2015 in review: pan and the big short

Pan: (dir: Joe Wright) Pan is pure, breathless, grand spectacle, colorful and quick-moving, visually inventive, sometimes ingenious. The use of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Blitzkrieg Bop" is inspired and powerful. Hugh Jackman as the pirate is absolutely marvellous. And still it manages to leave one entirely emotionally unengaged.

As in so much non-thinking children's fare, the bulk of the adult characters are cartoonishly evil, a few are angelically good (which means they exist for the sole purpose of loving, nurturing and furthering the boy-child at the film's center), and there is one weak but well-meaning clown-figure to mediate between the two groups. The mermaids, who might be so interestingly dangerous, are instead a boy's wet-dream, identical twin supermodels. The moral platitudes the film winds up promoting are ancient, etiolated (and, arguably, patently false) chestnuts like "a mother's love is perfect and stretches beyond time, space, even death" and "believe in yourself, and you can do anything!" These themes often find themselves attached to Peter Pan projects, but a return to the original book reveals a subtle darkness, and a cynical humor underlying themes of both motherhood and achievement. Wouldn't it be nice to explore some of that?

IN SUMMARY: Turn off your brain and enjoy the prettiness. Or just watch something else.

the Big Short: (dir: Adam McKay) It seems impossible that this story, mostly concerned with communicating the intricacies of banking minutiae, is told in an entertaining fashion, but it really is. Avoiding the linear and conventional, McKay keeps the pace jumping by having his characters break the fourth wall on occasion, usually to assure us either that a thing didn't really happen like they're showing it, or that yes, it really DID happen like this, and by bringing in celebrities (Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez, some naked chick in a bubble-bath whose name I didn't recognize) to tell stories illustrating the twistier expositionary points.

It's not Christian Bale's best work. Steve Carrell's character, depressed and growing increasingly so throughout, seems to be the only one facing the insanity of the situation with a sane reaction. You expect him at every moment to go off the roof.

IN SUMMARY: It's about the build-up to the crash, for Chrissake. As fun as they make it, it's still depressing as hell. Here's the thing: these guys, these underdogs, are betting on the world economy crashing, and we want them to win, and the slimy bankers to lose. But then when they do win, it means the fucking world economy has crashed. As the Brad Pitt character says (I'm paraphrasing), "You won. Just don't dance about it." In the lobby on the way out, I told my boyfriend I wanted to cancel my retirement fund. (I haven't.) In that moment, it felt like poison to the soul, having even the slightest contact with that world of hideous grotesquerie.

2015 in review: before we go

*SPOILER ALERT*

(dir: Chris Evans) Everyone knows you can make the switch from one side of the camera to the other. Dick Powell did it, after two decades of the mad fuckery that is the life of a matinee idol. He directed five pictures in all, including the atomic-age melodrama Split Second, the infamous the Conqueror, in which the Duke armors up as Genghis Khan, a couple of Mitchum-powered war pictures and a remake of It Happened One Night starring his wife, June Allyson. Then there's Charles Laughton, who hit it out of the park on the first swing with Night of the Hunter, a piece of brilliance so bold and visionary that nobody was ready for it; his masterstroke went unheeded; everyone turned their heads politely and chuckled in vague embarrassment, and he never directed another. Some would call that a shame; I call it a damn tragedy. Costner, Streisand, Gibson, Eastwood all made the jump and landed in one piece, winning accolades and ready acceptance. Some have even worked their way up to sit among the highest of the adepts: Eastwood with Unforgiven and, I would argue, Gibson with Apocalypto.

I'm willing to concede that two of the big strikes against Before We Go, the title (cashing in on the Linklater/Delpy/Hawke trilogy) and Evans himself playing the lead, were probably enforced from without by the money-men. You can hear the meeting, right? "So these kids meet cute, they wander around all night, it's like that Ethan Hawke picture, am I right? People will think it's another one in the series if we stick a 'before' in there. And don't think you're not starring in this, pal. These girls, they don't give a crap what you do behind the camera, as long as that pretty mug is in front of it." (Don't you hope producers really talk this way, like they're in a bad '30s movie? Like Bruce Campbell in the Hudsucker Proxy? "Say, what gives?")

I hope Evans sticks with it. Learning your craft in public is tough, probably tougher when you're one of the most famous handsome men currently extant in the galaxy. (Although it'd be a thousand times tougher if he were a woman, yeah.) The good news is, he's not travelling down the Charles Laughton road. But that's also the bad news, you know? In forty years, nobody's going to dig this up and call it a forgotten treasure.

The plot summary my cigar-chomping producer guy gave is correct: girl meets boy, she's had her purse snatched and he's playing trumpet in the train station. They walk around all night, falling just a little bit in love, and part in the morning, after two chaste kisses, to return to their respective lives, forever changed by the brief encounter. As formulas go, it's not a sure bet, but it's no longshot; we all know you can make it work, and on a slim budget, to boot.

This one suffers from a weak script, leads who share what you might call a friendship-chemistry but no fire, and a main actor who, like John Wayne when he finally found Howard Hawks, needs an objective director to remind him to stop depending so much on his eyebrows.

Alice Eve, so winsome and charming in Men in Black III, and, as I recall, fully satisfactory in Star Trek Into Darkness (although that whole film seems to have folded into a mental black hole from which my memory can access only a few unextraordinary glimpses), leaves the fun behind for this one, coming across stodgily, unremarkably. I am ready to give her the benefit of the doubt and place the blame elsewhere, perhaps at the writer's doorstep. For instance, it's unclear from the start why this handsome busker latches so firmly and immediately onto this rude, icy woman of a Type That Is Not His (he says it later on, straight out, "You're not my type"), but that kind of "don't ask" is typical of this script.

Here, look, here's her story: she's been married for several years, and for the last few she's been secretly reading her husband's intimate emails to his clandestine lover, but never let on. The marriage went on as before, he never guessed she knew, and the only difference was that she recognized it all as one vast sham.

This is HIS story: for six years he's been carrying a torch for his undergrad romance, the girlfriend who broke his heart and got away. They've had no contact at all during this time, but he's thought of her every day, dreamt over and over of her return into his arms, into his life. This is a fellow we're supposed to buy as healthy, strong, creative, a talented jazzman, a guy with Chris Evans' looks, mind you, and well-to-do enough to carry eighty bucks folding money in his pocket while he busks.

Something's wrong with both these pictures, you see what I mean? This cat either has a drug habit that's inhibiting him from emotional maturity, or he's got some kind of compulsive disorder. This woman, I'm sorry, I don't buy it. You don't keep reading the emails for that long without the habit itself bringing a change into the marriage: either it's going to break, she's going to fold, he's going to realize she knows, SOME damn thing. My point is these are not stories from the real world. These are fantasy, made-up stories. They could be reasonably delivered by a Billy Liar or a Walter Mitty, or someone whose life is on hold due to drugs or neurosis or the shyness that comes from extreme homeliness or from having ducked out of life to care for your ailing mother, like in the Haunting of Hill House. But healthy, grown-up people with money to spend on artwork and haircuts, like these are supposed to be? I don't buy it, sorry, not for a nickel.

I'll tell you the one thing I DO like about this story, the one thing I've never seen before and worked like gangbusters: the ex-girlfriend is not a bitch, and she and the trumpet-playing torch-bearer still have a good, strong chemistry. The relationship didn't work because they met at the wrong time, that's all, and now there's too much water under the bridge, it's still the wrong time. You never see that in film, but it happens all the time in life. That was a great choice on Evans' part, to shoot the reunion as if it were a love scene, with gazes locking across a crowded room, melty-eyed smiles, pounding hearts, the whole nine yards.

As far as the camerawork goes, they say that nascent directors choose handheld because handheld is easier to cut. Alright, I'll allow it, this one time. But as soon as you learn your craft, you buy a damn tripod, do I make myself clear? Handheld works OK for this kind of film, but don't you dare make it your automatic, unthinking, fallback choice. Find yourself a crackerjack editor instead, and get to work on your Scorsese/Schoonmaker, Tarantino/Menke relationship.

IN SUMMARY: I can't think of a compelling reason to watch it unless you're an Evans completist. The upside is that he's been in far worse films, and it's not, indeed, the worst romance ever made. The downside is that I can't think of a compelling reason to watch it, unless you're an Evans completist.

2015 in review: lambert and stamp

(dir: James D Cooper) A fascinating subject for a documentary, illuminating a pair of men as influential in the rock 'n' roll era as Brian Epstein or Andrew Loog Oldham. These are the colorful figures behind the rise and super-empire of The Who.

The tricky bit with docs, though, is that they rise and fall on the quality of the interviews. Lambert is dead (and, though it's hinted the death was shadowy and probably drug-related, they never do tell us how or when), and Stamp is the sort of talker who skims across the tops of things, going sidetracked into vocal fillers (long chains made of "you know"s and "um"s) and off-shoots, using a lot of space to say frustratingly little. He needed a more disciplined interviewer; he definitely needed a more determined editor.

Another reason docs fail to rise up into greatness is because they're made when too many of the folks are still alive, and so everyone is treading carefully to avoid stepping on toes, a dynamic fully in play here. Toes were already well-smashed in olden times, one can sense, and we can see Daltrey in particular trying terribly hard to avoid hurting Stamp's feelings, and to avoid pissing Townshend off, as well, which speaks well of Daltrey as a human, but it makes for very weak copy. All those moments when we watch a dark piece of truth pass unheralded behind his eyes, a piece which he chooses not to speak... those are the very words we long to hear. Townshend comes across as a man who is choosing his words carefully not so much to misdirect his interviewer as to avoid looking too closely at something himself, some old truth or possibly a mendacious aspect of his own personal myth.

In any case, it's useful to know going in that this is not at all a history of The Who; you really need to have taken your Who 101 before you watch it to have the basics readily to hand. Probably a simple viewing of the Kids Are Alright, one of the best rock docs ever made, will suffice. And it won't hurt to have a working background in Carnaby Street history, to boot: for this, I heartily recommend (Timbers fan) Shawn Levy's brilliant Ready, Steady, Go!, a wonderful book.

IN SUMMARY: I'm very glad this film was made, because now this footage can be used again once all the main players are dead and buried, when it's time for the REAL story to come out. This is an exercise in the wrapping up of loose ends for the kids involved. In other words, it's not really for us, it's for them, particularly for Stamp, and possibly for Daltrey, an opportunity for him to make peace with his past, or at least to bury some demons a bit more deeply. And although I'm glad to see that the kids are alright, I'm still wishing for a deeper digging into the Carnaby Street doings of these two probably once-nefarious characters.

2015 in review: spectre

(dir: Sam Mendes) Daniel Craig is the sexiest Bond, no question. He qualifies for that just from the way he looks at Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) when he's charming her into doing something against her better judgment. In fact, he has a way of looking at a woman as if she's the most beautiful he's ever seen, and it's marvellously seductive.

He's also the most intelligent Bond, so when he claims, as he does in this one, a tendency toward unthinking action, it's difficult to swallow it as gospel. We can SEE him introspecting, see it in a way that never would have occurred to Connery or Moore or Brosnan. But Craig gets a pass from the writers, too: he is allowed a dignity that previous Bonds were not. For instance, in the first scene, a Day-of-the-Dead sequence (very impressive, but would not have suffered from some chopping down), Bond slips out of a beauty's hotel room window, promising he won't be gone long. He blows up a building, has a big fight in a helicopter, the usual stuff. But if this were the Pierce Brosnan version, the writers would make him land the copter on the hotel roof and walk back into the girl's room brushing dust off his lapel and saying, "Now, where were we?" Craig never has to do that kind of dirty work, the leering stuff, and good riddance to it.

Still, these movies, the Craig Bonds, have lost something in the gaining of the substance. They're not candy anymore; they're no longer easy to watch, not always even fun. Every time they go back to London, for a start, it's like being sucked into an Orwellian dystopia from which hope and sunlight have been forever exiled. Any escape, even to the desert stronghold of a dastardly foe, seems a relief. And because Bond is fully human now, he has something to lose besides his sex-parts or his life. There is a Mephistophelean moment at the end when the villain (Christoph Waltz) tempts 007 to give up his soul in exchange for one moment of violent satisfaction, and, for a second, I really believed he might.

IN SUMMARY: over-earnest, overlong and pompous. What saves it are the likeable performances (Craig, Waltz, Harris, Lea Seydoux, Ben Whishaw. Ralph Fiennes is bravely commonplace as the deceased M's replacement, a terribly efficient clerk who's risen gradually to a post of importance).

And remember when you could count on a Bond opening credit sequence to be hypnotic, even if you didn't like the movie itself? No longer. The one is overblown, awkward, and the theme song sucks.

halloweenfest evening twelve: spring, kaidan, and thale

Spring: (2014. dir: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead) Kind of a pretty love story set in the shadow of Vesuvius, and probably the less you know going in, the better. But yes, there is a monster, and yes, a couple of bloody deaths.

*SPOILER ALERT*: Remember the original Stargate? Before all the TV spinoffs, the old Roland Emmerich movie with Spader and Kurt Russell? Remember when they encounter Ra, the supreme being, the entity as old as time, and you think to yourself, "That's it? Old as the aeons, and all you are is a mincing fashion-plate?" This is not quite that bad, but the millennia-old critter is still nowhere near as wonderful as Jarmusch's nosferatu in Only Lovers Left Alive. Maybe just watch that instead. Or at least make sure you watch that one as well. It's so seldom that Jarmusch does something marvellous, it's only fair to celebrate it when he does.

Kaidan: (2007. dir: Hideo Nakata) A gorgeous ghost story set in feudal Japan. At its center, geographically, lies a haunted pool; teleologically, the center is a House-of-Atreus curse on two families, uniting them karmically. The inciting event is given in diegetic prologue: a money-lender demands repayment of his debt from a samurai, who kills him and dumps his body in the (already haunted) pool. Both men are sinners; one is a usurer, the other a murderer. The tendrils of bloody consequence will wind through three generations and sidelong to affect cousins as well. In the end, there is a sense, with its strikingly eerie last image, that the curse may be played out, but perhaps only because the last survivor, the watching sister, has no children.

Movies in Japanese, more than other languages, frustrate because I often suspect the subtitles are not telling the whole story, that I'm missing out on the subtleties, and this is no exception. Some of the phraseology is modern, as well ("suck it up", "ask you out"), jarring one into a place of uncomfortable anachronism.

Still, the photography, the strangeness of the story, the sense of doom, the beauty of the palette, all together weave a concerted spell.

Thale: (2012. dir: Aleksander L. Nordaas) A lovable duo of crime-scene cleaners stumbles upon Huldra, a being from Norwegian mythology, stuck in a mouldering basement. The acting is lovely, the script communicates itself well even across the language barrier, and the creature herself is a beguiling mix of innocence and monstrosity. The story maintains a wistful melancholy travelling through a convincingly otherworldly atmosphere.

halloweenfest evening eleven: the legacy, the editor, the nightmare, the final girls

the Legacy: (1978. dir: Richard Marquand) Katharine Ross and Sam Elliot are so young and beautiful, and they seem to take such pleasure in one another's company that this slow-paced, clumsily-plotted horror classic is hard to resist. I've never seen Ross look so happy and relaxed, and this may be the only horror film in which the hero sells her soul to Satan and comes up with a happy ending and enhanced personal relationships.

Let me add a word about Margaret Tyzack (who plays the... well, the witch's familiar, with a nurse's costume and nine lives): she's part of that generation of English actresses who seem entirely practical, strong, and so layered with complexity that every movement of the eye seems to communicate something definite but mysterious, as if she knows something that we, in our simplicity, never will entirely understand. She reminds me in this of the magnificent Billie Whitelaw in the Omen, and was there ever a stronger and more unsettling presence onscreen than that one?

the Editor: (2014. dir: Matthew Kennedy & Adam Brooks) A loving send-up of Italian Giallos from the '70s, done with attention to detail: conspicuously bad dubbing, sudden zooms into close-up, swimming fades into flashback, sexually punning prop placement. Laughable amounts of completely gratuitous nudity and violent machismo, buckets of gore, bountiful moustaches, ridiculous plot-turns. Like most send-ups, the joke gets old before the end, but it has its enjoyable moments. My favorite line is when the investigating policeman (a detective named Porphyry) is told by a priest that in ancient times, editors were mistrusted as "bridges to the nether-regions."

the Nightmare: (2015. dir: Rodney Ascher) Ascher continues his journey as the most inventive of documentarians with this terrifying follow-up to 2012's Room 237. The Nightmare explores an age-old Fortean manifestation sometimes called The Old Hag (see here and here). It's a sleep disturbance as old as mythology, and shows up in the horror-lore of most every culture around the world. You wake up; you can't move; something awful approaches the bed, and you are helpless to do anything about it.

Ascher doesn't involve the rationalists. He goes straight to the sufferers, and has them tell their stories, some of which are re-enacted. Some involved have conquered or at least tamed the ongoing horror; others have resigned themselves to continued suffering, and, as one man says, eventual death within its throes. Some remember suffering it from infancy; one, chillingly, claims to have "caught" it from a girlfriend who told him the story of her sleep paralysis episodes, and to have passed it on to another girl the same way.

the Final Girls: (2015. dir: Todd Strauss-Schulson) At last! After several decades of movies about the angstiness of father-son relationships, here's an inventive, funny, and touching look at a girl coming to terms with her mother's untimely demise, all dolled up in the robes of a loving homage to slasher films. Truly, it's like no other movie I've seen, and I mean that in the best way.

When the Masked Killer leaps, ablaze, from a second story window, it is awesome to behold. When the characters transition into black-and-white "flashback" mode, or find themselves caught in slow-motion, it's done in playful and engaging ways. The comedy feels light-hearted and improvised, and the "slut" girl's strip-tease after she's taken too much Adderall (to the buttrock classic "Cherry Pie" by '80s hair-farmers Warrant) is one for the ages.

halloweenfest double feature: the traveler and sundown

the Traveler: (2010. dir: Michael Oblowitz) High Plains Drifter played out on the set of Assault on Precinct 13, only High Plains Drifter was written all right and this was written all wrong. In this one, we see the guilt-scene, repeatedly, in detail; we know everyone's secret almost from the beginning. There's nothing, -- OK, some, but not much, -- to be revealed. All we have are the vengeance-killings to watch, one after the other, and five million other movies give us that much. At the end of High Plains Drifter, there still lingers an exhalation of enigma. This one makes even the full-blown supernatural feel solid, humdrum, everyday.

Mr. Nobody (Val Kilmer) walks into a cop-shop on Christmas Eve to confess to killings he hasn't yet committed. The good parts are in the details, like the peeling green paint and buzzing fluorescent lights. A piece of Mozart's "Lachrymosa" runs an eerie thread throughout, coloring the movie much as the faux-"Deguello" did Rio Bravo. There's a nice fairy-tale tag at the end in which the supernatural bad guy gets put down by the power of his name spoken aloud, but it's tacked on in an awkward way and doesn't really fit. The pieces don't jive; the world does not cohere.

Kilmer continues his slow and steady transmogrification into Brando, and I mean that in a good way. Even in soporific mode, he draws the eye, and he's still got some mischief in him.

Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat (1989. dir: Anthony Hickox) An embarrassingly misguided attempt at a broad-stroked, horror/western/humor gallimaufry, the "humor" more along the lines of Monster Squad than Evil Dead, but not even achieving success at that humble level. Even Bruce Campbell and his near-ridiculous facility with this kind of thing takes a swing and a miss in the bumbling Van Helsing role. And it's a home-run swing, too, so he misses hard. Like when a soccer forward goes down onto his back for a bicycle-kick: if the ball hits the net, people use words like "sublime" and "miraculous", but even if you're Lionel Messi, you look pretty stupid when you miss. In this movie, everyone misses. Only Deborah Foreman (from Valley Girl) emerges with any dignity intact, albeit just barely, which makes me think I ought to revisit her work.

Here's the idea: Count Mardulak (David Carradine) has established, with the help of extreme sunblock and synthetic blood, a colony of reformed vampires in a remote part of the desert. There are problems when the occasional human stumbles in, and more problems when the old-school vamps posse up with guns shooting wooden bullets and vow to wipe out the apostasy. Nothing is funny, and Carradine knows it, giving so vacant a performance as to seem in retrospect almost transparent. The only part that's any fun is the end-scene when the humans erect a cross atop the mansion and the unrepentant vampires start exploding into flame, but that's just a nice special effect. This, however, is followed hard upon by an interesting theosophical moment when Mardulak, teary-eyed, realizes that his followers are intact because the Christian God has, at last, "forgiven" them. Has there ever been a movie in which the repentant vampire actively seeks forgiveness from a God in which he believes? Because I'd like to watch that movie.

But it has to be better than this one.