repeat inane mantras: “Trust your gut” and “Always remember, the universe has a way of leading you to where you’re supposed to be a place at the moment you’re supposed to be there.”
Wrongheaded as it is to fault a film for not being what it is not, I can wish “Men in Black International” entertained the nerve to make light– or dark– of border security and travel bans in a fictional U.S. welcoming “intergalactic refugees, a zone for creatures without a planet.”
Despite a progressive-sounding premise, there’s xenophobic profiling too. “Protecting the earth from the scum of the universe” is the agency motto endorsed by all four films. The Blu-ray of the third MiB film includes a first-person shooter game as an extra: “How good are you at spotting an alien? Step into the practice range and take out all the alien scum. Hitting alien targets score points and earns medals– just make sure you don’t hit any fellow agents or friends.”
Men in Black is an uber-deep agency with no Congressional oversight that routinely erases memories of civilians who happen to witness its agents exiling, detaining or executing aliens. That erasing is done with a neuralyzer, a gift from “some friends out of town.” This alien tech lets MiB agents implant cover stories in our minds to fill in zapped gaps. Fake news bypassing the internet. The Statue of Liberty’s torch is a mega-sized neuralyzer. Before using their pen-sized models, agents don special dark glasses that keep their own memory intact. At retirement, HR erases agents’ memories of their entire MiB careers.
A recurring scorn for protectees furnishes an opportunity for cynical diversion. The world cannot not take the truth, argues an agent in the first scene of the first film: “Damn, what a gullible breed.”
Unlike their Earth-saving counterparts in the Avengers, Transformers and X-Men comics-based film franchises, the Men in Black are yet to be problematized for their modus operandi. Transparency is neuralyzed.
©2019 Bill Stamets
Fear errant DNA in “Annihilation” and “Rampage”
by Bill Stamets
Biophobia vivifies “Annihilation” and “Rampage,” two films imagining altered DNA imperiling our planet. Unlike in all kinds of ways, these U.S. features happen to coincide in their disquiet. Both are symptomatic of pop cultural panic about the body.
The body in question belongs to a character bonded to another who will take enormous risks to accost, with the intent to cure, a monstrous anomaly. Other bodies– outsized mutants– assume fearsome secondary roles in the storylines: a bear and an alligator in one; a wolf and crocodile in the other. There’s an albino body in each film.
“Annihilation,” starring Natalie Portman, ends on an opaquely pessimistic note. “Rampage” stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who saves the day in high spirits.
Things in flames streak through the upper atmosphere and hit the United States in initial scenes of the two films. Their last scenes are less alike. In “Annihilation” a wife embraces her husband, whose multiple organ failure is in turnaround. In “Rampage” an orphaned silverback gorilla makes what the MPAA flags as a “crude gesture” (for coitus) to embarrass his adoptive dad in front of his budding love interest.
The two narratives observe research scientists with prior military careers using their expertise to intervene in a biological crisis. There is a highly secretive U.S. government operation in both scenarios.
Portman plays biologist Lena in “Annihilation,” written and directed by Alex Garland (“ex machina,” “28 Days Later”). Distributed by Paramount Pictures, this R-rated science fiction drama is based on the 2014 novel by Jeff VanderMeer. There her character is identified only as The Biologist. For seven years Lena served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan or Iraq, judging from a photo of her and her husband in uniform. She got her Ph.D. and now teaches cellular genetics in the medical school of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Johnson plays primatologist Davis Okoye in “Rampage,” directed by Brad Peyton (“San Andreas”). This PG-13 “action adventure” based on a 1986 arcade game is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. Davis is on staff at the San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary. His earlier service record in Army Special Forces is much redacted. Although his academic background is skipped by screenwriters Carlton Cuse (“San Andreas”), Ryan Engle, Ryan J. Condal and Adam Sztykiel, we hear his new ally has a “Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford with a specialty in conservation genetics.”
Opening titles for “Rampage” read: “In 1993, a breakthrough new technology, known as CRISPR, gave scientists a path to treat incurable diseases through genetic editing. In 2016, due to its potential for misuse, the U.S. Intelligence Community designated genetic editing a `Weapon of Mass Destruction and Proliferation.’” Cut to Athena 1, a space station run by Wyden Technologies. Screams, alarms, red lights, sparks, flames and smoke. Ground control cannot believe a CRISPR experiment could be to blame: “Test subject is a rat.” The only scientist left alive up there radios back: “Not any more.”
Three canisters of illegal gene-editing goo fall to earth in California, Florida and Wyoming. In all three states a random animal near impact undergoes a DNA hack. A gorilla, a crocodile and a wolf start to grow “exponentially larger and fiercer,” just like the mutant killer rat that knocked that corporate bio lab out of orbit.
Dr. Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris), a justifiably disgruntled ex-employee of Wyden subsidiary Energyne, catches San Diego’s morning TV news and rushes over to the wildlife sanctuary. Last night an albino gorilla there, who goes by the name George, came into contact with one of the canisters from Athena 1. He got big and bad and killed a guiltless grizzly. Kate tells Davis that a few years back she made CRISPR faster-acting. “I am the only one who can cure…” George interrupts, bellowing his newly engineered rage.
Davis and Kate team up with an operative from a never-specified outfit designated OGA, as in Other Government Agency. Agent Harvey Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) briefs primatologist Davis and geneticist Kate on his mission: “You see, when science shits the bed, I’m the guy they call to change the sheets.” The trio chases after the three interstate rampagers. The top priority for Davis, of course, is stealing the antidote from the Wyden Technologies lab that can arrest the runaway genetic mutation that turned his BPF (best primate forever) into a monster.
Claire Wyden (Malin Akerman) and Brett Wyden (Jake Lacy) of Wyden Technologies see dollar signs in the “weaponized DNA” of the three unplanned test subjects. As soon as they beam low-frequency bat-inspired sonar waves from an antenna atop their corporate headquarters in Chicago to beckon George, the 13.8-ton wolf and 150-ton crocodile to climb the city’s tallest skyscraper; and the U.S. Army kills them; then the Wydens will package the remains of their monsters. “We can sell that shit for a mint!” blurts Brett.
It’s a workaround for the Athena 1 rat fiasco. Claire and Brett proceed with their original business plan: offer a new bioweapon on the arms market. Wyden Technologies tasked Energyne geneticists like Kate to edit the DNA of sharks, whales, cheetahs and rhinoceros beetles. This bioengineered upgrade delivers “extraordinary genetic gifts, unlimited physical potential, combined with unthinkable violent and aggressive disposition.” And it works, as the rat, ape, wolf and croc prove. Dosing an animal with this DNA-adulterant would grant Wyden customers a tactical edge. Leash not included.
Kate and Davis find the secret antidote, and improvise a comic and shocking method to get George to swallow his medicine. Cured in a matter of seconds, he is recruited to take down the wolf and crocodile. Untreated, they continue to mutate and increase in meanness and body mass. Hardly a fair fight. Chicago is wrecked in the smackdown.
“Rampage” is dumb fun in places. I liked the spectacularly staged attacks on helicopters. Super-critters lunge upward to snatch aircraft in their jaws. Last year’s “Kong: Skull Island,” directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, excelled at this.
Johnson’s character pilots a helicopter in “Rampage,” as his character did in 2015’s “San Andreas” and will do in its upcoming sequel, again directed by Peyton. Johnson increasingly winks at his bankable screen persona: “Let’s go save the world,” he mugs here. Even the gorilla is self-aware. George– taught how to sign with his hands by Davis– pulls lame pranks. Performed amidst the rubble of Chicago, his ace gotcha pivots on a cheap movie cliche.
“Inspired by the Rampage Video Game,” state the credits of “Rampage.” One of the vintage games is installed in the Wyden Technologies office. Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman created the three-player arcade game for Bally Midway in 1986. That was before CRISPR genome tech was invented, so different glitches trigger the three rampagers who playfully level urban infrastructure. There’s no eco-anti-city agenda beyond adolescent glee in virtual mega-vandalism.
“Smash. Bash. Trash.” was the promo mantra for the original Rampage game. The manual for a 1988 iteration adapted for the Atari 2600 video console listed “Points Awarded” for “Punching a Building Vertically” (50), “Eating a Pedestrian or Soldier” (50), “Punching a Helicopter” (750) and 11 other moves. “Crunch the Concrete! Snack on a Soldier! Trash a Trolley! Join arcade legends George the Ape, Ralph the Wolf and Lizzie the Lizard on a mission of mass destruction from coast to coast. Go on a RAMPAGE!”
Press notes for the “Rampage” film claim the “gargantuan, genetically mutating creatures, completely out of control” are “on a path of destruction toward Chicago.” The stakes escalate into “a collision course with civilization.” Equating my city with all humanity might flatter the Chicago Film Office and the Illinois Film Office, but a publicist’s overstatement cannot be taken as cuing a larger-scaled sequel. Unless that rat survived the vacuum of outer space, or not all of Athena 1’s canisters are accounted for.
Peyton’s popcorn movie scolds corporate evil. The CEO gets her comeuppance. Ditto her obnoxious brother, in a dubious bit recalling the World Trade Center plaza on the morning of September 11, 2001. “Billionaire siblings,” as the press notes brand the Wydens, are easy prey.
If “Rampage” lacks social commentary on the ethics of biotech execs, there is surplus fear-engineering about gene-engineering. The 107-minute running time and $120 million budget are largely invested in magnifying the frightfulness of the rampagers via CGI. A tagline touts: “Big Meets Bigger.”
“Annihilation” is a far superior film that takes its fears more seriously. The poster warns: “Fear What’s Inside.” Garland uses CGI to conjure cellular, human-scaled and cosmic sights, ranging from the empirical to the ineffable. The opening shot focuses on a deep red flux: bubbling magma or pulsing protoplasm? Such imagery could be derived from vulcanology or microscopy footage licensed from a nature film archive. Garland concludes with the digitally altered iris of an eye, no less human than yours or mine, let’s hope.
Exiting a prescreening of “Annihilation,” one of the eight producers, David Ellison of Skydance Productions, called the cut “too intellectual” and “too complicated,” according to sources contacted by Borys Kit at The Hollywood Reporter in early December. It’s hard to see any of the 11 producers of “Rampage” saying that about their own product.
I have no idea how “Annihilation” might have changed, but the film as released certainly suits my taste for intellectual and complicated entertainment. After watching it twice, I read the first book in The Southern Reach Trilogy by VanderMeer. It is titled “Annihilation.” The next two are “Authority and “Acceptance.” On the internet, while looking for something else, I came across a PDF of a 127-page “Annihilation” script. Its cover page is labeled “Alex Garland V.10.”
Nothing I read in VanderMeer’s story and in V.10 that was not in Garland’s film, however, struck me as anything I would wish to add to the film I experienced, whether plot details or overall design.
Compared to “Rampage,” with a single flashback showing Davis meet two-year-old George in Africa, “Annihilation” is a more ambitious narrative. Editor Barney Pilling interlaces flashbacks and flashforwards consistent with Lena’s helical quest to decode crazy DNA.
“Annihilation” is mostly set in a timeline that starts with Lena teaching a cell biology class. About a week later she volunteers to join four women carrying scientific instruments and automatic rifles on a classified expedition into a biologically bizarre zone radiating from a lighthouse. Flowers sprout from the elongated antlers of miniature deer. Other fauna includes two huge mutants: a bear and an albino alligator. Lena kills both, though not before one of the freaks of nature kills two women. She hikes to the lighthouse, the epicenter of all this weirdness. One more kill and then she gets out of there.
The first scene with dialogue is a flashforward from the above timeline. Wearing a white Hazmat suit, Lomax (Benedict Wong), debriefs Lena, in white hospital garb, about the expedition. She is the only one of the five who came back. They sit facing one another at a table in a plain room. Government types watch through windows. Five more flashforwards will continue their encounter. Lena’s and Lomax’s last session segues to the film’s last scene, when Lena hugs her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac). They are isolated in a hospital-style room at the same secretive facility.
“I don’t know” is how Lena answers most of Lomax’s questions. To the word, that’s also how Kane answers her questions when he returns from his mission. The couple sits at their kitchen table. They face each other much like Lena and Lomax do in the flashforwards they share. Lena gets no further than Lomax will get.
Two flashbacks in the main timeline show Lena and Kane together at home. He is in Special Forces. Covert missions take him around the world. He departed a day early for his next one. Two other flashbacks show Lena and her lover, a married colleague on the medical school faculty. She ended the affair.
Kane left a year ago. Lena never found out what happened to him.
One evening he inexplicably makes his way to their house. She is repainting a room when he startles her. He is standing in a hallway, watching her without speaking. She takes him in his arms. His affect is off. He hardly knows himself, let alone her. All he can say is “I don’t know.”
Kane suddenly convulses and hemorrhages. En route to the local hospital, the ambulance is intercepted by speeding black SVUs and low-flying helicopters. Government suits and operatives take Kane and jab Lena in the neck with a sedative. Garbed in an orange jumpsuit, she awakes in a windowless room in Area X, what Agent Russell in “Rampage” would call an Other Government Agency. Unlikely line itemized in the federal budget, it’s there to make sense of something called the Shimmer. (This OGA’s budget is $300 billion in V.10.)
From outside, the Shimmer looms as a vast hemispherical enclosure appareled in Northern Lights. A diaphanous, viscous smear of pastel hues flow upward. It’s expanding. Area X must relocate to keep beyond the Shimmer’s ever-advancing boundary.
Lena learns Kane was on a prior team sent inside to bring back data, but she gets little out of Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the psychologist in charge of expeditions. “It started around three years ago,” she relates. “A religious event, an extraterrestrial event, a higher dimension. We have many theories, few facts.” She decides to lead the next team. (The Shimmer materialized 13 years ago in the novel; 30 in the V.10 script.)
By orders of magnitude Ventress will increase her understanding once she reaches the lighthouse. Right after it was hit by something in flames coming from space, the Shimmer arose there. Her enlightenment is literal. The lumens are immeasurable. She will not get out of there.
Before heading for the Shimmer Ventress assesses Lena, who thinks there’s a chance she can find a cure there for Kane, near death in an isolation ward on the base: “Soldier. Scientist. You can fight. You can learn. You can save him.”
Kane recorded two videos during his time in the Shimmer. Footage meant to inform the next team only panics them. Lena replays the video and we watch too. This is how Garland embeds two key flashbacks.
We know that Kane and Lena learn much about what transpires in the Shimmer, on their separate trips. Upon exiting– and they are the only ones ever to do so– their knowledge of it dissipates. Garland’s screen only mesmerizes. The Shimmer deletes memories. Unlike Lena and Kane, audiences can enter and exit the screen– and the Shimmer within– without suffering side effects. As the end credits roll, we can begin thinking through the “many theories, few facts” Garland disseminates.
Biophobia abounds in “Annihilation.” Life is frightful. Its very essence is its nemesis. The Shimmer is mega-exaggeration of life. A metastatic phantasmagoria.
The title is ominous. And ambiguous by implying there could be an annihilator. In the lighthouse Lena confronts a highly mutable thing listed in the cast credits as “Humanoid.” The press notes add: “Sonoya Mizuno… provided motion-capture reference for the being in its humanoid phase.” (V.10 variously refers to it as an “alien form,” “alien creature,” “The ALIEN” and “A BEING.” VanderMeer uses “alien” only as an adjective in the novel.)
Mizuno’s counterpart playing George in “Rampage” is Jason Liles, a 6’ 9” performance-capture actor. Garland gave Mizuno no lines in “ex machina,” where she played the mute android Kyoko. But in “Annihilation,” he supplements her modeling role and also casts her in a minuscule speaking part as Katie, a medical student in Lena’s class with one line.
“Over the course of the next term we will be closely examining cells in vitro and discussing autophagic activity,” lectures Lena. Autophagy is the process whereby living cells die. “Your research area is the genetically programmed life cycle of the cell,” Ventress later reminds Lena. “You’re a biologist. Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?”
Annihilation is automatic, a mechanism in the dialectic of life. Cells self-destruct for the greater good of the organism. No need to embody or personify any annihilator of living things. The lighthouse entity that manifests itself to Lena is not so much an individual as a clump of alien clay that can model individuals in life-like detail, minus souls maybe. The pods from outer space did this with people in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Don Siegel’s paranoid sci-fi film from 1956.
“It mirrored me,” Lena tells Lomax. She cites “echoes” and “corruptions of form, duplicates of form.” She sees it reproduce her. Kane saw that happen to him in the lighthouse too, as Lena sees when she plays the video he recorded there a year ago.
Ventress, who never told her team she had terminal cancer, experiences the Shimmer very differently: “We are disintegrating, our bodies as fast as our minds. Can’t you feel it? It’s like the onset of dementia.” On the verge of an involuntary transcendence, the psychologist suffers entropy panic: “[I]t will grow until it encompasses everything. Our bodies and minds will be fragmented until not one part remains. Annihilation.”
“It wasn’t destroying,” Lena tries to clarify for her interrogator. “It was changing everything. It was making something new.” Making what?” presses Lomax. Again he same three words: “I don’t know.”
When the expedition first steps through the shimmering veil, the women behold a terrain of marvels and menace. Lena notices peculiar flora and fauna. Impossible hybridizing occurs not just between species and genus, but phylum and kingdom. Rampant mutations and malignant growths, “like tumors,” hypothesizes Lena. Accelerated and uncontrolled cell growth. The alligator has shark teeth. The bear absorbs the screams of its prey, who continue to scream as if somehow alive somewhere inside its nightmare of a body.
The physicist, not the biologist, figures it out. Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson) tells the team: “The Shimmer is a prism but it refracts everything. Not just light and radio waves. Animal DNA, plants’ DNA. All DNA.” Whatever crashed into the lighthouse three years ago generated an aberrant Eden, a random remix of all DNA in the vicinity, a hack of life as we know it.
This astonishing idea is apparently Garland’s. A search of VanderMeer’s text yields no hits for “prism” or “DNA.” Credit the filmmaker as well for symbolizing Radek’s theory of refraction by framing a simple glass of water. Close-ups show Lena and Kane touch fingertips. The glass is placed on kitchen table in between the camera lens and their fingers, so the water magnifies part of their fingers. The rest of each hand, though, is its normal size. The split between magnified and normal, along the two sides of the glass, makes the couple’s hands look deformed, however. I interpret this shot as a microcosm of the refractive Shimmer.
Another wondrous image in the film shows what happens when human DNA and plant DNA commingle. Tangles of vines, leaves, flowers, moss and shrubs take the form of stationary people. Or people transmogrify into plants. Legs morph into thin tree trunks; branches replace arms. (“Like a topiary.” V.10.)
Radek theorizes hox genes freely circulate among living things in the Shimmer. She explains the purpose of these genes in nature is to guide the layout of a growing plant or animal. That’s how chimera could proliferate in the Shimmer. When greenery sprouts on her forearms, Radek welcomes this fate for her own body. Putting down roots, as it were, in the Shimmer.
Backstories for biophobic motifs in “Annihilation” and “Rampage” are traceable to historical and scientific texts in the real world.
George towers over Davis in posters advertising “Rampage.” The human handler may believe he’s the evolutionary better of the two primate pals, but the genetically super-charged gorilla knows only he can overpower the croc and wolf smashing, bashing and trashing Chicago. Ape upgrades were advocated by a German philosopher.
“The age of the experiment!” proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche in 1881. “The assumptions of Darwin have to be tested– through the experiment! Likewise the genesis of higher organisms out of the lowest ones. Experiments must be performed for thousands of years! Apes must be brought up to be human beings!” Energyne geneticists could research that in a “Rampage” sequel.
Legendary white apes populated Chinese paintings, prose and plays dating from third century B.C., as chronicled in such accounts as “Encyclopedic Records of Things.”
Albino apes were put on display long before George got to the San Diego Wildlife Sanctury. “A Milk-White Baboon. The Wonderful Albino Ape that Has Just Arrived in England,” reported The Buffalo Commercial on July 7, 1894. The Los Angeles Times ran the same story with the headline: “A Freak.”
The unnamed male from South Africa had a backstory as horrifying as George’s: “After a fierce fight the mother was killed and the young male was led away in captivity.” On the United Nation Anti-Poaching Task Force, Davis extracted George during a raid in an undisclosed African country: “When my team arrived, these bastard were in the middle of butchering his mother. They were cutting off her hands so they could sell them as ash trays.”
A “News of the Day” newsreel in 1937 included “Albino ape is brought to America,” according to the Motion Picture Herald. I found no related articles in an online archive of U.S. newspapers. But the phrase “albino ape” appears in a November 29, 1944 article distributed by United Press: “Japs Threaten to Kill Airmen Who Bail Out Over Japan; Call Them `Savages’ and `Albino Apes.’”
“White Pongo” was a summer 1945 release featuring “a white ape who practically steals all the scenes,” noted Showmens Trade Review. “The Ivory Ape,” a Japanese-American co-production set and shot in Bermuda, aired on ABC-TV in spring 1980. Jack Palance played the villainous big-game hunter seeking “a creature so rare worth it is weight in diamonds.”
New Scientist covered the death of “the world’s only known white gorilla, Floquet de Neu or `Snowflake.’” His cause of death on November 24, 2003 was oculocutaneous albinism. “Barcelona city authorities have rejected suggestions that Snowflake be stuffed, considering naming a street or plaza after him,” added the London-based weekly.
Two science books are placed in view as the camera passes through Dr. Kate Caldwell’s apartment. This gene scientist with a Ph.D. has what look like introductory undergrad textbooks simply titled “Genetics.”
The one book we see in “Annihilation” is more instructive. Lena has a copy of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. Johns Hopkins Hospital doctors extracted cervical cancer cells from a terminal African-American patient. Henrietta Lacks (1920–1951) died not knowing what researchers did with tissue samples they scraped from her tumor, which they were unsuccessfully treating with radium. In test tubes, though, “Henrietta’s cells,” writes Skloot, “were growing with mythological intensity.” Sold to labs around the world, the HeLa cell line enabled breakthroughs in tissue-culture technique, human genetics and genomic medicine.
Skloot footnotes “Probing the Secret of Life,” an article by Bill Davidson that Collier’s Weekly published on May 14, 1954. In a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine lab Davidson watches footage of HeLa cells “magnified 100,000 times” and rhapsodizes: “The movie was breathtaking and a little frightening. It was like a glimpse at immortality. There on the screen before me, big as a close-up of a movie star, was a cluster of turbulent disk-shaped living cells… All the time, there was constant unfathomable movement within the cell as it prepared for the greatest mystery of all– cell division.”
After the title “Annihilation,” Garland cuts to a lecture room screen filled with a round black-and-white image. “This is a cell,” Lena tells medical students. “Like all cells it was born from an existing cell. By extension all cells were ultimately born from one cell, a single organism alone on planet earth, perhaps alone in the universe. About four billion years ago, one became two, two became four. Then 8, 16, 32. The rhythm of the dividing pair which becomes the structure of… everything that lives and everything that dies.”
Without naming Henrietta Lacks, Lena tells her Johns Hopkins students the source of the tumor: “Female patient, early 30s taken from the cervix.”
Mitosis is what biologists call the division of cells. Lena makes it inexorable, exponential and existential. A day or so later she is alone at home. Painting a room shared with Kane could be her way of moving on. It’s been a year. She listens to the Crosby Stills & Nash song “Helplessly Hoping” from 1969: “They are one person/ They are two alone/ They are three together/ They are four for each other.” The lyrics splice her marital straits with her class notes on mitosis.
“Rampage” never lectures about its biology nor licenses tender songs to symbolize CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). Befitting the film’s emphasis on action, the end credits name two Military Advisors and one Genetics Lab Tech Advisor. The latter is James Dahlman from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Previously he was in the Genome Engineering lab at Harvard, headed by Feng Zhang, an innovator in using CRISPR-Cas9 for “multiplex genome editing in mammalian cells.” Just like Dr. Kate Caldwell in “Rampage,” Zhang earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at Stanford University.
Nature ran this rather sensational headline in its news section two years ago: “CRISPR’s hopeful monsters: gene-editing storms evo-devo labs: Easy gene alterations in weird creatures make CRISPR a killer app for evolutionary developmental biology.” Considering the jokey tilt of “Rampage,” I am surprised Energyne geneticists never picked CRISPR Critters as a nickname for the mighty mutant city-wreckers.
Biophobic prompts are also detectable in this Guardian headline: “Synthetic biology: ‘playing God’ is vital if we are to create a better future for all: The present gains and future benefits of synthetic biology are too great for it to be written off with fear-mongering maxims.” The byline belongs to Adam Rutherford, credited as the Scientific Advisor on “Annihilation.” He was one of the 15 co-authors of the paper “Human microphthalmia associated with mutations in the retinal homeobox gene CHX10” published in Nature Genetics. In the film Josie uses the term “hox” (sometimes italicized), shorthand for “homeobox” among gene scientists.
“Homeo” as a prefix came from “Homœosis,” a term proposed by William Bateson in his 1894 work “Materials for the Study of Variation, Treated with Especial Regard to Discontinuities in the Origin of Species.” He meant an anomaly in body plan altering where body parts appear, like “the modification of the antenna of an insect into a foot, of the eye of a Crustacean into an antenna.”
Walter Gehring, a pioneer in hox research, discovered in 1966 the underlying genetics of fruit flies that grew a leg out of their head where an antenna ordinarily is supposed to be, a freakish phenomenon known as antennapedia. On a 1980 trip to an international congress in Kyoto, he visited a ninth-century Buddha statue and found bronze butterflies with two more legs than normal.
In nature homeotic mutants are linked to “master regulator genes which play a key role in the specification of the body plan” in an individual plant or animal. The hox-type mutants in “Annihilation” that unsettle Josie multiply and move around for a pandemic of genetically modifying organisms. “Something here is making great waves in the gene pool,” warns Lena.
Strands in real genetics intersect in plot details. “Annihilation” scientists never refer to CRISPR, yet the Shimmer prism tampers with every genome in range. “Rampage” scientists never refer to hox genes, yet rampant CRISPR-triggering creates a trio of hox mutants.
The “Rampage” wolf keeps mutating. All of a sudden it can fly like a flying squirrel due to newly-grown webbing between its legs. In 2016 University of Chicago researchers used CRISPR/Cas9 to engineer changes in the size of web-like folds between the fins of zebrafish. Mutations in its tail arm the “Rampage” crocodile with porcupine-like projectile quills.
Dr. Ventress in “Annihilation” fixates on self-destruction as an all-purpose theory applicable to everything from cells to careers. There are real-world studies for that too, ranging from Sabina Spielrein’s 1912 psychoanalytic paper “Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being” to “Hox Proteins: Sculpting Body Parts by Activating Localized Cell Death,” published in 2002 by Current Biology.
Real-world fears exist offscreen. James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, briefed the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on February 9, 2016: “Research in genome editing conducted by countries with different regulatory or ethical standards than those of Western countries probably increases the risk of the creation of potentially harmful biological agents or products.”
One year earlier, Chinese researchers described successful efforts to enhance Beagles with targeted muscle hypertrophy. Two puppies– named Tiangou and Hercules– came into the world with their muscle mass doubled. Insects with hox malfunctions get their legs and wings doubled.
Published in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology, the Letter titled “Generation of gene-target dogs using CRISPR/Cas9 system” ends with an ominous phrase: “This approach may not only greatly facilitate the generation of novel dog models for bio-medical research, but also promote the creation of new strains of dogs with favorable traits for other purposes.” [italics added] Militarized mutant dogs?
The gene-militarizing profiteers in Brad Peyton’s film “Rampage” aim precisely at that sector of the international arms market. Worse screen fears are out there. The 10th draft of a script attributed to Alex Garland, the writer-director of “Annihilation,” compares the impact of the thing that caused the Shimmer to a weapon wounding Earth: “Then it hits the ground by the LIGHTHOUSE drilling into the earth like a bullet hole.” Intent to harm is implied, unless it was a stray shot from across the universe.
Profit obviously motivates Wyden Technologies but the Shimmer is illegible. “What does it want?” inquires Lomax. “I don’t think it wanted anything,” Lena answers.
One year apart, Lena and Kane each come face to face with an uncanny double in the lighthouse. A phosphorus grenade punctuates both encounters. Bodies incinerate in blinding white light. The couple gets a “glimpse at immortality,” as the 1954 author of “Probing the Secret of Life” described his sight of an endlessly dividing cell.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you,” wrote Nietzsche in his 1886 book “Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.”
“Annihilation” is nihilist entertainment with the nerve to assert that nature with its DNA awry is an unknowable nothing.
©2018 BILL STAMETS
Suppressing Sound to Survive in “A Quiet Place”
“A Quiet Place”
directed by John Krasinski
written by Bryan Woods & Scott Beck and John Krasinski; story by Woods & Beck
acted by Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe
presented by Paramount Pictures
running time: 90 minutes
MPAA- rated PG-13 “for terror and some bloody images”
by Bill Stamets
Beautifully made, “A Quiet Place” is a horror film about a family of five in a quiet place in the country. The Abbots walk, fish, dine, play Monopoly, homeschool and birth a baby– all while evading blind creatures of unspeakable ferocity. With preternaturally acute hearing and metal-ripping claws, they depopulated a nearby town. And possibly much of the planet.
John Krasinski directs, co-writes and stars in this atypical fright effort. He and co-writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck install genre fixtures that do the job. But their premise and plot transcend generic set-ups that trigger less demanding fans. I enjoyed a handful of jolts, even if those seated to my immediate right and left did not care to abide scares secondhand.
More than unnerving, Krasinski’s drama is moving too. Krasinski called it “a love letter to my kids” on The View, ABC’s morning talk show. On NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Krasinski said he liked that someone came out of an advance screening and said: “I never thought I’d cry in a horror movie.”
The opening title states “DAY 89” in white letters on black. An abandoned town, likely in upstate New York. A knocked-down red traffic light lays sideways on the street. “Missing” posters flutter on a bulletin board. The front page of the New York Post spells out: “It’s Sound.” Another headline, shown later: “YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN.”
Barefoot, the Abbotts silently loot a store. They use American Sign Language, subtitled on screen. Evelyn (Emily Blunt) picks through prescription drugs for her son Marcus (Noah Jupe). Lee (John Krasinski) hands a tool from the hardware shelf to their deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds), who has a broken cochlear implant. The youngest, Beau (Cade Woodward), is denied a toy NASA rocket whose battery-powered engine roars could draw a creature.
Homeward bound, the family is hunted. We only see a blur racing between trees. Then comes the film’s title, followed by the laconic “DAY 472.” I guess that’s good news. The Abbotts are still alive? Bad news– the countdown is not over. Day 1 presumably marked the slaughter’s onset. From the dates of birth and death on a memorial, we can estimate the film is set about two years from now.
Although the animated logo for Paramount Pictures showcases stars from space racing towards a mountain peak, we cannot presume that design signals any extraterrestrial origin for the things terrorizing “A Quiet Place.” Although the second scene of Paramount’s recent “Annihilation”– alien life form imperils Earth– in fact shows a fiery object from the sky striking a lighthouse where whatever-it-is will make its new home. I watched “A Quiet Place” liking not knowing where its ghastly creatures came from. (After the press screening, a reviewer mentioned glimpsing a shot of a news clipping with the words “meteor” and “Mexico.” So just pretend you did not read that.)
Krasinski and cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen frame the quiet with subtle touches like placing the camera at ground level to catch footfalls. A similar inter-sensory challenge was met in “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” (2006), directed by Tom Tykwer. A non-alien character has a sense of smell as keen as Krasinski’s creatures. Scents he detects are evoked with sensuous close-ups of things, living and dead, emitting a gamut of fragrances, musks and stenches.
Krasinski and sound editors Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn compose the soundscape with naturalism. Regan’s audio perspective finds its way into the storyline to discreet effect. Her father’s failed attempt to solder a fix in her implant cues a discovery key to the family’s survival.
To my ear, the most inspired choice on the soundtrack comes when Lee and Evelyn share earbuds as they slow dance to “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young. To swoon to. One letdown is recycling the scary clicks of insectoid creatures dating from 1997, the year Guillermo del Toro’s “Mimic” and Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers” were released.
“A Quiet Place” is hybrid horror spliced with other genres. Horror purists will note the absence of the supernatural. No spirits torment the Abbotts, nor do ghosts haunt their house. The screenplay borrows from those westerns where a frontier family defends a homestead from outlaws or Indians. The Abbotts appear to have taken over a vacant farm; they are not the stereotypical farmers of Hollywood. One of their perimeter defenses did remind me of steps taken by the resourceful family of five in Disney’s “Swiss Family Robinson” (1960) when a pirate attack loomed.
“A Quiet Place” better fits on the sci-fi horror shelf alongside M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” (2002), in which aliens encircle a Pennsylvania farm family. The urban and suburban iterations would be “The Purge” series of politically satiric horror films made by James DeMonaco in 2013, 2014 and 2016. Now the monsters are other Americans on 12-hour murderous rampages sanctioned by U.S. government each year as civic catharsis.
Truly original, “A Quiet Place” makes room for a sobering pause when Lee and Evelyn define their lives as defense of their children: “Who are we if we can’t protect them? What are we?” The matter-of-fact nobility of those lines segues– a bit later in a deft tonal shift– to that screen cliche of a badass mama bear wielding a shotgun and doing one of those one-handed reload pumps, `bring-it-on’ style. Without a word.
“Ready Player One”: Marx and Meta not in play
“Ready Player One”
directed by Steven Spielberg
written by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline, based on Cline’s novel
acted by Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance
presented by Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, Amblin Entertainment
MPAA-rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, nudity and language”
running time: 140 minutes
Chicago screening options include 70mm at Music Box Theater, 3733 N. Southport, and Navy Pier IMAX, 700 E. Grand
by Bill Stamets
“Ready Player One” is the touching story of a Columbus, Ohio high school senior finding the confidence to kiss his first love. Steven Spielberg’s thoroughly entertaining two-hour and twenty-minute saga of adolescent self-actualizing is set amidst an epic contest to preserve the status quo of an escapist entertainment corporation in the year 2045.
Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) takes his cue from James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the world-acclaimed creator of the OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation) whose lifelong regret was not kissing the one woman he loved.
Regrettably, this teen odyssey deflects from seeing the OASIS as a digital opiate of the masses. The emotional maturity of an orphaned gamer who does not get out much– not the political economy of a massive multiplayer online immersive simulation game– is the tiny heart of this “action adventure” observing five online friends playing the biggest electronic game ever. Warner Bros. Pictures, Amblin Entertainment and Village Roadshow Pictures tender a $175 million prospectus for a user-friendly simulation of a nondenominational paradise.
“Ready Player One” invests no ironic narrative interest in a last-century lens-based movie medium now valorizing a consumer VR (virtual reality) tech platform that could make screenwriters, screens, theaters and concession stands obsolete. The film’s closing disingenuous claim is that real life is better than escapism. The lifework of James Halliday and Steven Spielberg, of course, belies that commonplace.
Screenwriters Zak Penn (“Last Action Hero”) and Ernest Cline improve Cline’s 2011 novel. Streamlining decreases locales, truncates chronology, and reassigns a couple plot turns to different characters. A virtual car race through Manhattan to Central Park is among the CGI spectacles replacing humdrum episodes in Cline’s text. Profuse references to eighties pop culture are filtered out. Many remain, very many. Two “Spielberg” namedrops in the book are cut, as are two uses of “fascist” to smear the corporate villain. Halliday’s corporation, the one we are supposed to root for, is Gregarious Games, shortened from Gregarious Simulation Systems in the book. A half-minute of ambiguous dialogue about a spectral character is tacked on for the film’s beguiling finale.
“Ready Player One” opens with Wade introducing himself and the OASIS: “I was born in 2027. After the corn syrup drought, after the bandwidth riots. After people stopped trying to fix problems. Just tried to out-live them… These days, reality is a bummer. Everyone’s looking for way to escape. And that’s why Halliday, that’s why he was such a hero to us… James Halliday saw the future and then he built it. He gave us a place to go, a place called the OASIS… He showed us we could go somewhere without going anywhere at all… People come to the OASIS for all the things they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be.”
When he logs on “to escape the shitty hand that life dealt me” Wade becomes Parzival, his avatar in the OASIS. There he virtually hangs out with a few other avatars. These friends have never met in person. But they will. When they do “Ready Player One” will have little to say about online versus offline identities.
Parzival’s main reason to be in the OASIS is to one day own it. Upon his death Halliday hailed all OASIS players in a prerecorded video: Be the first to meet three challenges, find three keys, unlock three gates, and thereby win an Easter egg, as gamers term a special item hidden inside a game. Alluding to the Easter bunny, not the risen Christ. The ultimate winner gets OASIS and Gregarious Games, the company that Halliday co-founded in Columbus, Ohio. And a half-trillion dollars.
Five years later no one has figured it out. Most quit trying. Parzival competes with super-serious OASIS players called “gunters,” as in egg hunters. Most belong to clans to consolidate their efforts. Others, like Parzival and his four pals, toil solo.
Oologists, as in egg scientists, are a paid cadre of robin-egg-blue-sweater-wearing obsessives who over-analyze Halliday’s vast trove of eighties trivia to extract clues. Oology, by the way, is not another word Cline made up. The Oxford English Dictionary cites its origin in 1831 with the debut of a journal titled “British Oology: being illustrations of the eggs of British birds, with figures of each species, as far as practicable, drawn and coloured from nature: accompanied by descriptions of the materials and situation of their nests, number of eggs, &c.”
The Oology Department is inside Innovative Online Industries (IOI), the second largest company in the world after Gregarious Games. IOI dispatches its commando-styled avatars into the OASIS to hunt for Halliday’s mega-egg. They kill the avatars of gunters in their way. IOI also kills real people in the real world by deploying armed security agents and drones bearing explosives.
The detailing of two worlds in “Ready Player One” is telling. Living online differs from living offline. What do onscreen Columbus and online OASIS, one more fictive than the other, reflect about the reality where Spielberg, Cline and Penn live? They identify with Halliday, to whom they give the line: “I build worlds.” Game-playing interests them more than world-philosophizing.
The world of 2045 we see in the theater is limited to Columbus, Ohio. Grey skies. Drab garb. No trees or dogs. Meager smiles. Wade wakes up in his aunt’s trailer. He sleeps on her washing machine. Trailers are stacked in ramshackle towers. As Wade climbs down the metal scaffolding, we get peeks of his neighbors outfitted with VR visors and plugged into the OASIS. He sneaks into his hideout under a pile of rusty wrecked cars. That’s where he enters and exits the OASIS via an internet hook-up.
The Stacks, as Wade’s neighborhood is known, is a “ghetto trash rat warren,” sneers Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the so-easy-to-hate head of operations at IOI. Apart from a few street scenes, the only other side of Columbus in sight is the sleek headquarters of IOI where Sorrento runs the Halliday egg hunt like a corporate espionage and military intelligence mission. It’s a two-corporation economy, implies the film. I spotted only two ads. An IOC sign reads “Enlist Today.” A video billboard for haptic body suits reads: “Feel of Real/No Pain No Gain.”
Spielberg spares us the trope of television news clips of strife to bring us up to date on how the country got this way. He dispenses with the video newsfeeds watched by characters in Cline’s book. I am not even sure “United States” appears on the screen or soundtrack. Two things have not changed. A drugstore displays a “Medicaid Accepted” sign. And the police still issue the command: “Drop-the-gun-now-on-the-ground-turn-around-hands-on-your-head-walk-back-towards-me” without shooting to death the white man in a suit brandishing a gun.
Cline supplied more detail in his novel. (His site reproduces the covers of 16 translations, with Bulgarian, Japanese and Russian editions to come.) Sorrento ranted at greater length about Wade and his kind as “human cockroaches out there collecting food vouchers and using up precious oxygen.”
The popularity of the OASIS is boosted by “an ongoing energy crisis” and “an ongoing economic recession,” Cline writes. Gregarious Games and IOI headquartered in the same city yields a local upside in infrastructure: “Columbus doesn’t suffer the from rolling blackouts that plague most major U.S. cities.” The terrain between urban centers is described as a “lawless badlands” when Wade travels on “the deteriorating interstate highway system.” The 40 mph electric bus has “armor plating, bulletproof windows, and solar panels on the roof… A team of six heavily armed guards… protect the vehicle and its passengers in the event of a hijacking by road agents or scavengers.”
OASIS is far more fun. “You can climb Mount Everest– with Batman!” enthuses Wade as Parzival in his virtual tour for Spielberg’s audience. If you virtually fall from a virtual peak to your virtual death, you won’t feel it for real. What else is in the OASIS? Public schools and prostitution motels. No places of worship. Cline wrote in his book that Wade does not vote in local and national elections. “I did take time to vote in the OASIS elections, however, because their outcomes actually affected me,” relates Wade.
VR, videogames and films preoccupy the creators of the 2011 novel and its 2018 film adaptation. Gamer geeks can identify with the gunters and oologists. “Ready Player One” readers and “Ready Player One” moviegoers are alike as proxy gunters.
A clue in Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 film “Back to the Future” lets Parzival traverse Halliday’s first gate. Wade’s avatar tops the OASIS scoreboard. Parzival is instantly a global celeb. IOI targets him as an imminent threat to their takeover of OASIS, which Sorrento deems “the world’s most important economic resource.”
Parzival diligently mines a virtual archive for clues leading to the second gate. Halliday planted items for his site to relay to an alert gunter like Parzival. The archive’s English-accented curator avatar leaks a tip: “Rosebud,” a reference to an opaque clue in Orson Welles’ 1941 film. “Citizen Kane,” like “Ready Player One,” relates a quest to unlock a secret about a media titan. “Halliday kept track of every movie he ever watched, the week and the year he rewatched it, and how many times,” Parzival narrates.
Digital dioramas at Halliday’s autobiographical museum reenact incidents from his past. Parzival and Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), his online crush and competitor-turned-partner, eavesdrop on conversations. They hear Halliday recount an awkward first date in 2025: “She wanted to go dancing. So we watched a movie.” A new clue leads to Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” which likely contains yet another clue, so their avatars rush to the Overlook Theater and instantly find themselves inside the Overlook Hotel where Kubrick set his 1980 film based on a 1977 Stephen King novel. Art3mis scores a breakthrough by asking the avatar of Halliday’s date if she’d like to dance.
Cline incorporated a more on-message ‘80s film in his novel. Halliday hid one of his gates behind a poster for the 1983 film “WarGames.” Parzival points out: “`WarGames’ had been one of Halliday’s all-time favorite movies. Which is why I had watched it over three-dozen times.” Memorized dialogue equips him to unlock a gate. Parzival succeeds at a later gate thanks to watching “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” he specifies, “exactly 157 times.”
“WarGames,” directed by John Badham, features a Seattle high school kid (Matthew Broderick) hacking into a NORAD game titled Global Thermonuclear War. Helped by his girlfriend (Ally Sheedy), he averts Armageddon with the U.S.S.R. Parzival recites all the teen hacker’s lines with spot-on role-playing: “I was Matthew Broderick’s character in the movie `WarGames,’ I was in the movie.”
“Ready Player One” makes no play to put us inside itself using VR-like tricks, circa 2045. Two AMC theaters in Chicago where I attended preview screenings delivered meta-cinema moments of their own. The pre-presentation promo for Dolby Cinema promised a sensory experience almost on par with the OASIS: “Astonishing Brightness and Color/ Depth, Detail and Realism/ Moving Audio/ Completely Captivating.” Colliding ice cubes and bubbles of carbonation in a big cup of Coca-Cola sounded like the RMS Titanic repeatedly striking North Atlantic icebergs.
“`Ready Player One’ is a game-changer in Dolby Cinema,” touts AMC’s internet site. “The sleek, power recliners reverberate to move you deep into the story,” continues the come-on. The tech is not just “putting you at the center of the story” but it’s “letting you step into another reality and surrender to the story.”
“Watch a Movie or Be Part of One,” hypes AMC’s Navy Pier IMAX. Captivated participating is limited to sitting. The OASIS, on the other hand, will entertain in the near future without ever expecting us to “surrender to the story.” We are the storytellers. Exit writers for passive spectators; enter coders for interactive players.
True to his 1970s sense of high concept– a film premise simple enough to pitch in 25 words– Spielberg is neither conceptual nor high-minded about the film/game nexus his latest crowdpleaser. The big insight the late Halliday– via his artificially intelligent, archive-uploaded interactive avatar– imparts to Parzival is a sophomoric stoner tautology: “reality is real, you understand what I’m saying?” “Ready Player One” aims lower than Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001) and “Minority Report” (2002). Those near future sci-fi efforts are rather serious considerations of corporate ethics and technologies of virtuality.
“Even with all the popcorn in a film like ‘Ready Player One,’ it does still have social meaning,” Spielberg told the New York Times. What could it be? The 71-year-old filmmaker might not have said what he meant by that, or the writer or his editor decided it did to matter. Spielberg told Reuters: “In a way, our story is a cautionary tale as well as a great adventure.” The one cautionary scene, however, is played for laughs. A young mom is too immersed in OASIS play to pay any mind to her son who’s trying to let her know there’s a pan in flames on the kitchen stove.
Someone tried to impart “social meaning” to Spielberg’s film by invoking the rhetoric of righteous rebellion. Advertisements read: “A Better Reality Awaits,” “Break Free” and “Accept Your Reality… Or Fight For A Better One.” I doubt the writers of those taglines read the book or shooting script. OASIS occupants accept OASIS as is. They do not want to “break free” from it. They are contented consumers. There is no “better” OASIS to “fight for.” Unless IOI gets its hands on the Easter egg. Then the OASIS will certainly get worse, unacceptably so. Fighting for a better virtual reality at that point would just be a fight to bring back the old OASIS.
Fighting for a better real world is inconceivable. Cline’s novel reported: “The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants.”
There is only a sliver of resistance in Spielberg’s dystopic 2045. Samantha (aka, Art3mis) belongs to a small cell located in the Stacks. We learn little about her comrades; one is shown buying fresh carrots at the market. They recruit Wade after knocking him unconscious with an inhalant. When he wakens in their lair, Samantha quotes a “Star Wars” line: “Welcome to the rebellion, Wade.” They are resisting IOI, mostly online. There are no boots-on-the-ground guerrilla operations against other powers-that-be. It’s not a have-nots versus haves scenario. Samantha wants to win the OASIS and spread the wealth to feed the hungry.
Sorrento is unambiguously the bad guy. How bad? He crows about “the first of our planned upgrades” at IOI: “Once we roll back some of Halliday’s ad restrictions, we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual’s visual field before inducing seizures.” Boo!
IOI ought to incite political opposition for operating Loyalty Centers, the Orwellian name for its indentured servitude facilities. People in debt to IOI for internet service fees or VR gear, like visors and haptic body suits, or people whose avatars are behind in their virtual bills in the OASIS are rounded up and incarcerated. Samantha’s ill father was worked to death in a Loyalty Center. She lands in one too. IOC locks a visor on her head and forces her to operate her avatar in OASIS doing dangerous menial labor with explosives.
Since OASIS is coded entirely out of ones and zeros, it does not add up that virtual demolition, virtual construction, or any other virtual labor by indentured avatars would do what coders are doing to demolish and construct parts of this virtual world. The film reworks Cline’s novel here. Originally in the book it was Wade who’s forced into a Loyalty Center. But his work there made more sense. He did online tech support to help IOI customers with their OASIS issues.
Virtual work by real workers is critiqued more incisively in “Sleep Dealer,” Alex Rivera’s 2008 political indie set in the near future. The U.S. has closed the Mexican border. Virtual migration of manual labor replaces bodily migration, legal and illegal, of laborers. Internet feedback links let a Mexican worker in Mexico operate a cyber-robot on a job site in the U.S. The remote worker could be a welder, nanny, waiter or orange-picker. “We give the United States what they’ve always wanted– all the work without the worker,” explains a manager in Tijuana.
Released in 2009, “Surrogates” is a sci-fi thriller like “Sleep Dealer.” Both weigh mind/body duality issues skipped by “Ready Player One.” “Surrogates” director Jonathan Mostow adapts “The Surrogates,” a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele set in 2054. This noir detective tale, reset to the “Present Day,” sharply judges virtuality. Arguably reactionary, humanist and technophobic, “Surrogates” moralizes about people who purposely experience the world by proxy.
“Become anyone you want to be from the comfort and safety of your own home,” advertises Virtual Self Industries. “You can finally live the life you’ve always dreamt of without any risk or danger to your self.” Corporate motto is “Life… Only Better.”
You can make your life better by buying a very life-like robot that’s better in every bodily way. As in the OASIS, you can choose your gender and age, height and weight, and the colors of your skin, hair and eyes. You are limited to a humanoid template. The OASIS offers unlimited species, life forms and even nonliving things to choose as your avatar.
Uncommonly good-looking, the surrogates in “Surrogates” only exist offline. At home you plug into a special recliner that lets you remotely operate your surrogate via the internet. It goes to your place of work– and play– where it sees, talks, hears, tastes and feels everything you would if you were there yourself using your own senses.
The Prophet (Ving Rhames) exhorts people or their proxies, via artificial eyes and ears if their surrogates are paying attention: “We’re not meant to experience the world through a machine.” An entry at the Multiversal Omnipedia site reports that the first surrogate, made for a quadriplegic, climbed Mount Everest. Not with Batman, though.
Years later the wealthy reclusive inventor (James Cromwell) changes his mind and condemns surrogacy as “a perversion” and “an addiction”: “I changed the course of human history when I created surrogates. Now I’m going to change it back.” He unleashes a virus to irreversibly erase the operating systems of all surrogates. Boston streets are strewn with inert, insensate humanoids unyoked from their human operators. Pale and blinking at the sun, the populace stumbles out of doors in their bathrobes to live again `in real life,’ or IRL as they say online.
Unlike his counterpart in “Surrogates,” Halliday in “Ready Player One” has no change of heart about his historic creation: “Some things are perfect they way they are.” Nevertheless he shows Parzival a big red button that can delete OASIS in toto. It’s unthinkable the new owner will hit it intentionally. Wade too is OK with the utopian game space as Gregarious Games always ran it, although he outlaws Loyalty Centers operated by IOI.
As entertainers in a capitalist society, Steven Spielberg and Ernest Cline are not typically paid to demystify their medium and disenchant fans. Did they sublimate reflexivity into satire (e.g. “corn syrup drought” and Parzival watched a Monty Python film “exactly 157 times”)? The film and its source novel are culturally self-conscious only insofar as they indulge fanboys and fangirls. Gunters and oogolists partake in a purely tactical nostalgia to decode ‘80s fan Halliday. Absent in 2045 are fans of new songs, TV shows, toys, comics or novels, assuming anyone is making new ones in 2045.
“Ready Player One” is incurious about movies, games and virtual reality making us see, listen, feel, think, wish and live differently. “OASIS would ultimately change the way people around the world lived, worked, and communicated,” conceded Gregarious Games co-founder Ogden Morrow in Cline’s book. Simon Pegg plays him in the film. He is double cast as an avatar key to Parzival’s quest.
The film trims Morrow’s misgivings. According to the book, “he felt that the OASIS has evolved into something horrible” and wrote in his autobiography: “It has become a self-imposed prison for humanity.” Wade recounts: “As the era of cheap, abundant energy drew to a close, poverty and unrest began to spread like a virus. Every day, more and more people had reason to seek solace inside Halliday and Morrow’s virtual utopia.”
Headlines of articles papering the interior of Wade’s hideout include a Wired magazine cover asking: “Is James Halliday Playing Games… or Playing God?” In a voiceover the acolyte lauds the supreme gamer and Easter-egger: “he wasn’t just the owner of the world’s biggest company, he was like a god People loved him. They worshipped him as much as his creation.”
OASIS looks like Karl Marx’s nightmare of capital’s dream of distracting the masses with phantasmagoria. “Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes,” Marx wrote in 1843 while living in Paris. “Religion… is the opium of the people.” This dictum is found in his “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” published in German in 1844.
Here is the line in context: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”
“Marx himself used opium,” write historians Victoria Berridge and Edward Griffiths in “Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England.” His use was medical and metaphorical, argues U.K. sociologist Andrew McKinnon.
Opium did not suffer opprobrium at first. Among early auspicious mentions: “Bullein’s Bulwarke of Defence against all Sicknesse, Soarenesse and Woundes” in 1579. “Opium at prefent is in great efteem, and is one of the moft valuable of all the fimple medicines,” indicated “Encyclopædia Britannica; or a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences” in 1771. “In 1820s England, there were somewhere between 16,000 and 26,000 opium sellers,” note Berridge and Griffiths.
The year Marx penned his infamous metaphor, opium use was surveyed in “First Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Large Towns”: “It was stated by the Rev. Mr Clay, that in the town of Preston alone, in 1843, `upwards of sixteen hundred families were in the habit of using Godfrey’s Cordial [labeled a “children’s opiate”], or some other equally injurious compound.’” Other brands to pacify English children were Atkinson’s Infants’ Preservative, Street’s Infants Quietness, and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, which was imported to England from United States.
Reformers raised alarms about “opium poisoning” from overdosing. Opium was also used for suicide. Starting in the 1850s drafts of the Pharmacy Act and the Sale of Poisons Bill proposed restricting opiate sales in England. Stigmatizing opium users as moral defects came later.
OASIS is Halliday’s Remedy For Interpersonal Isolation. “I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world,” Halliday shares with Parzival. “I just didn’t know how to connect with people there. I was afraid for all my life. Right until the day I knew my life was ending. That was when I realized that as terrifying and painful as reality can be it’s also the only place that you can get a decent meal. Because reality is real.” (An oologist would catch that “decent meal” quip as coming from a line about getting a “good steak” in a 1977 New Yorker story by Woody Allen.)
After kissing Samantha, Wade announces: “We closed the OASIS on Tuesdays and Thursdays. People need to spend more time in the real world because like Halliday said, `reality is the only thing that’s real.’” Once there, in real life, outside of the OASIS– what will people do besides kiss?
To save the future of the OASIS, Parzival united OASIS avatars loyal to Gregarious Games and lead them to victory over the avatars of IOI. Any chance Wade and Samantha will lead offline masses to repair present reality? At the beginning of “Ready Player One” Wade says the OASIS came along “after people stopped trying to fix problems.” If 2045 is the year to make America great again, its fixers must log out of the OASIS first. And that can be uncomfortable. “It’s the only place that feels like I mean anything,” reveals Wade in the trailer. That line is not heard in the film.
Spectrally evanescent avatars in the OASIS are like impotent ideas attacked in “The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism,” a polemic Marx and Fredrick Engels wrote in late 1844, again in Paris. It was their first collaboration. They urged: “Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. In order to carry out ideas men are needed who can exert practical force.”
Online players and offline people are alienated, like “ideas” and “men” in 1844. Dualist disconnects are built into existence in 2045. What is to be done, practically? “Ready Player One” entertains no idea. When is good for you?
Tuesdays and Thursdays are open.
Father finders: a raider of tombs and a wrinkler of time
Brave daughters undertake quests to find their missing fathers in “Tomb Raider” and “A Wrinkle in Time.” Seekers of an empowering role model will find her here. One film dabbles in magico-cosmo-theology. The other muses on it by zooming around the universe.
Very far from home, dearly missed fathers are found by daughters overcoming fantastic obstacles. Twenty-one year-old Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander)– in “Tomb Raider” directed by Roar Uthaug (“The Wave”)– decodes clues to locate the tomb of Japan’s legendary Queen Himiko in order to thwart the “Order of Trinity, an ancient militant organization that seeks control over the supernatural to rule the fate of mankind.” Eighth-grader Meg Murry (Storm Reid)– in “A Wrinkle in Time” directed by Ava DuVernay (“Selma”)– navigates a 91 billion light year fold in space-time to fight “a purely evil energy, known simply as the It, … an evil that’s actively spreading throughout the universe.”
“Tomb Raider” is a descendant of a 1996 video game of the same name. Fourteen more versions followed, according to Wikipedia. I cannot say I played any of them. Never watched a 2007 web series of ten animated shorts. Press notes for the present film fail to mention two prior feature films: “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” (2001) and “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider– The Cradle of Life” (2003). Both starred Angelina Jolie playing an older Lara Croft brandishing an ironic grin along with high-tech arms.
We meet the Lara Croft of 2018 losing a sparring match at a mixed martial arts gym where she’s behind in her fees. This East London bike courier cannot accept that her father, wealthy widower Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West), might have died during his mysterious absence, now in its seventh year. She cannot bring herself to sign a Declaration of Death in Absentia and thereby inherit Croft Holdings and Croft Manor.
On the verge of finally inking her signature, Lara instead opens a Japanese puzzle box her father left her. Inside is an old snapshot of them together. And there’s a note leading her to the Croft family mausoleum, under which she finds her father’s hidden research workshop. Thanks to a SONY camcorder with a battery that hold its charge for seven years, Richard instructs Lara to destroy his Himiko files. She does not. She looks through that box, finds an invoice from a sea captain, flies to Hong Kong.
Lara finds that captain’s son Lu Ren (Daniel Wu). His father also disappeared seven years ago, after an attempted voyage with Lara’s father to the legendary island hiding the legendary tomb of the legendary Queen Himiko. After a glance at a snapshot of himself with his father, Lu Ten decides to take Lara’s money and take her there. En route we hear notes Richard recorded on his tape recorder, and see charts and sketches from his notebook. Perils ensue.
Lara’s action scenes are brutalizing. The MPAA rates “Tomb Raider” PG-13 “for sequences of violence and action, and for some language.” First is her fierce gym fight where she taps out of a headlock. Then a bike chase injures her. In Hong Kong she deals with a trio of young thugs. Currents and reefs smash Lu Ren’s vessel upon Yamatai Island, which is not so legendary after all. Lara and Lu Ten are captured by heavily armed multinational thugs employed by Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins, who is great at popping his eyes toward green screens). He says he killed their fathers.
For seven years, a Trinity subcontractor or subsidiary has tasked Vogel– using dynamite and slave labor– to find Himiko’s tomb and bring back her super, if not truly supernatural, weapon. Shots of a framed photo of Vogel’s two daughters tell us he really, really wants to finish this and go home.
Although their hands are bound, Lara and Lu Ten spearhead a slave revolt. She flees through the jungle, leaps off a cliff, plunges into a torrential river, grabs ahold of a rusty WWII bomber at the brink of a waterfall, parachutes into more jungle, and then kills her tracker with a headlock. An attack on Vogel’s camp to steal a satellite phone takes an unexpected turn when Vogel puts a gun to the head of none other than Lord Richard Croft, an evasive semi-crazed cave-dweller on the island for the past seven years. The plot delivers a revisionist twist to Himiko’s resume and a lot of action inside the raided tomb, much in debt to Indiana Jones films.
The London ending points to a sequel. Her father once warned: “Trinity is everywhere.” As Croft executive Ana (Kristin Scott Thomas) reminds Lara: “Just think what you can do for the world, with your potential, with your wealth.” At a pawn shop Lara arms herself with more than headlock, looks into the lens, and grins. Cue end credits of this diversion distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures and Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures.
The only idea entertained by screenwriters Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons, with the story credited to Evan Daugherty and Robertson-Dworet, touches on an out-of-date debate about myth versus truth, magic versus science by British anthropologists.
The Croft crypt contains Lady Amelia Croft, 1964–1998. In his video to Lara, her father reveals her death inspired a quest: “I began searching the world, desperate for a hint of another realm, for proof the supernatural, anything to feel her with me again.”
The grief-struck widower’s research detoured to Queen Himiko: “a powerful sorceress who ruled through dark magic, spreading death and destruction through the mere touch of her hand… entombed beneath a mountain.” He vows to stop Trinity: “If Vogel opens that tomb, Himiko’s curse will be unleashed on the world.” “If it fell into the wrong hands, it could be catastrophic.” He foresees “genocide.”
In a flashback to Croft Manor, 14-year-old Lara shoots arrows at an apple. Richard cites a Swiss archer of old. “William Tell was a myth, dad,” corrects Lara. “Well, all myths have foundation in reality,” he counters. Richard’s point is underscored when that line recurs later in an audio montage.
Vogel is inconsistent. He believes the Queen’s tomb and touch are real enough to excavate for Trinity, yet he taunts the Crofts: “[T]he difference between myth and reality, Richard, something you could never understand.” Entering the tomb, the raiders notice a pulse of air. “She’s still breathing,” marvels Richard. “Or a change in atmospheric pressure,” cracks Vogel. Opening the coffin, they are taken aback when the queen’s corpse sits up. Vogel points to the gears and levers beneath her: “See? Smoke and mirrors.”
Vogel doubts Lara could ever “believe this nonsense.” She interprets ancient paintings inside the tomb that revise the demonized image of Queen Himiko as a deadly vector. Unsophisticated epidemiologists, her contemporaries had turned to the supernatural. “They thought it was magic,” divines Lara.
“A Wrinkle in Time” admits no ambiguity to its big picture, albeit one populated with supernatural-seeming beings. Not from Earth, they are nonetheless totally real. Einstein explains nearly everything in this fantasy adventure from Walt Disney Studios that’s rated PG “for thematic elements and some peril” by the MPAA. An ambiguous agenda in the film’s Cold War era source novel, however, does not make its way to the screen.
Meg Murry (Storm Reid) will leap instantaneously across the cosmos accompanied by her adopted younger brother Charles Wallace Murry (Deric McCabe) and her classmate Calvin (Levi Miller). The threesome’s kindly enablers are Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling). Mr. Which, Mr. Whatsit and Mr. Who are elsewhere, if they exist.
Although the young adult novel by Madeleine L’Engle once mentions a “time wrinkle” coupled with a “space wrinkle,” the 1962 book and 2018 film titled “A Wrinkle in Time” are actually about their characters traveling through space, not in time.
Four years ago to the day, as a television newscaster tells us, Mr. Murry (Chris Pine) mysteriously vanished in an attempt to “travel the universe with his mind.” How? The NASA theoretical physicist theorized: “Tap into the right frequency.” How far? Approximately 91 billion light years. That distance is inexplicably downscaled to 92 million light years in the press notes from Walt Disney Studios.
Meg’s mom, Mrs. Murry (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), is a biophysicist: “I’m mostly interested in the small atoms, particles, the unseeable energies that move through us all.” Together, Meg’s parents discovered “tessering,” a fifth-dimensional mind-based way to transit the universe via a “tesseract” without a spacecraft or supernatural tricks. Before her maiden voyage Meg is assured: “Tessering is almost nearly perfectly natural.” (To wrinkle is to tesser in the vocabulary of this story.)
“Your father has done an extraordinary thing,” Mrs. Which advises Meg. “No human has ever traveled so far out in the universe. But he may be in danger and we’re here to help you find him.”
Why do these three eccentrics– peculiarly capable of materializing and dematerializing– want to help out? “Because that’s what we do,” brightly offers Mrs. Whatsit. “We’re warriors who serve the good and the light in the universe… Think of us as big-hearted.”
DuVernay’s screen adaption of L’Engle’s novel traces Meg’s evolution from a dispirited, detention-prone outcast at James Baldwin Middle School, to a bold selfless cosmic do-gooder. Her superpower of sorts is her love that lets her rescue her father imprisoned on the planet Comazotz, and to free her brother from the awful soul-stealing It voiced by David Oyelowo, who played Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma.” L’Engle variously describes It as IT, the Thing, the Dark Thing and the Black Thing.
Reunited with Meg– nicknamed Megatron and Megaparsec by her dad in the book– Dr. Murry in the film apologizes for prioritizing science over parenthood: “I wanted to shake hands with the universe but I should have been holding yours.”
“A Wrinkle in Time” devotes more narrative space-time to detailing emotion and evil than does “Tomb Raider.” Lara Croft self-actualizes just a smidgen in her character arc. Her nemesis Trinity is thinly drawn. Its counterpart in the 2001 film was the Illuminati.
Mrs. Which schools Meg on the insidious intergalactic shadow: “You see, this is what the It does, one person at a time, until fear takes over, fear turns to rage, rage leads to violence, and then there’s a tipping point. If we do not act soon, Darkness will fall across the universe. We’re in search of warriors who can fight the It. Who can bring hope back.”
“Some of our the best warriors have come from Earth,” Meg is told. Her brother makes a guess: “`Jesus!’ Charles Wallace said. `Why of course, Jesus!’ `Of course!’ Mrs. Whatsit said.” That exchange in the novel is not in the film. Screenwriters Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell drop the son of God from L’Engle’s pantheon of Earth’s prior warriors.
Only one woman is named the 1962 book: Madame Curie, the Nobel Prize winner who coined the term “radioactivity.” L’Engle added Mother Theresa, Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Day when Scholastic magazine students asked for more recent “light-bearers,” according to an undated transcript.
Curie is joined in the film by “[Frida] Kahlo… Maya Angelou and now Meg Murry.” Mrs. Which lauds Meg: “the universe is right tonight because of you.”
The screenplay leaves out a scene in L’Engle’s book where Calvin strains to explain to an alien trio of “Things” what sort of beings Mrs. Which, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Whatsit are. “`Angels!’ Calvin shouted… `Guardian angels!’… he shouted again… `Messengers! Messengers of God!’”
Mrs. Which, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Whatsit bestow a higher purpose on Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin. “This is where we leave you,” says Mrs. Which. “To become warriors on Earth.” The three kids and Mr. Murry all tesser homeward. They land in the Murry’s back yard.
Grown up Meg and Calvin are scientists with seven children in a 1965 novel by L’Engle.
Christian parents in Alabama, Alaska, California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Texas objected to public schools assigning fiction they deemed religiously incorrect.
“Attention parents… After page 64 this book is 90 percent occult… Demand that it be taken out of our schools. Do it now for the sake of your children and future sixth and seventh graders,” exhorted Kathleen Hollop of Wappingers Falls in her letter printed in The Poughkeepsie Journal on December 3, 1987. In her January 1, 1988 letter she asked: “Who do you want your children to serve– God or Satan?”
People for the American Way ranked “A Wrinkle in Time” one of “11 Top targets in 1990-91” in its survey of attempts to take books out of public schools. The novel also appeared on two lists compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association: “100 Most frequently challenged books” in 1990–1999 and “Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books” in 2000–2009.
Calvin College prof Donald Hettinga reported in Christianity Today: “[L]ibrarians in Christian schools and churches handle her books as though they carried dangerous heresies, sometimes relegating them to back shelves where patrons must ask specifically for them, and sometimes banning them altogether.”
“Banners have a tiny, controllable little God and they’re terrified that God might be bigger, more exciting, wilder,” L’Engle told the Associated Press in 1993. Claris Van Kuiken penned a 1996 exposé titled “Battle to Destroy Truth, Unveiling a Trail of Deception” that accused L’Engle of lacing her prose “with a pinch of rat poison.” In 2017 she still maintained: “L’Engle’s novels… are spiritual poison for children, precisely because they are considered `Christian.’”
L’Engle tuned in a radio show attacking her and related: “It was a very strange sensation to listen to a spewing out of hate, a septic vilification of me and everything I believe. My response was instinctively visceral, as though someone were plunging a knife in my intestines and twisting it.”
Evangelicals attacked L’Engle for her alleged New Ageism, Christological deconstruction and allegiance to a doctrine called “open theism.” An Anglican, she explained her intent for “A Wrinkle in Time” to the National Catholic Reporter in 1986: “It’s based on Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory. It’s good, solid science, but also it’s good, solid theology. My rebuttal to the German theologians [who] attack God with their intellect on the assumption that the finite can comprehend the infinite, and I don’t think that’s possible.”
L’Engle reflected on her path of faith in a 1972 memoir: “I found myself explaining to the young minister that I did not believe in God, ‘but I’ve discovered that I can’t live as though I didn’t believe in him.’” In a 1986 book she wrote: “Jesus… is God’s show and tell” and told an interviewer that same year: “The Bible is… a magnificent story book. It doesn’t give any answers, it just tells more stories.”
Passages of scripture recited by Mrs. Which, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Whatsit are italicized in the book, although L’Engle never cites Biblical chapter and verse. And when Meg must block It from brainwashing her, she “shouted” the Declaration of Independence and the Periodic Table of the Elements as if they were incantations to counter against cosmic evil. Inasmuch as It is depicted as an totalitarian entity, not Satan, maybe patriotism and physics are apt ordnance.
L’Engle attended Episcopalian services and served as a volunteer librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. A PBS interviewer asked her in 2000 if she was a Christian writer and she answered: “No. I am a writer. That’s it. No adjectives. The first thing is writing. Christian is secondary.”
L’Engle’s tertiary thing might be an early sixties zeitgeist marked by Sputnik upset, Communism phobia and conformity panic. DuVernay’s film omits a political theme prominent in L’Engle’s book. Unlike religious errancy, the writer’s ideological bent might have struck readers as unambiguous, so she triggered critics on neither the right nor the left.
When the American Library Association awarded its John Newbery Medal to “A Wrinkle in Time” L’Engle gave an acceptance speech on July 15, 1963 at a banquet during the organization’s annual conference in Chicago. She cautioned against a Sputnik-provoked curriculum that denied American children access to imaginative literature: “There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin.”
That folksy metaphor of packaged baked goods evokes “Little Boxes,” a song written by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 and popularized by Pete Singer the next year. The lefty folk singer also recorded Reynolds’ ban-the-bomb lament “What Have They Done to the Rain?”
Collective de-individualizing groupthink is targeted in “Little Boxes.” Southern California suburban tract housing inspired Reynolds’ refrain: “Little boxes all the same… And they all look the same.” Middle-class routines of school, college, white-collar career, home ownership, marriage and children are satirized from a liberal angle.
The Murry family hardly dwells in a Little Box. Dr. Murry is a maverick at NASA. The book supplies more detail about his government employment in a top-secret tesseract project at Cape Canaveral. “Certainly we weren’t the only nation to investigate along that line,” he informs Meg. “But we did try very hard not to let it be known abroad that we were trying to make it practicable,” adding “there was no way to try it out ahead with rats or monkeys or dogs.” He was the second tesser-enabled traveler. The first was lost in space-and-time. L’Engle is clearly referring to the U.S. competing with the U.S.S.R. to launch satellites– then identified as “artificial”– in the Cold War “space race.”
Over many pages, the book describes Comazotz as an extra-terrestrial Communist hell run by the CENTRAL Central Intelligence Agency. In the chapter titled “The Man with Red Eyes,” Prime Coordinator (named “Red” and played by Michael Pena in the film) eyes Charles Wallace and claims: “I am peace and utter rest. I am freedom from all responsibility.”
In a matter of blinks, the boy is hypnotized and brainwashed. Telepathically he is forced to channel It’s pitch: “On Comazotz we are all happy because we are all alike… Complete equality. Everybody’s exactly alike… You see, on this planet everything is in perfect order because everybody has learned to relax, to give in, to submit… on Comazotz individuals have been done away with. Comazotz is ONE mind. It’s IT.”
An unlucky boy out of sync with robot-like boys in his homogenous neighborhood is re-educated through painful conditioning. “After today he’ll never desire to deviate again,” comments Charles Wallace approvingly. “IT sometimes calls Itself the Happiest Sadist,” he “giggle[s].” Social engineering includes euthanasia: “[W]e have conquered all illness, all deformity… We let no one suffer. It is so much kinder simply to annihilate anyone who is ill… Rather than endure such discomfiture they are simply put to sleep.”
Life under It is a tyranny of mind and body. Yet some passages could be read as a beat-era critique of conformity– befitting a one-time denizen of Greenwich Village who set her first published novel in that bohemian enclave. My alternate take may be irrelevant to the novel’s initial reception. Did the book’s anti-Soviet message elicit no objections in 1963?
I see “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” directed by Don Siegel, as social commentary open to similar interpretations. This 1956 science fiction film was based on Jack Finney’s story “The Body Snatchers” serialized by Colliers Magazine in 1954. Big pods from outer space fall on fields near a small California town. As residents sleep, they are duplicated overnight by goo in nearby pods. Outwardly looking like the original, the dupe lacks all its individuality. Pod people are pacified. No emotions. Mind-controlled, they dutifully do the bidding of the invaders and dispatch truckloads of pods throughout the country.
Is this an anti-Red allegory? Or does the film subvert that exegesis with a different alarmist agenda? “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is arguably a paranoid diagnosis of a country losing its individuality, humanity and liberty to conformity. The U.S. is doing this to itself. There’s no need to accuse outsiders.
“Communism is struggling for the minds of men while we have been sleeping,” stated the film’s producer, Walter Wanger. Finney denied he ever wrote “a cold war novel, or a metaphor for anything.” The film is “neither anti-Communist nor anti-anti-Communist,” writes Wanger biographer Matthew Bernstein. He quotes contributing uncredited screenwriter Richard Collins: “It wasn’t either of those things, believe me.” Once a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and Communist Party, Collins was blacklisted until he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951.
“Tomb Raider” is unambiguously free of big ambiguities. There’s merely Vogel’s cognitive dissonance of simultaneously believing and disbelieving that Queen Himiko is a supernatural weapon of mass death. The film “A Wrinkle in Time” delivers uplift minus bookish thoughts about Christianity and conformity.
The book and film sharing the title “A Wrinkle in Time” express a relatable sentiment: daughters love their dads. L’Engle and DuVernay dedicate their respective works to their respective fathers. Lara Croft would no doubt dedicate one of her efforts to Lord Richard Croft if Croft Holdings invests in a sequel and her executive producer perks include dedicating the film.
“Pacific Rim Uprising”: less than oceanic in originality
“Pacific Rim Uprising”
directed by Steven S. DeKnight
written by Emily Carmichael & Kira Snyder and Steven S. DeKnight and T.S. Nowlin; story by DeKnight and Nowlin
acted by John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Jing Tian, Cailee Spaeny, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman
presented by Legendary Pictures and Universal Pictures
MPAA-rated PG-13 “for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and some language”
running time: 111 minutes
“Pacific Rim Uprising” offers inanely iterated bouts of CGI combat between Kaiju, mega-dino-like creatures from another dimension, and Jaegers, 25-story-high mecha-robots whose embedded human co-pilots neurally bridge right and left hemispheres to muster the requisite brain power for interfacing with their mechanical limbs and weapons.
Dazzling pixels and numbing decibels overserve the senses. All this entertained many of my neurons, if not my plot receptors. An amazement in the design: an underdetailed narrative built on thin, short threads of dialogue between one-note characters. It’s almost bold to insert such slight pauses between the outsized action sequences.
Guillermo del Toro directed “Pacific Rim” in 2013. The credits for “Pacific Rim Uprising” list him among 14 producers in the 2018 sequel directed by Steven S. DeKnight. Screenwriters Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder and DeKnight bring back many characters and tropes created by screenwriter Travis Beacham in 2013. When is a sequel more like a reboot?
Not returning is Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), the Pan Pacific Defense Corps commander who cloaked his Jaeger in Kaiju corpse DNA to fake out the Kaiju guarding an inter-dimensional “Breach” on the floor of the Pacific Ocean through which the “alien race” of Precursors dispatch Kaiju to defeat humankind and terraform Earth as a new habitat for Precursors. “Today we are canceling the apocalypse,” proclaimed Pentecost upon launching his suicide mission to breach the Breach and detonate his onboard nuclear reactors.
Ten years afterwards, in 2035, the son of this world-famous world-saver has quit as a Jaeger pilot. Jake Pentecost (John Boyega) works as a Jaeger tech scavenger with a famous father issue.
From the start, the screenplay of “Pacific Rim Uprising” repurposes “Pacific Rim” elements. The first film also had a father and son who were both Jaeger pilots. The son had similar “daddy issues,” as another pilot put it. Both films have black markets: in the first dealers peddled Kaiju debris; in the second Jake and Amara (Cailee Spaeny), a plucky 15-year-old scrapper, deal in Jaeger parts. Both films feature hotshot protocol-overriding pilots who quit and find dangerous work elsewhere. They’re induced to return to the Pan Pacific Defense Corps where they piss off officers and bond with other pilots.
“Pacific Rim Uprising” repeats a major plot point in “Pacific Rim.” Jaegers and their pilots face replacement by a new defensive technology. In the first film there’s a billboard for “Defending Your Future, Alaska-California Anti-Kaiju Wall,” presumably one of many designed to protect Pacific coastal cities from further attacks. This time a Chinese corporation debuts remote-controlled anti-kalju drones to make Jaegers obsolete. Neither measure succeeds. Jaegers must save the day.
The most appealing carry-over is the spat between scientists Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day) and Herman Gottlieb (Burn Gorman). Know-your-enemy inquiry results in dire blowback. This twist is the most original reveal in “Pacific Rim Uprising,” in which there is no uprising, above or below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, by the way.
As in “Transformer” and other sci-fi action franchises, there is no permanent plug in the inter-dimensional portal in “Pacific Rim Uprising.” More invaders are inevitable. So too is the collateral damage when we keep battling aliens in high-density population centers. This over-indulgence in CGI urbicidal fantasy is nearly obscene.
What I Did Not See in “All I See is You”
“All I See is You”
directed by Marc Forster
written by Marc Forster & Sean Conway
acted by Blake Lively, Jason Clarke, Yvonne Strahovski, Danny Huston
presented by SC International Pictures
rated R for strong sexual content/nudity, and language
running time: 110 minutes
I did not get “All I See is You”
Because:
a) I did not notice the right things and connect them the right way.
b) The film is unambiguously about ambiguity and I did not get that.
c) The filmmakers incompetently crafted the uncertainty they sought.
That is, the motives of two key characters are indistinct in ways that did interest me.
I can see all of the above being partly true. It can be a treat or a chore to disambiguate clues and parry misdirection in a film. It depends on the spectator’s inclination to collude with the director. “I would prefer not to,” to quote the title character of Herman Melville’s 1853 story ‘‘Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,’’ scrivened a year after his “Pierre: or, the Ambiguities.”
Director Marc Forster is versatile, with credits including “World War Z,” “Machine Gun Preacher,” “Quantum of Solace,” “The Kite Runner” and “Stay.” His “Stranger Than Fiction” and “Finding Neverland” shuttle with finesse between the inner life of an author and the lived truth of other characters. Neither film is psychologically puzzling like “All I See is You.”
Before making his mark in 2001 with “Monster’s Ball,” Forster directed three features that he co-wrote. The first was the unreleased “Loungers,” shot on 16mm in 1995. According to the Internet Movie Data Base, the “storyline” of this “experimental absurdist musical” was “A lounge singer hires his sister, who suffers from amnesia, to kill their parents.”
Forster is co-writer of “All I See Is You” with Sean Conway. The “I” and “You” in the title possibly refer to both sightless Gina (Blake Lively) and her sighted husband James (Jason Clarke). Flashbacks to Gina’s childhood glimpse a car accident in Spain. Her parents died. She and her sister survived. This is when Gina lost her sight. The plot skips her years prior to marrying James and moving to Bangkok where he works in insurance. An operation restores vision to Gina’s right eye. Her left one was irreparably damaged.
What her new sight changes in her life is unclear. Does James change? Then Gina’s one good eye starts to go bad. Lies are told. The film is not lying to viewers but Forster and Conway go too far in not spelling out too much of what’s going on.
The press notes for “All I See is You” refer to “an almost perfect marriage.” In the pre-operative part of the story I saw no obvious imperfections. The couple’s good-natured disagreements usually end in laughter.
Post-operative Gina dyes her hair blond, adopts a neighbor’s elderly dog, and goes house-hunting. Making choices on her own is a side effect of seeing again. James, in turn, surprises her with a trip to Spain where they honeymooned and her sister lives now. There’s a slightly sharper argument about whether they are staying in “the exact same suite” they booked years ago. She is sure it’s different. He admits he lied about it for some reason. After they return to their high-rise apartment in Thailand, he buys the house Gina likes without telling her.
Sexual tension arises, even if this was not a pre-existing condition for the couple. James is concerned with what Gina sees and how others see her. On a night-time stroll at the Spanish resort they pass a beachfront room where a naked couple stands by their sliding glass door, making love with the lights on. James tells Gina she doesn’t want to see that. On a night out, James refuses to join his wife, her sister and brother-in-law when they take in a sex show at a club. One night in their train compartment Gina binds her husband’s wrists for some martial experimentation. And she records it. James is neither amused nor aroused.
Back in Bangkok, the couple gets ready for a big deal dinner with James’ work associates. James is taken aback at her look. “I just never seen my wife in a dress like that before,” he says. “I guess it’s not really you, huh?” Gina counters: “Well we don’t really know who me is, do we?” Me neither, at this point.
Another exchange underscores a mutually impaired regard.
“Did you love me more before?” –Gina.
“When you were blind?” –James
“Uh uh.” –Gina
“I could ask youth same thing.” –James
“No I asked you.” –Gina
All we may know for certain is what two doctors tell James and Gina– in the absence of the other. His doctor tells him he is infertile. Her doctor tells her the eyedrops she is presently applying are ineffective; a lab test shows they lack the prescribed antibiotic for her corneal transplant and iris reconstruction. That accounts for the inflammation and her failing vision, if not what occurred with her medicine. Neither spouse passes along those test results to the other. Both findings will put the couple in a bad light. At least from our perspective.
Gina’s eye surgeon is a tad shady. Dr. Hughes is played by Danny Huston, frequently found in the role of an unreliable character. Although the credits include an Eye Consultant, Dr. Hughs uses the improbable expression “interocular lens implantation.” That would mean implanting an eye midway between his patient’s right and left eyes, where mystical lore locates a “third eye.”
The cure of a blind lover figures in many French novels and plays between 1760–1830, notes University of Michigan lit prof William Paulson. “The eye surgeon was to prove an ambiguous figure in this literature, sometimes a virtuous hero of enlightened science, sometimes a vain old schemer, sometimes an out-and-out charlatan.” One instance in this genre was “The Blind Man Who Refused to See,” a story by Chevalier de Cerfvol in 1771. Identified with France’s “populationist” camp, he opposed celibacy and penned nine books advocating legal divorce.
In her 1824 pamphlet “Reflections on the Physical and Moral Condition of the Blind,” a 22-year-old blind woman named Thérèse-Adèle Husson cautioned against the blind wedding the blind. She sketched a dire prospect for such a match. “If this portrait is horrifying, that of a young, unmarried blind woman marrying a sighted man is even worse… I beseech women deprived of sight but with some money to live and die keeping hold of their precious freedom.”
“I’m pregnant,” Gina tells James towards the end of “All I See is You.”
Mating by the blind vexed Lucien Howe, an eye doctor and eugenicist who headed the Buffalo Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis and chaired the Committee of Hereditary Blindness in the Ophthalmology Section of the American Medical Association. At a June 1918 AMA meeting in Chicago he proposed: “It is unjust to the blind to allow them to be brought into existence simply to lead miserable lives. It is unjust to taxpayers to be compelled to support them.” The currently blind and kin of the congenitally blind would need to post up to $14,000 in bond to qualify for a marriage license.
Howe also suggested legislators let “innocent taxpayers” block “cacogenic marriages”: “When a man and woman contemplate marriage, if a visual defect exists in one or both of the contracting parties, or in the family of either, so apparent that any taxpayer fears that the children of such a union are liable to become public charges, for which that taxpayer would probably be assessed, then such taxpayer, on guaranteeing the legal costs, may apply to the County Judge for an injunction against such a marriage.”
“I am of the opinion that a really large percentage of the blindness is caused simply by neglect in early childhood,” stated Howe in 1893. He singled out German-American midwives– “not infrequently ignorant and careless in the extreme.” Howe also used the singular “woman” for all womankind. “I use that word in the generic sense, as including not simply the married woman, but that very considerable number– I think about 4,000,000– of the unmarried women, because they have motherly instincts, and if they are not married, they expect to be.”
On January 4, 1918 Howe appeared before the Committee on Woman Suffrage in the House of Representatives for over an hour. Women ought to deal with “infant mortality” instead of seek suffrage, he urged. Chairman John E. Raker: “You lay this loss in infantile life to woman, do you?” “Very, very likely,” answered Howe. “[W]omen should correct those defects as promptly and completely as possible… [W]e should have the energies of the women at all times directed to the care of those children… and not occupy their attention and energies with politics,” testified Howe on behalf of the American Constitutional League.
War raged in Europe, children died here. “One hundred and fifty thousand in one year! The battles around Verdun– in fact, the whole Compienge district– hardly gave in dead many more than that. That is only one year.”
Helen Keller urged blind women not to marry. Blind herself, she wrote in “Midstream: My Later Life” in 1929: “It would be a severe handicap to any man to saddle upon him the dead weight of my infirmities. I know I have nothing to give a man that would make up for such an unnatural burden.” Keller related her conversation with Alexander Graham Bell: “`I can’t imagine a man wanting to marry me,’ I said. `I should think it would seem like marrying a statue.’”
Publicized as a “psychological drama” and “obsessive love story,” “All I See is You” prompts vague suspicions about James and Gina alike. Someone broke into their apartment. Her dog is gone. Then a letter– with a misspelling of “know”– comes from someone who saw a man tie the dog to a fence: [I] “really believe in my heart that she belongs to me. When I look at her she looks back at me and that is called love. I now that you are missing her but I cannot give her back. It would make me too sad. Sorry.”
Eyes reflecting love is for pets and owners, as well as lovers. Gina teaches guitar to a neighbor girl. They appear on stage for a school contest. They strum and sing: “when I’m happy all I see is you… You can see the love that’s in my heart when you look deep into my eyes.” James leaves the auditorium when he hears the lyric “Say goodbye.”
Little in the film is that legible, except in the end credits where score titles include “I’ve Only Seen Them in Movies,” “I’ve Never Been to a Nightclub” and “Reality and Fantasy.”
Possessive sight and the female gaze are longstanding screen tropes. Yet “All I See is You” visualizes blindness and its cure without imagination. To quote the press notes quoting the director and co-writer: “`When I make a film, my visuals are always guided by the motivation of both the character and the story,’ Forster says. `In this case, I wanted to find a way to tell a story without the limitations of traditional narrative devices, where I could literally embody a painter and create innovative and fluid visuals.’” Cinematographer Matthias Koenigswieser believes he sidesteps an obvious binary style: “now it’s Hollywood and now it’s avant-garde.”
The “traditional narrative devices” in this marital thriller are too indirect to my eye. Motives remain in a murk. I prefer the sublime opacity of the couple in “Last Year in Marienbad,” the unapologetically avant-garde narrative by Alan Resnais from 1961.
©2017 Bill Stamets
“Blade Runner 2049”: Enthralling sci-fi action thriller unearths a birth of freedom
“Blade Runner 2049”
directed by Denis Villeneuve
written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green; story by Hampton Fancher; based on characters from novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick
acted by Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Carla Juri, Lennie James, with Dave Bautista and Jared Leto
photographed by Roger Deakins
scored by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch
presented by Warner Bros. Entertainment and Alcon Entertainment
MPAA rated R for violence, some sexuality, nudity and language
running time: 164 minutes
A Los Angeles Police Department officer undertakes a noir quest in “Blade Runner 2049,” set thirty years after the original “Blade Runner.” Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”) directs an absorbing sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi thriller in an even more dystopic California. Officer K (Ryan Gosling) tracks clues that point to his past. After detouring into a cul-de-sac of self-knowledge, he uncovers things that could incite a sea-change of liberty in the labor economy. Already I can see another sequel coming.
The titles of the two films refer to a law enforcement specialty necessitated by willful and lethal “replicants,” android slaves manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation in the first film and by the Wallace Corporation in the second. A blade runner tracks and terminates renegade models among these laborers, soldiers and “pleasure units.” The 2019 blade runner in the 1982 film was Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). He meets his 2049 counterpart K in the 2017 film, as the teaser trailer makes too clear.
This spot debuted on December 19, 2016, repurposing some of Deckard’s 2019 dialogue for an opening voiceover: “Replicants are like any other machine. They’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit it’s not a problem.” Deckard and K are the focus of the 1:45 video, which is disproportionate to the screen time the two end up sharing in the 164-minute film.
The chain of clues includes the date “6.10.21” carved under the hoof of a wooden toy horse K finds on an out-of-the-way protein farm, windswept with red dust. One tiny yellow flower blooms somehow. Rib bone scrapes made with a combat medic’s scalpel lead to a serial number. As in “Children of Men”– Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film set in dystopic 2027 U.K.– a singular birth augurs salvation. Heroic sacrifices are made to safeguard this unique individual.
Records about the person of interest in “Blade Runner 2049” were erased thirty years ago. New evidence emerges. Warner Bros. Pictures and Alcon Entertainment asked reviewers to not categorize this character, among others, as human or replicant. Publicists stipulated at some advance screenings that members of the press sign a Confidentiality Agreement itemizing “confidentiality obligations in connection with being given the opportunity to view the Motion Picture prior to its general release’ that reads, in part: “I WILL NOT POST, TWEET, EMAIL, BLOG OR OTHEWISE SHARE MY THOUGHTS, OPINIONS OR ANYTHING ELSE ABOUT THE MOTION PICTURE OR THIS SCREENING PRIOR TO FRIDAY, SEPT. 29 at 9:00 AM Eastern Time/ 8:00 AM Central Time/ 6:00 AM, Pacific Time.” (Upper-case boldface and typo in the original.)
Signing the agreement also obligated writers to not disclose this agreement or quote it: “I will not disclose any information to any third party not employed or engaged by Warner Bros. regarding how Warner Bros. conducts the screening…”
At a Chicago screening a publicist read aloud a prepared statement from Villeneuve: “I’m excited for you to see my film today. Before we begin, I have a favor to ask all of you… Of course, what you think of my movie is up to you. However, in whatever you write I could ask that you try preserve the experience for the audience seeing the film the way you will see it today, without knowing any details about how the plot unfolds… Thanks, Denis.”
“Do not reveal the fate of any of the characters,” instructed a follow-up email sent to those who attended the screenings. At the end of the film, we do see who is still alive or life-like. But their actual fates might not be known until another sequel updates us.
That lets us spend more time on design details, like the puzzling 20th-century expressions “Made in CCCP” and “Soviet-Happy” that co-writers Hampton Fancher and Michael Green place in 21st-century signage. Fancher was the main screenwriter for “Blade Runner” and gets a story credit on “Blade Runner 2049.”
Archivist Coco (David Dastmalchian) speaks of “thick milky” records thwarting K’s inquiry. His odd phrasing sounds as if borrowed from Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel “A Clockwork Orange.” Most electronically stored data vanished in a pre-2049 “blackout.” Coco recalls the ensuing “ten days of darkness” from his youth. Although K could be about the same age, he has no memory of his own since he is a replicant and knows his memories are “implants.” Never born of woman, he and his kind each come with convincing fictive recollections of their nonexistent early years.
Rachel (Sean Young) was a replicant in the first film who at first was unaware she was a replicant, a prototype loaded with images of childhood that came from the niece of Dr. Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), Rachel’s employer and maker. In the second film, K meets Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), a Wallace Corporation subcontractor who makes up memories to install in a later line of replicants.
Humans learn who is a replicant by asking questions designed to elicit emotions replicants lack. The screenplay of the first film was replete with evocatively crafted prompts and scenarios for blade runners conducting sessions. A variant in the new film is a “baseline” administered by LAPD, apparently to monitor replicants in its employ. K, a known and self-knowing replicant formally identified as KD6–3.7, must reply to a volley of queries. Reaction times are key, he’s reminded by the vocal device. Exchanging phrases with his artificially intelligent examiner, K spits out non sequiturs like “cell,” “interlink,” and an alliterative string “dark… distinct… dreadfully.”
Villeneuve tests viewers with misdirecting stimuli in the opening minute. Corporate logos are all frizzly glitchy. It’s a big screen cliché– this video counterpart of radio static. It is based on the anachronism of electron guns raster-scanning interlaced lines of pixels in a cathode ray tube. Destabilizing sight to index distrust in reality. Although Deckard will gruffly and defensively insists: “I know what’s real,” neither of the “Blade Runner” films are about any reality underlying or enveloping an unreality, as deconstructed in “The Matrix” films made by the Wachowskis between 1999 and 2003.
What is real in “Blade Runner” films is a personal crisis for humans and replicants unsure of what they are. Villeneuve politicizes this uncertainty and questions how different replicants and humans really are. “This breaks the world, K,” warns LAPD Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright) when K’s clues align above his pay grade.
After a title card of set-up, “Blade Runner 2049” opens with an extreme close-up of K’s closed eye. It opens. There is no narrator, but the film centers on his perspective and blind spot. The first film’s first scene had close-ups of eyes belonging to a different replicant piloting a craft through the November night sky of 2019 Los Angeles en route to the designer of his artificial eyes. Towering gas jets were reflected on his eyeballs. Thirty years later, the city is even darker. Natural gas reservoirs must be depleted since no flames are in sight. Less neon too.
Locations multiply in Villeneuve’s film. The action gets out of L.A., starting with the farm where K targets AWOL replicant Sapper (Dave Bautista). The ruins of San Diego and Las Vegas are staging grounds for explosive set pieces. There’s an orphanage where wretched, albeit “nimble,” children take apart old circuit boards. “The nickel is for the colonial ships,” K is told. Lines in both films refer to “Off-world” enterprises requiring labor under conditions no human could endure.
Costume designer Renée April told the New York Times: “It’s snowing, freezing, pollution everywhere. There is no fashion.” Fancher’s story adds little to the backstory of who screwed up this world. A voiceover that never reached the soundtrack of Scott’s film, in one of its handful of iterations, blamed “overpopulation and the greenhouse factor.”
No country is named. Two corporations– Tyrell’s and Wallace’s– matter. The only historical item traceable to our world is “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson. Curiously, two characters in 2049 know the same line from that 1883 novel. There are no schools, libraries, universities, bookstores, theaters or cinemas in this Los Angeles. For that matter, nor is there a city council, board of supervisors, state legislature, U.S. Congress or United Nations.
“`Blade Runner,’ in a sense, actually is about paranoia,” Ridley Scott told Paul Sammon in “Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner,” revised and updated in 2017. Sammon collates his seven interviews with the English director between 1980 and 1995. Scott is an executive producer of the sequel which Villeneuve says he perfuses with: “A kind of inner paranoia about yourself that I wanted to keep alive in the second movie.”
In Scott’s film Deckard deals with clues that he is a replicant, like Rachel. Scott called that twist: “A narrative detail which would always be hidden, except from those audience members who paid attention and got it.” Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), CEO of the Wallace Corporation, taunts Deckard in 2049 that the blade runner’s initial encounter with Rachel at Tyrell’s office was predestined by corporate design. A “single perfect specimen” was foreseen.
Scott and Fancher opened “Blade Runner” with text about the Tyrell Corporation conceiving replicants for “slave labor.” A replicant band of mutineers from an “Off-world” work site returned to Los Angeles. Their mission was metaphysical, as Deckard discovers. In 2049 newer models of replicants, in larger numbers, will announce a political agenda. It too is personal.
Villeneuve, Warner Bros. Pictures and Alcon Entertainment do not care if critics spoil the ideological mise-en-scène of their sci-fi action thriller sublimely crafted by cinematographer Roger A. Deakins and production designer Dennis Gassner. Philosophizing on humanity and autonomy play no part in the marketing of “Blade Runner 2049.” Ford and Gosling are not playing deep thinkers, yet these two blade runners transcend their duty as slave chasers. (California’s governor signed the Fugitive Slave Law on April 15, 1852, but by 1855 the state assembly had stopped voting annually to renew it. Congress had passed national versions in 1793 and 1850, then repealed them in 1864.)
Between the blade running in 2019 and the blade running in 2049, there was a period of replicant “prohibition,” as it was put at the time. Villeneuve commissioned three filmmakers to imagine prequel vignettes. Shinichiro Watanabe’s “Blade Runner 2022: Lights Out” shows “human supremacy movements” and urban lynching of replicants. Christian singer-songwriter Lauren Daigle composed “Almost Human” for this 15-minute anime.
A replicant is “a being virtually identical to a human,” explains the opening card of Scott’s 1982 film. The human slur for replicants is “skin jobs.” Tyrell tells Deckard: “Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. `More human than human’ is our motto.” Thirty years later, a post-prohibition replicant recycles Tyrell’s hype with an ominous sneer. You could call her an abolitionist or maybe an alt-human supremacist.
Tyrell’s goal is ungodly. Could he make a replicant capable of replicating? “Androids can’t bear children,” Rachael Rosen reminded Rick Deckard in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Scott and Villeneuve do not show the love-making scene that follows in the source novel of their respective screen adaptations: “I am not alive! You’re not going to bed with a woman. Don’t be disappointed, okay?” (Dick’s spelling of her name can be spotted in the ungrammatical admonishment to the press: “Please not mention of any cameo roles, including references to Rachael.”)
Tyrell told Deckard: “Rachel is an experiment. Nothing more.” Replicants cannot literally evolve unless they can procreate, but Tyrell upgrades his models faster than natural selection does.
Replicants are screen descendants of robots. Class interests typically conflict. Maria (Brigitte Helm) in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” is a one-off look-alike of a community organizer. “She is the most perfect and most obedient tool which mankind ever possessed!” exults her creator. He dispatches robot Maria to sabotage the workers struggle lead by the real Maria. Detroit labor strife flares when human cops vote to strike over an Omni Consumer Products contract for hiring, or rather purchasing robotic cops in Paul Verhoeven’s “Robocop.” Cybertronics is at fault for manufacturing lovable robots for childless couples in Stephen Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.” Set in 2035 Chicago, Alex Proyas’ “I, Robot” puts a detective on the case of rogue machines at U.S. Robotics.
Wallace Corporation is the top suspect now. “Every leap of civilization was built off the back of a disposable work force,” declares Wallace. “We lost our stomach for slaves, unless engineered.”
“Blade Runner” films are as philosophically minded as they’re astutely designed. Rachel and Deckard were tormented by ambiguity: `who-or-what-am-I?’ and `where-did-I-come-from?’ Knowing oneself meant doubting one’s humanity, for both characters. Their identities hinged on untrustworthy memories and snapshots with no negatives in hand.
“Blade Runner 2049” reprises existential crises Rachel and Deckard faced in 2019. Political ideas enter the picture too. Left unanswered is who made Los Angeles so awful. One dirty bomb, we hear, went off in southern California since the first film.
Because Villeneuve, Deakins and Gassner put entrancing vistas before our eyes, it’s disorienting to hear words ungrounded in that story world. Lt. Joshi lectures K: “The world is built on a wall. Separates kind. Tell either side there’s no wall, you bought a war, or a slaughter… It’s my job to keep order. That’s what we do here. We keep order.” Except Fancher and his co-writers– David Peoples in 1982 and Michael Green in 2017– omit a sense of how Los Angeles or society at large operates. Yes, there are multi-lingual, multi-national, multi-racial throngs in streets patrolled by militarized LAPD units. That’s only a caricature of civic order.
By “kind(s)” and “side(s)” that are “separate(d)” by a virtual “wall” Lt. Joshi could mean antagonistic classes of Angelenos. The film later implies there are human and replicant castes, with more and more of the latter working on Earth. Scott’s film limited their number to a handful of illegal immigrants from a colony. Villeneuve inserts an anomalous scene, at most two minutes long, where we see plainly garbed people in what looks like Roman catacombs. Intrigued as I am by Lt. Joshi’s loaded words, this assembly felt like a placeholder for a third “Blade Runner” film.
Standing among believers, Freysa (Hiam Abbas) delivers lines like Lt. Joshi’s, even if the two women are not of the same kind on the same side. In her only scene, Freysa informs K: “A revolution is coming and we are building an army. I want to free our people… Deckard, Sapper, you, me– our lives mean nothing next to a storm that’s coming. Dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do.” A slave revolt looms? Voltaire in a 1769 letter lauded the one lead by Spartacus in 73-71 BC as “a just war, indeed the only just war in history.”
The seed of insurrection was planted three decades ago. A select few replicants took a quantum leap of self-definition. Freysa and Sapper may be the only ones still around who witnessed what they call a “miracle” on 6.10.21 that “meant we are more than just slaves” and “we are our own masters.”
Christian motifs in “Blade Runner 2049” are more allusive than the unmistakeable ones in “The Matrix” and “Children of Men.” Ordered to kill his first living thing, K shares with Lt. Joshi: “I’ve never retired something that was born before.” Dick’s transitive verb for terminating replicants was “retire.” When she asks, “What’s the difference?” K answers, “To be born is to have a soul, I guess.” This is not the usual water cooler discourse at the office. “Hey, you’ve been getting on fine without one,” snidely cracks his immediate superior.
No souls– or winged symbols of them– are in sight but there’s one birth of sorts. Wallace is inspecting a new model. This specimen is encased in a white sac suspended from the ceiling. It reminds me of scenes from documentaries about meat processing plants, where a carcass on an assembly line is hung by its hooves and a butcher’s cuts loosens its guts. Instead of viscera, Wallace’s slice yields a tremulous naked adult female replicant moist with goo.
“Happy Birthday,” blesses Wallace, dripping with irony. His best designer of childhood memories to implant in adult replicants happens to love making up birthday parties.
“We make angels in the service of civilization,” rhapsodizes Wallace in the obligatory monologue where the evil genius explains his master plan to the good guy for our benefit. “We can storm Eden and retake her.”
A more obscure Christian reference slips into some medico-bio-genetic engineering dialogue: the so-called “Galatian syndrome.” In Galatians 5:1 the apostle Paul preached: “[W]e are children, not of the slave but of the free woman. For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”
I leave that Biblical verse uninterpreted for now, although Villeneuve, Warner Bros. and Alcon did not ask the press to refrain from close readings of scriptural shout-outs. Truly original and thoughtful science fiction like “Blade Runner 2049” and “Arrival”– whose pivotal shot Villeneuve echoes here in concluding frames– is as rare as a tiny flower growing under a dead tree above an ossuary on a protein farm.
K’s and Deckard’s kinetic pursuit of clues merits the cliché `life-changing.’ Procreativist sedition is at hand. Visionary paranoia pays off.
@2017 Bill Stamets
“mother!”: an allegory in flames by Darren Aronofsky
mother!
written and directed by Darren Aronofsky
acted by Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse
presented by Paramount Pictures
running time: 120 minutes
rated R by MPAA for strong disturbing violent content, some sexuality, nudity and language
“mother!” is an audacious downbeat allegory of Christian cosmogeny. In full-blown male auteur mode, Darren Arnofosky mocks a God-like blocked author who tears the very life-force out of his young wife to appease his worshipful, world-ravaging fans. Arnofosky interpolates a ballerina’s creative hell of “Black Swan” (2010) with his mystically fixated men from “Noah” (2014), “The Fountain” (2006) and “π” (1998).
Paramount Pictures publicizes Aronofsky’s seventh feature as a “psychological thriller,” “relationship thriller” and “a home invasion horror tale.” Allegory alert! None of the characters haveth names. Only one, the first listed in the credits, gets an upper-case first letter. Him (Javier Bardem) is getting nowhere on his next book, as mother (Jennifer Lawrence) finishes up rehabbing their three-story house.
It starts as a horror film. A montage of dissolving interior shots shows blackened ruins metamorphose from soot and cinders into bright rooms and hallways in color. This is where the couple live alone and where all of “mother!” is set. Childless mother awakes in bed and calls for her husband: “Baby?” Aronofsky inflects her opening scenes with horror tropes. The lovingly restored old place abounds with creaks and thunks. A circling camera at very close range personalizes her perspective. We immerse in her episodes: hearing high-pitched sounds, peering through walls to a behold beating heart, and dosing herself with yellow-powder from old vials.
The first knock at the door comes in the seventh minute. It’s man (Ed Harris). Says he’s new around here. An orthopedics prof looking for a B&B. Turns out he loves the words of Him and carries a Him photo that unsettles mother. “I’m a huge fan,” gushes man. “Your words have changed my life.” He spends the night. Next morning his wife, woman (Michelle Pfeiffer), knocks. Then their two grown sons show up. One kills the other over a will.
Blood seeps through a vagina-like crack in the floorboards, with supernatural consequences downstream in the basement where an oil-burning furnace fires up on its own. On mother’s last trip down there, fans of “The Hunger Games” may find offense in a Girl on Fire flashback. Recall that line by Jennifer Lawrence’s character: “I was just hoping I wouldn’t burn to death.”
At this point “mother!” has birthed a blackly absurdist comedy as mother is buffeted by family and friends of man, woman and their late son who barge in for a wake. Him accommodates an ever-growing influx of unwelcome visitors who are uncommonly inconsiderate of mother. They come to Him for autographs, souvenirs, blessings and ultimately a neonatal eucharist.
Aronofsky leapfrogs genres and lands in terra incognito. With blunt strokes he trespasses on incongruous religious themes found in Peter Greenaway’s 1993 provocation “The Baby of Macon” and Terrence Malick’s 2011 hymn “The Tree of Life.” This auteur boldly allegorizes creativity and Creation. His grandiloquent poet– we never see or hear a word he writes– is enthralled by His abjectly debased and world-despoiling readers. Aronofsky cynically eviscerates celebrity culture.
“mother!” imagines a monstrous cycle of life and nothingness. The last shot nearly replays the first, with foremother (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) turning over in bed for the last line: “Baby?” The film’s anonymous press notes quote the film’s writer-director on conceiving his film, with no muse in sight: “From this primordial soup of angst and helplessness I woke up one morning and this movie poured out of me… It is a mad time to be alive.” As evidenced, Aronofsky adds, by world population, migrants, politics, icebergs, meat-eating elites, and tourists killing “rare baby dolphins” for the sake of a selfie. “As a species… we live in a state of denial about the outlook for our planet and our place on it.”
On Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week Jennifer Lawrence said the film’s singular setting– an octagonal house in the country– stands for “Earth.” You may notice that it has no driveway. She also called Aronofsky’s film “biblical.” Only twice does her character utter a word along those lines. About her rehab project after the unexplained fire that incinerated the house wherein Him dwells, she explains to man: “I want to make a paradise, and I love the work.” In a later scene, once Him starts to write again, she excuses herself from his writing room: “I don’t want to interrupt. I’ll just get started on the apocalypse.”
Dumbstruck by Aronofsky’s nerve, I liked thinking through “mother!” for a day or two then quit. Its shape and agenda are ugly.
[My last two lines amend my initial review as posted. I may revisit Aronofsky’s earlier films, find his interviews, and write more. Mused or museless.]
“Dunkirk”: valorizing mechanics of suspenseful survival
“Dunkirk”
directed by Christopher Nolan
written by Christopher Nolan
produced by Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan
acted by Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, James D’Arcy, Barry Keoghan
scored by Hans Zimmer
presented by Warner Bros. Pictures
running time: 107 minutes
rated PG-13 for intense war experience and some language
screening in 70mm at Music Box Theater, Chicago
“Dunkirk” is a war movie about an historic retreat that equivocates about English valor. Writer-director Christopher Nolan renders an epic maneuver by interpolating tales of soldiers, sailors, pilots and civilians. Set between May 26 and June 5, 1940, the panorama encompasses France and England, the sea between and the sky above.
England evacuated 338,226 troops from a French beach under German attack. Most of the British Expeditionary Force crossed the English Channel in 222 Royal Navy and 861 English civilian vessels. Joshua Levine, the film’s historical consultant, quotes 113 eye-witnesses in his 2010 book “Forgotten Voices of Dunkirk, in Association with Imperial War Museum.”
This masterful 107-minute narrative unfolds linearly, like every other piece of cinema ever projected on a celluloid strip or from a Digital Cinema Package. The distinctively edited “Dunkirk,” though, installs three distinct timelines, each with its own duration: one week, one day, one hour. Nested episodes overlap for novel continuity. Shuttling between the three strands is disconcerting only on cuts when the times of day do not match.
Nolan’s originality lies in narrative form. Machinery for concocting anomalies in chronology appears in the mise-en-scène of his films “Memento” (2000), “Inception” (2010) and “Interstellar” (2014). Their respective plots foreground technology: a Polaroid camera, a dream-sharing Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous device, and a gravitational lens intervening in spacetime via an Einstein-Rosen bridge.
In the tie-in book “Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture” Nolan tells Levine he shot “from the point of view of the pure mechanics of survival… We don’t deal with the politics of the situation.” Screen time for the German operation Case Red (Fall Rot) is limited to strafing and shelling by the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht. There’s no to-do about the design of “Dunkirk” other than onscreen titles introducing three time frames– “one week,” “one day,” “one hour”– during Operation Dynamo.
“To me, narrative is controlled release of information, and I don’t feel any obligation to make that release chronological,” Nolan told the Village Voice when he debuted his first feature in 1999. “Following” embedded “an ingenious structure that involves flashforwards and doubling back,” stated its press notes.
“Nolan’s now trademark twists and turns and disjointed approach to time’s linearity” is noted by one contributor to the 2015 book “The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible.” Seven other writers there use the misnomer “non-linear” to describe Nolan’s style. That term comes from algebra. In the 1970s it was adopted to market film editing on video using meta-data and random-access. It’s trending among reviewers as if linearity is the default narrativity for the last millennium or longer.
The arc of “Dunkirk” is grounded in the historical record. But the viewing experience is anything but distant. Cameras attached to Spitfires catch tilted vistas during dogfights. Close-ups of his fuel level dial increase tension about the fate of Royal Air Force pilot Farrier (Tom Hardy, “Inception”). Hans Zimmer’s score ever ratchets upward through a jagged sawing of strings.
“We looked at a lot of suspense films,” Nolan told entertainment reporters. “I really wanted the film to be driven primarily through the mechanism of suspense, which I think is one of the most cinematic of film forms, the most pure cinema.” He mentioned “Wages of Fear” directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1953. He disguised his screenplay by titling drafts “Bodega Bay” after the California locale of “The Birds,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 thriller that climaxed with a fictive evacuation.
“I don’t see it as a war film,” Nolan tells Levine. “It’s a suspense film, but we try and push the visceral suspense as far as we can. So you get into the language of horror films, definitely… I didn’t look at too many war films. We looked at Spielberg’s `Saving Private Ryan,’ which was also instructive because it has a horror movie aesthetic.”
As for the Germans– and not just those helming U-boats– “It’s like the shark in `Jaws,’ maybe you see the fin but you don’t see the shark.” When cameras started rolling Warner Bros. Pictures slotted “Dunkirk” as an “Epic Action Thriller” in a May 26, 2016 press release.
Does Nolan’s 2017 big screen genre correspond to the 1940 wartime event? England grappled with Dunkirk, an exodus christened the “Miracle of Dunkirk” not long after a Day of National Prayer on May 26 in Westminster Abbey attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury, King George VI and prime minister Winston Churchill. “Wars are not won by evacuating,” Churchill told the House of Commons on June 4. “Dunkirk” survivors read his speech in newspapers the following day on the train from Dorset to London.
That same day Deutsche Diplomatisch-Polititische Korrespondenz informed the Berlin bureau chief of the New York Times that the prime minister’s speech, broadcast by BBC radio, was “a sober, unvarnished, manly confession of defeat.” An Associated Press dispatch from Paris called Dunkirk “a great retreat.” The Chicago Tribune called it “a defensive holocaust to meet the Nazi drive.”
“England’s rout at Dunkirk,” as Colliers magazine war correspondent Quentin Reynolds put it in his 1963 autobiography. “Only incredible courage, amazing luck, and unexpected German stupidity had saved the English army from complete annihilation,” he recollected in The Ottawa Journal on October 18, 1941.
Just days prior to the evacuation, on May 22, 1940, an Associated Press forecast: “The British expeditionary force, in peril of being pinned against the English channel, means to die where it stands rather than let the Germans occupy the coast where they could face an attack on the British Isles.”
“WE NEVER SURRENDER,” later thundered the all-caps headline in London’s Daily Mirror on June 5. Ninety-nine soldiers in the Royal Norfolk Regiment did surrender near Dunkirk on May 27. Waffen-SS troops then machine-gunned them at a farm house in Le Paradis. Two survived. Some 200 French West African soldiers in the vicinity were not even allowed to surrender. They were massacred at once. A German High Command communiqué claimed German forces captured 40,000 Allied troops left behind at Dunkirk.
“The emerging story of Dunkirk was being shaped to fit the sense of national self,” writes Levine in his 2017 book. Author J.B. Priestley mused on his weekly BBC radio broadcast of June 5, 1940: “The news of it came as a series of surprises and shocks, followed by equally astonishing new waves of hope. What strikes me about it is how typically English it is. Nothing, I feel, could be more English both in its beginning and its end, its folly and its grandeur… What began as a miserable blunder, a catalogue of misfortunes ended as an epic of gallantry. We have a queer habit– and you can see it running through our history– of conjuring up such transformations.”
“Dunkirk” too is transforming history. Nolan calls his serious entertainment “an intimate epic” about “communal heroism.” Yet valor is individualized, equivocally.
In the opening scene Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) makes his way through the deserted streets of Dunkirk. German propaganda flyers flutter down. They show a map and spell out: “You Are Surrounded!” Tommy filches a cigarette butt from an ashtray inside a window sill. Unseen Germans shoot down his five mates. He runs to an English emplacement then heads to the beach and beholds endless lines of soldiers waiting to board ships home.
Tommy helps a French soldier (Damien Bonnard) bury an English one in the sand. They exchange no words, as the latter puts on the uniform and boots of the dead man, identified by his dog tags as Gibson. Together they pick up a stretcher bearing a wounded English soldier and push their way ahead of able-bodied men to reach a hospital ship.
Nolan charts their mission with a revelatory chain of tracking shots. Left ambiguous are the young men’s motives: selfless aid to an abandoned comrade, selfish opportunism, or an impulsive tangle of both. Stretcher-bearers are turned away in one scene, though. “One stretcher takes the place of seven men,” bluntly states an officer counting evacuees.
Levine’s 2010 book quotes a few Dunkirk survivors who call themselves “cowards.” Others do not come home. A sergeant in the Royal Engineers recalls: “I saw chaps run into the water screaming because mentally it had all got too much for them. During the two days we were on the beach, at least a couple of dozen men committed suicide by running into the sea.” Nolan shows Tommy, the nameless French soldier, and Alex (Harry Styles) on the shore witnessing one such incident, wordlessly.
Another casualty is the fault of a shell-shocked Englishman rescued at sea by the Moonstone, a “little ship” owned by retired Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance). Listed in the credits as Shivering Soldier (Cillian Murphy), he panics and shoves George (Barry Keoghan), a young civilian onboard who dies of his resulting head injury. George’s dying wish is fulfilled. His local newspaper, Weymouth Herald, memorializes him as a “hero” instead of the unlucky victim he in fact was. Nolan renders this episode with duplicitous sincerity. There’s no angst over the `noble lie’ of civic fictions found in his “The Dark Knight” (2008) and “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012).
“All we did was survive,” a soldier admits. This shame was overshadowed by a rallying cry dubbed the “Dunkirk spirit.” For the sake of home front morale, Churchill blocked the news on June 17 about Germany sinking the RMS Lancastria off the French coast. Operation Ariel, an ill-fated replay of Operation Dynamo, overloaded this requisitioned Cunard liner with civilians bound for England. Some 4,000 to 6,000 died from drowning, burning oil on the surface, and strafing.
Two years later Joseph Goebbels invoked what Churchill had once labeled a “colossal military disaster” to argue that “an attempted landing anywhere in Europe would quickly provide England with a second, and far worse, Dunkirk. [Churchill] cannot risk such a defeat without causing a fatal crisis for the Empire.” The article– titled “The Air War and the War of Nerves”– ran in the June 14, 1942 issue of the Ministry of Propaganda weekly Das Reich. The Allied invasion at Normandy would start on June 6, 1944.
Dunkirk interested Hollywood long before “Dunkirk.” Variety reported in 1940: “Within 20 days there were four claims on the subject” with the disclaimer: “nothing more than a title and an idea exist for most of these pictures.” Universal eyed “Dunkerque.” Warners lined up properties titled “Dunkirk” and “Evacuation.” A November 27 Variety headline that year read: “Dave Selznick… Yens `Dunkirk’ Yarn.” His tentative title was “Beaches of Dunkirk.” The source was supposedly “a semi-official story by a survivor.” The August issue of The Atlantic Monthly ran a short story by a Royal Navy captain using the pen name Bartemius. “The Beaches of Dunkirk” relates a plucky gal disguising her gender and motoring across the Channel to Dunkirk. Is her sweetheart among the survivors?
Another fictive skipper appears in “Channel Incident,” released September 23, 1940 by the Ministry of Information. Anthony Asquith directed this eight-minute short “told in story form” starring Peggy Ashcraft. The Sydney Morning Herald deemed it “a film which is almost unbearably true in its simplicity.” A brief review in the Motion Picture Herald, published in Chicago, related: “A yachting, sporting lass hears the call for boats. She rallies the yachting club bartender, a feeble minded but faithful retainer and an errant soldier, aboard her boat; and does her heroic evacuation work. She also finds her soldier friend among the defeated. The short contains actual Dunkirk scenes. But these are few. The rest are acted, and in the manner of amateur theatricals.”
Documentary News Letter, founded by John Grierson and based in London, panned “Channel Incident” for “its insistence on the outlook of the Edwardian novelette.” The anonymous critic continued: “It is a flaming insult to the men of Dunkirk and to the men and women of the little boats, a flaming insult indeed to the British people, to reduce this great story to the terms of a middle-class female chuntering back and forth across the Channel and rescuing soldiers only incidentally while she searches for her husband… If ever a film symbolised the mental outlook by which Britain could lose this war, `Channel Incident’ did it; and it was splendid to note the disgust, either frigid or vocal, with which it was received by many in the public cinemas.”
The Guardian agreed that “Channel Incident” was useless for bolstering or burnishing the new Dunkirk spirit: “a slight story, but no moral whatsoever.”
Variety noted that English novelist Louis Golding– sailing to New York City in November 1949– pitched a feature-length drama inspired by Dunkirk that would push no moral or message. “These Are the Lads” nonetheless “presents the point of view the British are anxious to get across.” Variety stated “he wanted to make the picture on a straight commercial basis, as he feels it is not propaganda but a story.” Four months later, syndicated Hollywood columnist John Truesdell wrote: “Golding, has the movie factories bidding high for his story of the Dunkirk devastation, titled `Leave It to the Lads.’” Golding claimed he could not shoot on the English coast because the civilian vessels would become military “targets.”
“Hollywood has an acute naval situation, a shortage of small sea-going craft,” announced Variety on May 28, 1941. British Air Ministry helped on Spitfire scenes in Hollywood’s “A Yank in the R.A.F.” Twentieth Century-Fox shot the Dunkirk evacuation scene on a back lot in June. The National Board of Review called it “a thrilling reconstruction of the debacle at Dunkirk.” Betty Grable and Tyrone Power starred. It premiered on September 25, 1941.
Two other films came later: “Dunkirk” (1958) and “The Sands of Dunkirk” (1961). The 2016 release “Their Finest,” directed by Lone Scherfig, is a workplace romance set in the Ministry of Information. Two screenwriters adapt an irresistibly uplifting, if factually iffy, tale of twin sisters borrowing their father’s fishing boat to help bring soldiers home from Dunkirk.
Nolan valorizes the mechanics of evacuation in his “Dunkirk.” Zimmer’s valedictory score at the end mobilizes the Miracle of Dunkirk motif. It’s hard to imagine Nolan adding a coda to acknowledge a June 2, 1940 report from the Paris bureau of the Associated Press headlined: “Turn Back Nazis at Dunkirk. 200,000 Germans Attack in Waist Deep Flood; Mowed Down.” Allied defenders opened flood sluices to create a seawater moat to block Germans advancing on Dunkirk. “Bursting shells made geysers in the water and churned it into a muddy and bloody froth.”
©2017 Bill Stamets
“Spider-Man: Homecoming”: Marvel’s universal sophomore knows his place in Queens
“Spider-Man: Homecoming”
directed by Jon Watts
written by: Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley, and Jon Watts & Christopher Ford, and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
based on the Marvel Comic Book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
acted by Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Edward Leeds, Zendaya, Jon Favreau, Jacob Batalon, Laura Harrier, Marisa Tomei, Chris Evans
released by Sony Pictures Entertainment, Columbia Pictures, Marvel Studios
rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for sci-fi action violence, some language and brief suggestive comments
“Spider-Man: Homecoming” pleases as an action adventure about growing up. In a deciding moment of self-making, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) will scale his future as a superhero. Jon Watts directs this summery PG-13 diversion based on the Marvel Comic series launched by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in August 1962. In April 1999 Los Angeles Superior Court judge granted rights for the Spider-Man character and television distribution of films to Marvel Enterprises and Sony Pictures Entertainment. A screen franchise ensued.
A newfound maturity lets Parker know himself as a 15-year-old sophomore at Midtown School of Science and Technology. Apart from his chimera arachnid characteristics, the title character is at the age to go to a homecoming dance, take a Spanish quiz and resolve a linear acceleration equation. He shows up for the academic decathlon nationals. Instead of competing alongside his teammates, however, this costumed web-spinner saves them from peril atop the Washington Monument. Full-time world-saving can come later.
Parker is on his own for guidance. Grown-ups are not around for this teen from Queens. His legal guardian is Aunt May (Marisa Tomei). She’s concerned by how much time he spends in his room. And why is he always losing his knapsacks? Five and counting. Quick changes in alleys mean Parker forgets where he cached his street clothes when changing for crime-fighting errands.
Parker looks up to Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), a mostly absent mentor renowned for his exploits as Iron Man. This CEO of Stark Industries, headquartered in Manhattan, is Parker’s corporate sponsor of sorts. On their irregular get-togethers Stark brings him upgraded Spider-Man outfits. The latest beta comes with a Siri-like A.I. assistant. No one knows who Spider-Man is behind his mask. Iron Man, on the other hand, is out as an international celebrity.
“Spider-Man: Homecoming” opens with Parker shooting a selfie video about jetting to Berlin. Aunt May is told he was on a Stark internship retreat. The truth is that Stark beckoned Parker to join forces with the Avengers, a consortium of adult superheroes lead by super-industrialist Stark. We do not see the battle in question detailed in “Captain America: Civil War” last year.
“Spider-Man: Homecoming” presumes we saw that film, along with others in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The press notes quote director Jon Watts explaining why he and his co-writers Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers dispensed with backstory: “[W]e… didn’t have to spend any time explaining why this 16-year-old kid [Parker says he’s 15 in the film] would come up with the idea of becoming a superhero. He’s grown up in the MCU; when Peter Parker was eight years old, he saw Tony Stark say ‘I am Iron Man’ on TV.”
An Iron Man animated series aired from 1994 to 1996, but there’s no flashback to seven- or eight-year-old Peter watching reruns on television, reading comics, or playing with action figures in the 2017 film. Nor do we learn what happened to his parents. And there’s nothing about the radioactive spider bite that enhanced him with spidery powers. Aunt May is off the mark about the “changes your body is going through.”
So fanboy Parker first met Stark on the screen. Fans of Spider-Man met him there too: “Spider-Man” (2002), “Spider-Man 2” (2004), “Spider-Man 3” (2007) and “The Amazing Spider-Man” (2012). Tobey Maguire played the title character in the first three films; Andrew Garfield in the fourth. Fans got to know Stark in “Iron Man” (2008), “Iron Man 2” (2010) and “Iron Man 3” (2013)– all starring Downey. For an otherwise calculated effort, Watts’ film offers no guide for unversed viewers.
The notion of guiding neophytes is teased in “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” Captain America (Chris Evans), a Marvel character introduced in a 1941 comic book, turns up in videos at Parker’s high school. “Hi, I’m Captain America… Today my good friend _______ , your gym teacher, …” This upstanding superhero imparts one-liners to kids in detention: “The only way to really be cool is to follow the rules.” Apparently public schools outsource both calisthenics and counseling to Captain America.
To do your homework, watch “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011), “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014), “Captain America: Civil War” (2016) and the two Avengers films without his name in their titles. When Spider-Man interrupts a crew of ATM thieves, note they’re wearing masks of various Avengers. An Identity Theft poster is on the wall.
If the 2017 screenwriters skip essentials in Spider-Man’s origin story, they introduce a new supporting character deserving more screen time, if not a spin-off of her own. Michelle (Zendaya) is a quirky academic decathlete. Off to the side, she speaks out of the corner of her mouth in her handful of scenes. Classmates wonder why she knows so much about Parker, like his dropping marching band and robotics lab. “I’m not obsessed with him, just very observant,” she deflects. She lurks in detention: “I just like coming here to sketch people in crisis.”
Parker’s best pal Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) marvels at a theory Parker devises to explain a local crime trend under Stark’s radar: “Whoever’s making these weapons is obviously combining alien tech with ours.” Leeds goes meta-nerd: “That is literally the coolest sentence anyone has ever said.”
The self-radicalized entrepreneur making and selling those weird weapons is Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton). His resentment against east coast elites drives the narrative of “Spider-Man: Homecoming”– not Parker’s path to Spider-Manhood. Toomes’ criminal activity furnishes Parker with a case to solve. He hopes to impress Stark and attain Avengers status.
Toomes gets a backstory in the opening scene, set eight years before the storyline of “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” His hardhat crew processes debris in a sort of ground zero in New York City. Suddenly a contingent of federal suits come on site. They brandish executive order 3960 per “exotic alien technology” that overrides his contract. This will ruin his business and put his people out of work, he pleads.
A television newscaster adds context: “A joint venture between Stark Industries and the federal government, the Department of Damage Control, oversees the collection and storage of all alien and other exotic material. Experts estimate there are over 1500 tons of exotic materials scattered throughout the tri-state area.” What you may have missed in a prior Marvel film was the Avengers defending New York City from aliens. Extraterrestial war materiel was left on the field of battle.
Stark and Washington, D.C. collude to disempower Toomes, who identifies with forgotten men and women. He makes a hard turn to a darker side: stealing alien tech and selling a new generation of hardware to criminals– and terrorists? “The world’s changing,” Toomes tells his employees. “It’s time we changed too.”
Alongside a rebooted career, the changing Toomes adapts that “exotic” tech to fashion himself a superhero-style outfit. Enter the Vulture, a villainous version of Iron Man. This befits Keaton after starring in “Batman” (1989) and “Batman Returns” (1992), and later in “Birdman: or (The Unexpected Virtue of Innocence” (2014) where he played an over-the-hill winged action hero. A paunchy middle-aged man in a Spider-Man outfit appears briefly as a background character with no lines. In the current film a Toomes employee adopts an alien tech-enhanced persona of Shocker on sales calls.
Watts may not waste screen time with Parker’s angst of adolescence, yet Toomes takes the floor to speechify: “How do you think your buddy Stark paid for that power? Or any of his little toys? Those people, Pete, those people up there, the rich and the powerful, they do whatever they want. Guys like us, you and me. They don’t care about us. We build their roads and fight their wars and everything. They don’t care about us… That’s how it is. I know you know what I’m talking about.”
That’s it for political philosophizing. Even that much talk strikes Parker as out of place. He asks the question few characters actually do ask in these circumstances: “Why are you telling me all this?” Toomes admits it’s in part to buy time to get “airborne” as Vulture. As another Keaton character once insisted, channeling his Birdman persona: “People, they love blood. They love action. Not this talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit.” And so the fight begins: Spider-Man versus Vulture.
Earlier, Toomes schooled Parker: “You’re young. You don’t understand how the world works.” True enough, though Parker is more worldly than his sidekick who guesses that after high school this is what a boss tells an employee: “Good job on those spreadsheets. Here’s a gold coin.”
Watts’ film snarks about the Avengers franchise. The gym teacher who had to play the Captain America video cracks: “I’m pretty sure this guy’s a war criminal now but whatever.” Iron Man– Tony Stark is called “hypercapitalist” in the press notes– has drawn a heavy critique or two. Exhibit A: the 2014 Cineaction article titled “How to Read Iron Man: The Economics, Geopolitics and Ideology of an Imperial Film Commodity.” There Tanner Mirrlees proposes: “Iron Man supports the economic power of the U.S. Empire by sustaining the global market dominance of Hollywood and its cross-border trade in blockbuster films, synergistically cross-promoting itself and other U.S. commodities through itself and other derivative goods, and generating revenue for the Walt Disney Company and its U.S. ruler and owner, [CEO, Robert A.] Iger.”
A glance at the historical record yields no web so nefarious, although on March 9, 1942 the Motion Picture Daily reported a new book titled “Himmler, Nazi Spider Man.” Another wartime allusion can be spotted in Time Magazine on June 6, 1944: “The strong, fine strands of spider webs have been very helpful in the wartime manufacture of optical instruments and range finders.” Headlined “Spider Man,” the article credited “Pete” Petrunkevitch, “the world’s foremost authority on spiders,” with that very spidey innovation. Captain America and Iron Man plots foreground on U.S. research and development for overseas war efforts.
So far I found no evidence that Peter Parker owes his name to the above-mentioned Yale professor from Russia, one Alexander Ivanovich (“Pete”) Petrunkevitch. Spiderman creator Stan Lee, who has a fleeting cameo in “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” originally heralded his comic book hero with no ideological baggage at all: ‘‘the world’s most amazing teen-ager– Spider-Man– the superhero who could be– you.’’
Fans– that’s “you”– identifying with Lee’s character could read the fine print, after Wikileaks posted hacked emails exchanged between Sony Pictures Entertainment and Marvel Characters, Inc. A Confidential Non-Binding Discussion Document and a Second Amended and Restated License Agreement state that Peter Parker and Spider-Man “must always strictly conform to the following Mandatory Character Traits.”
The Caucasian heterosexual male character “does not deliberately torture… deliberately kill humans other than in defense of self or others… use foul language beyond what is permitted in a PG-13 rated film… smoke tobacco… abuse alcohol… use or sell/distribute illegal drugs… engage in sexual relations before the age of 16 or with anyone below the age of 16.”
Core Powers and Abilities are specified too. “Spider-Man has the proportionate strength of a spider. This means he can lift or press approximately 10 tons. Spider-Man has the proportionate jumping ability of a spider. This means he can jump vertically approximately 5 stories (approximately 50 feet) and/or horizontally approximately the length of a city block (approximately 264 feet).” His exceptional “flexibility” exceeds that of a “contortionist.” He “can evade bullets– even from automatic weapons… His accelerated metabolism increases his tolerance to toxins.” He “can maintain his equilibrium better than an Olympic level gymnast.” Sony Pictures Entertainment “shall have the right to depict any of Spider-Man’s Approved Powers in any particular Picture at up to full strength and/or as having any lesser strength… Spider-Man’s powers apply to Spider-Man’s civilian identity, Peter Parker, as well.”
Oblivious or not to limits on his freedom, Parker ultimately makes a self-knowing choice. Spider-Man– “Queens’ own local colorful crime-stopper,” to quote an admiring local TV news talent– is staying home. He never left, really.
©2017 Bill Stamets
“Transformers: The Last Knight”: Securing homelands and unearthing secrets
directed by Michael Bay
screenplay by Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, Ken Nolan
story by Akiva Goldsman, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, Ken Nolan
acted by Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, Jerrod Carmichael, Isabela Moner, Santiago Cabrera, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci; Transformer characters voiced by Peter Cullen, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi
presented by Paramount Pictures in association with Hasbro
rated PG-13 for violence and intense sequences of sci-fi action, language, and some innuendo
running time: 149 minutes
Pop culture cosmology lifts Arthurian myth to embroider backstory in “Transformers: The Last Knight.” The fifth film of a toy-based franchise directed by Michael Bay lobs summer action spectacle. The CGI chaos is as meticulously crafted as ever. Bay can stupefy almost sublimely. Enabled by six editors, this hands-on showman evokes a three-eyed Shiva, the Hindu god known as a `transformer’ depicted with up to ten arms.
Since the 2007 debut of “Transformers” I have ogled Bay’s cinema-of-attractions set pieces. Futurist-Vorticist detailing of metallic behemoths– transforming in a matter of seconds into cars, trucks, motorcycles, helicopters, jets, submarines, boomboxes, laptops, flatscreen televisions, campus hotties, dinosaurs and fire-breathing dragons– startles the eye.
Eardrums endure collateral damage. So do Chicago, Shanghai and other unlucky terrestrial locales where factions of “intelligent mechanical beings” from the civil war-ravaged planet Cybertron continue their eons-old “blood feud.” A 2007 tagline apprised us: “Their war. Our world.”
Autobots “fought for freedom” and Decepticons “dreamt of tyranny,” narrated Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) in the third film. He– all of his kind are gendered as male– is the key recurring Autobot (Autonomous Robotic Organism). In 2017 he will face a crisis of self-knowing by encountering his creator.
Hasbro Industries imported Transformer toys from Japan in 1984, four months after Tonka Corp. began distributing a similar GoBots toyline. (Hasbro Industries, renamed Hasbro, Inc., bought Tonka in 1991.) Hasbro restyled its G.I. Joe male action figure as “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero,” a counter-terrorist taking on the international evildoers of Cobra Command in 1982. A script is in the works to combine G.I. Joe and the Transformers onscreen.
The ad campaign from ten years ago hyped: “[director/ executive producer] Michael Bay (Armageddon) and [executive producer] Steven Spielberg (War of the Worlds) change the history of motion pictures with their stunning and revolutionary visualization!”
Bay’s battles and chases are inventive, but what comes in between is not. Seven writers fill the 149 minutes of “Transformers: The Last Knight” with intrepid outliers unearthing an outlandish truth underlying a debunked myth, and save Earth from annihilation by aliens. Mostly set in contemporary England– Stonehenge and 10 Downing Street are among shooting locations– Bay’s latest conjures up a premodern pact and prophecy.
As in “Prometheus” and “The X-Files” evidence emerges of primordial alien arrivals. We might be latecomers to Earth. The very end of the fifth film hints the sixth will elaborate. This one may be the last Transformers for Bay, who says he is handing over directing duty to others. Three months ago he told MTV News that 14 more Transformers films are outlined.
“Transformers: The Last Knight” opens amidst the CGI ruins of Soldier Field in Chicago. A dying Autobot knight– who came from the planet Cybertron at least 1600 years ago– hands a Cybertronian-etched talisman to a Texas inventor running a Badlands junkyard to hide illegal aliens from the private paramilitary Transformers Reaction Force. Sector Seven– “a special access division of the Government, convened in secret under President Hoover”– no longer monitors terrestrial Transformers.
As the title’s “Last Knight” Mark Wahlberg reprises his role as Cade Yeager from the fourth film, “Transformers: Age of Extinction.” Except now this Texan on the run is like a station manager on an underground railroad for his Autobot buddies. The abolitionist reference is hardly farfetched. Look for a photograph of Harriet Tubman later on. The first three films featured Shia LaBeouf playing the lead befriender of the Autobots. We followed his character Sam Witwicky graduate from high school, go to college and get his first job. U.S. President Barack Obama awarded him a medal for his heroism.
Yeager, a widower with a daughter in college, is paired in the 2017 iteration with Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), an Oxford University professor of English history. We first meet her playing polo. A teammate taunts her for being “single.” In her next scene she instructs Puffy and other kids on a London museum tour that all those Arthur, Lancelot, Merlin and Percival legends are “horse shit.” Imagine her shock upon discovering she shares DNA with one of them.
“You don’t need to save the world. You need a frigging’ girlfriend,” advises Yeager’s daughter in a phone call cut short to foil U.S. government intel gatherers.
Wembley and Yeager are brought together by Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins), “the last of the Order of the Witwiccans.” Burton imparts the inside story of this “secret society” founded “to protect the secret history of Transformers here on Earth.” The 40-generation roster includes Leonardo Da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Catherine the Great, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Stephen Hawking and even Sam Witwicky.
“Your father was a member,” Burton informs Wembley. She learns Merlin was real. We saw him ourselves back in the opening scene: “England– The Dark Ages.” Merlin (Stanley Tucci) is drunk and late for a battle where Arthur (Liam Garrigan) and his army are “outnumbered, a hundred to one.” Merlin begs for military magic from Transformers hiding in a local cavern. They deploy a three-headed dragon to win the day. Debunker of legends of fire-breathers, Wembley always thought Arthur’s catapults hurled fireballs at Saxon invaders. Paramount Pictures lobs CGI fireballs through the opening credits at the audience.
Merlin also gets a secret super powerful staff from the Transformers. Only he or an heir can wield it. In the right hands it will save the world someday. “You, Miss Vivian, are Merlin’s last descendant here on Earth and as such you are our last hope,” states Burton. And right there, on the very last page of volume 40 of the dusty tome charting Merlin’s family tree, there’s an irrefutable 8×10 photo of Vivian Wembley. Only her grasp can activate the long-lost staff. She and the Yank are now yoked as Earth’s co-saviors.
Transformers screen characters– human and alien– are never scripted as lovingly as the special effects and soundtrack are composed. Screwball dialogue between Yeager and Wembley is on the schoolyard level. She orders: “You American man, shut it.” In a later scene he comes back with: “You, English lady, shut it.” They spar over mishearing “chaste” as “chased.” Wince when you hear Sir Anthony Hopkins use “dude” and “dickhead.” His human-sized robo-butler Cogman (voiced by Jim Carter) cracks, “No shit, Sherlock.”
It’s as if the writers excuse their lapses by inserting an early scene of four Chicago boys trespassing on an Alien Contamination Zone in search of robot souvenirs. “We’re kids,” their leader tips his cohorts. “We can get away with anything.”
Careless writing leads to different characters referring to the same planet as both “Unitron” and “Unicron.” In Bay’s world the words “race” and “species” are interchangeable: all of humanity is one “race” and one “species,” and all the Transformers represent a single “race” and “species.” It’s a binary cosmos. “Two species at war. One flesh, one metal,” narrates Burton.
In the previous film, Yeager dubbed his daughter’s Irish boyfriend “Lucky Charms” and mocked his “Leprechaun” accent. “You’d get your ass kicked in Ireland for saying that,” advised Shane (Jack Reynor). Yeager gets another pushback in “Transformers: The Last Knight” when a Native-American policeman (Gil Birmingham) complains that Yeager calling him “chief” is “vaguely racist.”
Lines emanating from the “vocal processors” of Transformers cater to a demographic that once played with Hasbro toys, read Transformers comics, watched Transformers cartoons and played Transformers video games. And may continue to so entertain themselves. Autobots and Decepticons sound like macho bikers and military irregulars. With all their quicksilver transformability, you’d think the screenwriters would tap into the politics of identity and diversity that animate so many superhero narratives (e.g., “The X-Men”). Instead these English-speakers default to adolescent trash talk.
The first Autobot to manifest on Bay’s big screen is Bumblebee. Hiding-in-plain-sight is the modus operandi of Transformers in Earth’s technoscape. This particular alien morphs into a yellow and black 1977 Camaro that turns up on a used car lot. The proprietor has no idea how it got there but sells it to Sam Witwicky in the first Transformers film.
No voice actor is credited for Bumblebee in the first four films because this CGI character is mute, due to prior damage in combat. All his dialogue is sampled from rock songs and movie lines. Ironically, his pop cultural tastes in sampling lend him a more distinctive personality than his voiced peers. At the end of the fifth film, he has two different “voice processors” installed. Bay’s longtime sound designer and supervising sound editor Erik Aadahl voices Bumblebee’s handful of lines here. This Autobot headlines a prequel/ spinoff film scheduled for next June.
Script slips can puzzle. Every “Transformers” film seems to include Americans discovering an old Transformer in an out-of-the-way place like the Arctic Circle. That entity was “reverse-engineered,” starting in 1935. Among the “modern age” tech yielded: “cars.” Rather imprecise on the timeline of internal combustion motor vehicles. Henry Ford debuted his Model T in 1908.
Meaningless precision occurs in the 2014 film. Aliens turned Earth, partly or totally, into Transformium “65 million” years ago. And that is “B.C.” to be clear. Aliens also visited in “17,000 B.C.” Optimus Prime divulges, indefinitely: “They have been here forever.” That voiceover is used as a tagline too.
Dialogue and taglines repurpose Hasbro hype. “More than meets the eye!” reads a 1984 ad touting a Hasbro toy that transforms between a Decepticon and a Walther P-38 gun. “Ages 5 & Up.” Optimus Prime uses the same expression in “Transformers” to refer to the optics of humans and Transformers alike. It reappears in a 2017 article in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology that “interrogates” the first two Transformers films. “[T]here is much more to these commodities than meets the eye: they are also U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) promotions in disguise,” argues an Ontario assistant professor of communications.
Marketing prose at times is off the mark: “`The Last Knight’ shatters the core myths of the Transformers franchise.” No such thing to see here. Nothing is demystified or deconstructed. This film conforms to what came before and continues the tale. Even though the three writers credited for this screenplay and story have not worked on earlier Transformers films.
The filmmakers indulge in one witty bit of reflexivity. Music builds as Burton intones weighty lines of ancient lore about King Arthur’s 12 knights and their 12 alien Guardian Knight allies. Just as we hear an overwrought crescendo, we spot Cogman playing an organ in the background. “You ruined the moment again,” hollers Burton, the 12th Earl of Folgan. “I was trying to make the moment more epic,” pleads his aide-de-camp. “Legend tells that one last knight would someday be chosen and the struggle to save the world would begin,” continues Burton, who always gets Yeager’s surname wrong. “It would appear, Mr. Cade, that that last knight is you.” Cue a swelling offscreen chorus. Burton orders Cogman: “Stop it!”
When his 2014 Transformers film came out Bay told a Mother Jones writer: “Yes, I am a political person, and I have my views about America… I don’t feel the need to go out and tell people what to believe politically.” Last year The New Yorker ran a satire headlined “Donald Trump Chooses Michael Bay as Running Mate.”
Two taglines for “Transformers” (2007) launched the franchise premise: “Their war. Our world.” and “Most have come to destroy us. Some have come to protect us.”
At first an interplanetary bystander, the U.S. turns into an ally of the Autobots, but then tries to exile these conflict refugees. In later episodes, American CEOs and NSA types will make covert deals with Decepticons.
A topical hook threading the five films is the Department of Homeland Security. Transformers are classified “alien terrorists” in the fourth. Non-alien terrorists are absent. There’s a fleeting reference to 9/11 in the second. When Decepticons strike, a television newscaster reported the country is at “Condition Delta, which is the highest level we’ve been at since 9/11.”
Decepticons in the first film targeted U.S. military computers at Special Operations Command Central in the Qatar desert. Bay’s second film made up the Classified Alien-Autobot Cooperation Act and Non-Biological Extraterrestrial Species Treaty. U.K.’s unnamed prime minister (Mark Dexter) is on the phone asking about the unnamed “U.S. president” and “Putin” in the 2017 film. Bay skips the traditional scene from other alien attack films: a montage of world capitals in a united front for self-defense.
Transformers films universalize the issue of homeland security. Civil war ruined Cybertron. That puts Earth in peril. Autobots seek asylum here. Decepticons in pursuit always seek some Cybertonian power source and an ultimate weapon to wipe out Autobots. And they seek dominion over Earth as a resource to rebuild Cybertron. In Bay’s universe, no one’s home is secure.
“Earth, the only place in the universe whose people let me call it home,” Optimus Prime shares with Yeager in “Transformers: The Last Knight.” Yet, as Burton notes: “Transformers are declared illegal on Earth.” This film introduces homeless 14-year-old Izabella (Isabela Moner), orphaned by a Decepticon missile strike during the Battle of Chicago. Hiding amidst the rubble, she stands by stigmatized, stereotyped Autobots: “Someone’s got to take care of them. They’re scared, they’re lost. No place, no home, no family. Do you know how that feels?” This nurturing militant is a social justice warrior for illegal aliens. Yeager and his comrade Autobots let her tag along.
“All they want is a home and you know that,” Yeager argues with Lt. Colonel William Lennox (Josh Duhamel). “You push them and they push right back.” Lennox counters: “Whose side are you on? They’re all bad.” Transformer-phobe and rogue C.I.A. official (Kelsey Grammer) in the previous film insisted: “There are no good aliens or bad aliens, Yeager. It’s just us and them!”
Lennox fought alongside Yeager, Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and other Autobots against Decepticons in the first three films, where he was ranked Captain, Major and Colonel, respectively. Chief Master Sergeant Epps (Tyrese Gibson), fighting the good fight in those same films, noted: “We’ve shed blood, sweat, and metal together.” “Transformers are declared illegal on Earth,” narrates Burton.
Now Lennox fears more and more diasporic aliens finding their way to Earth. Little does he know the film will end with an alien narrator transmitting a homing beacon into space: “I am Optimus Prime. Calling all Autobots. It’s time to come home.” He means Earth, not Cybertron. In the closing lines of the first film Optimus Prime termed Earth “a new world to call home.”
“Friends?,” Lennox reacts. “This is an invasion. One day we wake up. They’re in charge.” In the second film he informed his commandos: “This makes six enemy contacts in eight months.” And Optimus Prime briefed General Morshower (Glenn Morshower): “Our alliance has countermanded six Decepticon incursions this year, each on a different continent.” In the third Transformers film, Optimus Prime related how Autobots also served their hosts as off-the-books United Nations Peacekeepers: “So now we assist our allies in solving human conflict, to prevent mankind from doing harm to itself.”
Self-harm was afoot in Chicago. Decepticons conspired with treasonous fixers ensconced in Trump Tower. Their objective? Acquire “a slave labor force” of “six billion” humans to “rebuild Cybertron.” Sentinel Prime (voiced by Leonard Nimoy) decreed: “Now, it is time for the slaves of Earth to recognize their masters. Seal off the city.” The ruins of the ensuing Battle of Chicago, where 1300 died, are where Izabella and Yeager will meet in the 2017 film. (By hashtagging #MidasTouch, Donald Trump claimed some credit for the 2011 “summer blockbuster” in his August 13, 2012 tweet.)
“To punish and enslave” is the sneering motto adopted by a Decepticon disguised as a police car in 2007 and 2017. In 2014 Optimus Prime rallied Dinobots, variant Transformers predating the auto age who assume the guise of mechano-dinosaurs: “We must join forces, or else we’ll all be their slaves.”
Bay’s writers insert no dialogue about historical, terrestrial slavery. However, a relevant aphorism that recurs as a line of dialogue, a motto and a tagline does coincide with a 1942 quote in Vogue magazine about Japan enslaving China.
“Without sacrifice there can be no victory!” is the battle cry of medieval English warriors repelling Saxon invaders in “Transformers: The Last Knight.” Paramount Pictures recruits that line in its publicity. Burton lectures Wembley and Yeager: “It has been said throughout the ages that there can be no victory, without sacrifice.” For his 11th-grade history class, Sam gave a “family genealogy report” in “Transformers.” His great-great grandfather Captain Archibald Witwicky (William Morgan Sheppard), glimpsed via flashback, urged his band of Arctic explorers: “No sacrifice, no victory!” That’s the family motto.
“No Sacrifice … No Victory” is also the headline of Agnes Smedley’s dispatch in the April 15, 1942 issue of Vogue. Embedded with the New Fourth Chinese Army at a hospital near the front, Smedley quotes an elderly Chinese woman resisting the Japanese invaders: “Without sacrifice, there is no victory. We do not want to be slaves of the devils.”
Freedom is under threat across the galaxy. “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings,” declared Optimus Prime in 2007. A 2011 tagline warned: “Earth’s last stand. The fight for our freedom begins.” Bay leverages such anodyne one-liners only for mounting awesome maneuvers, never for an aside on human or alien rights. We have yet to see a Dialecticon or Kantbot on the roster of autonomous robotic organisms.
Other philosophical filler is for pondering origins. “Transformers: The Last Knight” continues a theme introduced in “Transformers: Age of Extinction.” Optimus Prime promised: “Autobots, we’re going to prove who we are and why we’re here!” His last lines were: “There are mysteries to the universe we were never meant to solve. But who we are and why we are here, are not among them.” To get answers, he zooms across the galaxy to wrecked Cybertron and meets the Creator known as Quintessa (Gemma Chan), “the Prime of Life.” Gendered female, Quintessa generates Transformers and can re-engineer them. She weaponizes his will for her designs on Earth.
Quintessa qualifies as an Intelligent Designer. Creationists may cry heresy. Bay is unclear about what form of life Transformers are. “They have evolved” since the first film, forewarned a tagline for the second. Darwinists will notice there’s nothing like natural selection going on. Characters variously refer to Transformers’ “genome,” “chromosomes” (which are somehow “infect[ious]”) and “hatchlings.” When a depowered Transformer is rebooted he is said to be “reincarnated” or “resurrect[ed].”
Transformers each have a “power source” in the center of their chests (or mediastinum, the term medical students had to memorize in Anatomy 101). It glows faint blue, as do all alien energies in Earth cinema. Unspelled on screen, this sounds like Allspark. “It contains our life force and our memories,” says Optimus Prime. “Yeah, we call it a soul,” replies Yeager. Sam got hold of a shard. Besides transmitting Cybertonian symbols into his head, it enabled him to read “a 903-page astronomy book in 32.6 seconds” and manically write arcane formulas on the blackboard in his Astronomy 101 classroom.
Christianity and other faiths are out of the picture. Transformers make little theological impact on Americans. “Excuse me, are you the Tooth Fairy?,” inquires a little girl the night one of the 30-foot-tall aliens cuts through her suburban yard. “You gotta wonder: if God made us in His image, who made him?,” asks Epps, in the only line of its kind in all five films.
“We were gods once, all of us!,” vents Sentinel Prime, former mentor of Optimus Prime back on Cybertron. This turncoat first entered the storyline in 2011’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” During the civil war, he fled their planet with space bridge pillars, but crashed on our moon. In 1961 the U.S. and U.S.S.R. discovered his spacecraft. The government secretly moved the depowered Prime that was on board to Earth. Secret research ensued. Just as it did in 1935 when a different Transformer was secretly moved from an Arctic Circle crash site to a secret research facility.
If Transformers were all gods on their planet, who were the lesser inhabitants, the believers bowing to them? Now there is only one and she sounds like a lower-case “g” deity who de-deified Transformers. Quintessa rebukes Optimus Prime: “You dare to strike your god?”
God-grade power takes the form of super-high-tech that drives every Transformers plot. Decepticons are the ultimate power-seekers, both physical and political. Autobots typically thwart their quests. Allspark, the Cube, Energon, Seeds and Transformium are at stake. Each film adds a plot element from long, long, long ago that tells us how these powerful resources made their way from Cyberton to Earth. Plots lengthen Transformers film running times– ranging from 143 to 165 minutes– with intervening hunts to find clues to locate keys to unlock alien powers. Among these items: eyeglasses etched with a map, a children’s book holding a secret, and something called a Matrix of Leadership.
Bay is more interested in alien weaponry than religious ramifications of one-time gods appearing here. He especially likes their planet-annihilating and sun-consuming gizmos. Transformers deploy really cool killer toys. An ill-conceived, if non-lethal, one that Hasbro launched in 1966 was “The Hypo-Squirt,” an oversized plastic squirt gun modeled on a hypodermic needle: “It’s Fun!! Shoots Over 20 Feet Accurately.”
Bay is invested in so-called practical effects– wherein real stuff really blows up– versus the digital virtual ones. His enthusiasm for filmmaking tricks echoes a line Orson Welles, an amateur magician and showman of stage and radio, supposedly said after touring the RKO Radio Pictures lot: “This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!” Roger Ebert is among many who recycled that irresistible quote. Biographers usually write “reportedly said” and cite no source. “When a New York friend asked him about it [RKO] Welles pointed to the wilderness of cameras, lights, sound apparatus and other engines of the talkies. `It’s the greatest railroad train a boy ever had,’” claimed the Saturday Evening Post in 1940, without identifying the second-hand source. John Logan’s 1997 draft of the screenplay for the Welles’ biopic “RKO 281” has Welles (Liev Schreiber) playing to a newsreel camera: “I’ll tell you what, this is the best electric train set a boy ever had!”
The scientific superiority of Cybertron inspires about a minute of demystifying dialogue in “Transformers: The Last Knight.” “Magic does exist,” relates Burton. “It was found long ago. Inside a crashed alien ship.” That was back in the year 484 A.D. when Merlin obtained a weapon made by 12 Transformers transforming into that singular Saxon-smiting dragon. To hide the key to Sun Harvester technology in the second film, six principled Primes from Cybertron sacrificed themselves to create a secret crypt inside an Egyptian pyramid. All to thwart an evil seventh Prime
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” says Yeager. Impressed, Wembley promptly name-drops Arthur C. Clarke as the source. Thus initiating a chance of romance. Natalie Portman’s character, an astrophysicist, used the same quote in Kenneth Branagh’s 2011 film “Thor” when she refers to the Einstein-Rosen bridge. The title god (Chris Hemsworth), son of Odin (Anthony Hopkins), informs her: “Your ancestors called it magic. And you call it science. Well, I come from a place where they’re one and the same.”
“Personally I’m going to rely on physics and mathematics to save the planet, not mysticism, fairies and some hobgoblin,” declares the hard science guy played by Tony Hale in Bay’s new film. Wembley wielding Merlin’s staff to foil the evil Creator on her Earth-bound exoplanet is unthinkable to this Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer.
A “bidding war” for “alien technology” broke out between India, Israel, Japan and Russia in the fourth film. Engineers and entrepreneurs were busy dismembering aliens. One of whom, named Brains (Reno Wilson), resisted: “This is illegal experimentation… This is worse than waterboarding!” Yeager angled for a competitive edge: “If I could apply that technology to my inventions we’d never have to worry about money again.” A Chicago CEO (Stanley Tucci) crowed: “We will own the robotics industry.” Optimus Prime countered: “We are not your technology!”
Wembley tells kids at the museum: “A desperate last stand between civilization and barbarism. Two worlds colliding. Only one survives.” Burton later repeats her past words to underscore the Earth versus Cybertron showdown. Now the Creator and her Decepticons clash with Earth and its Autobot allies. That dualism evokes Samuel Huntington’s 1993 essay “The Clash of Civilizations?” On July 6, 2017 in Warsaw’s Krasiński Square, President Donald Trump framed a dire scenario for all of Europe. “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive… Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?… [O]ur civilization will triumph… So, together, let us all fight like the Poles– for family, for freedom, for country, and for God.”
Bay mobilizes similar sentiments on the grand scale of a galactic smackdown. Transformers films entertain with escapist spectacle that resolves nothing. Thinking of a different genre in a different time of war, Agnes Smedley regretted Hollywood distracted her home front readers from grasping the struggles of Chinese women: “American women, going to movies, finding the solution of life’s bitter problems in the mirage of a Hollywood kiss and embrace.”
©2017 Bill Stamets
Strange shadows on screen: Brit Noir at the Gene Siskel Film Center
A strange film vein comes to light in the Brit Noir series continuing at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 North State, through November 30. Upper-crust crooks, doomed dames, pervy plots, swinging scores and moral mayhem impart an irresistible weirdness to the five black-and-white dramas I previewed so far.
The eight titles in the line-up were released between 1946 and 1965. One that circulated in black-and-white is presented here with its color restored. Carol Reed directs two; John Ford one.
Among titles already screened is “Never Take Candy from a Stranger” (1960) directed by Cyril Frankel and shot by Freddie Francis. The opening `square-up’ touts: “This story– like its characters– is fictitious. It is set in Canada. But it could happen anywhere and it could be true.”
The new high school principal– a Canadian who left at age 10– brings his English wife and their 9-year-old daughter Jean (Janina Faye, who would appear two years later in “The Day of the Triffids”) to an eastern Canadian town. “Some of her best friends are foreigners,” quips the art teacher apologizing for a sniffy neighbor at the welcoming party.
In the opening scene, the local pervert and town patriarch peers through his binoculars at Jean and her pal Lucille playing on a swing. Lucille tells Jean the creep will give them sweets. We do not see the girls undress and dance for him, but Jean will so testify in court. Lurid psychological local color ensues in this “go-ahead” sawmill town with a “colonial” chip on its shoulder.
English boys and girls of the same age are told to undress– in proximity to a Geiger counter– in “These Are the Damned” (1962), directed by Joseph Losey. An American yachtsman runs afoul of seaside locals. First, there’s a gang whose signature tune goes:
Black Leather Black Leather Smash Smash Smash
Black Leather Black Leather Crash Crash Crash
Black Leather Black Leather Kill Kill Kill
(Single, double or triple exclamation points probably belong after every word in these lyrics.)
Then we meet nine radioactive children hidden in a secret underground lab. Government experimenters told them they are in a spaceship. Sci-fi social commentary mixes up a modernist sculptor with a delinquent clique in this hybrid exploitation art film.
“90 Degrees in the Shade” (1965) is decidedly more continental in sensibility. Shot in Prague with English dialogue, this Czechoslovakia/ UK coproduction directed by Jirí Weiss compares with other Brit Noirs by channeling sexual anxiety. It starts at a riverside swim park on a hot summer day. The miserably married Mr. Kurka (Rudolph Hrusínský, “The Cremator”)– bound in a six-button vest– leers at bathing beauties before auditing a shop with inventory irregularities.
The adulterous manager and his clerk Alena (Anne Heywood, “The Depraved” and “The Nun and the Devil”) are caught replacing the cognac with tea in 79 bottles of Martell and Courvoisier. The Jazz Orchestra of Czech Radio supplies a beat-noir setting for this moralizing sketch of an existentially wronged woman. Wry despair on the Vltava. Screens 6 p.m. Monday, November 14.
More malfeasance in a place of business transpires in “Cash on Demand” (1961), directed by Quentin Lawrence. Based on a play by the one-time owner of Herman Göering’s Mercedes, the plot is confined to the Haversham Branch of City & Colonial Bank. On December 23rd, a conman impersonates an insurance inspector, leans on a Scroogey small town bank manager (Peter Cushing, who joined Janina Faye in the “Dracula” of 1958), and absconds with £93,000. The dialogue is crafty, although there’s none of the erotic tension detectable elsewhere in the series. Screens 4:55 p.m. November 26 and 6 p.m. November 28.
“Wanted for Murder” (1946) is especially polished next to the more pulpy movies in Brit Noir. Lawrence Huntington directs a London thriller rather in the style of Alfred Hitchcock. Eric Portman, seen in three Powell & Pressburger films, here plays a serial killer dubbed “The Strangler.” The executioner to Queen Victoria figures in his lineage and he smashes the skull of his likeness on display in a horror museum. It’s a bloodline that dooms this toff to off one woman after another. The New Scotland Yard is on the case. Psychosexual class issues are on the couch. Screens 5 p.m. November 19 and 6 p.m. November 21.
Viscera, valor, values: “Hacksaw Ridge”
Hacksaw Ridge
directed by Mel Gibson
written by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight
acted by Andrew Garfield, Sam Worthington, Luke Bracey, Teresa Palmer, Rachel Griffiths, Hugo Weaving, Vince Vaughn, Darcy Bryce, Roman Guerriero, Firass Dirani, Luke Pegler, Michael Sheasby, Goran D. Kleut, Yoji Tatsuta
produced by William Mechanic, David Permut, Terry Benedict, Paul Currie, Bruce Davey, Tyler Thompson, William D. Johnson, Brian Oliver
rated R “for intense prolonged realistically graphic sequences of war violence including grisly bloody images”
running time: 138 minutes
“For intense prolonged realistically graphic sequences of war violence including grisly bloody images” the Classification and Rating Administration of the Motion Picture Association of America rates “Hacksaw Ridge” R. Heads explode, guts spill, limbs are blown off, skin is aflame, rats feast on the dead.
Director Mel Gibson is not adverse to placing viscera on the screen– “Apocalypto,” “Braveheart,” “The Patriot,” “The Passion of the Christ,” “We Were Soldiers”– but it’s hard to see where “war violence” belongs in a film weighing non-violence as a value. Is the sickening realism here mocking the Sixth Commandment (“Thou shall not kill”) or is it there to vindicate a pacifist on the front line?
“A True Story” states an opening title in “Hacksaw Ridge.” Private First Class Desmond T. Doss (1919-2006), a conscientious objector and U.S. Army medical corpsman, receives a screen salute from Gibson and co-writers Robert Schenkkan (“The Quiet American”) and Andrew Knight (“The Water Diviner”).
President Harry S. Truman awarded Doss a Congressional Medal of Honor on the White House lawn on October 12th, 1945. The citation details “outstanding gallantry far above and beyond the call of duty” on May 2nd, 5th and 21st of that year. The unarmed Seventh Day Adventist pulled some 75 wounded riflemen from the field of fire on Okinawa. His own wounds, along with the tuberculosis he contracted, left him disabled for the rest of his life. He considered raising tropical fish to get by, reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch on July 27, 1947.
“In a cinematic landscape overrun with fictional `superheroes,’ I thought it was time to celebrate a real one,” says Gibson in the film’s press notes. In the role of Doss, he casts Andrew Garfield from “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.”
True Comics, published in Chicago, profiled Doss in a 23-panel tale “Hero Without a Gun” in its April 1946 issue. A 1967 book titled “The Unlikeliest Hero: The Story of Pfc. Desmond T. Doss, The Soldier Who Wouldn’t Touch a Gun” was written by Booton Herndon, who served in a medical unit that landed at Utah Beach on D-Day. “Desmond Doss: In God’s Care, The Unlikeliest Hero and Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient” is the 1998 book by his second wife.
The first screen version of the Doss saga was “The Conscientious Objector,” produced, directed and co-written by Terry L. Benedict. A Seventh-day Adventist, he made that 2004 documentary at the behest of the Desmond Doss Council, an organization initiated by Doss himself in 2000. Its mission is to “Preserve, protect and manage the life story of Desmond T. Doss and his intellectual properties, collections, and memorabilia in a manner that honors his legacy, his beliefs, his church and his God.” Benedict is credited among the eight producers of “Hacksaw Ridge.”
We first see Doss on his back. Wounded, he recites verses from Isaiah 40. The camera hovers overhead. Mud and blood are underfoot for his litter-bearers. The scene closes at the edge of an escarpment. Gloriously suspended in a white void, the din of battle muted, Doss is not heavenward. The story moves to the Blue Ridge Mountains, 16 years earlier, to the home of his Christian values.
Two concise scenes cue turning points for Doss. Ten-year-old Desmond (Darcy Bryce) fights with his brother Hal (Roman Guerriero). Losing and laying on his back, he knocks Hal out with a brick. “I could have killed him,” realizes Desmond. His mother Bertha (Rachel Griffiths) says: “Murder is the worst sin of all, is to take another man’s life. That is the most egregious sin in the Lord’s sight.” Doss peers at a framed illustration of the Ten Commandments and imprints on the Cain and Abel episode.
Years later his drunk father Tom (Hugo Weaving) once again threatens his mother. Desmond, now a young man, points a gun in his face. He later relates this incident to a fellow soldier in a lull in the hell of Okinawa: “And that’s when I made my promise to God I ain’t never gonna a touch a gun again.”
Before their infantry company deployed for the Pacific Theater, drill sergeant Howell (Vince Vaughn) had presented Doss and other trainees with “a clip-fed shoulder-fired semi-automatic weapon designed to bring death and destruction to the enemy.” Doss declined the M-1: “I’m sorry sergeant, I can’t touch a gun.” On Okinawa he does touch one in order to jerry-rig a litter for dragging the wounded Howell from the enemy. (The real Doss in 1945 used a rifle stock to set a compound fracture in his own arm.)
In other brief exchanges Doss makes his case to enlist as a medic, a noncombatant with a 1–A–0 classification. To his father: “I figure I’ll be saving people not killing ‘em.” To his sweetheart Dorothy (Teresa Palmer): “I don’t know how I’m going to live with myself if I don’t stay true to what I believe, much less how you could live with me.”
“The United States Army does not make mistakes,” insists an officer inconvenienced by a conscientious objector out of place in a rifle company. “If there’s a problem, you must be that problem.” An army psychiatrist is supposed to issue a section 8 discharge for Doss. “This is Satan himself we’re fighting,” claims the ostensibly secular clinician. “What are you going to do? Hit him with your Bible?… What do you do when everything in your world is under attack?”
“I don’t know sir,” responds Doss. “I ain’t got answers to questions that big. But I also feel that my values are under attack and I don’t know why.” The psychiatrist’s worldview evokes “Prelude to War” in the “Why We Fight” series. National values are at stake in this propaganda film underwritten by the United States War Department and the Office of War Information. S. Lowell Mellett, head of the Bureau of Motion Pictures, appraised this 1942 Frank Capra film: “One of the most skillful jobs of moviemaking I ever have seen, the picture makes a terrific attack on the emotions.” In a November 9, 1942 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he wrote: “Engendering nervous hysteria in the Army or in the civil population might help to win the war, although I doubt it.”
On a date with Dorothy, Doss watches “Prelude to War.” Gibson’s film, however, implies that Capra’s film hardly makes an impact. The Seventh Day Adventist draftee opts to not accept a deferment. (Benedict says the real Doss made his first trip to a movie theater when we went to see his documentary “The Conscientious Objector.”)
The 138-minute “Hacksaw Ridge” devotes only seven minutes of dialogue for setting forth Doss’s faith and ethics. The script omits his religious tradition. “In the 1850s Adventists singled out the United States” as “the second beast of Revelation 13,” according to an Adventist sociologist. During the Civil War, a prophetess counseled: ”God’s people… cannot engage in this perplexing war, for it is opposed to every principle of their faith. The church assured Congress that Adventists were “a people unanimously loyal and antislavery, who because of their views of the Ten Commandments and of the teaching of the New Testament cannot engage in bloodshed.” The church would urge draftees in 1916: “Show yourself willing to cooperate, but keep your conscience clear, even unto punishment and death itself.”
The Selective Service Act of 1940 designated inductees who refuse to bear arms as “conscientious objectors.” A year later Adventists started using the expression “conscientious cooperators” for their patriotic form of “Christian noncombatancy.” Doss was one among some 12,000 Adventists serving as medics in WWII.
An Associated Press dispatch from Vatican City on November 22, 1941 quotes Pope Pius XII equivocating: “If it is true that the church does not want to mix in disputes about the opportunity, utility and earthly efficacy of diverse temporal forms which are purely political institutions or activities.” Plainspoken Doss, by contrast, is clear about his aims as an aidman– the U.S. Army term for a medic: “While everybody else is taking life, I’m going to be saving it. With the world so set on tearing itself apart it doesn’t seem such a bad thing to me to want to put a little bit of it back together.”
Gibson pits a-man-of-principle against the powers-that-be, although the film makes a point of not thinking too much about it. Tom Doss, a bitter WWI vet, tells his son Desmond he’s not cut out for war: “Everybody else jumps in, does things quick without thinking like the damn idiot fools we were. Soldiers who live, they live because they can do that. You can’t. You got to sit and think and pray about everything. Well, look at you, you’re doing it right now… See, there you go thinking it all out.”
At Fort Jackson, Sergeant Howell isolates Doss in front of other soldiers-in-training: “Do not look to him to save you on the battlefield. Because he will undoubtedly be too busy wrestling with his conscience to assist.” An Associated Press headline about the real Doss in 1945 would tell a different story: “Medic Won’t Kill Japs, But He Saves 75 Yanks.” Time Magazine wrote: “He felt that God would not let him perish by the sword if he did not live by the sword.”
An oddly included scene at the end of “Hacksaw Ridge” comes off as a wrong-headed comment on two cultures of sacrifice. Instead of surrendering, a character listed as “Japanese General” (Yoji Tatsuta) commits seppuku (self-disembowling) with a short sword, followed by kaishaku (decapitation) performed by an underling with a longer blade. Samurai code of honor and Seventh Day Adventist duty to uphold the Sixth Commandment are juxtaposed to no clear end.
“Hacksaw Ridge” is more action film than a pacifist apologia. A brave saviour under fire is a more likely hero than a spiritual introvert thumbing through his Bible. Gibson lauds the valor of Doss more than his values.
________________________________________________________________________________
A month after receiving his Medal of Honor, Doss and 48 other recipients came to the American Legion’s 27th annual national convention in Chicago. They stood to accept the applause of the assembly at the Coliseum. A breakfast was served in their honor at the Morrison Hotel. One piece of business reported by the Chicago Tribune: “To the accompaniment of cheers, the convention voted that conscientious objectors be kept in service until sixth months after the discharge of the last combat soldier.”
American Legion program for the four-day meeting stated: “For God and country, we associate ourselves for the following purposes: … To foster one hundred per cent Americanism; To preserve the memories and incidents of our associations in the great wars…”
On July 4, 2004 a bronze life-size statue of Doss was dedicated at the National Museum of Patriotism in Atlanta. The place closed in 2010. At an October 30, 2010 auction the President Jimmy Carter statue went for $125. Martin Luther King’s sold for $100. No word of what happened to Doss’s.
“The Beatles: Eight Days a Week– The Touring Years” a concert-contextualizing documentary about four friends and their screaming fans
“The Beatles: Eight Days a Week– The Touring Years”
directed by Ron Howard
written by Mark Monroe
edited by Paul Crowder
presented by Abramorama; streaming video on-demand on Hulu
at Music Box Theater through September 29
running time: 106 minutes
What was the world of The Beatles? “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week– The Touring Years” answers with a documentary that’s often insightful and always entertaining. American director Ron Howard contextualizes the concerts that took John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr from the clubs of Liverpool and Hamburg to the world via records, radio and television.
From June 1962 to August 1966, the British pop group played 166 concerts in 15 countries and 90 cities, by a count included in press notes. “We just want to play. Playing was the most important thing,” says drummer Starr, who attests: “We had the worst [record] deal in the world… You got to remember we made our money playing live.”
“By the end it became quite complicated, but at the beginning things were really simple,” relates singer, songwriter and bass guitarist McCartney. His late band mates John Lennon and George Harrison are well represented thanks to a vast trove of archival clips.
“The Beatles were kind of the dream of how you might be with your friends as you went through life,” offers screenwriter Richard Curtis, an English fan since boyhood. Howard, writer Mark Monroe and editor Paul Crowder bring in few talking heads to interpret the “14-year-old in 1964.” Author Malcolm Gladwell posits: “Quite literally, this society is dominated by teenagers… What you’re seeing is the emergence of this international teen culture.”
Sigourney Weaver was one of those 14-year-olds. She went to a Beatles concert at the Hollywood Bowl on August 23, 1964. “I felt as much a girl can feel. I was in love with John,” she recalls. “It was this sense of world music. We were all loving them all over the world.”
A 15-year-old Florida girl got a ticket to the September 11, 1964 concert in Jacksonville. The Beatles’ contract stipulated no segregated gigs, so the Gator Bowl admitted its first integrated audience, some two months after the Civil Rights Act passed. Kitty Oliver, a Fab Four fan turned jazz singer and oral historian, recollects on camera her thrill at that historic occasion, one that did not, though, make its way into her book “Multicolored Memories of a Black Southern Girl.”
Besides copious clips, Howard samples 16mm news footage from press events during international tours. Dealing with screaming fans and inane questions took its toll. “What do you dream of when you sleep?” asked someone at a June 26, 1966 session in Hamburg. “We’re only the same as you, man, only we’re rich,” responded Lennon, according to a transcription of the recording at http://www.beatlesinterviews.org.
Part of the ensuing exchange makes its way into “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week– The Touring Years”:
FEMALE: “Why are you all so horrid snobby?”
JOHN: “Because we’re not flattering you.”
…
PAUL: “You know… You expect, sort of, nice answers to ALL the questions. But if the questions aren’t nice questions, they don’t have to have nice answers. And if we don’t give nice answers, it doesn’t mean we’re snobby. It just means we’re natural.”
A later passage reveals more of the tour dynamic:
Q: “You’re successful now for many, many years. Are you sometimes very tired about it?”
PAUL: “No, I don’t think… You know, if we were tired then we’d stop, because there’s no need to. We’ve started out wanting money like everybody else. But when you get money, you don’t HAVE to go on, you know. But we only go on ‘cuz we enjoy it. We enjoy making records and we enjoy singing, and things. That’s the only reason. And having money as well, but the other one is the main reason.”
The Beatles stopped touring because it stopped being fun. The last show was in Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29, 1966. The lads had played a total of 815 sets– playing up to eight hours a day at the start. As musicians they had grown up. The best way to creatively keep together was to gather in a recording studio. Cue such albums as “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Magical Mystery Tour.” The last one was “Let it Be.” They split up in 1970.
Sully: “Does anyone need to see any more simulations?”
Sully
directed by Clint Eastwood
written by Todd Komarnicki, based on Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow
acted by Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney, Patch Darragh, Jane Gabbert, Ann Cusack, Molly Hagan
presented by Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures
rated by the MPAA: PG-13 for some peril and brief strong language
running time: 93 minutes
Subtly designed, “Sully” is a disaster film that never over-dramatizes the five-minute flight of US Airways flight 1549 on January 15, 2009. Director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki instead dwell on how the event was scrutinized by the National Transportation Safety Board and sensationalized by New York City television. The outcome is commonly known: 155 passengers and crew survived an emergency landing on the Hudson River after Canada geese jammed the jet’s two engines.
What’s original in this drama’s design is how the plot interpolates varied audiences in the saga. “Sully” opens with the voice of air traffic controller Patrick Harten (Patch Darragh) at La Guardia Airport radioing “Cactus 1549, runway 4, clear for takeoff” to the cockpit of a Charlotte-bound Airbus. Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III (Tom Hanks) confirms: “Cactus 1549, runway 4, clear for takeoff.” That exchange sets up the rapport between viewers and characters that structures the rest of the self-reflective narrative– “Sully” and Sully take off together.
Ironically, that controller will be the last one to know the pilot and everyone else on board survives. Right after flight 1549 breaks radio contact at 15:30:43.7 and drops off his radar screen, Harten removes himself from his post, presumably per tower work rules. He sits alone in a windowless room to process his shock. Only later does he discover what all his co-workers know from monitoring live news. Sully’s first call is to his wife Lorrie (Laura Linney) in the kitchen of their California home. “I’m OK,” he tells her. “What do you mean?” she replies. “Turn on the television,” he explains.
“Sully” was released two days before the 15th anniversary of four commercial passenger jets– commandeered by Al-Qaeda terrorists– crashing on September 11, 2001. “Hey, no one dies today,” a first responder assures a shivering passenger. In the fortuitous aftermath of flight 1549, one of Sully’s colleagues points out: “You know, it’s been quite a while since New York had news this good– especially with an airplane in it.” On September 11, 2016 Eastwood told the New York Times: “New York was still in shock from 9/11 and everything else. That particular time in history [January 15, 2009], New York was in a bit of of a depressed state. This thing was something people could hang on to as a happy-ending story.”
“We had a miracle on 34th Street– I believe now we have had a miracle on the Hudson,” Governor David Paterson told New Yorkers that day, invoking the title of the 1947 film “Miracle on 34th Street.” Within the hour “Miracle on the Hudson” would be the tagline for the feel-good news item. Four days before the inauguration of the 44th president, gino55 posted on the New Jersey news site NJ.com: “Shouldn’t we be counting this as Obama’s first miracle? I’m thinking we should!!! The messiah is already at work…”
For the record, “miraculous” never appears in the 196-page NTSB report titled “Loss of Thrust in Both Engines After Encountering a Flock of Birds and Subsequent Ditching on the Hudson River…” The engines “ingested” Canada geese whose remains were confirmed by mitochondrial DNA tests and stable hydrogen isotope analysis, and Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Lab comparing feather samples from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Acknowledging the bird strike and its aftermath rank as “a movie-worthy moment in aviation history,” the independent federal agency informed the media: ”The NTSB was not asked to contribute to or participate in the production of ‘Sully’ and as such we were not afforded an opportunity to ensure our actions and words were portrayed with accurate context or reflected our perspective.”
“Sully” recalls Eastwood’s last drama, also a salute to an American hero. “American Sniper” (2014) is based on “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. History,” written by Chris Kyle with two co-authors in 2012. “Sully” screenwriter Komarnicki draws on the 2009 autobiographical account “Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters” by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow, who helped Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her astronaut husband write “Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope.”
The structure of “Sully” is entirely Komarnicki’s. Three scenes revisit the flight itself. One starts with Sully buying a sandwich in La Guardia prior to take-off. Another shows the aftermath. Once safely ashore, he presses for a passenger count and waves off the mayor’s flacks attempting to stage a photo op. The plot largely spans that January day and a handful that follow, as Sully and Jeff attend NTSB hearings in New York City. (The real public hearings took place June 9-10 in Washington, D.C.)
We also see Sully imaging alternate outcomes for flight 1549– via a nightmare in his hotel room and a daylight vision that grips him as he gazes out the window of a high rise. There are no survivors in these tragic scenarios. Sully shrugs off post-traumatic counseling. He goes jogging around Manhattan.
Other plot elements are two flashbacks to turning points in Sully’s career– as a teenager and later as an Air Force pilot. He tapes an interview with NBC’s Katie Couric and turns up on NBC’s “Late Night with David Letterman” with his flight crew. Komarnicki also places five calls between Sully and his wife in the storyline. Televisions playing breaking news are another recurring element. However, the dramatic crux of “Sully” arrives in the third act when the NTSB screens simulations of flight 1549. What alternate outcomes could have arisen after the bird strike?
Eastwood modulates tension when recreating the incident. Don’t brace for the impact of “Flight,” directed by Robert Zemeckis in 2012. Its fictional pilot appears before a NTSB board too. The real-life source of that script’s technical details, if not outcome, was Alaska Airlines flight 261 on January 31, 2000. No one survived its crash landing off the California coast. Nor does the Hudson River landing in “Sully” build the hold-on-to-your-seat suspense of the snowy Andes landing in “Alive,” Frank Marshall’s 1993 screen dramatization of the October 13, 1972 Chilean crash detailed in the book “Alive! The Story of the Andes Survivors.” Aviation film completists will note a fleeting scene of a B-17 landing on a Pacific shore in “Air Force,” directed by Howard Hawks in 1943.
On the outside, Sully is a consummate pro. His only request of the hotel manager is to dry-clean his uniform for his debriefing. On the inside, visibility is low. One sign he’s rattled: almost stepping into traffic on his first Manhattan jog after landing. Lifelong attention to detail surfaces when Sully interrupts a NTSB official: “It was not a crash. We knew what we were doing. It was a forced water landing.” And, to be clear, he landed his A320 “on the Hudson” not “in the Hudson.”
According to NTSB transcripts of cockpit voice recordings, the real Sully said on that day: “we’re gonna be in the Hudson” and the La Guardia controller relayed to his supervisor: “I think he said he’s goin in the Hudson.” The film is true to one detail redacted from the official transcript: Sully says “birds,” which is followed by “[sound of thump/thud(s) followed by shuddering sound]” and then first officer Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) says “oh shit.” (NTSB transcribers uses “#” for “Expletive” and “@” for “Non-Pertinent word.”)
“Everything is `unprecedented’ until it happens for the first time,” points out Sully, annotating an NTSB official who used “unprecedented” to characterize flight 1549.
The audience foregrounded for most dramatic effect in “Sully” is the one at the public hearing to determine the cause of the accident. Everyone in that room already knows the actual outcome on January 15, 2009, just like everyone in audience at a “Sully” screening who remembers news reports or saw Warner Bros. Pictures’ trailers. Making their video premieres within the film are simulations streamed from the Airbus Training Center in Toulouse, France. A cockpit cam shows experienced pilots sitting in a flight simulator as they encounter identical parameters of engine damage, altitude, fuel level, wind speed, etc. in order to second-guess real-time decisions by their counterparts on the original flight.
“I don’t not like being in control of the process,” Sully tells his first officer.
The proceedings feel stacked against Sully and Jeff. In 20 computer simulations their aircraft reaches a runway for a safe landing. “Engineers are not pilots,” complains Sully. “They were not there.” He urges, “If you’re looking for human error, make it human.” Then the NTSB uses real pilots. They succeed in returning to La Guardia and a nearby New Jersey airport. But the board is forced to admit they had 17 practice runs.
“I cannot quite believe you still have not taken into account the human factor,” states Sully, as if pleading his case in open court. “These pilots were not behaving like human beings, like people who were experiencing this for the first time.” Since “there was no time for calculating,” he wants a new round of simulations. Adding a 35-second delay to the pilots’ response time will make their time frame more like what Sully and Jeff faced. The pilots now crash into city buildings before reaching airports.
The disaster is only virtual, of course, for both viewers inside the film watching a simulation on a video screen and those of us watching from the outside on the big screen.
At this point the “Sully” audience at the Chicago preview screening I attended did something atypical. Many applauded. Not to questionably cheer a catastrophe in Manhattan with hundreds of deaths. But to show solidarity with Sully. An understatement of vindication. “Does anyone need to see any more simulations?” asks the NTSB chair. Another round of applause. This audience also clapped when Sully earlier got confirmation that all 155 aboard were accounted for. I credit Eastwood, Komarnicki and Hanks for crafting such an impact at the multiplex.
“Sully” parlays the `this-is-like-a-movie’ trope discreetly. “This is so surreal,” muses Sully, taken aback by the media attention. “I guess I’m having a little trouble separating reality from whatever the hell this is.” When he gets an impromptu hug from a stranger, he’s at a loss: “What just happened?” Sully is spotted in a nearly empty bar. The TV is on. A clip of you-know-who is on the news. The bartender finds it all too “unreal” and has a comic epiphany: “Sully’s here and he’s there.” One of regulars chimes in: “He’s everywhere!”
Television can make an icon in less than a news cycle, and the internet can do so even sooner. “Sully, watch the news– you’re a hero,” explains Lorrie. “The whole world is talking about you.” “I don’t feel like a hero,” he insists, once again weighing a word choice. “I’m just a man doing a job.” Now retired as a pilot, he has a gig as CBS News Aviation and Safety Expert.
The echo style of lines passed between cockpit and tower– “Cactus 1549, runway 4, clear for takeoff”– repeats in later lines of dialogue. “We did our job,” Sully assures Jeff, who affirms, “We did our job.” “Tell me it’s almost over,” pleads Lorrie over the phone. Enough with the camera crews on the front yard. Sully obliges with, “It’s almost over.” Here the soundtrack parallels the visual mirroring via TV screens and NTSB videos.
“Sully” evolves into an inquest into the ineffable. Why flight 1549 lost thrust in both engines is no mystery but Sully’s inner calculus eludes investigators. They want more than: “I eyeballed it.” The chair concludes the hearing by thanking Sully: “Remove you from the equation and the math fails.”
Online truth-seekers go beyond the obvious. The Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry debunks the supernatural spin of “Miracle on the Hudson” on one site. A paranoid one peddles “The Deep Semiotics of Flight 1549.”
Beneath the film’s surface lays a message. Komarnicki brings up a sentiment he heard from his former pastor from Belfast: “Never set sail to a fear, knowing that all seas are the seas of God and even if you sink, you sink only deeper into Him.” In an interview posted by Reel Faith the screenwriter observes: “This is a good news movie that reminds us there’s something deeply beautiful and unselfish within us as human beings that we can access through grace and sometimes by pure instinct of how we were made.”
Star Trek Beyond: career changes of small consequence
Star Trek Beyond
directed by Justin Lin
written by Simon Pegg & Doug Jung
based on “Star Trek” television series created by Gene Roddenberry
acted by John Cho, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoë Saldana, Karl Urban, Anton Yelchin, Sofia Boutella, Idris Elba
presented by Paramount Pictures and Skydance
rated PG-13 by MPAA for sequences of sci-fi action and violence. Violence: Characters are in peril in many scenes throughout this film, although little blood or other detail of violent acts are shown.
running time: 122 minutes
Star Trek films are of two sorts: TV-like episodes or cinema-scale epics. Even on a towering Imax screen, viewed from third row center, “Star Trek Beyond” felt small. Director Justin Lin, and writers Simon Pegg and Doug Jung, aim small. A routine narrative with thin characters, this lesser entry entertains only modest thoughts about the title’s “Beyond.”
Big thoughts are a fixture in the franchise launched by Gene Roddenberry in 1966 as an NBC series. “Star Trek Beyond” is the 13th in an uneven succession of big screen features since 1979. Its philosophizing on virtuous vocations and galactic governance is cursory.
Once again, the five-year mission of the U.S.S. Enterprise is “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Originally intoned by William Shatner in the role of Captain James T. Kirk, that Starfleet mandate opened each television episode. “Star Trek Beyond” moves those lines to the film’s end. The first words– “Space, the final frontier”– are voiced by a younger Kirk (Chris Pine). Assorted male and female crew members under his command recite the remainder, with “no one” replacing “no man.”
“Today is our 966th day in deep space,” states Kirk near the start of “Star Trek Beyond,” his third turn captaining the U.S.S. Enterprise for producer J.J. Abrams. Morale is flagging. His log entry cites “prolonged co-habitation” as a contributing factor. He’s not seeing anyone himself. What does he see in the beyond? Is he less curious about the frontier?
“The farther out we go, the more I find myself wondering what it is we’re trying to accomplish,” Kirk confides to his journal. “If the universe is truly endless, then are we not striving for something forever out of reach?” Doubts aside, he dutifully heads towards “an unstable nebula” out there in “uncharted space.” When he hails his crew, Kirk lifts a line from a 1966 television episode: “We have come to understand that there is no such thing as the unknown– be it temporarily hidden.”
The plot is routine: ambush, shipwreck, escape, chase. Villain thwarted, civilians saved. Combat and chases unfold in loud blurs of shards. Which way is up is unclear because in space, there is no up. Maybe Lin needs Earth gravity to ground his action sequences. This was not an issue in his four turns steering “Fast and Furious,” a thoroughly terrestrial franchise where vehicles travel below warp speed.
By luck the atmosphere, temperature and terrain of Vancouver and Dubai all support the shooting of exteriors light years from Earth. The characters, cast and crew never need helmets and suits, or off-planet per diems. The film’s visual highlights are two built environments with CGI enhancements: a primitive depopulated planet where a Federation vessel crashed a century or so ago, and an urbane Starbase with skyscrapers aimed every which way. Due to multi-vectorial artificial gravity, I figure.
Key cast members reprise roles from two past Star Trek films directed by J.J. Abrams: “Star Trek” (2009) and “Star Trek into Darkness” (2013). Besides Kirk, the roster includes commander Spock (Zachary Quinto), chief engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott (Simon Pegg), Dr. “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban), communications officer Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and ensign Chekov (Anton Yelchin). Novel detail and nuance is scripted only for Spock and Kirk, the two ranked highest. They each get a speck of characterization tied to their respective fathers.
Career changes loom. On the anniversary of his father’s death aboard the U.S.S. Kelvin, Kirk waits to hear about a promotion to Vice Admiral. Spock weighs his own exit the Enterprise. Is it time to follow in his recently deceased father’s footsteps to New Vulcan? Their issues are small compared to what impels Krall (Idris Elba) to fire up the ultimate weapon– made then disarmed long ago by the Ancient Ones, in the best interests of the universe.
Krall is one seriously disgruntled seeker of redress. He once saw “a lot of off-world combat” as a Major in the United Earth Military Assault Command Operation, according to his file. “I’m a soldier,” he tells Kirk. “You gave us peace. Peace is not what I was born into.” He chafed in his new uniform when Starfleet made him captain of the U.S.S. Franklin. He could not abide the new order of galactic diplomacy. It borders on treason “to break bread with the enemy,” he seethes.
“This is where the frontier pushes back,” Krall threatens his former employer, the Federation. He debates Kirk about character-building and self-knowledge: “We knew pain. We knew terror. Struggle made us stronger… But without struggle you will never know who you truly are.” This quasi-Nietzschean diatribe gets muddled in a segue to Krall’s agenda: “To save you from yourselves.” An interstellar terrorist strike on a Starbase will teach the soft Federation a hard lesson in military realism or something.
As in the “Independence Day” franchise, wile is the weapon of the good and the just against overpowering odds. The same ploy is in play here. Take out the enemy’s command-and-control of its hive-like swarms of spacecraft to preserve the peace of the universe. Instead of uploading a virus, Kirk’s team broadcasts aggressive vintage rock by VHF to crash the “cyberpathic link” synchronizing Krall’s “bioweapon.”
Kirk speaks of politics in the known universe when he instructs Krall: “We change. We have to. Or we spend the rest of our lives fighting the same battles.” The former major could not make peace with his warrior within. Kirk and Spock likewise prove incapable of making their own career changes. They battle internally with duty, without collateral damage. Both decide to keep going boldly toward that final frontier.
Kirk was born on the day his father died. It’s never the right day to party. Yet this will be the day he elects to undertake another mission for “fun.” At a surprise celebration, Bones grouses about the prospect of encountering more “alien despots hellbent on killing us” and “incomprehensible cosmic anomalies that could wipe us out in an instant.”
“It’s going to be so much fun,” enthuses Kirk. If only “Star Trek Beyond” could make it so.
“Wiener-Dog”: a satiric dachsund encomium by Todd Solondz rated R for “some disturbing content”
“Wiener-Dog”
written and directed by Todd Solondz
acted by Julie Delpy, Tracy Letts, Keaton Nigel Cooke, Greta Gerwig, Kieran Culkin, Danny DeVito, Ellen Burstyn, Zosia Mame
produced by Annapurna Pictures and Killer Films
distributed by IFC Films and Amazon Studios
rated R by MPAA for language and some disturbing content
running time: 88 minutes
exhibited at The Music Box Theater, with Todd Solondz appearing at 7pm show on July 16th
The title canine passes through the lives of various owners in a mannered exercise of moralizing by writer/director Todd Solondz. “Wiener-Dog” is a thread of vignettes involving a dachshund in transit. She goes by various names. Her next to last owner, an elderly companion called Nana (Ellen Burstyn), names her Cancer.
In his press notes, Solondz synopsizes his effort as “a chronicle of the life of a dog and how this particular dog spreads comfort and joy to the people she meets, bringing meaning to their lives.” The dachshund indeed uplifts its human companions, who vary in their competence in caring for her and one another.
But Solondz omits his ironic style and spin from his line above. “Wiener-Dog” is a sentimental narrative of moral satire about mortality. Although Solondz (“Happiness” “Palindromes,” “Storytelling,” “Welcome to the Dollhouse”) mentions “Benji” and “Au Hasard Balthazar” as his “touchstones” here, I think he’s really working in the Renaissance genre of the animal encomium and later French satires that embroidered eulogies for dogs and other animal intimates– even our diseases.
The “wiener-dog,” as some owners and others call her, is not so much a character as an occasion for human characters to ask uncomfortable questions about life and death. The dog offers no consoling answers. She gets few close-ups and is not called upon for reaction shots. Unlike the Weimaraner and German shorthair pointer in the backseat of the Lincoln Navigator driven by Matthew McConaughey in the TV spot “Time to Eat.”
The film begins with someone dropping her off at an animal shelter. As opening credits in a mock-fancy typeface scroll by, she tries to figure out what she’s doing in a metal cage surrounded by the din of barking. This will be her longest one-shot.
Solondz soon places her in a home where a boy receiving leukemia treatment will pose the most profound questions. Next we see her in a car with Colorado plates heading to Ohio, the office and apartment of a screenwriter, a residential street, and ultimately an art gallery. Her role is always to help humans make their own sense of things.
A cynical, maybe sophomoric choice is later sampling “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy as counterpoint to the distressed barks the wiener-dog endured in the opening scene. Solondz’s most arch move is inserting a too-cute old-time intermission with corny titles. For an entra’-acte he includes a clever montage of a partly animated dachshund trotting by various backdrops around the country. The impossibly instantaneous changes in scenery recall surreal passages from Buster Keaton and Maya Deren films.
Last listed under “Thanks” in the end credits are “Little Hope, Big Hope, Vodka, Ruby and Rozie.” Could they be dachshunds playing the wiener-dog? Things may not have ended well for all of them, since there’s an anomalous qualification in the disclaimer: “American Humane Association monitored some of the animal action. No animals were harmed in those scenes.” Let’s not ask about unmonitored animal action in those other scenes. Also note the absence of a disclaimer that no dogs died in the making of this motion picture.
“Wiener-Dog” is a weirdly touching memorial with caustic inflections. (Spoiler: the Classification and Rating Administration of the Motion Picture Association of America indicates there is “some disturbing content” so “Wiener-Dog” is rated “R” for “Restricted.”)
by Bill Stamets 
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